Tag Archives: deportation

Latin Times: Florida AG Encourages People To Report Their Ex Partners To Immigration Authorities: ‘We’d Be Happy To Assist’

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“If your ex is in this country illegally, please feel free to reach out to our office,” said James Uthmeier

Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier encouraged people to report their ex partners to immigration authorities so they can be deported.

In a social media post, Uthmeier said “we recently got a tip from someone whose abusive ex overstayed a tourism visa” and now he is “cued up for deportation.”

“If your ex is in the country illegally, please feel free to reach out to our office. We’d be happy to assist.”

Uthmeier has also made headlines recently for proposing the construction of the migrant detention facility known as “Alligator Alcatraz,” located at a remote airport site surrounded by Everglades wildlife. The facility has in fact been inaugurated and mired by allegations of mistreatment. Legal advocates are calling for the shutting down of the facility, decrying “unlivable” conditions that include mosquito-ridden units and lights being on all the time.

Uthmeier made the post as CBS News reported that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) conducted some 150,000 deportations in the first six months.

The figure is still far from its self-imposed goal of recording 1 million deportations in the first year of the administration, but the agency has vowed to ramp up efforts, especially after getting tens of billions in funds following the passage of President Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act.

Should deportations continue at this pace, they would reach about 300,000 by the end of the year, the highest figure since fiscal year 2014, when the Obama administration conducted 316,000 ICE removals. The highest amount ever recorded was in 2012, when the agency conducted some 410,000 deportations.

However, the administration is significantly ramping up efforts to that end, especially after getting an additional $45 billion from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, as well as $30 billion to fund every stage of the deportation process. Acting ICE Director Todd Lyons said last week that the agency plans to use some of that money to hire 10,000 agents to locate and arrest migrants suspected of being in the country unlawfully.

Asshole!

James Uthmeier is such a pathetic excuse for human detritus!

Florida AG Encourages People To Report Their Ex Partners To Immigration Authorities: ‘We’d Be Happy To Assist’
Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier encouraged people to report their ex partners to immigration authorities if they are in the country unlawfully

https://www.latintimes.com/florida-ag-encourages-people-report-their-ex-partners-immigration-authorities-wed-happy-587482

CBS News: ICE head says agents will arrest anyone found in the U.S. illegally

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In an exclusive interview with CBS News, the head of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said his agents will arrest anyone they find in the country illegally, even if they lack a criminal record, while also cracking down on companies hiring unauthorized workers.

Todd Lyons, the acting director of ICE, said his agency will prioritize its “limited resources” on arresting and deporting “the worst of the worst,” such as those in the U.S. unlawfully who also have serious criminal histories.

But Lyons said non-criminals living in the U.S. without authorization will also be taken into custody during arrest operations, arguing that states and cities with “sanctuary” policies that limit cooperation between ICE and local law enforcement are forcing his agents to go into communities by not turning over noncitizen inmates.

“What’s, again, frustrating for me is the fact that we would love to focus on these criminal aliens that are inside a jail facility,” Lyons said during his first sit-down network interview on “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan.” “A local law enforcement agency, state agency already deemed that person a public safety threat and arrested them and they’re in detention.”

“I’d much rather focus all of our limited resources on that to take them into custody, but we do have to go out into the community and make those arrests, and that’s where you are seeing (that) increase” in so-called “collateral” arrests, Lyons added, referring to individuals who are not the original targets of operations but are nonetheless found to be in the U.S. unlawfully.

Collateral arrests by ICE were effectively banned under the Biden administration, which issued rules instructing deportation officers to largely focus on arresting serious criminal offenders, national security threats and migrants who recently entered the U.S. illegally. That policy was reversed immediately after President Trump took office for a second time in January.

As part of Mr. Trump’s promise to crack down on illegal immigration, his administration has given ICE a broad mandate, with White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller pushing the agency to conduct 3,000 daily arrests. While ICE has so far not gotten close to that number, the agency just received tens of billions of dollars in additional funds from Congress to turbo-charge its deportation campaign.

Lyons said “it’s possible” to meet the administration’s target of 1 million deportations in a year with the new infusion of funds. ICE has recorded nearly 150,000 deportations in Mr. Trump’s first six months in office, according to internal government data obtained by CBS News.

From Jan. 1 to June 24, ICE deported around 70,000 people with criminal convictions, but many of the documented infractions were for immigration or traffic offenses, according to data obtained by CBS News.

While the administration frequently highlights arrests of non-citizens convicted of serious crimes like murder and rape, ICE also has sparked backlash in communities across the country due to some of its tactics and actions, including the use of masks by agents (which Lyons said will continue due to concerns about the safety of his officers), arrests of asylum-seekers attending court hearings and raids on worksites.

“ICE is always focused on the worst of the worst,” Lyons said. “One difference you’ll see now is under this administration, we have opened up the whole aperture of the immigration portfolio.”

Lyons promises to hold companies accountable 

Another major policy at ICE under the second Trump administration is the lifting of a Biden-era pause on large-scale immigration raids at worksites.

In recent weeks, federal immigration authorities have arrested hundreds of suspected unauthorized workers at a meatpacking plant in Nebraska, a horse racetrack in Louisiana and cannabis farms in southern California. At the cannabis farms alone, officials took into custody more than 300 immigrants who were allegedly in the country unlawfully, including 10 minors.

Amid concerns from industry leaders that Mr. Trump’s crackdown was hurting their businesses, ICE in June ordered a halt to immigration roundups at farms, hotels and restaurants. But that pause lasted only a matter of days. Since then, the president has talked about giving farmers with workers who are not in the U.S. legally a “pass,” though his administration has not provided further details on what that would entail.

In his interview with CBS News, Lyons said ICE would continue worksite immigration enforcement, saying there’s no ban on such actions. He said those operations would rely on criminal warrants against employers suspected of hiring unauthorized immigrants, which he said is not a “victimless crime,” noting such investigations often expose forced labor or child trafficking.  

“Not only are we focused on those individuals that are, you know, working here illegally, we’re focused on these American companies that are actually exploiting these laborers, these people that came here for a better life,” Lyons said.

Asked to confirm that ICE plans to hold those employing immigrants in the U.S. illegally accountable — and not just arrest the workers themselves — Lyons said, “One hundred percent.”

ICE head says agents will arrest anyone found in the U.S. illegally, crack down on employers of unauthorized workers
Immigration agents will arrest anyone they find in the country illegally, even if they lack a criminal record, acting ICE Director Todd Lyons said in an exclusive CBS News interview.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ice-head-todd-lyons-agents-will-arrest-anyone-found-illegally-crack-down-on-employers

NBC News: Calls to strip Zohran Mamdani’s citizenship spark alarm about Trump weaponizing denaturalization

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Past administrations, including Obama’s, have sought to denaturalize U.S. citizens, such as terrorists and Nazis. But advocates worry he could target political opponents.

Immediately after Zohran Mamdani became the presumptive Democratic nominee for mayor of New York City last month, one Republican congressman had a provocative suggestion for the Trump administration: “He needs to be DEPORTED.”

The Uganda-born Mamdani obtained U.S. citizenship in 2018 after moving to the United States with his parents as a child. But Rep. Andy Ogles, R-Tenn., argued in his post on X that the Justice Department should consider revoking it over rap lyrics that, he said, suggested support for Hamas.

The Justice Department declined to comment on whether it has replied to Ogles’ letter, but White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said of his claims about Mamdani, “Surely if they are true, it’s something that should be investigated.”

Trump himself has claimed without evidence that Mamdani is an illegal immigrant, and when erstwhile ally Elon Musk was asked about deporting another naturalized citizen, he suggested he would consider it.

The congressman’s proposal dovetails with a priority of the Trump administration to ramp up efforts to strip citizenship from other naturalized Americans. The process, known as denaturalization, has been used by previous administrations to remove terrorists and, decades ago, Nazis and communists.

But the Trump DOJ’s announcement last month that it would “prioritize and maximally pursue denaturalization proceedings” has sparked alarm among immigration lawyers and advocates, who fear the Trump administration could use denaturalization to target political opponents.

Although past administrations have periodically pursued denaturalization cases, it is an area ripe for abuse, according to Elizabeth Taufa, a lawyer at the Immigrant Legal Resource Center.

“It can be very easily weaponized at any point,” she said.

Noor Zafar, an immigration lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union, said there is a “real risk and a real threat” that the administration will target people based on their political views.

Asked for comment on the weaponization concerns, a Justice Department spokesperson pointed to the federal law that authorizes denaturalizations, 8 U.S.C. 1451.

“We are upholding our duty as expressed in the statute,” the spokesperson said.

Immigrant groups and political opponents of Trump are already outraged at the way the Trump administration has used its enforcement powers to stifle dissent in cases involving legal immigrants who do not have U.S. citizenship.

ICE detained Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian activist engaged in campus protests critical of Israel, for more than 100 days before he was released. Turkish student Rümeysa Öztürk was also detained for two months over her pro-Palestinian advocacy.

More broadly, the administration has been accused of violating the due process rights of immigrants it has sought to rapidly deport over the objection of judges and, in cases involving alleged Venezuelan gang members and Salvadoran man Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Supreme Court.

Denaturalization cases have traditionally been rare and in past decades focused on ferreting out former Nazis who fled to the United States after World War II under false pretenses.

But the approach gradually changed after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. Aided by technological advances that made it easier to identify people and track them down, the number of denaturalization cases has gradually increased.

It was the Obama administration that initially seized on the issue, launching what was called Operation Janus, which identified more than 300,000 cases where there were discrepancies involving fingerprint data that could indicate potential fraud.

But the process is slow and requires considerable resources, with the first denaturalization as a result of Operation Janus secured during Trump’s first term in January 2018.

That case involved Baljinder Singh, originally from India, who had been subject to deportation but later became a U.S. citizen after assuming a different identity.

In total, the first Trump administration filed 102 denaturalization cases, with the Biden administration filing 24, according to the Justice Department spokesperson, who said figures for the Obama administration were not available. The new Trump administration has already filed five. So far, the Trump administration has prevailed in one case involving a man originally from the United Kingdom who had previously been convicted of receiving and distributing child pornography. The Justice Department declined to provide information about the other new cases.

Overall, denaturalization cases are brought against just a tiny proportion of the roughly 800,00 people who become naturalized citizens each year, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

‘Willful misrepresentation’

The government has two ways to revoke citizenship, either through a rare criminal prosecution for fraud or via a civil claim in federal court.

The administration outlined its priorities for civil enforcement in a June memo issued by Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate, which listed 10 potential grounds for targeting naturalized citizens.

Examples range from “individuals who pose a risk to national security” or who have engaged in war crimes or torture, to people who have committed Medicaid or Medicare fraud or have otherwise defrauded the government. There is also a broad catch-all provision that refers to “any other cases … that the division determines to be sufficiently important to pursue.”

The denaturalization law focuses on “concealment of a material fact” or “willful misrepresentation” during the naturalization proceeding.

The ACLU’s Zafar said the memo leaves open the option for the Trump administration to at least try to target people based on their speech or associations.

“Even if they don’t think they really have a plausible chance of succeeding, they can use it as a means to just harass people,” she added.

The Justice Department can bring denaturalization cases over a wide range of conduct related to the questions applicants for U.S. citizenship are asked, including the requirement that they have been of “good moral character” in the preceding five years.

Immigration law includes several examples of what might disqualify someone on moral character grounds, including if they are a “habitual drunkard” or have been convicted of illegal gambling.

The naturalization application form itself asks a series of questions probing good moral character, such as whether the applicant has been involved in violent acts, including terrorism.

The form also queries whether people have advocated in support of groups that support communism, “the establishment in the United States of a totalitarian dictatorship” or the “unlawful assaulting or killing” of any U.S. official.

Failure to accurately answer any of the questions or the omission of any relevant information can be grounds for citizenship to be revoked.

In 2015, for example, Sammy Chang, a native of South Korea who had recently become a U.S. citizen, had his citizenship revoked in the wake of his conviction in a criminal case of trafficking women to work at a club he owned.

The government said that because Chang had been engaged in the scheme during the time he was applying for naturalization, he had failed to show good moral character.

But in both civil and criminal cases, the government has to reach a high bar to revoke citizenship. Among other things, it has to show that any misstatement or omission in a naturalization application was material to whether citizenship would have been granted.

In civil cases, the government has to show “clear, convincing, and unequivocal evidence which does not leave the issue in doubt” in order to prevail.

“A simple game of gotcha with naturalization applicants isn’t going to work,” said Jeremy McKinney, a North Carolina-based immigration lawyer. “It’s going to require significant materiality for a judge to strip someone of their United States citizenship.”

Targeting rap lyrics

In his June 26 tweet, Ogles attached a letter he sent to Attorney General Pam Bondi asking her to consider pursuing Mamdani’s denaturalization, in part, because he “expressed open solidarity with individuals convicted of terrorism-related offenses prior to becoming a U.S. citizen.”

Ogles cited rap lyrics that Mamdani wrote years ago in which he expressed support for the “Holy Land Five.”

That appears to be a reference to five men involved in a U.S.-based Muslim charitable group called the Holy Land Foundation who were convicted in 2008 of providing material support to the Palestinian group Hamas. Some activists say the prosecution was a miscarriage of justice fueled by anti-Muslim sentiment following the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Ogles’ office and Mamdani’s campaign did not respond to requests seeking comment.

Speaking on Newsmax in June, Ogles expanded on his reasons for revoking Mamdani’s citizenship, suggesting the mayoral candidate had “failed to disclose” relevant information when he became a citizen, including his political associations. Ogles has alleged Mamdani is a communist because of his identification as a democratic socialist, although the latter is not a communist group.

Anyone speaking on Newsmax these days is an irrelevant fruitcake.

The Trump administration, Ogles added, could use a case against Mamdani to “create a template for other individuals who come to this country” who, he claimed, “want to undermine our way of life.” (Even if Mamdani were denaturalized, he would not, contrary to Ogles’ claim, automatically face deportation, as he would most likely revert his previous status as a permanent resident.)

In an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on June 29, Mamdani said calls for him to be stripped of his citizenship and deported are “a glimpse into what life is like for many Muslim New Yorkers and many New Yorkers of different faiths who are constantly being told they don’t belong in this city and this country that they love.”

Targeting Mamdani for his rap lyrics would constitute a very unusual denaturalization case, said Taufa, the immigration lawyer.

But, she added, “they can trump up a reason to denaturalize someone if they want to.”

McKinney, a former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said the relatively low number of denaturalization cases that are filed, including those taken up during Trump’s first term, shows how difficult it is for the government to actually strip people of their citizenship.

“But what they can be very successful at is continuing to create a climate of panic and anxiety and fear,” he added. “They’re doing that very well. So, mission accomplished in that regard.”

Calls to strip Zohran Mamdani’s citizenship spark alarm about Trump weaponizing denaturalization
Past administrations, including Obama’s, have sought to denaturalize U.S. citizens, such as terrorists and Nazis. But advocates worry he could target political opponents.

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/calls-strip-zohran-mamdanis-citizenship-trump-denaturalization-power-rcna216653

The Intercept: State Cops Quietly Tag Thousands as Gang Members — and Feed Their Names to ICE

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Gang databases are often racially biased and riddled with errors. States and cities send their flawed information to immigration authorities.

Police gang databases are known to be faulty. The secret registries allow state and local cops to feed civilians’ personal information into massive, barely regulated lists based on speculative criteria — like their personal contacts, clothing, and tattoos — even if they haven’t committed a crime. The databases aren’t subject to judicial review, and they don’t require police to notify the people they peg as gang members.

They’re an ideal tool for officials seeking to imply criminality without due process. And many are directly accessible to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

An investigation by The Intercept found that at least eight states and large municipalities funnel their gang database entries to ICE — which can then use the information to target people for arrest, deportation, or rendition to so-called “third countries.” Some of the country’s largest and most immigrant-dense states, like Texas, New York, Illinois, and Virginia, route the information to ICE through varied paths that include a decades-old police clearinghouse and a network of post-9/11 intelligence-sharing hubs.

Both federal immigration authorities and local police intelligence units operate largely in secret, and the full extent of the gang database-sharing between them is unknown. What is known, however, is that the lists are riddled with mistakes: Available research, reporting, and audits have revealed that many contain widespread errors and encourage racial profiling.

The flawed systems could help ICE expand its dragnet as it seeks to carry out President Donald Trump’s promised “mass deportation” campaign. The administration has cited common tattoos and other spurious evidence to create its own lists of supposed gang members, invoking the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to send hundreds to El Salvador’s notorious Terrorism Confinement Center prison, also known as CECOT. Gang databases The Intercept identified as getting shared with ICE contain hundreds of thousands of other entries, including some targeted at Central American communities that have landed in the administration’s crosshairs. That information can torpedo asylum and other immigration applications and render those seeking legal status deportable.

“They’re going after the asylum system on every front they can,” said Andrew Case, supervising counsel for criminal justice issues at the nonprofit LatinoJustice. “Using gang affiliation as a potential weapon in that fight is very scary.”

Information supplied by local gang databases has already driven at least one case that became a national flashpoint: To justify sending Kilmar Abrego Garcia to CECOT in March, federal officials used a disputed report that a disgraced Maryland cop submitted to a defunct registry to label him as a member of a transnational gang. The report cited the word of an unnamed informant, Abrego’s hoodie, and a Chicago Bulls cap — items “indicative of the Hispanic gang culture,” it said.

The case echoed patterns from Trump’s first term, when ICE leaned on similar information from local cops — evidence as flimsy as doodles in a student’s notebook — to label immigrants as gang members eligible for deportation. As Trump’s second administration shifts its immigration crackdown into overdrive, ICE is signaling with cases like Abrego’s that it’s eager to continue fueling it with local police intelligence.

Nayna Gupta, policy director at the American Immigration Council, argued that this kind of information-sharing boosts ICE’s ability to target people without due process.

“This opens the door to an incredible amount of abuse,” she said. “This is our worst fear.”

In February, ICE arrested Francisco Garcia Casique, a barber from Venezuela living in Texas. The agency alleged that he was a member of Tren de Aragua, the Venezuelan gang at the center of the latest anti-immigrant panic, and sent him to CECOT.

Law enforcement intelligence on Garcia Casique was full of errors: A gang database entry contained the wrong mugshot and appears to have confused him with a man whom Dallas police interviewed about a Mexican gang, USA Today reported. Garcia Casique’s family insists he was never in a gang.

It’s unclear exactly what role the faulty gang database entry played in Garcia Casique’s rendition, which federal officials insist wasn’t a mistake. But ICE agents had direct access to it — plus tens of thousands of other entries from the same database — The Intercept has found.

Under a Texas statute Trump ally Gov. Greg Abbott signed into law in 2017, any county with a population over 100,000 or municipality over 50,000 must maintain or contribute to a local or regional gang database. More than 40 Texas counties and dozens more cities and towns meet that bar. State authorities compile the disparate gang intelligence in a central registry known as TxGANG, which contained more than 71,000 alleged gang members as of 2022.

Texas then uploads the entries to the “Gang File” in an FBI-run clearinghouse known as the National Crime Information Center, state authorities confirmed to The Intercept. Created in the 1960s, the NCIC is one of the most commonly used law enforcement datasets in the country, with local, state, and federal police querying its dozens of files millions of times a day. (The FBI did not answer The Intercept’s questions.)

ICE can access the NCIC, including the Gang File, in several ways — most directly through its Investigative Case Management system, Department of Homeland Security documents show. The Obama administration hired Palantir, the data-mining company co-founded by billionaire former Trump adviser Peter Thiel, to build the proprietary portal, which makes countless records and databases immediately available to ICE agents. Palantir is currently expanding the tool, having signed a $96 million contract during the Biden administration to upgrade it.

TxGANG isn’t the only gang database ICE can access through its Palantir-built system. The Intercept trawled the open web for law enforcement directives, police training materials, and state and local statutes that mention adding gang database entries to the NCIC. Those The Intercept identified likely represent a small subset of the jurisdictions that upload to the ICE-accessible clearinghouse.

New York Focus first reported the NCIC pipeline-to-immigration agents when it uncovered a 20-year-old gang database operated by the New York State Police. Any law enforcement entity in the Empire State can submit names to the statewide gang database, which state troopers then consider for submission to the NCIC. The New York state gang database contains more than 5,100 entries and has never been audited.

The Wisconsin Department of Justice, which did not respond to requests for comment, has instructed its intelligence bureau on how to add names to the NCIC Gang File as recently as 2023, The Intercept found. Virginia has enshrined its gang database-sharing in commonwealth law, which explicitly requires NCIC uploading. In April, Virginia authorities helped ICE arrest 132 people who law enforcement officials claimed were part of transnational gangs.

The Illinois State Police, too, have shared their gang database to the FBI-run dataset. They also share it directly with the Department of Homeland Security, ICE’s umbrella agency, through an in-house information-sharing system, a local PBS affiliate uncovered last month.

The Illinois State Police’s gang database contained over 90,000 entries as of 2018. The data-sharing with Homeland Security flew under the radar for 17 years and likely violates Illinois’s 2017 sanctuary state law.

“Even in the jurisdictions that are not inclined to work with federal immigration authorities, the information they’re collecting could end up in these federal databases,” said Gupta.

Aside from the National Crime Information Center, there are other conduits for local police to enable the Trump administration’s gang crusade.

Some departments have proactively shared their gang information directly with ICE. As with the case of the Illinois State Police’s gang database, federal agents had access to the Chicago Police Department’s gang registry through a special data-sharing system. From 2009 to 2018, immigration authorities searched the database at least 32,000 times, a city audit later found. In one instance, the city admitted it mistakenly added a man to the database after ICE used it to arrest him.

The Chicago gang database was full of other errors, like entries whose listed dates of birth made them over 100 years old. The inaccuracies and immigration-related revelations, among other issues, prompted the city to shut down the database in 2023.

Other departments allow partner agencies to share their gang databases with immigration authorities. In 2016, The Intercept reported that the Los Angeles Police Department used the statewide CalGang database — itself shown to contain widespread errors — to help ICE deport undocumented people. The following year, California enacted laws that prohibited using CalGang for immigration enforcement. Yet the California Department of Justice told The Intercept that it still allows the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Office to share the database, which contained nearly 14,000 entries as of last year, with the Department of Homeland Security.

“Each user must document their need to know/right to know prior to logging into CalGang,” and that documentation is “subject to regular audit,” a California Department of Justice spokesperson said.

Local police also share gang information with the feds through a series of regional hubs known as fusion centers. Created during the post-9/11 domestic surveillance boom, fusion centers were meant to facilitate intelligence-sharing — particularly about purported terrorism — between federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies. Their scope quickly expanded, and they’ve played a key role in the growth of both immigration- and gang-related policing and surveillance.

The Boston Police Department told The Intercept that agencies within the Department of Homeland Security seek access to its gang database by filing a “request for information” through the fusion center known as the Boston Regional Intelligence Center. In 2016, ICE detained a teenager after receiving records from the Boston gang database, which used a report about a tussle at his high school to label him as a gang member. Boston later passed a law barring law enforcement officials from sharing personal information with immigration enforcement agents, but it contains loopholes for criminal investigations.

In the two decades since their creation, fusion center staff have proactively sought to increase the upward flow of local gang intelligence — including by leveraging federal funds, as in the case between the Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Police Department and the Maryland Coordination and Analysis Center, which works directly with the Department of Homeland Security. An email from 2013, uncovered as part of a trove of hacked documents, shows that an employee at the Maryland fusion center threatened to withhold some federal funding if the D.C. police didn’t regularly share its gang database.

“I wanted to prepare you that [sic] your agency’s decision … to NOT connect … may indeed effect [sic] next years [sic] funding for your contractual analysts,” a fusion center official wrote. “So keep that in mind…………..”

Four years later, ICE detained a high schooler after receiving a D.C. police gang database entry. The entry said that he “self-admitted” to being in a gang, an Intercept investigation later reported — a charge his lawyer denied.

For jurisdictions that don’t automatically comply, the Trump administration is pushing to entice them into cooperating with ICE. The budget bill Trump signed into law on the Fourth of July earmarks some $14 billion for state and local ICE collaboration, as well as billions more for local police. Official police partnerships with ICE had already skyrocketed this year; more are sure to follow.

Revelations about gang database-sharing show how decades of expanding police surveillance and speculative gang policing have teed up the Trump administration’s crackdowns, said Gupta of the American Immigration Council.

“The core problem is one that extends far beyond the Trump administration,” she said. “You let the due process bar drop that far for so long, it makes it very easy for Trump.”

State Cops Quietly Tag Thousands as Gang Members — and Feed Their Names to ICE
Gang databases are often racially biased and riddled with errors. States and cities send their flawed information to ICE.

Daily Caller: ‘Another Win For The American People’: Appeals Court Hands Trump Admin Deportation Victory

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An appellate court ruled the Trump administration can move forward with ending temporary deportation protections for thousands of Afghan and Cameroonian nationals.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is allowed to end the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for roughly 10,000 Afghans and Cameroonians while a court challenge against the move continues to play out in court, the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Monday. The court determined that while CASA — an immigration advocacy group suing DHS — has a plausible case, there is not enough evidence to block the TPS phaseout while the court challenge continues.

“We agree with the district court that CASA, Inc. has stated a plausible claim for relief with regard to the alleged ‘preordained’ decision to terminate temporary protected status (TPS) for Afghanistan and Cameroon, and that the balance of the equities and the public interest weigh in favor of CASA, Inc,” the court stated, according to court documents.

“At this procedural posture, however, there is insufficient evidence to warrant the extraordinary remedy of a postponement of agency action pending appeal,” the ruling continued.

The Monday court ruling marks the latest victory in the Trump administration’s ongoing effort to keep TPS designations temporary.

A federal authority first established in the Immigration Act of 1990, TPS bestows sweeping deportation protections and work eligibility to certain foreign nationals living in the U.S., including illegal migrants, whose home countries are experiencing any number of conflicts or devastating natural disasters, making it potentially unsafe for them to go back, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS).

The authority does not grant permanent legal status, according to USCIS. Those who lose TPS become amenable to removal unless they obtain another form of immigration status.

Despite its purpose as a temporary form of deportation protection, the authority has served as a more permanent measure in practice.

Honduras and Nicaragua, for example, were initially designated for TPS roughly 25 years ago based on an environmental disaster that resulted in “substantial, but temporary” disruption of living conditions, according to a DHS memo issued earlier in July. Since that time, however, both Central American countries have seen their TPS designations “continuously extended” over the years, with Nicaragua’s designation being extended a total of 13 consecutive times.

The Trump administration is moving to finally end TPS for Nicaragua and Honduras, arguing that conditions in both countries no longer support the deportation protection designation. Earlier this year, the administration also announced it would nix the Biden White House’s TPS extension for Haiti, a designation the country has enjoyed since 2010, and revoke an 18-month TPS extension granted to roughly 600,000 Venezuelan nationals by Biden officials.

“This is another win for the American people and the safety of our communities,” DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin stated Tuesday to the Daily Caller News Foundation. “TPS was never intended to be a de facto asylum program, yet it has been abused as one for decades.”

No, you ignorant bitch, this isn’t a “win” for anyone except our deranged King Donald and his entourage of blind sycophants.

This is a stain on America. We provided shelter for 10,000 Afghans and Cameroonians who were at risk in their home countries; you and your cronies are pulling the rug out from under them. If you actually succeed in deporting them, many, perhaps thousands, will end up injured and murdered.

“DHS records indicate that there are Afghan nationals who are TPS recipients who have been the subject of administrative investigations for fraud, public safety, and national security,” McLaughlin continued. “This decision restores integrity in our immigration system and ensures that Temporary Protective Status is actually temporary.”

In May, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem declared TPS for Afghan nationals would end within 60 days, according to a release. The number of Afghans on TPS is relatively small compared to the number of Afghans who arrived to the U.S. en masse amid President Joe Biden’s chaotic withdrawal from the country and obtained other forms of immigration benefits.

Roughly 9,600 Afghans and nearly 3,500 Cameroonians currently have TPS, according to The National Immigration Forum. The deportation protections for Afghan nationals were slated to end earlier in July and protections for Cameroonian nationals are set to expire on Aug. 4.

What’s needed now is a direct appeal to the Supreme Court, if they will hear the case, or a conflicting opinion in another circuit, which normally would force the issue to the Supreme Court.

‘Another Win For The American People’: Appeals Court Hands Trump Admin Deportation Victory
An appellate court is allowing the Trump admin to move forward with ending temporary deportation protections for thousands of Afghan and Cameroonian nationals.

https://dailycaller.com/2025/07/22/court-ruling-hands-trump-admin-tps-win

Mirror: CNN halts show for ‘breaking news’ as poll delivers harsh blow to Donald Trump

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CNN’s regular broadcast was interrupted for a breaking news segment, revealing that a significant number of Americans were against Donald Trump’s latest immigration move.

Trump, who was brutally blasted over his new $250 visa fee for travelers, has often boasted about his poll numbers on immigration but the reality is very different.

I’ve separated the poll results into bullet points for readability:

  • As a poll appeared on screen, the news anchor shared, “Just 42% of Americans now approve of how he’s handled immigration,
  • with only 40% approving of his policies on deportation specifically.
  • When it comes to deportations, 55% think Trump has gone too far and that’s up sharply by 10 points since February.”
  • Another poll dissecting the different aspects of deportation showed that 53% of people were against Trump’s plan to increase the ICE Budget by billions.
  • 59% also opposed his move to end the effort to end birthright citizenship.
  • Another 57% Americans opposed the President’s hopes to build new detention centers.
  • A staggering 59% of people were against Trump’s plan to detain undocumented immigrants with no criminal record.
  • When asked if they believed “Trump’s immigration policies are making the US safer,” 53% of Americans said no.

CNN halts show for ‘breaking news’ as poll delivers harsh blow to Trump
President Donald Trump has come under fire from a new poll by CNN, which says 55% of Americans believe that he has gone ‘too far’ with his latest immigration plans

https://www.themirror.com/entertainment/donald-trump-immigration-cnn-poll-1280319

Charlotte Observer: Stephen Miller’s Migrant Claim Sparks Outrage

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White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller has claimed that removing undocumented immigrants would enhance public services in cities like Los Angeles. However, critics have noted that over 70% of the more than 57,000 individuals detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) have no criminal convictions. They added that a fear of deportation and restrictive policies have driven an avoidance of healthcare.

Miller said, “What would Los Angeles look like without illegal aliens? Here’s what it would look like: You would be able to see a doctor in the emergency room right away, no wait time, no problems. Your kids would go to a public school that had more money than they know what to do with. Classrooms would be half the size. Students who have special needs would get all the attention that they needed. … There would be no fentanyl, there would be no drug deaths.”

Bullshit!!!

Federal Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong ruled, “During their ‘roving patrols’ in Los Angeles, ICE agents detained individuals principally because of their race, that they were overheard speaking Spanish or accented English, that they were doing work associated with undocumented immigrants, or were in locations frequented by undocumented immigrants seeking day work.”

Meanwhile, back on Planet Earth:

Cato Institute data shows 65% of over 204,000 ICE detainees in fiscal year 2025 had no criminal record. While some committed serious crimes, most do not fit the violent image portrayed by the Trump administration.

A 2014 UCLA study found only 10% of undocumented adults use emergency rooms annually, compared to 20% of U.S.-born adults. Trump-era changes to the “public charge” rule have further reduced healthcare use.

Brennan Center for Justice senior director Lauren-Brooke Eisen stated, “Trump has justified this immigration agenda in part by making false claims that migrants are driving violent crime in the United States, and that’s just simply not true. There’s no research and evidence that supports his claims.”

Critics have argued that claims linking undocumented immigrants to the fentanyl crisis are misleading. Nearly 90% of fentanyl-related convictions involve U.S. citizens.

Stephen Miller’s Migrant Claim Sparks Outrage

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/stephen-miller-s-migrant-claim-sparks-outrage/ss-AA1J0dy7

USA Today: Lawyer details ‘horrendous conditions’ faced by 11th grader detained by ICE

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“This kid has been sleeping on a cement floor for five days, no access to a shower; he’s brushed his teeth twice,” said Marcelo Gomes da Silva’s immigration attorney.

Sleeping on a cement floor in a windowless room. Only brushing your teeth twice in five days and never getting to shower. Being mocked by a guard.

These are among the “horrendous conditions” that Massachusetts high school junior Marcelo Gomes da Silva endured while being held by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, according to his lawyer Robin Nice.

Gomes Da Silva, 18, was arrested by ICE agents on May 31 when he was stopped on his way to volleyball practice with friends in his hometown of Milford. Federal officials said they targeted da Silva’s father, Joao Paulo Gomes-Pereira, who they say is an undocumented immigrant from Brazil, but they detained Gomes da Silva − who came to the United States at the age of 7 with his parents − when they realized he had overstayed his visa.

According to Nice, Gomes Da Silva was subsequently detained for five nights in cells that are intended to hold detainees for hours before being transferred. The cells lack access to basic amenities like beds and showers.

“The Burlington (Massachusetts) facility is not a detention center, it’s a holding cell,” Nice told USA TODAY after a June 5 hearing in Gomes da Silva’s case, which has drawn nationwide attention and fervent local opposition to his detention and possible deportation.

“It’s deplorable,” she added.

Nice first raised the issue in a federal immigration court hearing on whether he would be granted bail.

“He’s being held in just awful conditions no one should be subjected to: sleeping on a cement floor for just a few hours per night,” Nice began, before she was cut off by Immigration Judge Jenny Beverly, who noted the hearing was not the proper venue to raise the issue.

Shackles, teasing, and solitary confinement

Nice provided more details on her client’s confinement in a press conference after the hearing, in which the judge set a $2,000 bond for Gomes da Silva’s release, and in a subsequent interview with USA TODAY.

“This kid has been sleeping on a cement floor for five days, no access to a shower, he’s brushed his teeth twice. He’s sharing a room with men twice his age,” Nice said at the press conference outside the Chelmsford, Massachusetts federal immigration court.

At one point, Gomes da Silva was taken to a hospital emergency room because he was suffering severe headaches and vision loss stemming from a high school volleyball injury days earlier. When he was transferred to and from the hospital, he was handcuffed and kept in leg shackles and then moved to a different room, Nice said.

“He got back to the holding facility at 4 am and then was put in what I would refer to as solitary confinement: it was a room without anyone else, and all of these rooms that people are held in, there is no window,” Nice said. “There is no yard time, because it’s not set up for that.”

“If you are detained in the Burlington ICE facility, you do not see the light of day,” she said. “You don’t know what time it is.”

The isolation that da Silva subsequently endured made him so “desperately lonely” that he took to banging on the walls of his cell to get someone to come talk to him, Nice told USA TODAY. The guards, who he said mostly ignored him, nicknamed him “the knocker” in response.

When Gomes da Silva was held in the room with a larger group, one of the guards played a cruel practical joke on the detainees, Nice said:

“He said when ICE opens the door it means either someone’s coming in or someone’s getting released, so everyone perks up when they open the door. So he sees in a little slit in the door window, one ICE officer motion to another and says ‘watch this,’ and so one ICE officer opens the door to the cell and just stands their for a minute and then says, ‘psych!’ And closes the door. And everyone had just perked up,” Nice recounted.

The isolation in the ICE holding facility extended beyond its walls, Nice said. There was no way for her to call her client there, and he could only make one call for two minutes per day − and not even every day.

Nice wasn’t able to get in to see Gomes da Silva until the fifth day of his confinement. He was so shut off from the outside world that he didn’t know his varsity volleyball team had lost in the semi-finals of the state tournament, even though the match drew media coverage.

ICE did not respond to USA TODAY’s request for comment on Nice’s allegations.

In a statement on June 2, Patricia Hyde, acting field director for ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations’ in Boston defended Gomes da Silva’s detention and said the agency intends to pursue deportation proceedings.

“When we go into the community and find others who are unlawfully here, we’re going to arrest them,” Hyde said. “He’s 18 years old and he’s illegally in this country. We had to go to Milford looking for someone else and if we come across someone else who is here illegally, we’re going to arrest them.”

‘Nobody deserves to be down there’

Later on June 5, Gomes da Silva himself addressed reporters after posting the $2,000 bond and being released.

“Nobody deserves to be down there,” da Silva told reporters. “You sleep on concrete floors. The bathroom — I have to use the bathroom in the open with like 35-year-old men. It’s humiliating.”

Gomes da Silva also said they were given only crackers for lunch and dinner. Nice told USA TODAY he was also fed what he described as an undefined “mush” that was “like oatmeal, but not oatmeal.”

A twice-weekly churchgoer, Gomes da Silva asked the guards for a bible but was not provided with one.

Beside him were U.S. Reps. Seth Moulton and Jake Auchincloss, both Democrats from Massachusetts, who said they returned from Washington, D.C., on Thursday to speak with da Silva and to inspect the detention center.

Consequences of an immigration crackdown

The Trump administration has sought to ramp up deportations of undocumented immigrants, including those like da Silva who were brought here as children and have no criminal record. ICE reported holding 46,269 people in custody in mid-March, well above the agency’s detention capacity of 41,500 beds.

USA TODAY has previously reported on allegations of conditions in ICE detention similar to what Gomes da Silva and Nice described.

In March, four women held at the Krome North Processing Center in Miami said they were chained for hours on a prison bus without access to food, water or a toilet. They also alleged they were told by guards to urinate on the floor, slept on a concrete floor, and only got one three-minute shower over the course of three or four days in custody.

The allegations come after two men at Krome died in custody on Jan. 23 and Feb. 20.

Lawyer details ‘horrendous conditions’ faced by 11th grader detained by ICE
“This kid has been sleeping on a cement floor for five days, no access to a shower; he’s brushed his teeth twice,” said the teenager’s attorney.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/06/05/marcelo-gomes-da-silva-ice-conditions/84057203007

WCCO Radio Minneapolis: Civil rights advocates are condemning ICE courtroom arrests in Minneapolis

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Members of the Minnesota Immigrant Rights Action Committee, gathered in protest outside Minneapolis’s Whipple Federal Building, claiming ICE agents have detained at least four people after they showed up for their scheduled immigration court hearings.

Leaders like Ward 9 Minneapolis Councilmember Jason Chavez are demanding an end to these practices.

“We’re going to be strengthening our separation ordinance,” says Chavez, “we’ll do that by working with community members that are leading the work on the ground because the folks on the grounds are the ones that are protecting our community.”

Member of The Interfaith Coalition on Migration John Benda describes what volunteers with his organization have seen.

“Our volunteers who do court watch here, are telling us the stories of agents waiting outside the court hearing rooms, and people think they’re free to go outside and they are apprehended.”

Advocates argue these arrests are a part of an aggressive, nationwide deportation agenda under the current administration.

You do what they tell you to do, and then they arrest you and deport you anyway.

Civil rights advocates are condemning ICE courtroom arrests in Minneapolis
Immigrant rights advocates are speaking out against alleged actions by plain-clothes ICE officers who reportedly detained at least four individuals outside immigration court hearings at the Whipple Federal Building in Minneapolis.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/civil-rights-advocates-are-condemning-ice-courtroom-arrests-in-minneapolis/ar-AA1IAVRI

Independent: ICE secretly deported Pennsylvania grandfather, 82, after he lost his Green Card

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‘I can see all my family is in pain right now,’ Luis Leon granddaughter said

The family of an 82-year-old Chilean national feared he was dead for weeks before discovering that he had been detained by ICE after he misplaced his green card, according to a report.

Relatives last saw Luis Leon, who lives in Allentown, Pennsylvania, on June 20, when he and his wife visited the Philadelphia immigration office to replace his lost green card, The Morning Call first reported.

There, officers handcuffed him and took him away without explanation, relatives told the outlet. His family was left scrambling, contacting immigration offices, hospitals and even a morgue for more information on Leon’s whereabouts.

Then, on July 9, Leon’s wife received a call that seemed to confirm the family’s worst fears; the caller claimed the 82-year-old had died.

Thankfully, this week, his family members learned that Leon had been moved from a detention facility in Minnesota to Guatemala. He’s now in a hospital in Guatemala City, the outlet reported. The Independent has reached out to ICE for more information.

It’s not immediately clear why he was sent to Guatemala. But last month, the Supreme Court left the door open for the Trump administration to deport immigrants to countries they have never called home.

“I can see all my family is in pain right now,” his granddaughter Nataly told The Morning Call. She’s planning to fly to Guatemala to see her grandfather, who suffers from diabetes, high blood pressure and other conditions.

She told the outlet she hopes to amplify Leon’s experience to show how he was treated by the immigration system.

If the multi-location ordeal wasn’t enough, the unknown caller contacted the family another time. Days after immigration authorities arrested Leon, a woman claiming to be an immigration attorney called Leon’s wife and claimed she could help get Leon out on bail. However, she didn’t mention how she learned about the case or where he was at the time.

Leon was granted political asylum in 1987 after surviving Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet’s regime, the outlet reported. He has a clean record — and hasn’t even been given so much as a parking ticket, the family claimed.

He’s not alone, figures from the data distribution organization Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse show. As of this week, there are more than 56,800 people in ICE detention; 72 percent of them have no criminal convictions.

The Independent is the world’s most free-thinking news brand, providing global news, commentary and analysis for the independently-minded. We have grown a huge, global readership of independently minded individuals, who value our trusted voice and commitment to positive change. Our mission, making change happen, has never been as important as it is today.

ICE secretly deported Pennsylvania grandfather, 82, after he lost his Green Card
‘I can see all my family is in pain right now,’ Luis Leon granddaughter said

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/ice-deported-grandpa-green-card-b2792290.html