House Speaker Mike Johnson stumbled through his response after California Gov. Gavin Newsom pointed out that crime in Johnson’s home state of Louisiana is several times worse than in the Golden State.
Johnson spoke haltingly after he was played a clip Friday on Fox and Friends of Newsom pointing out that the murder rate in Louisiana is “nearly four times higher” than in California.
“Gavin Newsom will do anything for attention. He can name-drop me all, all,” Johnson stammered, “that he wants. He needs to go and govern his state and not be engaging in all of this.”
“We have crime,” he stuttered, “in cities across America.”
He added that his hometown of Shreveport, Louisiana, has “done a great job of reducing crime, gradually,” and said it was import to address crime “everywhere that it rears its ugly head.”
“I think every major city in the country—the residents of those cities are open to that, and anxious to have it,” he said.
Crime rates in red and blue states have come under fresh scrutiny after President Donald Trump ordered thousands of National Guard troops into Democratic-led cities like Los Angeles and Washington, D.C.—with Chicago next on his list.
The administration claims the deployments are necessary to “liberate” residents of those cities from crime, which they say has turned American streets in war zones.
Johnson’s office did not immediately respond to request for comment.
Democratic governors, however, have argued the deployments have nothing to do with public safety, since Trump isn’t sending in troops to the states with the highest crime rates—which happen to be controlled by Republicans.
“If he is to invest in crime suppression, I hope the president of the United States would look at the facts,” Newsom said during a press conference on Thursday. “Just consider Speaker Johnson’s state and district. Just look at the murder rate that’s nearly four times higher than California in Louisiana.”
The vast majority of Americans do not approve of the president sending in soldiers to quell local crime. A Quinnipiac University poll released this week found that just 41 percent of respondents approved of Trump posting the National Guard in Washington, D.C., to fight crime.
Those troops have not been trained in local law enforcement, and the crackdown has wreaked havoc on the courts as judges are flooded with cases involving trumped-up charges.
And despite Trump’s claims that Washington is as dangerous as a third-world city, soldiers in the nation’s capital have been picking up trash and spreading mulch to pass the time.
An analysis by Axios found that 13 of the top 20 cities with the highest homicide rates were located in states with Republican governors. At the state level, eight of the top 10 states with the highest murder rates are red states.
Kilmar Abrego Garcia has spent the past several months on an involuntary tour of detention centers at home and abroad. Back in March, Immigration and Customs Enforcement picked up the Maryland dad and took him to immigration detention facilities in Louisiana and then Texas before the U.S. government flew him to the notorious Salvadoran megaprison CECOT—which Trump administration officials have admitted was a mistake.
Months after a federal judge ordered him returned to the U.S., he was brought back in June and immediately taken into criminal custody in Tennessee before he was once again ordered released, at which point he was swiftly put back into ICE custody and shuttled to a facility in Virginia. Over the course of a few months, Abrego Garcia has been in at least three immigration detention facilities, one criminal facility, and a foreign gulag entirely unauthorized to receive U.S. detainees, all while the government has failed at every attempt to establish a clear legal basis for his detention. It is effectively ferrying him from one type of custody to another only when it skirts close to being in open contempt of court.
According to Abrego Garcia’s lawyers, he was offered a plea deal for the thin trafficking charge federal prosecutors are pursuing against him with the promise that he would then be deported to Costa Rica; if he refused, federal authorities would instead send him to Uganda, a country he’s never been to. That’s exactly what Trump officials then moved to do before the same federal judge ruled that he could not be deported until at least early October while she considered the legality of their deportation efforts; in the interim, Abrego García is renewing his application for asylum. This is the first time in a decade of covering immigration that I can recall the explicit use of a removal location as a cudgel to gain compliance, especially in a separate criminal matter.
It’s easy to lump this odyssey in with the rest of the Trump-era immigration enforcement spectacle, but I’d argue that it is more of an avatar for the collapse of various systems into an all-encompassing expression of government power. Lawyers, journalists, and researchers have long used the term crimmigration to refer to the interplay between the criminal and civil immigration systems—how a criminal charge can trigger immigration consequences, for example. Still, due process generally demands some independence between the processes; except where explicitly laid out in law, you shouldn’t be able to bundle them together, in the same way that it would be obviously improper to, say, threaten someone with a tax investigation unless they plead guilty to unrelated charges.
Yet since the beginning of Abrego Garcia’s ordeal, the government has been trying to make his case about essentially whatever will stick, flattening the immigration and criminal aspects into one sustained character attack. It attempted to justify his deportation by tarring him as a gang member, an accusation that was based on comically flimsy evidence and which the government never tried to escalate to proving in court. Per internal Department of Justice whistleblower emails, officials desperately cast about for scraps of evidence to paint him as a hardened MS-13 leader and basically struck out.
After a federal judge ordered that he be brought back, the Justice Department devoted significant resources to retroactively drumming up charges over a three-year-old incident that police didn’t act on at the time, in which the government’s main witness, unlike Abergo Garcia, is a convicted felon. It is so flimsy that his lawyers are pursuing the rare defense of vindictive prosecution, pointing out the obvious fact that the criminal charge was ginned up as punishment and PR in itself.
It’s not that the specific contours of the legal cases are immaterial or that we shouldn’t pay attention to the arguments and evidence that the administration is trotting out (or, as the case may be, attempting to manufacture). These things all create precedent and they signal what the administration is willing to do and how judges can or will exercise their power. But we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that the specifics of the immigration and criminal cases are effectively beyond the point, and this is all really about bringing the awesome weight of the government down to bear on a designated enemy.
The administration is attempting to create a situation where Abrego Garcia cannot actually win, even if he does ultimately succeed in his immigration and criminal cases. His life has become untenable despite the fact that the administration has, despite dedicating significant resources to the search, failed to produce any conclusive evidence that he is a public danger or a criminal or really anything but the normal “Maryland man” descriptor that they’ve taken such issue with. This is an effort to demonstrate to everyone the Trump administration might consider an enemy that it has both the will and capacity to destroy their lives by a thousand cuts.
Abrego Garcia is perhaps the most acute example because he sits at the intersection of an array of vulnerabilities: he is a noncitizen without clear-cut legal status, is not wealthy, has had criminal justice contact in the past, and is a Latino man, a demographic that right-wing figures have spent years trying to paint as inherently dangerous. Each of these characteristics provides a certain amount of surface area for the government to hook onto in order to punish him for the offense of making them look bad through the self-admitted error of deporting him illegally.
This is unforgivable for reasons that go beyond ego or malice; as Trump and officials like Stephen Miller move to tighten their authoritarian grip in areas of political opposition, they’re relying partly on might but also partly on a sense of infallibility and inevitability. To put in court documents that they erred in removing this one man to one of the most hellish places on Earth is, in their view, to call the entire legitimacy of their enterprise into question, and that cannot stand.
It is more useful to look at Abrego Garcia’s case as the ultimate extrapolation of this strategy, which is being deployed to various extents against administration opponents like, for example, Federal Reserve board governor Lisa Cook. Trump is attempting to fire her ostensibly over allegations of mortgage fraud, though the administration itself is barely even pretending that this is anything but the easiest and quickest entry point they could find to come after an ideological opponent, or at least a potential obstacle. If Cook had had some hypothetical immigration issue, the administration would almost certainly have latched onto that instead. It’s all a means to an end.
For many workers or organizations reliant on the federal government, President Donald Trump’s return to office has meant jobs, funding and entire agencies slashed, as the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) claims to have cut $202 billion.
But one industry has seen exponential growth — and expects even more to come: immigration detention.
“Private prison companies have been so giddy since last November, about the prospect of making billions of dollars at the expense of every American,” Stacy Suh, director at Detention Watch Network, told The Independent.
And the companies made sure to help Trump get elected.
America’s two leading detention companies, Geo Group and CoreCivic, were among the Trump campaign’s most notable donors last year, with executives and subsidiaries donating a total of $2.7 million to the president’s campaign and associated political action committees.
CoreCivic even bestowed over $500,000 towards Trump’s inauguration this year, while Geo Group contributed to his 2016 inauguration fund.
Trump’s Big, Beautiful, Bill set aside an unprecedented$45 billion for ICE to boost immigration detention. As the two largest detention powerhouses in the U.S., both Geo Group and CoreCivic stand to win big.
As soon as Trump won the election last November, CoreCivic’s share price saw a huge spike, nearly doubling from $13.63 per share to $22.13 per share in just one week.
GeoGroup’s share price jumped from $15.13 to $25.05 in the same post-election period.
This is likely because the privately-run facilities house 86 percent of the detained immigrant population, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC).
Yet just 6 percent of Americans believe that ICE detention centers should be run privately, an exclusive poll for The Independent can reveal, with the majority saying facilities should be run by federal or state governments, according to Prolific.
Over 60,000 people are currently held in immigration detention across the U.S., according to ICE records seen by The New York Times.
That number has already jumped by 54 percent since Trump’s return, with average detention populations under the Biden administration around 39,000, according to TRAC.
But though the government may determine their future, the 20 largest ICE detention centers are all operated by private companies, according to TRAC’s data in January.
GeoGroup and CoreCivic are the leading operators, both in terms of facilities operated and their capacity. Other private firms, like Lasalle Corrections and Management & Training Corporation (MTC), also have contracts to run ICE facilities.
CoreCivic runs the biggest detention centre in the country — Adams County Correctional Facility in Natchez, Missouri, with over 2,100 detainees on average each day. The new federal facility at Fort Bliss may soon take the cake, however, with a capacity of 5,000 people.
Both CoreCivic and GeoGroup provide both traditional prison incarceration services, and immigration detention services, to federal and state governments.
But with a slowdown in incarceration and greater focus on rehabilitation in recent years, prison contracts have been drying up — and increased immigration detention contracts has become more foundational to their business models.
One of Trump’s first actions in office was also to end the Biden-era ban on private prison providers, allowing companies like GeoGroup and CoreCivic to once again contract with the Department of Justice.
When asked for comment about its reliance on punitive policies by the new administration to build its business, CoreCivic noted that it does not enforce immigration laws, or arrest anyone, or have any say over an individual’s deportation — but it acknowledged that Trump’s policies does provide it with growth opportunities.
“As the current administration is exploring all options available to them to address the increasing demand for detention services and capacity, we expect that those options will include the high-quality solutions CoreCivic provides,” Ryan Gustin, director of Public Affairs at CoreCivic, told The Independent.
Meanwhile, a spokesperson for GeoGroup told The Independent that “simply put, our facilities are never overcrowded.”
But Freedom of Information Act requests by TRAC last month revealed that several facilities run by GeoGroup were significantly overcapacity on at least one day this year.
This includes GeoGroup’s Pine Prairie processing centre in Louisiana, which has a contractual maximum of 500 people but held 1,311 detainees at some point in 2025.
Immigration operations make up over a third of revenue for both Geo Group and Core Civic, latest financial reports show, making ICE their largest governmental partner.
“We are proud of the role our company has played for 40 years to support [ICE’s] law enforcement mission, over seven different Presidential Administrations,” a GEO Group spokesperson told The Independent.
Geo Group has been awarded nearly $8 billion in federal contracts over successive governments, according to the federal database, in addition to state contracts.
Over half of this ($4.4 billion) was awarded by ICE for immigration detention services.
Meanwhile CoreCivic has been awarded over $8.3 billion in federal contracts over time, with a quarter ($2 billion) of those being ICE contracts to run detention facilities.
“ICE’s budget now is larger than many militaries around the world, while our hospitals and schools remain underfunded, and people are losing their access to health care and food benefits,” said Suh.
The Independent contacted ICE for comment for this article but did not get a response.
Federal contracts from ICE have been steadily increasing since Trump’s first term (with for a brief time during the peak of the pandemic), according to the federal spending database, rising from $137.5 million awarded in 2016 to $463.4 million in 2025 so far.
ICE contracts awarded since January alone include $353.5 million to GeoGroup, $148 million to CoreCivic, and $313 million to CSI Aviation — ICE’s deportation flight contractor.
“There is more and more incentivization to cage people in immigration detention. The more people that they detain, the more their business grows,” Suh said. “Financial Incentives are really the bedrock of incarceration.”
And now, documents seen by The Washington Post reveal that ICE is planning to more than double detention capacity, from around 50,000 to more than 107,000 by January 2026.
These plans include opening or expanding 125 facilities before the end of the year – with over $1 billion in contracts each year between CoreCivic and GeoGroup, according to the Post’s analysis of ICE documents.
Already, both detention giants have seen a flood of new or amendedcontracts and have opened up new facilities to expand their capacity.
What’s more, ICE has issued nine of these contracts without allowing competitive bids, citing a national emergency at the Mexico border — meaning that CoreCivic secured the deal to reopen its contentiousLeavenworth facility without competition, according to PBS.
“We stay in regular contact with ICE and all our government partners to understand their changing needs, and we work within their established procurement processes. It is our policy to respect these processes,” Gustin told The Independent of CoreCivic’s contracts.
Since January alone, several facilities have been opened up to hold more immigrants in detention as ICE ramps up its raids.
In the Michigan town of Baldwin, former prison North Lake Correctional Facility has now reopened as an immigration center operated by Geo Group, to the tune of $70 million in annual revenue. The 1,800-bed facility opened in June despite facing significant pushback from residents and local protests.
And just last week, a tense dispute broke out at a local board meeting in Mason, Tennessee, over the reopening of a CoreCivic facility as an immigration detention center. Residents crowded the meeting and chanted outside in protest of the contract, which was ultimately approved, according to reports in the Tennessee Lookout.
“If ICE expansion plans are fully realized, that’s a massive shift in resources. It’s also a massive transformation in the very fabric of American society and how it operates,” Suh told The Independent.
“Communities across the country are rightly outraged about detention expansion happening on their doorstep. People are saying, ‘No, we don’t want detention in our community. We don’t want our neighbors to be torn apart away from their loved ones’.”
Vice President J.D. Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and White House Deputy Chief of StaffStephen Miller were met with a hostile welcome at Washington, D.C.’s Union Station on Wednesday.
Their visit came as the National Guard had been camped out around the iconic station as part of President Donald Trump’s crime crackdown in the nation’s capital.
Bystanders looked on as the trio was met with hecklers in the station’s marble lobby as they came confidently strolling through with their entourage.
“You’re an embarrassment to Ohio,” one woman could be heard shouting as Vance kept a smile plastered on his face.
“F***ing nazi,” another man wearing a backpack shouted while taking video on his phone as the group marched through.
“Get the f*** out of my city,” shouted a third man.
Others could be heard chanting “free DC” as video showed the group casually walking into Union Station’s Shake Shack restaurant.
Other protesters shouted about the war in Gaza and to “free Palestine.”
In another video taken of their entrance, a man could be heard shouting at Vance, “Oh look, it’s couch f—er. You going to f— a couch, buddy?” in a reference to the joke that plagued the vice president on the campaign trail.
Upon entering the restaurant, Vance mingled with some service members, many of whom said they were from South Carolina. He took a few pictures while thanking them for their service and joked that the visit was “a hell of a lot more fun” than what he did most days.
“We ought to be able to enjoy great American cities. That’s what we’re trying to do in the Trump administration,” Vance told reporters from inside the Shake Shack as protesters could still be heard in the background.
As they spoke, a box of burgers sat in front of them, and National Guard members surrounded them. Chants of “Free DC” could still be heard in the background.
“We’re committed to this mission just like the one at the southern border and in Los Angeles,” Hegseth said. “Our law enforcement officers deserve to be able to do their jobs safely.”
The defense secretary gestured to the box of cheeseburgers in front of him and declared he “always liked a good cheeseburger” when he was in uniform, so he was hopeful he could deliver a few of them.
The Trump administration announced earlier this month that it was deploying hundreds of National Guard troops to the nation’s capital to combat crime. Multiple Republican-led states, including West Virginia, South Carolina, Ohio, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Tennessee, have all rushed to send additional troops to D.C.
However, critics have observed that the service members have largely been stationed along the National Mall and at Union Station, two largely low-crime destinations visited by millions of tourists every year.
In an unhinged rant, Miller then said they were going to “add thousands more resources to this city to get the criminals and the gang members out of here.”
He argued they were going to ignore the “stupid white hippies” protesting, who he claimed should go home and “take a nap because they’re all over 90 years old,” despite the hecklers at Union Station appearing to be all different ages.
“It’s kind of bizarre that we have a bunch of old, primarily white people, who are out there protesting the policies that keep people safe when they never felt danger in their entire lives,” Vance angrily added.
Recapping his field trip on Fox News later that night, the vice president deflected on host Laura Ingraham’s description of the appearance as “eventful,” claiming instead he had heard from “a couple of friends” who said the area now “feels safer.”
“Living with lawlessness and disorder,” he added, “is fundamentally a question of political will.”
“If you’ve got the political will to enforce the law, you can make even cities like D.C. safe again, and that’s what we are demonstrating. And I hope that the American people take an important lesson from this because, obviously, D.C. is a federal city. New York, L.A., these places are not,” he said.
“I hope the American people just recognize that you don’t have to live with lawlessness. You don’t have to live with third-world murder rates. If you just take control of these cities, you can make them save places to live again.”
https://www.thedailybeast.com/vance-hegseth-and-miller-branded-nazis-in-botched-pr-stunt
Vermont’s Republican Gov. Phil Scott has declined to send the state’s National Guard to Washington, D.C., noting that he didn’t believe it to be a proper use of these troops.
“In the absence of an immediate emergency or disaster that local and regional first responders are unable to handle, the governor just does not support utilizing the guard for this purpose, and does not view the enforcement of domestic law as a proper use of the National Guard,” Scott’s chief of staff Jason Gibbs told Vermont Public on Friday.
Scott is the rare Republican leader who’s refused to bow to the Trump administration’s requests as the president has deployed National Guard and federal law enforcement to address what he’s described as a spiraling crime crisis in the capital. In reality, data shows that violent crime rates in the district have declined in 2024 and 2025, and Trump’s efforts have been criticized by Democrats as a “stunt” designed to distract from other controversies his administration is grappling with, like the Justice Department’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files.
Scott’s decision followed a Pentagon request for a “few dozen” of the state’s troops, according to Gibbs, and comes as six Republican-led states, including West Virginia, South Carolina, Ohio, Mississippi, Tennessee and Louisiana, have authorized the deployment of their National Guard to D.C. in the last week.
All told, Trump has already deployed 800 National Guard troops to the city, and the states’ contributions could put that number upwards of 1,700.
It’s not evident why more troops have been requested from different states and what function they will serve upon their arrival in D.C.
A spokesperson for Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee told the Associated Press that the state’s National Guard would “assist with monument security, community safety patrols, protecting federal facilities, and traffic control.” Some troops “may be armed,” a Guard representative said Sunday.
“In this case, because it is being hyperpoliticized, the governor doesn’t feel like — and I believe the vast majority of Vermonters don’t feel like — it would be an acceptable and appropriate use of the National Guard,” Gibbs added in his comments to Vermont Public.
A Scott spokesperson and a White House spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment. A Pentagon spokesperson declined to provide additional comment.
Gibbs noted that Scott would have viewed the situation differently if D.C. leaders had called for federal aid, which was not the case this time around. On Friday, the D.C. attorney general sued the Trump administration for its federal takeover of the leadership of the district’s police force.
“This doesn’t make sense. The numbers on the ground and the district don’t support 1,000 people from other states coming to Washington, D.C.,” Mayor Muriel Bowser said on Monday.
This also isn’t the first time that Scott has pushed back on the Trump administration’s attempts to use the state’s National Guard. Previously, Scott rejected a Defense Department request to utilize Vermont’s National Guard to assist Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents at detention facilities.
Agreen card holder detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has told Newsweek that conditions at the Houston Detention Center are harsh, saying the food served is so poor that he wouldn’t even give it to his dog.
Deon Lewis, who has lived in the United States since 1993, was taken into ICE custody on June 17. He has criminal convictions for cocaine possession, firearm offenses, multiple drug-related charges and driving without a license, according to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
He has faced serious medical challenges, including sickle cell disease and two lung surgeries due to pneumothorax. Lewis requested to be deported after struggling to live inside the ICE-run facility.
“The conditions in the Houston Detention Center are terrible. From the health care to the food they feed us. This food my dog wouldn’t even eat,” he told Newsweek from inside ICE custody.
The Department of Homeland Security has denied the allegations.
“There is black mold growing in the showers and bathroom floors. The air quality is horrible,” Lewis said.
“Some guards treat us like animals. Not all of them, but I think they try their best to keep us as uncomfortable as they possibly can,” he said.
“These facilities they are holding these people in are not set up correctly for humans to be held in. The conditions are not humane,” he added.
His wife, Roxanne Lewis, told Newsweek, “I have had many nights not being able to sleep from the worry about his health.”
She said that during transfers between detention centers—from Baltimore to New Jersey, Boston, Louisiana and finally Houston—he was denied proper medical attention. She recounted one incident in Louisiana when a nurse allegedly laughed while he vomited on the floor.
President Donald Trump has directed his administration to remove millions of migrants without legal status as he seeks to fulfill his campaign pledge of widespread mass deportations. In addition to people living in the country without legal status, immigrants with valid documentation, including green cards and visas, have been detained.
Lewis has a criminal record dating back to 2002, when he was arrested for cocaine possession, pleaded guilty and was sentenced to probation, according to the Houston Chronicle. In 2020, he faced additional charges, including possession of marijuana and cocaine and carrying a firearm, the outlet reported.
DHS has defended Lewis’ detention, emphasizing his criminal history and ICE’s commitment to providing medical care and maintaining humane conditions for detainees.
“The fake news refuses to report on Americans raped, murdered, and molested by criminal illegal aliens but maintain their 24-7 news cycle peddling false sob stories for dangerous lawbreakers—like Deon Kevon Lewis,” said Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for DHS.
She continued: “Lewis is a 43-year-old convicted DRUG TRAFFICKER from Trinidad and Tobago, with multiple convictions including for cocaine trafficking, being a felon in possession of a firearm, and driving without a license and carrying a loaded firearm in a vehicle.
“ICE provides all detainees access to comprehensive medical, dental and mental health care to include conducting an intake screening within 12 hours of their arrival at each detention facility. DHS takes its commitment to promote safe, secure, humane environments for those in our custody very seriously.”
Despite DHS’s assurances, Lewis said his experience in detention had been painful and disheartening.
“I am still here being detained, praying to be deported back to my birth country. I am paying for a crime I committed 23 years ago. I paid my dues to society, for the wrong I had done & don’t deserve this,” he said.
His wife described the toll the detention has had on the family, saying: “We are all feeling as a family very depressed. Being without Deon has been extremely difficult. He is a loving Father, Husband, Son, & Friend to many. He isn’t the ‘public safety threat’ as they are trying to portray him as. He is always willing to help someone in need.”
https://www.newsweek.com/green-card-holder-detained-ice-food-2114892
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has confirmed that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detained 16 Hmong and Laotian immigrants in Michigan, transferring them to facilities in Louisiana and Texas. Advocates have criticized the agency’s aggressive tactics, citing some detainees’ longstanding residence in the U.S. Deportations to Laos are reportedly underway following the acquisition of travel documents.
DHS said, “This operation resulted in the arrest of multiple criminal illegal aliens, including child sex abusers, drug traffickers, a known gang member who obstructed a murder investigation, and other Laotian nationals with extensive criminal histories.”
ICE reported that 15 individuals were arrested following summonses to its Detroit field office, including one later arrest at a Lansing workplace. The group reportedly included a known gang member, child sex offenders, and drug traffickers.Authorities noted that Laos and Thailand have accepted more deportees following U.S. pressure under President Donald Trump. More than two dozen Michigan lawmakers and a Detroit council member urged Field Office Director Kevin Raycraft to release the detainees.
Families have said several detainees arrived as children or were born in refugee camps. Supporters have highlighted that many serve caregiving roles, while ICE has emphasized that the individuals have felony convictions and active judicial removal orders.
Advocates have argued that arrests at scheduled meetings may erode trust with immigrant communities. ICE asserted that it will execute final removal orders once travel documents are finalized.
Rep. Donovan McKinney (D-MI) wrote, “It’s cruel, it’s wrong, it’s unjust, and it must end. We are calling for their release. Families belong together, not torn apart in secrecy. We also call for transparency and accountability so these horrific events stop happening. Deportation doesn’t just impact one person; it tears at the fabric of entire communities.”
Authorities noted that Laos and Thailand have accepted more deportees following U.S. pressure under President Donald Trump. More than two dozen Michigan lawmakers and a Detroit council member urged Field Office Director Kevin Raycraft to release the detainees.
Families have said several detainees arrived as children or were born in refugee camps. Supporters have highlighted that many serve caregiving roles, while ICE has emphasized that the individuals have felony convictions and active judicial removal orders.
Advocates have argued that arrests at scheduled meetings may erode trust with immigrant communities. ICE asserted that it will execute final removal orders once travel documents are finalized.
Rep. Donovan McKinney (D-MI) wrote, “It’s cruel, it’s wrong, it’s unjust, and it must end. We are calling for their release. Families belong together, not torn apart in secrecy. We also call for transparency and accountability so these horrific events stop happening. Deportation doesn’t just impact one person; it tears at the fabric of entire communities.”
McKinney added, “We’re talking about small businesses losing a valued employee, elders losing caregivers, children losing a parent or grandparent. … These individuals are our neighbors, our coworkers, our friends, our fellow Michiganders.”
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/ice-detains-16-hmong-laotian-immigrants/ss-AA1KHlJ6
An American citizen has told how she was held by ICE for 48 hours, claiming she was denied water despite proving her legal status.
Andrea Velez, 32, had just arrived at work in Downtown Los Angeles on June 24 when agents grabbed her and forced her into a car.
Velez told NBC4 News Los Angeles that an immigration raid was going on when she was slammed to the ground. Velez, a graduate of Cal Poly Pomona, who works in fashion was taken into custody while her mother, Margarita Flores, screamed at agents to stop.
“She’s a U.S. citizen,” Velez’s mother, an immigrant from Mexico, said through tears. “They’re taking her. Help her, someone.”
Velez said she was sitting in a detention center and was given nothing to drink for 24 hours. In total she spent two days in detention. She said that the ordeal has left her unable to physically return to work.
“I’m taking things day by day,” she told the station.
The incident had been notorious from the beginning. LAPD officers were called to the scene because it was reported as a “kidnapping” but did not intervene when it became clear it was an ICE action—even though it was against a U.S. citizen, ABC& Los Angeles previously reported.
Velez was charged with assaulting a federal officer while he was attempting to arrest a suspect. A federal criminal complaint alleged that the agent was chasing after a man but Velez stepped into the agent’s path and extended her arm “in an apparent effort to prevent him from apprehending the male subject he was chasing.” The complaint added that her arm hit the agent in the face.
The incident had been notorious from the beginning. LAPD officers were called to the scene because it was reported as a “kidnapping” but did not intervene when it became clear it was an ICE action—even though it was against a U.S. citizen, ABC& Los Angeles previously reported.
Velez was charged with assaulting a federal officer while he was attempting to arrest a suspect. A federal criminal complaint alleged that the agent was chasing after a man but Velez stepped into the agent’s path and extended her arm “in an apparent effort to prevent him from apprehending the male subject he was chasing.” The complaint added that her arm hit the agent in the face.
Velez denied wrongdoing. She said that during the incident, someone grabbed her and slammed her to the ground. She tried to tell the agent, who was in plainclothes, that she was an American citizen. But he told her she was “interfering” and he was going to arrest her.
“That’s when I asked him to show me his ID, his badge number,” she said. “I asked him if he had a warrant, and he said I didn’t need to know any of that.”
Velez said she repeatedly told ICE officers she was a U.S. citizen. When she was taken into a Los Angeles detention center, she gave officers her driver’s license and health insurance card to prove her citizenship status. She was still locked behind bars.
Velez’s family was unaware of her whereabouts for more than a day until lawyers for the family tracked her down.
Later, the Department of Justice (DOJ) dismissed her case without prejudice, meaning it could be reopened if prosecutors decide to.
Velez’s attorneys told NBC Los Angeles that they are exploring legal moves against the federal government.
Between 2015 and 2020, ICE erroneously deported at least 70 U.S. citizens, arrested 674 and detained 121. It is unclear how many have been mistakenly taken amid the Trump administration’s mass campaign to deport 1 million immigrants per year.
In January, U.S. citizen Julio Noriega was looking for work in Chicago when he was swept up in the mass raids. In May, Georgia college student Ximena Arias-Cristobal was detained after police pulled over the wrong car during a traffic stop. In June, a deputy U.S. marshal was detained in Arizona because he “fit the general description of a subject being sought by ICE.” That same month, a Ph.D. student named Job Garcia was tackled and thrown to the ground by ICE for recording a raid in Los Angeles.
A recent lawsuit claims that at least three American-born children have been removed from the country. The sudden banishment includes a 4-year-old boy with stage-four kidney cancer who was receiving critical, life-saving medical treatment in the United States. He was shipped from Louisiana to Honduras in April.
The Daily Beast has reached out to ICE for comment.
DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin told the Daily Beast: “FALSE. ICE provided Andrea Velez with water, food, sanitary products, and she was given restroom breaks as needed. The media needs to stop peddling lies and smears that have led to a 1000% increase in assaults against our brave ICE officers.”
An investigation from the office of Democratic Senator Jon Ossoff uncovered more than 500 allegations of human rights abuses in immigration detention facilities, including more than a two dozen reports involving children and pregnant women and more than 40 instances of physical and sexual abuse.
The senator launched an investigation into conditions inside the nation’s sprawling network of immigration detention facilities after Donald Trump took office in January.
A subsequent report, first published by NBC News on Tuesday, identified 510 “credible reports” of abuse inside Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers, federal prisons, local jails and military bases, including Guantanamo Bay, and on deportation flights.
“Credibly reported or confirmed events to date include deaths in custody, physical and sexual abuse, mistreatment of pregnant women, mistreatment of children, inadequate medical care, overcrowding and unsanitary living conditions, inadequate food or water, exposure to extreme temperatures, denial of access to attorneys, and family separations,” according to the report.
Those events include 41 allegations of physical or sexual abuse, including an alleged incident in El Paso where a detainee was “slammed against the ground, handcuffed, and taken outside” for “stepping out of line in the dining hall.”
The report also uncovered two 911 calls from a California facility referencing sexual assaults or threats of sexual assaults. At a facility in Texas, at least four emergency calls since January have reportedly referenced sexual abuse, the report found.
When a group of detainees in Miami flooded a toilet in protest of poor conditions, officers reportedly threw flash-bang grenades into the room and “shot at the men with what appeared to be pellets or rubber bullets,” according to the report. The detainees were then handcuffed with zip-ties that cut into their wrists when detainees requested food, water and medication, the report says.
The senator’s office uncovered at least 14 reports alleging pregnant women were mistreated in Homeland Security custody, “including not receiving adequate medical care and timely checkups, not receiving urgent care when needed, being denied snacks and adequate meals, and being forced to sleep on the floor due to overcrowding,” according to the report.
A pregnant woman’s partner in custody in Georgia had reported to the senator’s office that she had bled for days before staff took her to a hospital.
Once she was there, “she was reportedly left in a room, alone, to miscarry without water or medical assistance, for over 24 hours,” according to the report. According to documents obtained by NBC News, the woman received a follow-up check-up on April 9, 11 days after she miscarried.
In another case, a pregnant detainee was reportedly told to “just drink water” after requesting medical attention.
Attorneys for other detainees told the senator’s office that their pregnant clients have been forced to wait “weeks” to see a doctor while in custody.
The senator’s office also collected 18 reports involving children, including U.S. citizens, some as young as two years old.
Three of those children reportedly experienced “severe medical issues” while in detention and were denied adequate medical treatment, according to the report.
In another case, an attorney reported that a U.S. citizen child with severe medical issues was hospitalized three times while in custody with her non-citizen mother. According to the report, when the young girl began vomiting blood, the mother begged for medical attention, to which an officer reportedly told her to “just give the girl a cracker.”
A citizen child recovering from brain surgery was reportedly denied access to follow-up care, a case that was publicly reported earlier this year. She faces continued brain swelling and speech and mobility difficulties, according to the senator’s report.
Another previously reported case involving a four-year-old cancer patient is also included in the senator’s report.
“Regardless of our views on immigration policy, the American people do not support the abuse of detainees and prisoners … it’s more important than ever to shine a light on what’s happening behind bars and barbed wire, especially and most shockingly to children,” Ossoff said in a statement shared with The Independent.
Homeland Security assistant secretary Tricia McLaughlin told NBC News that “any claim that there are subprime conditions at ICE detention centers are false.”
Detainees in ICE custody are provided with “proper meals, medical treatment, and have opportunities to communicate with lawyers and their family members,” she said.
“Ensuring the safety, security, and well-being of individuals in our custody is a top priority at ICE,” she told NBC.
The Independent has requested additional comment from Ossoff’s office and Homeland Security.
Ossoff’s report follows nearly eight months of the president’s vast anti-immigration agenda and mass deportation machine, set to receive tens of billions of dollars over the next decade to radically expand detention capacity and the number of ICE agents working to remove people from the country.
Lawsuits and reports from immigration advocates and attorneys have alleged similarly brutal conditions in facilities in California, Texas, Louisiana, New Jersey, Florida and New York, where detainees have reported food shortages, illness and denial of access to legal counsel.
