Tag Archives: Immigration

Independent: Kilmar Abrego Garcia seeks gag order against Trump administration, singles out Noem and Bondi’s ‘inflammatory’ attacks

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Barrage of public attacks could taint jury pools with ‘irrelevant, prejudicial, and false claims,’ according to Abrego Garcia’s attorneys

Kilmar Abrego Garcia is asking a federal judge for a gag order to stop Trump administration officials from publicly attacking him with “inflammatory” statements that attorneys say are threatening his right to a fair trial on criminal smuggling charges.

Lawyers for the wrongly deported Salvadoran immigrant say Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Attorney General Pam Bondi, among others, have spent months publicly disparaging his “character and reputation” by smearing him as a wife beater, pedophile, gang member and terrorist.

“The government’s ongoing barrage of prejudicial statements severely threaten — and perhaps have already irrevocably impaired — the ability to try this case at all — in any venue,” lawyers wrote Thursday night.

The Trump administration has “distorted the events and evidence underpinning his case to the public; misrepresented his criminal record; disseminated false, irrelevant, and inflammatory claims; and expressed the opinion that he is guilty of the crimes charged,” lawyers wrote.

Last month, the federal judge overseeing the criminal case ordered his release from jail before trial, finding that prosecutors failed to show “any evidence” that his history or the arguments against him warrant his ongoing detention. Judges have found the allegations “fanciful” and formally ruled that he does not pose a danger to the public.

Abrego Garcia was mistakenly deported to a brutal prison in his home country, igniting a high-profile legal battle for his return at the center of Donald Trump’s anti-immigration agenda.

Government lawyers admitted he was removed from the United States due to a procedural error, and several federal judges and a unanimous Supreme Court ordered the Trump administration to “facilitate” his return after his “illegal” arrest.

But the government spent weeks battling court orders for his return while officials launched a barrage of public attacks, declaring that he would never again step foot in the country.

He was then abruptly returned in June to face allegations that he illegally moved other immigrants across the country. He has pleaded not guilty.

In their request to keep him in jail before trial, federal prosecutors claimed he is a member of the transnational gang MS-13 and “personally participated in violent crime, including murder.”

Prosecutors also claimed he “abused” women and trafficked children, firearms and narcotics, and there is also an ongoing investigation into “solicitation of child pornography.”

Abrego Garcia is not facing any charges on any of those allegations, nor has he been convicted of anything. A federal judge determined that the government failed to link those allegations to evidence that implicates him.

Abrego Garcia’s wife had previously sought a protective order against him several years ago, though she never pressed charges and said the couple has since resolved their disputes. She has played a prominent public role defending him.

Last week, a federal judge granted his release from pretrial detention. Immigration authorities arrested him days later and threatened to deport him to Uganda.

A separate judge has blocked the government from deporting him while he challenges his latest arrest. A decision is expected after October 6.

His attorneys have argued that the indictment is aimed at punishing Abrego Garcia for his ongoing legal battle with the Trump administration, which has “vilified” him from the moment the case made headlines that caused massive political headaches for the White House.

After he was released from jail this month, Noem labeled him a “MS-13 gang member, human trafficker, serial domestic abuser and child predator.”

That same day, the White House called him “a criminal illegal alien, wife-beater and an MS13 gang member facing serious charges of human smuggling.”

This week, the president called him an “animal” who had “beat the hell out of his wife.”

But the “pièce de résistance,” according to Abrego Garcia’s lawyers, was a cartoon posted by the White House’s official X account depicting him with “MS-13” written beneath it.

“If the government is allowed to continue in this way, it will taint any conceivable jury pool by exposing the entire country to irrelevant, prejudicial, and false claims about Mr. Abrego,” lawyers wrote.

A DHS official told The Independent that if Abrego Garcia does “not want to be mentioned” by administration officials, “then he should have not entered our country illegally and committed heinous crimes.”

“Once again, the media is falling all over themselves to defend this criminal illegal MS-13 gang member who is an alleged human trafficker, domestic abuser, and child predator,” the official added.

“The media’s sympathetic narrative about this criminal illegal alien has completely fallen apart, yet they continue to peddle his sob story,” the official said. “We hear far too much about gang members and criminals’ false sob stories and not enough about their victims.”

The Justice Department declined to comment to The Independent.

I can’t recall ever seeing the gov’t so obsessed with demonizing someone as Kilmar Garcia.

Kilmar Abrego Garcia seeks gag order against Kristi Noem and Pam Bondi
Barrage of public attacks could taint jury pools with ‘irrelevant, prejudicial, and false claims,’ according to Abrego Garcia’s attorneys

https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-politics/kilmar-abrego-garcia-gag-order-trump-noem-bondi-b2816582.html

Independent: Trump team has fined immigrants who didn’t self-deport $6 billion — and now it’s coming to collect

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Department of Homeland Security threatens lawsuits and massive tax bills to collect balances ‘owed’ by thousands of immigrants

Immigrants have been racking up as much as $1,000 a day in fines if they disregard orders to deport, totaling more than $6 billion that the Trump administration now intends to collect.

Since Donald Trump returned to office, the Department of Homeland Security has issued roughly 21,500 fines, part of a pressure campaign to encourage millions of people to leave the country with a promise that the government would waive the fees against them.

In recent weeks, the government has threatened immigrants with lawsuits, debt collectors and massive tax bills if they don’t pay those penalties, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The new system, put in place by the Trump administration in June, means immigrants are not only at risk of arrest and forced removal from the U.S. but also crushing financial debt that is virtually impossible to escape. One immigration attorney told the WSJ that it amounts to “psychological warfare.”

DHS has issued past-due notices for unpaid fines with growing interest and threatened to garnish tax refunds, deploy private collection agencies and alert credit bureaus to delinquent payments owed by targeted immigrants, many of whom are low-wage workers, according to WSJ.

The agency has also suggested it could report unpaid fines to the IRS, which could then treat the balance as taxable income.

The message from Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem “is clear: if you’re in the country illegally, leave now or face the consequences,” a senior DHS official said in a statement to The Independent.

Under rules introduced in June, DHS officers can send letters threatening fees on noncitizens over failure to deport, and all rights of appeal could be eliminated if they fail to reply within 15 days.

The process is permitted under a law passed by Congress in 1996 as part of a wider immigration package. But over the last three decades, threats of fees — which can now reach up to $998 a day — have rarely been enforced. Officers instead focused on removal, rather than adding another layer of punishment.

But that changed under Trump, largely because the process for sending out threatening fines with potentially financially disastrous results is much easier, according to the American Immigration Council, an immigration policy research group.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has vowed to recoup “funds owed to Americans.”

“As part of the effort to fulfill President Trump’s agenda, Treasury’s Debt Collection Service is actively working with ICE to secure payment for all civil fines and penalties owed by illegal aliens to the U.S. government,” Bessent said on social media.

According to TV ads and social media announcements from DHS, immigrants who choose to “self-deport” will “not have to pay these fines.”

Instead, immigrants are offered “financial assistance up to $1,000” and “a free flight home,” as well as “the potential opportunity to return to the United States the legal, right way,” according to the agency.

Immigrants can do so using the CBP Home app, formerly the CBP One app, a Joe Biden-era product that allowed more than 1 million immigrants to begin their immigration process before reaching the country. The Trump administration has revoked legal status for all immigrants who entered the country with that app.

A senior DHS official told The Independent that “iIlegal aliens should use the CBP Home app to fly home for free and receive $1,000 stipend, while preserving the option to return the legal, right way.”

“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,” the official said.

The American Immigration Lawyers Association has called that promise “a deeply misleading and unethical trick.”

Under current law, anyone living in the U.S. for more than six months without legal permission cannot return as an immigrant for at least three years. Immigrants who were in the country for more than a year could be blocked from reentering for at least 10 years.

Immigrants with a record of deportation also are more likely to face lengthy waiting periods, or outright denials, when applying for future visas.

Noem has claimed that more than 1.6 million immigrants have “left” the country within the first 200 days of the administration.

In May, a Honduran woman who has lived in the U.S. for two decades was hit with nearly $2 million in fines for failing to leave the country after receiving a removal order in 2005.

“I live with anxiety… I can’t sleep… I don’t feel,” the 41-year-old mother-of-three U.S. citizens told CBS News.

Another woman — a mother-of-four in New York who has been living in the U.S. for 25 years and trying to get her removal order tossed so she can get a green card — had considered self-deporting out of fear that the Treasury Department would repossess her house, according to WSJ.

She faces more than $2 million in overdue penalties, with growing daily interest. She could also be subject to administrative costs totaling at least 32 percent of her fine, or more than half a million dollars, according to DHS.

To carry out the president’s plans for mass deportations, the Trump administration has pushed to “de-legalize” millions of immigrants who were granted humanitarian protections and other protective orders to legally live and work in the country.

More than 1 million people are at risk of being removed from the U.S. after the administration revoked Temporary Protected Status for several countries.

Another 1 million immigrants who entered legally through the CBP One app also are at risk of being arrested and removed, while thousands of people with pending immigration cases are being ordered to court each week only to have those cases dismissed, and find federal agents waiting to arrest them on the other side of the courtroom doors.

Those reversals have radically expanded a pool of “undocumented” people to add to Trump’s deportation numbers.

https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-politics/migrants-self-deport-fines-trump-administration-b2815156.html

Slate: I’ve Covered Immigration for a Decade. I’ve Never Seen the Government Do This Before.

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It’s the ultimate extrapolation of an alarming Trump administration strategy.

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.

I’ve Covered Immigration for a Decade. I’ve Never Seen the Government Do This Before.
This case is the ultimate extrapolation of an alarming Trump administration strategy.

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/08/trump-news-immigration-kilmar-abrego-garcia-deportation-removal.html

Albany Times Union: Ex-Border Patrol agent gets prison for making migrants show breasts

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A former U.S. Border Patrol agent was sentenced to 12 months in federal prison Wednesday after pleading guilty to charges that he had made immigrant women expose their breasts when he was processing their information using a computer webcam.

The incidents took place after the immigrants had been encountered by Border Patrol agents in August 2023 while crossing the southern border.

Shane Millan, 54, who pleaded guilty in March to two misdemeanor counts of deprivation of rights under color of law, had been working at a Border Patrol station at Wellesley Island in Jefferson County and was using the computer to get information from the immigrants during interviews over a webcam. He had been a border patrol agent for 17 years at the time.

According to federal court records, Millan was tasked with gathering the migrants’ biographical and other information and saving the data electronically so that they could remain in the United States pending further immigration proceedings. Although the immigrants had crossed the southern border, Millan was doing the work through a computer from upstate New York at a time when record numbers of migrants were entering the U.S. and the federal agency was overwhelmed.

According to prosecutors, Millan “repeatedly abused his authority by requiring female immigrants to expose their breasts during these video-conference sessions, ostensibly so that he could confirm whether they had any chest tattoos.”

Millan did not speak Spanish but used a translation app to learn phrases such as, “I will also need you to lift your bra, please,” and “I will need to verify once more, can you stand in front of the monitor and lift your shirt and bra again, please,” according to court records.

One of the women, who was carrying an infant, resisted when Millan told her to lift her shirt a second time. Court records indicate he told her that he would not sign her paperwork unless she showed him her bare chest again. She reluctantly placed her child on the floor and lifted her shirt.

“These sickening demands violated agency policies regarding voyeurism and strip searches, but the victims did not know that,” federal prosecutors wrote in a sentencing memorandum. “(Millan’s) repeated instructions appeared legitimate, which is the lynchpin of a color of law offense, and multiple immigrants reluctantly complied with them.”

Acting U.S. Attorney John A. Sarcone III said: “Everybody deserves respect, and we will not tolerate the sexual exploitation of immigrants by members of law enforcement. Nobody is above the law.”
 
Prosecutors said Millan admitted requiring at least a dozen women to show him their breasts during the webcam processing. The misconduct was exposed after “multiple victims had the courage to come forward and report how they were exploited,” prosecutors said.

When he was initially interviewed about the allegations in August 2023, Millan told investigators that he had asked only one woman to lift her shirt but never asked any women to remove their bras. In June 2024, after an investigation that lasted nearly a year, he confessed to what he had done, according to court records.

Millan’s attorneys, while noting his behavior was “disturbing” and “aberrant,” had asked the judge to consider a sentence of “supervision, rather than incarceration,” along with mental health counseling. They said that he had no prior criminal history and is having trouble finding a new job due to publicity about his case.

They also wrote in the sentencing memorandum that prior to his arrest last year, Millan’s “lifestyle was not only law-abiding, considering his family commitments, religious practices, and career, his lifestyle was devoted to caring for and protecting others.”

Making Amerika great again, one perverted bully-boy at a time!

Ex-Border Patrol agent gets prison for making migrants show breasts

https://www.timesunion.com/capitol/article/border-patrol-agent-gets-prison-making-migrants-21018000.php

L.A. Times: L.A. teen is moved to ICE detention center out of state without parents’ knowledge

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Benjamin Guerrero-Cruz’s family was stunned and heartbroken when the 18-year-old was grabbed by immigration agents while walking his dog in Van Nuys just days before he was set to start his senior year at Reseda Charter High School.

This week, his family was caught off-guard once again when they learned that Immigration and Customs Enforcement had transferred him to Arizona without notifying any relatives, according to the office of U.S. Rep. Luz Rivas (D-North Hollywood), which spoke to his family and reviewed ICE detention records.

Guerrero-Cruz was moved out of the Adelanto Detention Facility in San Bernardino County late Monday night and taken to a holding facility in Arizona in the middle of the desert, according to the congresswoman’s office.

On Tuesday night, he was scheduled to be transferred to Louisiana, a major hub for deportation flights, but at the last minute he was taken off the plane and sent back to Adelanto, where he is currently being held.

“Benjamin and his family deserve answers behind ICE’s inconsistent and chaotic decision-making process, including why Benjamin was initially transferred to Arizona, why he was slated to be transferred to Louisiana afterward, and why his family wasn’t notified of his whereabouts by ICE throughout this process,” Rivas said in a statement.

On Tuesday, Rivas introduced a bill that would require ICE to notify an immediate family member of a detainee within 24 hours of a detainee’s transfer. Currently, ICE is required to notify a family member only in the case of a detainee’s death.

“Benjamin’s story of being detained and sent across state lines without warning or notification is like many other detainees in Los Angeles and across the country,” Rivas said. “Many immigrant families in my district do not know the whereabouts of their loved ones after they are detained by ICE.”

The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The agency previously stated that Guerrero-Cruz was awaiting deportation to Chile after overstaying his visa, which required him to depart the United States on March 15, 2023.

Guerrero-Cruz was arrested Aug. 8 and held in downtown L.A. for a week, during which time he was briefly taken on an unexplained trip to a detention center in Santa Ana before being transferred to Adelanto on Aug. 15, according to a former teacher who visited him in custody.

His experience of being pingponged around different facilities is common among those being detained in what the Trump administration is billing as the largest deportation effort in American history.

This trend is also reflected in ICE’s flight data. The agency conducted 2,022 domestic transfer flights from May through July — representing a 90% increase from the same period last year, according to a widely cited database of flights created by immigrant rights advocate Tom Cartwright.

Cartwright posited in his July report that this uptick could be related to a “need to optimize bed space as detention numbers have ballooned from 39,152 on 29 December to 56,945 on 26 July.”

Jorge-Mario Cabrera, spokesperson for the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights L.A., called the Trump administration’s detention policies cruel, saying it appears that they are detaining people for as long as possible and “moving them from place to place for no reason other than because they can.”

“The fact that these dumbfounding transfers in the middle of the night cause chaos, confusion, and minimizes access to legal representation does not seem to bother them one bit,” he said in a statement.

Susham M. Modi, an immigration attorney based in Houston, said he had witnessed an uptick in the frequency of transfers among those recently detained by ICE.

“[Detainees are] also being often transferred to where there’s less lawyers,” he said. “I’ve seen consults where they’ve been transferred to Oklahoma, where it is very hard to find an attorney that might do, for example, federal court litigation.”

Although families can use ICE’s Online Detainee Locator to search for loved ones, it isn’t always up to date, and some families do not know how to use it, Modi said. When detainees are transferred, they often can’t make outgoing calls from the detention facility until someone has deposited money into their account — another hurdle for keeping family members updated on their whereabouts, he added.

L.A. teen is moved to ICE detention center out of state without parents’ knowledge
Benjamin Guerrero-Cruz, detained by immigration agents while walking his dog, was moved across state lines without his parents’ knowledge. A congresswoman says ICE should be required to notify family when a detainee is transferred.

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-08-28/l-a-teen-nabbed-on-street-by-ice-transferred-out-of-state-without-parents-knowledge

Mediaite: Firefighters Arrested in ‘Border Patrol Operation’ While Fighting Massive Fire

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Federal agents reportedly demanded to see the IDs of members belonging to two private contractor crews hired to battle the fire, which some 400 individuals are working to contain. Firefighters who spoke to the Times did so based on the condition of anonymity because they fear retaliation by the federal government.

“You risked your life out here to save the community,” one firefighter said. “This is how they treat us.”

Two firefighters in Washington state were arrested on Wednesday while combating the largest wildfire in the state.

The Bear Gulch fire has consumed nearly 9,000 acres since it began on July 6.

“Why the two firefighters were arrested is unclear,” The Seattle Times said. “But a spokesperson for the Incident Management Team leading the firefighting response said the team was ‘aware of a Border Patrol operation on the fire,’ that it was not interfering with the firefighting response and referred reporters to the Border Patrol station in Port Angeles.”

Federal agents reportedly demanded to see the IDs of members belonging to two private contractor crews hired to battle the fire, which some 400 individuals are working to contain. Firefighters who spoke to the Times did so based on the condition of anonymity because they fear retaliation by the federal government.

“You risked your life out here to save the community,” one firefighter said. “This is how they treat us.”

While waiting for their supervisor to arrive on Wednesday morning, the crews were confronted by federal law enforcement around 9:30 a.m. One of the firefighters told the Times they were instructed not to take video as they were asked to line up and present their IDs.

The Times added:

In a FaceTime video call from the other firefighter to The Seattle Times, firefighters in their gear were seen sitting on logs in front of federal officers. Some firefighters were dismissed back to their vehicles.

One firefighter attempted to walk over to his company vehicle to get something to drink and appeared to have been called back by federal officers.

In images shared by firefighters from the scene, a U.S. Customs and Border Protection vehicle is parked nearby. Officers wearing “Police” vests are seen arresting a firefighter, while another appears to be restrained.

According to one of the firefighters, they were denied the chance to say goodbye to the detained crew members.

“I asked them if his (family) can say goodbye to him because they’re family, and they’re just ripping them away,” the firefighter told the Times. “And this is what he said: ‘You need to get the (expletive) out of here. I’m gonna make you leave.’”

Since taking office again in January, President Donald Trump has implemented a crackdown on illegal and legal immigration. His administration has targeted farmhands, garment workers, international students, and other immigrants from various walks of life for deportation.

Firefighters Arrested in ‘Border Patrol Operation’ While Fighting Massive Fire
Two firefighters in Washington state were arrested on Wednesday while combating the largest wildfire in the state.
Firefighters Arrested in ‘Border Patrol Operation’ While Fighting Massive Fire

Newsweek: Ron DeSantis Wasted $250 Million on Alligator Alcatraz as It Faces Closure

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The state of Florida is committed to $245 million toward the construction of “Alligator Alcatraz,” the Everglades immigration detention facility which is due to close in days.

An email obtained by The Associated Press Wednesday from Kevin Guthrie, head of the Florida Division of Emergency Management, indicates the facility will likely soon be empty, after a federal judge ruled it must cease to operate.

Newsweek contacted Governor DeSantis’s office and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for comment on Thursday via email outside of regular office hours.

Why It Matters

Since his second presidential inauguration in January, President Donald Trump has overseen a crackdown aimed at illegal immigration, increasing spending on immigration enforcement and removing legal impediments to rapid deportations.

Having to close the new Florida detention facility would be a blow to both Governor DeSantis and the Trump administration, and would show that one of the main impediments to White House policy continues to be the courts.

What To Know

Figures published by Florida officials show the state has signed contracts worth at least $245 million to companies for work at the new Florida detention facility, which was constructed by repurposing the Dade-Collier Training and Transition Airport in Ochopee.

The largest single contract, at $78.5 million, went to Jacksonville based Critical Response Strategies which is responsible for hiring corrections officers, camp managers and IT personnel.

Longview Solutions Group was awarded $25.6 million for site preparation and construction while IT company Gothams has a $21.1 million contract to provide services including access badges and detainee wristbands.

Some of the contract details were later removed from Florida’s public database, sparking criticism from Democratic state Rep. Anna Eskamani.

Florida officials said some of their spending would be reimbursed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

But the Trump administration has said in a court filing it has had nothing to do with funding of the facility, according to CBS: “Florida is constructing and operating the facility using state funds on state lands under state emergency authority.”

The filing also says: “DHS (the U.S. Department of Homeland Security) has not implemented, authorized, directed, or funded Florida’s temporary detention center.”

The facility was expected to cost $450 million to operate each year after construction, according to CNN.

However, in a blow to DeSantis, a federal judge in Miami ruled on August 21 that “Alligator Alcatraz” must be closed down within 60 days, and that no further detainees could be transferred to the facility during this time. Just weeks previously the same judge had ordered a halt on construction work at the camp.

Legal challenges had been brought by a coalition of environmental group and the indigenous Miccosukee Tribe.

What People Are Saying

Speaking about conditions at the facility Florida Representative Debbie Schultz, a Democrat, said: “They are essentially packed into cages, wall-to-wall humans, 32 detainees per cage.”

In an interview with CNN Thomas Kennedy, a policy analyst for the Florida Immigrant Coalition, said: “The fact that we’re going to have 3,000 people detained in tents, in the Everglades, in the middle of the hot Florida summer, during hurricane season, this is a bad idea all around that needs to be opposed and stopped.”

In a statement previously sent to Newsweek a DHS official said: “Under President Trump’s leadership, we are working at turbo speed on cost-effective and innovative ways to deliver on the American people’s mandate for mass deportations of criminal illegal aliens.

“DHS is complying with this order and moving detainees to other facilities. We will continue to fight tooth-and-nail to remove the worst of the worst from American streets.”

What Happens Next

The Trump administration is expected to continue its crackdown on illegal migrants in the United States in a move that will put pressure on existing immigration detention facilities, and could lead to more being constructed.

Ron DeSantis wasted $250 million on Alligator Alcatraz as it faces closure
A federal judge has ruled that the new Florida detention center must close within 60 days.

https://www.newsweek.com/ron-desantis-wasted-250-million-alligator-alcatraz-it-faces-closure-2120638

Washington Post: D.C. judges and grand jurors push back on Trump policing surge

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A federal grand jury refused to indict a man who threw a sandwich at a federal officer, and grand jurors refused three times to indict a woman accused of assaulting an FBI agent.

President Donald Trump’s surge of federal law enforcement on the streets of D.C. is meeting resistance in the city’s federal courthouse, where magistrate judges have admonished prosecutors for violating defendants’ rights and court rules, and grand jurors have repeatedly refused to issue indictments.

On Tuesday, a federal grand jury refused to indict a former Justice Department employee who threw a sandwich at a federal law enforcement agent in an incident this month that went viral on social media, according to two people with knowledge of the case who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they weren’t authorized to discuss it publicly. Prosecutors had sought to charge Sean Charles Dunn with a felony count of assaulting, resisting or impeding a federal officer.

Trump declared a crime emergency this month, giving federal law enforcement agencies and National Guard members unprecedented authority to patrol the nation’s capital, while also enlisting the District’s 3,100-member police force to assist with immigration enforcement. More than 1,000 arrests have followed, according to the White House. Meanwhile, D.C.’s top prosecutor, Jeanine Pirro, ordered her staff to file the stiffest possible charges in every case.

But there are emerging signs that not all of the arrests will stand up to scrutiny in court.

Before prosecutors failed to indict Dunn, a grand jury on three separate occasions this month refused to indict a D.C. woman who was accused of assaulting an FBI agent, another extraordinary rejection of the prosecution’s case. Days later, a federal magistrate judge said an arrest in Northeast Washington was preceded by the “most illegal search I’ve seen in my life” and described another arrest as lacking “basic human dignity.”

While judges are known to criticize prosecutors from time to time, grand jurors only in rare cases refuse to issue an indictment, which requires them to find only probable cause that a crime was committed, the lowest evidentiary bar in criminal cases. Instances of failed indictments have begun to crop up more since Trump took office this year. Grand jurors in Los Angeles have rejected indictments of people who were arrested for protesting the administration’s immigration enforcement actions, according to the Los Angeles Times.

The July 22 scuffle at issue in D.C. federal court occurred weeks before Trump’s law enforcement order, but the grand jurors were presented with the case this month just as federal agents were descending on Washington.

Prosecutors alleged that Sydney Reid was obstructing and recording agents from the FBI and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement as they attempted to arrest a gang member being released from the D.C. jail who was slated for deportation. An FBI agent scraped her hand against a wall amid the fracas, and prosecutors planned to charge Reid with assaulting, resisting or impeding a federal officer, a felony offense punishable by up to eight years in prison.

Under the Fifth Amendment, however, charges that carry potential penalties of more than a year in prison must be approved by a grand jury. At least 12 members must vote to authorize an indictment. After striking out with the D.C. grand jury, prosecutors dropped the effort to charge Reid with a felony and instead filed a misdemeanor charge that does not require grand jury approval. The maximum penalty for the misdemeanor is one year in jail.

“After Ms. Reid was wrongfully arrested, the ICE agent told her, ‘You should have just stayed home and minded your business,’” Reid’s public defenders, Tezira Abe and Eugene Ohm, said in a statement. “As a United States citizen and a compassionate person, caring about fellow D.C. residents getting snatched off the streets by ICE agents is her business and should be of concern to all human beings.”

They added: “The U.S. attorney can try to concoct crimes to quiet the people but in our criminal justice system, the citizens have the last word. We are anxious to present the misdemeanor case to a jury and to quickly clear Ms. Reid’s name.”

Several recent cases, including Dunn’s, have involved the same felony statute that prosecutors tried to apply to Reid’s case.

Pirro declined to speculate about how juries in D.C., where 90 percent of voters cast ballots for Trump’s opponent in the 2024 presidential race, might respond to criminal cases as the federal crackdown continues.

“The only thing that I can say is we are prosecutors. We are the tip of the spear. We are the ones who take these cases into court, and the burden is on us to prove these cases, and we welcome that burden — beyond a reasonable doubt,” Pirro said at a news conference Tuesday. “Sometimes a jury will buy it and sometimes they won’t. So be it. That’s the way the process works.”

A spokesman for Pirro did not say whether federal prosecutors would try to present the Dunn case to a grand jury a second time. The spokesman, Timothy Lauer, alleged that a government lawyer had violated a court rule requiring confidentiality in grand jury proceedings by disclosing the decision not to indict Dunn. The grand jury’s move in that case was first reported by the New York Times. Dunn’s attorney, Sabrina Shroff, declined to comment.

U.S. Magistrate Judge G. Michael Harvey said at a hearing this month that prosecutors should have promptly notified the court about the grand jury’s decision not to indict Reid but that they held off for days, violating a court rule. “I’ve taken up that issue with the U.S. attorney’s office,” Harvey said last week.

But the most pointed criticisms of Trump’s law enforcement surge have come from Magistrate Judge Zia M. Faruqui, who has castigated law enforcement officials for wearing masks while tackling and arresting a Venezuelan national who worked as a food-delivery driver, for disobeying an order the judge issued this week to release a woman from the D.C. jail, and for arresting and jailing a 37-year-old because “he was a Black man going into Trader Joe’s.”

“I’d say we live in a surreal world right now,” Faruqui said at a court hearing for Christian Enrique Carías Torres, who was taken down by masked federal agents as he exited a Bluestone Lane coffee shop with a delivery order, an arrest that was captured on video by a Washington Post reporter.

“This is not consistent with what I understand the United States of America to be,” the judge told Carías Torres. “You should be treated with basic human dignity. We don’t have a secret police.”

Pirro’s office said in a court filing that Carías Torres ran after officers approached him, struggled as he was being taken down and tried to flee from a police vehicle after being handcuffed, adding that he had missed his immigration court hearings since entering the country in 2023.

Violent crime is down 27 percent so far this year compared with the same period in 2024, according to D.C. police data, and has declined 51 percent when measuring the year-over-year period since Trump issued his order Aug. 11.

The president has painted a portrait of “crime, bloodshed, bedlam and squalor” in the District, blaming years of passive policing by local authorities and lenient criminal justice policies from Democratic officials.

“But now they are allowed to do whatever the hell they want,” Trump said of D.C. police as he announced his moves. He said criminals in the city are rough and tough, “but we’re rougher and tougher.”

Carías Torres was charged with assaulting, resisting or impeding federal officers, just as Dunn and Reid had been, after an officer injured his head while helping take him to the ground. Faruqui ordered that Carías Torres be released pending trial, acknowledging that ICE would have an opportunity to take him into custody to enforce a removal order issued by an immigration court last year.

In another case, federal prosecutors charged Kristal Rios Esquivel with a felony violation of the same statute, which makes it illegal to assault federal officers. Her alleged offense started when she walked through a door that was marked “staff only” at the National Zoo’s bird house, tripping an alarm. As National Zoo Park Police officers arrested her for unlawful entry, Rios Esquivel spat on two of them and kicked one, prosecutors alleged. Her attorney has criticized the arrest as an instance of overpolicing.

Rios Esquivel was held for five days in the D.C. jail before making her initial appearance Monday in Faruqui’s courtroom, which Faruqui said was bad enough. The judge ordered Rios Esquivel released pending trial, but the D.C. Department of Corrections did not free her the same day. Faruqui threatened to impose sanctions in a scathing order issued Tuesday that said officials had subjected Rios Esquivel to illegal detention, and she was released.

“What is especially troubling is that this is not even the first time in the past four months that the Court has encountered this same problem of false imprisonment,” Faruqui wrote, citing another case from April.

At yet another court hearing scrutinizing police tactics in D.C., Faruqui reprimanded federal prosecutors this week for charging Torez Riley with illegally possessing firearms. The judge found that D.C. police officers, who were on patrol with federal agents, violated Riley’s privacy rights by searching his bag, where they found two guns. Riley had previously been convicted of weapons offenses, prosecutors said.

Police said in court documents that Riley’s bag had been searched in part because it appeared to contain something heavy. But that observation was not enough to show probable cause that Riley had committed a crime, the court found.

It was “without a doubt, the most illegal search I’ve seen in my life,” said Faruqui, a former D.C. federal prosecutor, adding that Riley had been jailed and kept away from his three children and pregnant wife for a week because “he was a Black man going into Trader Joe’s.”

Pirro’s office then filed court papers to dismiss the case, and the judge ordered Riley released from a D.C. jail facility.

A spokesman for Pirro said that as soon as she “was shown the body-worn camera footage on Friday, she ordered the dismissal of the charges.” The motion to dismiss was filed Monday.

In response to Faruqui’s criticisms, Pirro said in a statement: “This judge has a long history of bending over backwards to release dangerous felons in possession of firearms and on frequent occasions he has downplayed the seriousness of felons who possess illegal firearms and the danger they pose to our community.”

But Faruqui also admonished Riley over his firearm possession. “You will die, you will kill somebody, or you will end up in jail,” the judge said.

Riley is set to face consequences in Maryland, where Faruqui said authorities would use what they learned in the “blatantly illegal” D.C. search to show he violated his probation in an earlier gun possession case. A bench warrant was issued Monday over the probation violation, according to records from Prince George’s County Circuit Court.

Riley’s wife, Crashawna Williams, said she took a week off from the beauty classes she’s enrolled in to deal with her husband’s case while taking care of their boys, ages 3, 8 and 12.

“I feel like he shouldn’t have been arrested in the first place,” Williams said. But, she added, what could they do?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/08/27/trump-crime-surge-court-cases

No paywall:

D.C. judges and grand jurors push back on Trump policing surge
A federal magistrate judge said one arrest in D.C. was preceded by the “most illegal search I’ve seen in my life” and another lacked “basic human dignity.”

https://www.msn.com/en-us/politics/government/ar-AA1Lk9uv

CBS News: Kilmar Abrego Garcia taken into ICE custody amid new deportation threat

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Kilmar Abrego Garcia taken into ICE custody amid new deportation threat
Kilmar Abrego Garcia was taken into custody Monday by immigration authorities following his release from jail in Tennessee. His attorney, Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, says Garcia has filed a lawsuit challenging deportation without a fair immigration trial and full appeal rights.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/kilmar-abrego-garcia-taken-into-ice-custody-amid-new-deportation-threat/vi-AA1LbmYt

I’ve lost track of where this poor guy supposedly is — is he in jail or out of jail today?

Raw Story: DOJ’s shock move lets Trump stack immigration courts with handpicked lawyers

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The Justice Department plans to scrap longstanding rules and qualifications for immigration judges and create a new policy where it can appoint any lawyer it wants to temporarily preside over cases, reported Government Executive on Wednesday.

“The change gives Attorney General Pam Bondi wide latitude in selecting officials to oversee asylum and other cases pending before the Executive Office of Immigration Review, the Justice Department agency that runs the nation’s immigration courts,” said the report. “That authority could provide President Trump with additional power to withhold legal status from immigrants and expedite his mass deportation efforts.”

Immigration judges are different from typical so-called “Article III” judges, like the Supreme Court, courts of appeals, and district courts, who are constitutional officers appointed for life; they are instead “Article I” judges who were authorized by Congress to serve at the pleasure of the presidential administration and hear narrow types of subject matter issues.

“Since 2014, the department has allowed only former immigration judges, administrative law judges from other agencies or Justice attorneys with at least 10 years of experience related to immigration law to serve as temporary immigration judges, or TIJs,” said the report. “In its update, to be issued Thursday as a final rule, EOIR called those parameters overly restrictive, noting it has hired fewer than a dozen temporary judges since the Obama administration put them into place.”

The shortage of immigration judges available to hear cases has been a contentious issue for years, and was part of the reason for the massive backlog of cases for the surge of migrants in the years prior to the Trump administration.

A bipartisan immigration deal cut in the final years of the Biden administration would have established more funding for immigration courts to operate on an expedited basis; however, Trump worked behind the scenes to tank the deal among Republican lawmakers.

This makes a mockery of justice under administrative judges. All administrative judges should be removed from Department of Justice and placed under the supervision of the circuit / district courts.

DOJ’s shock move lets Trump stack immigration courts with handpicked lawyers

https://www.rawstory.com/doj-judges