President Donald Trump claimed that he is above the law, saying that he can attack Harvard University all that he wants. Trump is not legally allowed to withhold federal funds from Harvard.
Parking an ICE vehicle on a public street to intimidate immigrants is the goal.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/video/peopleandplaces/ice-sparks-fear-parking-near-church/vi-AA1Me0zY
Workers stayed on a roof in Rochester as agents left with slashed tires following a four-hour ICE standoff.
A dramatic standoff in upstate New York between immigration agents, roofers and protesters ended with officials leaving the scene with slashed tires Tuesday.
The confrontation happened at a residential job site where one worker was detained and others refused to come down from a rooftop in Rochester’s Park Avenue area.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and other federal agencies arrived at the sanctuary city home to carry out a removal operation of the suspected illegal immigrants.
One roofer was taken into custody, while others stayed on the rooftop, WXXI News reported.
The incident escalated quickly when more than 100 protesters gathered at the scene, according to the NPR radio station.
Some were heard chanting “shame” and called the agents “gestapo,” according to the outlet.
At one point, a CBP vehicle, the station reported, was allegedly forced to retreat on four slashed tires as the crowd clapped. A few blocks away from the scene, the SUV was towed, WHAM reported.
The four-hour standoff saw federal agents abandon their attempts to detain other workers.
Late last month, the Rochester City Council voted unanimously to codify the city’s sanctuary policy.
The Western New York Coalition of Farmworker Serving Agencies helped mediate the standoff, according to WXXI.
“The coalition is committed to standing alongside farmworkers, immigrants, and migrants to ensure dignity, fairness, and access to justice,” coalition Executive Director Irene Sanchez said in a news release.
The incident came as the Trump administration has increased immigration enforcement across the country.
“President Trump’s been clear we’re going to prioritize public safety threats and national security threats, and data shows that’s exactly what we’re doing,” White House border czar Tom Homan told reporters Tuesday. “But if you want me to sit here and bless someone being here illegally, I’m not going to do that because they cheated the system.”
CBP and ICE did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment.
An Irish woman who has been living in the US since she was a child faces deportation over a ‘bad’ $25 cheque she wrote a decade ago.
Donna Brown, 58, who emigrated nearly 50 years ago, is being held by Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement – known as ICE – and faces being sent back to Ireland.
Her husband, Jim Brown, said his wife, an Irish citizen born in England, moved to America when she was 11 and is a legal resident alien, but not a U.S. citizen. The couple married eight years ago, which he believes should also protect her from being deported.
Mr Brown told his local TV station in Missouri: ‘It’s just not fair that you’re telling me I have to be a bachelor the rest of my life because of some stupid policy.’
In July, Donna was arrested at customs in Chicago on her return from Ireland after a family funeral. Her husband said: ‘You don’t arrest 58-year-old grandmothers. It’s just wrong. She hasn’t committed crimes.’
She has now spent more than 30 days in jail in Kentucky as the US government moves to deport her, which Mr Brown fears will happen.
‘It’s egregious that we have allowed a government to allow this to happen,’ he said.
‘It’s egregious that we have allowed a government to allow this to happen,’ he said.
Legal documents for her arrest say that ten years ago, Donna wrote a bad cheque for $25. However, she paid the money back and was given probation. But Mr Brown said the US government is now arguing that was a ‘crime of moral turpitude’.
US courts say a ‘crime of moral turpitude… refers generally to conduct that shocks the public conscience as being inherently base, vile or depraved, contrary to the rules of morality’. It has been used in the past against former IRA members who did not declare their crimes to immigration.
Mr Brown believes his wife’s arrest is a direct result of the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration policies.
‘I think it’s nonsense. I think it’s a blanket thing to catch everybody, to fill [jail] beds. They signed a stupid bill that is torturing innocent people, and that’s the problem,’ he said. He is now protesting at what he calls his wife’s ‘deplorable’ conditions in jail and is campaigning for her release.
‘She’s been in this country 47 years, is married, with five kids and five grandkids, and you’re telling me she’s a flight risk? I want somebody to have the guts and the fortitude to stand up and say, “You know what? This is wrong”,’ he said.
‘It’s crazy that this is happening. It’s just crazy that this is even allowed in this country. That’s the problem. It shouldn’t even be thought that this should be okay,’ he said.
Mr Brown, a veteran who served 20 years in the military, said he won’t stop fighting for his wife. ‘My wife is not a criminal,’ he said. He is now caring for their horses on their nine-acre farm near Troy, Missouri.
A GoFundMe for Donna states it was created to help prepare and support her husband’s ‘fight for justice and freedom of his wife, Donna Hughes-Brown, who was wrongly detained and incarcerated this past July.
‘The goal is to raise the resources necessary to cover the lawyers and court fees, and help Jim and Donna navigate these difficult, stressful and expensive times,’ the appeal reads.
‘Jim and Donna are both very strong supporters and helpers of our community. They are often involved with multiple volunteer organisations and projects. They both are hard-working, honest, and caring individuals. They are good servers of God; humble people who are always willing to help, and kind friends that share knowledge and wisdom with anyone in need.’
In May of this year, Cliona Ward was released from custody in the US where she had been arrested after she returned from visiting her dying father in Ireland.
The 54-year-old Dubliner lives in Santa Cruz, California, and was detained by ICE over minor convictions from almost 20 years ago, which were supposed to have been expunged from her record.
Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor blasted the Supreme Court’s decision to allow wide-scale ICE raids and immigration stops in Los Angeles to continue on Monday. In a scathing dissent, she said the court was giving the Department of Homeland Security a green light to “seize anyone who looks Latino.”
The Monday ruling lifted an injunction on “roving” ICE actions in Southern California. That order from a lower court judge barred agents from carrying out detentions based on ethnicity, languages being spoken, employment or location.
While the Supreme Court’s ruling was unsigned, it appeared to be supported along partisan lines as all three liberals dissented. Writing for the liberal justices, Sotomayor called the order “unconscionable” and said it made Latinos throughout the region “fair game.”
“We should not have to live in a country where the Government can seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and appears to work a low-wage job,” Sotomayor wrote.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh, concurring with the unnamed majority, said ethnicity was a “a ‘relevant factor’” for ICE agents to consider. He added that “many” undocumented immigrants in the Los Angeles area “do not speak much English,” and work low-wage, manual labor jobs.
“Under this Court’s precedents, not mention common sense, those circumstances taken together can constitute at least reasonable suspicion of illegal presence in the United States,” Kavanaugh wrote.
In her dissent, Sotomayor raised concerns about how the ruling could impact constitutional protections against unreasonable search and seizure.
“The Fourth Amendment protects every individual’s constitutional right to be free from arbitrary interference by law officers,” she wrote. “After today, that may no longer be true for those who happen to look a certain way, speak a certain way, and appear to work a certain type of legitimate job that pays very little.”
https://www.salon.com/2025/09/08/sotomayor-says-scotus-ruling-lets-ice-seize-anyone-who-looks-latino
New York’s small farms are beginning to feel the strain of immigration enforcement under the Trump administration, with experts warning that an industry heavily reliant on undocumented workers needs an urgent solution from Congress.
While much of the focus when it comes to immigrants in the Empire State has been the New York City metro area, the state itself is home to as many as 67,000 farmworkers across 30,000 farms mostly upstate and on Long Island.
“We are the most important part of the country, because no one can live without food,” said one Mexican man who has worked in New York for 12 years, speaking to Newsweek on condition of anonymity. “So we can live without a car, without electricity, without many things. But we can’t live without food.”
A Multi-Billion Dollar Industry At Risk
The human impact of ongoing ICE raids is evident to those working on the ground. Another farm worker in New York, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals, told Newsweek that “cows are going to die” if the administration’s deportations continue across the state.
“It’s a risk every day to go to work. It’s a risk to go to the grocery store. It’s a risk to drive your kids to school. It’s a risk to drive your child to their doctor’s appointment,” the worker told Newsweek.
The person said that the farming industry in New York won’t be able to function without immigrant workers.
“It doesn’t make sense on either a human level or on a business level. The food industry relies mostly on undocumented people,” the worker said.
New York is the country’s top producer of yogurt, and number two producer of apples, but U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids are potentially putting an $8 billion farming industry at-risk, experts believe.
Margaret Gray, an associate professor of political science at Adelphi University, told Newsweek that New York state has a diversity of farming sectors and immigrant workers supporting them.
“Dairy workers are year-round workers, apple pickers might only be in the state for eight or 12 weeks,” Gray said. “So, a lot of the apple pickers are on H-2A guest worker visas and so they’re not going to be targeted by ICE, but the dairy industry is not eligible for these visas at this time because to be eligible, you cannot have year-round work.”
Year-round operations, such as dairy farms, are largely ineligible for H-2A visas. Dairy farming requires consistent labor throughout the year to care for animals and maintain production, and the H-2A program is designed only for temporary or seasonal work during workforce shortages.
As a result, many dairy farms and other year-round agricultural businesses continue to rely heavily on undocumented workers to keep their operations running.
Gray said that communities like those in Suffolk County, on Long Island, where large immigrant communities have formed around the farming and agricultural industries, are among those most at risk when many residents and workers do not hold legal status.
“Even the detention of one worker right now can cause chaos. I have talked to people who are literally afraid to leave the house,” Gray said. “They’re afraid to go grocery shopping, they won’t go to parent-teacher meetings, and some of them aren’t even sending their children to school out of fear.”
A declining workforce, especially in sectors such as agriculture, could trigger supply shortages and higher labor costs, which may ultimately increase consumer prices.
Undocumented New Yorkers made a substantial economic contribution, paying $3.1 billion in state and local taxes, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. The Migration Policy Institute estimates that approximately 11.3 million undocumented immigrants live in New York.
“As business owners and employers in agriculture, we are very dependent on migrant workers,” Dennis Rak, who owns Double A Vineyards in West New York, told Newsweek. “These are jobs that we’d offer to any person, they are not bad-paying jobs, they’re $20 an hour or more, but no one wants to do any sort of manual labor anymore. So it’s critical for agriculture to have access to a source of labor that will do this.”
Will Trump Find a Solution?
Armando Elenes, Secretary-Treasurer for the United Farm Workers of America, told Newsweek that UFW has seen higher engagement from farm workers who want to know their rights should ICE show up.
In May, 14 workers at Lynn-Ette & Sons Farms, in Orleans County, were detained during an ICE raid. Then, in mid-August, agents showed up again to arrest seven more.
“The workers that have not been detained, it’s the fear of them being next or them being targeted, and the workers who were detained, they have their roots here,” Elenes said. “They’ve been here for years, and they have families here, they have friends here, and to be uprooted and basically sent back, whether it be to Guatemala or to Mexico, it’s a traumatic experience.”
President Donald Trump said in July at the Iowa State Fairgrounds that his administration was working on legislation to allow undocumented workers in sectors such as agriculture and hospitality to remain in the country, a compromise that many in MAGA said amounted to “amnesty.”
“We’re working on legislation right now where – farmers, look, they know better. They work with them for years. You had cases where…people have worked for a farm, on a farm for 14, 15 years and they get thrown out pretty viciously and we can’t do it. We gotta work with the farmers, and people that have hotels and leisure properties too,” Trump said, although no official program or policy update has been announced.
The administration has urged those in the U.S. without legal status to self-deport, offering them $1,000 to do so, or face tougher penalties, such as ICE detention. For the Mexican worker Newsweek spoke to, leaving is not an option.
“I think that the people who are taking self-deportation are people who have just arrived and since they haven’t had a permanent job, they don’t have a life, like they don’t have stability anymore,” he said. “So that’s not an option, I think, for most of the people who are here, because, I mean, $1,000 you earn in a week.”
Newsweek asked the USDA what the administration was doing about the issue, with a spokesperson repeating that Trump was “putting America First”, including streamlining H-2A and H-2B visas.
“Our immigration system has been broken for decades, and we finally have a President who is enforcing the law and prioritizing fixing programs farmers and ranchers rely on to produce the safest and most productive food supply in the world,” the spokesperson said.
Rak said he had little faith that the Trump administration was making any serious efforts on immigration reform which would help business owners like him.
“It doesn’t matter who is in the White House, or who’s in charge of Congress, none of them has been able to work together to come up with a solution that would solve this problem,” Rak said. “If the problem was solved with a workable immigration policy, we wouldn’t need to have the enforcement things that are going on now.”
https://www.newsweek.com/new-york-farms-immigrant-workers-ice-raids-2124775
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Trump administration have imposed roughly 21,500 fines totaling $6.1 billion on noncitizens who have ignored removal orders. Critics argued that such policies place undue pressure on individuals to leave the country and use misleading incentives that complicate compliance. Meanwhile, DHS and the Treasury Department are actively enforcing the collections while also offering voluntary-departure programs.
DHS rules allow daily fines and limit appeals if noncitizens don’t respond within 15 days. Collections have included tax reporting, private agencies, and refund garnishments.
…
A Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official stated, “It’s an easy choice: Leave voluntarily and receive a $1,000 check, or stay and wait till you are fined $1,000 a day, arrested, and deported without a possibility to return legally.”
Atta girl, Kristi “Bimbo #2” Noem: Compound their misery by fleecing them and stealing their hard-earned saving!
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/dhs-announces-6b-in-fines-for-noncitizens/ss-AA1LZgUK
