Daily Beast: Trump Frees Felon to Keep Deported Maryland Dad Locked Up

The White House is so hellbent on keeping Kilmar Abrego Garcia behind bars, it has released a convicted human smuggler.

The Trump administration has freed a convicted human smuggler in its desperate bid to convict Kilmar Abrego Garcia of the same charge.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) deported Abrego Garcia in March—a move the Department of Justice (DOJ) admitted was an error—before a federal judge forced the administration to return him. Abrego Garcia was placed in federal custody on a human smuggling charge as soon as he set foot on U.S. soil again.

Despite President Donald Trump’s pledge to focus mass deportation efforts on criminals—the “worst of the worst”—the DOJ has now released three-time felon Jose Ramon Hernandez Reyes from federal prison and transferred him to a halfway house in exchange for his testimony against Abrego Garcia, an undocumented father from Maryland.

Which likely will make him an unreliable witness because he has been paid / rewarded for his testimony. When it’s all over, Kilmar Abrego Garcia will walk free.

“It’s wild to me,” Lisa Sherman Luna, executive director at the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition, told the Washington Post. “It’s just further evidence of how the government is using Kilmar’s case to further their propaganda and prove their political point.”

https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-frees-felon-to-keep-deported-maryland-dad-locked-up

LA Times: Authorities arrest over 100 people on Tennessee roads in support of Trump’s deportation plan

More than 100 people have been taken into custody by federal immigration officials in a joint operation with the Tennessee Highway Patrol, leaving many in Nashville’s immigrant community uncertain and worried.

“None of us have ever seen anything like this,” Lisa Sherman Luna, executive director of the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition, said Friday.

But immigrant rights supporters contend that the patrols have focused on parts of the city where the majority of residents are people of color.

“All signs point to this being racial profiling intended to terrorize the heart of the immigrant and refugee community,” Sherman Luna said. “What we’ve heard is that THP is flagging people down for things like a broken taillight or tinted windows.”

Sherman Luna believes some of those being detained would be allowed to stay in the country if they were able to receive competent legal representation at an immigration hearing. Instead, she has heard that people are agreeing to be deported out of fear that they could spend months or years in immigration detention.

https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2025-05-11/authorities-arrest-over-100-people-on-tennessee-roads-in-support-of-trumps-deportation-plan