Tag Archives: Oregon

Newsweek: Justice Department Issues Birthright Citizenship Update

Posted on by
Reply

The U.S. Department of Justice has released an update confirming that it plans to ask the Supreme Court to rule on the constitutionality of President Donald Trump‘s executive order seeking to end birthright citizenship.

The announcement was disclosed in a joint status report filed Wednesday, August 6, 2025, in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington.

Why It Matters

The Justice Department’s plan to seek a Supreme Court ruling on the constitutionality of President Donald Trump’s executive order to end birthright citizenship—entitled “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship”—marks a critical juncture in the national debate over immigration and constitutional rights.

Signed on January 20, 2025, it directs the federal government to deny citizenship documents to children born in the U.S. to undocumented or temporary immigrant parents.

At stake is the interpretation of the 14th Amendment, which has long been understood to guarantee citizenship to nearly all individuals born on U.S. soil. A ruling in favor of the order could reshape federal authority over citizenship, impact millions of U.S.-born children, and redefine the limits of executive power—making this one of the most consequential legal battles in recent memory.

What To Know

On February 6, 2025, the district court in Seattle issued a nationwide preliminary injunction blocking enforcement of President Trump’s executive order.

The case under review, State of Washington v. Trump, was just one of several ongoing legal challenges in which lower courts have largely rejected the administration’s legal theory. District courts in Maryland (February 5), New Hampshire (February 10), and Massachusetts (February 13), have each upheld that the order conflicted with constitutional protections and halted its enforcement in their respective jurisdictions.

One of those judges, U.S. District Judge Leo Sorokin, an appointee of former President Barack Obama who sits on the federal bench in Boston, granted a nationwide preliminary injunction, affirming that the constitutional guarantee of citizenship applies broadly, and finding the policy to be, “unconstitutional and contrary to a federal statute.”

The government appealed the ruling and sought partial stays from the district court, the Ninth Circuit, and the Supreme Court. After the Supreme Court denied a partial stay, the Ninth Circuit requested further briefing and, on July 23, upheld the injunction.

The new update came in a joint status report filed August 6, 2025, in which the DOJ stated that Solicitor General D. John Sauer intends to file a petition “expeditiously” for certiorari—a legal term that refers to the process by which a higher court (most commonly the U.S. Supreme Court), agrees to review a lower court’s decision—in order to place the case before the Court during its next term, which begins in October.

This means the Justice Department has now formally indicated it will seek a U.S. Supreme Court ruling on the constitutionality of President Trump’s executive order; though it has not yet chosen which specific case—or combination of ongoing cases—it will use as the basis for its appeal.

The parties plan to update the court further once those appellate steps are finalized.

Fourteenth Amendment At Stake

Since the adoption of the 14th Amendment to the United States Constitution on July 9, 1868, the citizenship of persons born in the United States has been controlled by its Citizenship Clause, which states: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” Courts have consistently upheld this principle for more than a century, most notably in the 1898 Supreme Court case United States v. Wong Kim Ark.

However, the Trump administration argues that the amendment should not apply to children of parents who lack permanent legal status, a position that has been repeatedly rejected by lower courts.

What People Are Saying

President Trump, during an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press, December 8, 2024, said: “Do you know if somebody sets a foot—just a foot, one foot, you don’t need two—on our land, ‘Congratulations you are now a citizen of the United States of America,’ … Yes, we’re going to end that, because it’s ridiculous.” Adding: “…we’re going to have to get it changed. We’ll maybe have to go back to the people, but we have to end it. … We’re the only country that has it, you know.”

Attorney General Pam Bondi told reporters in June 2025: “Birthright citizenship will be decided in October, in the next session by the Supreme Court.”

DOJ attorneys wrote in the filing: “In light of the Ninth Circuit’s decision, Defendants represent that the Solicitor General plans to seek certiorari expeditiously to enable the Supreme Court to settle the lawfulness of the Citizenship Order next Term.”

Jessica Levinson, constitutional law professor at Loyola Law School, said: “You can’t ‘executive order’ your way out of the Constitution. If you want to end birthright citizenship, you need to amend the Constitution, not issue an executive order.”

What Happens Next

The Justice Department must decide which case or combination of cases it will use to challenge lower court rulings and bring the birthright citizenship issue before the Supreme Court. Once it makes that decision, the DOJ will file a petition for certiorari.

The Court is not required to accept every petition, but because this involves a major constitutional question, it is likely to grant review. If that happens, the Court could hear arguments in 2026 and issue a ruling by June of that year.

For now, the Justice Department and attorneys representing plaintiff states—including Washington, Arizona, Illinois, and Oregon—have agreed to submit another update once the appellate process is clarified or if further proceedings in the district court are required. Until then, the order remains unenforceable, lower court rulings blocking Trump’s executive order remain in effect, and current birthright citizenship protections continue to apply.

What part of Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment is so hard to understand? Only a Totally Retarded Dumb-Assed Idiot (TRDAI) could miss the meaning of it:

Section 1. All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

Unfortunately there seems to be no shortage of TRDAIs in the Trump regime. 🙁

Justice Department Issues Birthright Citizenship Update
Fight over Trump’s order to deny birthright citizenship heads toward Supreme Court, with 14th Amendment protections at stake

https://www.newsweek.com/justice-department-issues-birthright-citizenship-update-2110176

San Francisco Chronicle: Trump asks SCOTUS to allow profiling in California ICE raids

Posted on by
Reply

Any attorney who files or argues in favor of this appeal should be disbarred!

Any justice who votes in favor of this appeal should impeached and removed!

The Trump administration is asking the Supreme Court to allow officers to arrest suspected undocumented immigrants in Southern California because of how they look, what language they’re speaking and what kind of work they’re doing, factors that federal judges have found to be baseless and discriminatory.

Last month’s ruling by U.S. District Judge Maame Frimpong, upheld by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, “threatens to upend immigration officials’ ability to enforce the immigration laws in the Central District of California,” D. John Sauer, the Justice Department’s solicitor general, said Thursday in a filing with the Supreme Court. “This Court should end this attempted judicial usurpation of immigration-enforcement functions” and suspend the injunction while the case is argued in the lower courts, Sauer wrote.

The Central District, which includes Los Angeles County and six other counties, has nearly 20 million residents, more than any other federal court district in the nation. It became the focus of legal disputes over immigration enforcement after President Donald Trump took control of the California National Guard in June and sent thousands of its troops to the streets in Los Angeles to defend immigration agents against protesters of workplace raids.

A 9th Circuit panel upheld Trump’s commandeering of the National Guard, rejecting a lawsuit by Gov. Gavin Newsom. But Frimpong, an appointee of President Joe Biden, ruled July 11 that immigration officers were overstepping legal boundaries in making the arrests, and issued a temporary restraining order against their practices.

In a ruling Aug. 1 upholding the judge’s decision, another 9th Circuit panel said federal officers had been seizing people from the streets and workplaces based on four factors: their apparent race or ethnicity, the language they spoke or accent in their voice, their presence in a location such as a car wash or an agricultural site, and the type of work they were doing.

That would justify the arrest of anyone “who appears Hispanic, speaks Spanish or English with an accent, wears work clothes, and stands near a carwash, in front of a Home Depot, or at a bus stop,” the panel’s three judges said. They agreed with Frimpong that officers could not rely on any or all of those factors as the basis for an arrest.

But the Trump administration’s lawyers said those factors were valid reasons for immigration arrests in the Central District.

In April, U.S. District Judge Jennifer Thurston issued a similar order against the Border Patrol, prohibiting immigration arrests in the Eastern District of California unless officers have a reasonable suspicion that a person is breaking the law. The district is based in Sacramento and extends from Fresno to the Oregon border.

“You can’t just walk up to people with brown skin and say, ‘Give me your papers,’” Thurston, a Biden appointee, said at a court hearing, CalMatters reported. The Trump administration has appealed her injunction to the 9th Circuit.

The administration’s compliance with the Central District court order was questioned by immigrant advocates on Wednesday after a raid on a Home Depot store near MacArthur Park in Los Angeles, in which officers said 16 Latin American workers were detained. An American Civil Liberties Union attorney, Mohammad Tajsar, said the government “seems unwilling to fulfill the aims of its racist mass deportation agenda without breaking the law.”

There is ample evidence that many businesses in the district “unlawfully employ illegal aliens and are known to hire them on a day-to-day basis; that certain types of jobs — like day labor, landscaping, and construction — are most attractive to illegal aliens because they often do not require paperwork; that the vast majority of illegal aliens in the District come from Mexico or Central America; and that many only speak Spanish,” Sauer told the Supreme Court.

“No one thinks that speaking Spanish or working in construction always creates reasonable suspicion” that someone is an illegal immigrant, the Justice Department attorney said. “But in many situations, such factors — alone or in combination — can heighten the likelihood that someone is unlawfully present in the United States.”

The Supreme Court told lawyers for the immigrants to file a response by Tuesday. 

The case is Noem v. Perdomo, No. 25A169.

Trump asks SCOTUS to allow profiling in California ICE raids
The Trump administration is asking the Supreme Court to let officers arrest suspected undocumented immigrants in Southern California because of how they look.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics/article/scotus-immigration-california-20809308.php

Washington Post: He left Iran 40 years ago. He may be deported to Romania. Or Australia.

Posted on by
Reply

The withholding of a removal order that Reza Zavvar felt protected him from deportation is now being wielded by the Trump administration to send him to a country he doesn’t know.

Sharp knocks on the front door interrupted Firouzeh Firouzabadi’s Saturday morning coffee. On the porch of her suburban Maryland home were two law enforcement agents and a very familiar pit bull mix named Duke.

“Can you take this dog?” Firouzabadi recalled one of the men saying. “I said, ‘This is my son’s dog. Where is he?’ They wouldn’t say.”

At that moment, her adult son, Reza Zavvar, was handcuffed in the back of an SUV parked two houses down in the Gaithersburg neighborhood where the Iranian-born family has lived since 2009 — apprehended, he later said, that late June day by at least five federal immigration agents in tactical gear who told Zavvar they had been waiting for him to take Duke out for his regular morning walk.

More than a month later, Zavvar, 52, remains in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody,part of a surge of arrests of immigrants with standing court orders barring their deportation to their native countries.

The Trump administration has increasingly turned to sending people to third countries. In court papers, ICE said it plans to send Zavvar to Australia or Romania. He has no ties to either place.

Zavvar left Tehran alone when he was 12, arriving in Virginia in 1985 on a student visa secured by his parents as a way to escape eventual conscription into the Iranian army. He eventually received U.S. asylum, and then a green card.

His family joined him and they settled in Maryland, but in his 20s, Zavvar’s guilty pleas in two misdemeanor marijuana possession cases jeopardized his immigration status. In 2007, an immigration judge issued a withholding of removal order, determining it was unsafe for Zavvar to return to Iran. He built a life, went to college and has been working as a white-collar recruiter for a consulting firm.

…

So he pleaded guilty 27 years ago to a couple marijuana possessions charges (legal today in 24-40 states, depending on purpose of usage) and now ICE wants to deport him to a third country (possibly Romania or Australia).

Click one of the links below to read the rest of the article.

He left Iran 40 years ago. He may be deported to Romania. Or Australia.
Handcuffed outside his Maryland home while walking his dog, Reza Zavvar is among a surging number of immigrants arrested with standing court orders barring deportation to their native countries.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/2025/08/03/immigration-arrests-third-country-removals

He left Iran 40 years ago. He may be deported to Romania. Or Australia.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/he-left-iran-40-years-ago-he-may-be-deported-to-romania-or-australia/ar-AA1JOsY5

Law & Crime: ‘Naked attempt to evade clear law’: Federal judge says Trump admin ‘unequivocally’ acted unlawfully in unilaterally shuttering Job Corps

Posted on by
Reply

A federal judge in Washington, D.C., has halted the Trump administration’s effort to shutter the Job Corps training program — the nation’s largest residential career training program for thousands of low-income youth — becoming the second to do so within the span of a month.

U.S. District Judge Dabney L. Friedrich — an appointee of President Donald Trump during his first term — on Friday granted the request for a preliminary injunction blocking the closing of 99 Job Corps centers throughout the nation, reasoning that the U.S. Department of Labor’s (DOL) unilateral closing of the program, which was created and authorized by Congress, violated federal law.

The case stems from the Labor Department notifying the 99 private Job Corps centers across the nation on May 29, 2025, that they would “cease operations” by June 30.

The lawsuit was filed last month by a group of seven student-enrollees in the Job Corps program hailing from Georgia, Mississippi, Oregon, North Dakota, and Michigan on behalf of themselves as well as the putative class of students enrolled at all 99 centers affected by the program’s shuttering.

The complaint alleged that the Labor Department was legally required provide advance notice and an opportunity for public comment before closing any Job Corps center, as required by federal law. By failing to do so, the administration’s actions allegedly violated the Administrative Procedures Act (APA) and the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) of 2014.

The administration asserted that the shuttering of all Job Corps centers was a “statutorily authorized pause — as opposed to a closure,” a claim that Friedrich said did not stand up to scrutiny.

“This argument fails because DOL’s across-the-board shutdown extended far beyond any ‘pause’ contemplated by the statute,” the judge wrote. “The agency suspended operations at all 99 privately operated Job Corps centers without any expectation of future reopenings. And it effected the mass shutdown without complying with any of the statutory requirements that must precede a ‘pause’ in operations. DOL failed to conduct an individualized assessment or develop a performance improvement plan for any of the 99 centers. It instead suspended all operations based on the perceived failures of the Job Corps program as a whole.”

Friedrich said the nationwide shutdown was “not only unprecedented,” but also” inconsistent with its historic standard of practice.” While earlier “pauses” allowed for the realistic possibility that Job Corps centers would be reopened, here, the administration informed students that they should harbor “no expectation of transfer to another center or return to their current center.”

The court said there was no need to engage in any analysis regarding the difference between a “pause” and a “closure” because “the record unequivocally demonstrates that DOL unlawfully ‘closed’ all 99 privately operated Job Corps centers, in violation of the WIOA.”

“At bottom, DOL’s position is entirely circular: So long as the agency uses the term ‘pause’ and never makes a final decision to ‘formally close’ a center, it is authorized to shutter any Job Corps center indefinitely,” Friedrich wrote. “In DOL’s view, the WIOA’s procedural mandates hinge on the terminology the agency chooses to use, allowing it to sidestep its statutory obligations entirely. That cannot be correct. Because DOL unlawfully ‘closed’ all 99 privately operated Job Corps centers, in violation of the WIOA, the Court finds that the plaintiffs have established a likelihood of success on the merits of their APA claims.”

The plaintiffs are being represented in the case by the Southern Poverty Law Center and Public Citizen. Adam Pulver, an attorney with Public Citizen Litigation Group and lead counsel for the plaintiffs, lauded the ruling.

“The Department of Labor’s decision to abruptly close Job Corps centers across the country, ignoring legal requirements and literally putting vulnerable young people on the street, was callous, and as the Judge today agreed, illegal,” Pulver said in a statement. “The Department’s ludicrous argument to the court, that in shutting down 99 Job Corps centers it was not actually closing those centers, was a naked attempt to evade clear law.”

Federal judge says Trump admin ‘unequivocally’ violated law in shuttering Job Corps
A Trump-appointed judge blocked the administration’s effort to shutter al 99 Job Corps centers nationwide, saying it violated federal law.
‘Unprecedented’: Judge says Trump admin ‘unequivocally’ acted unlawfully in unilaterally shuttering youth job training program

Daily Caller: Blue State Judges Refuse To Jail Leftists Charged In Violent Attacks

Posted on by
Reply

Democrat-appointed federal judges in Oregon have repeatedly refused to jail suspects charged with violence at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility and an Elon Musk-owned Tesla store.

A court on Monday ordered Robert Jacob Hoopes to be released pending trial after he allegedly tried to ram his way into an ICE facility in Portland and injured an ICE officer’s eye with a rock, according to the Department of Justice (DOJ). Between July 8 and July 11, two other Oregon defendants accused of armed assaults on federal agents and a Tesla store were also given supervised release despite the Trump administration’s objections, according to court records and local media reports.

Hoopes, 24, allegedly threw rocks at the ICE building among a crowd of protesters on June 14 and struck an officer “in the head, causing a significant laceration over the officer’s eye,” according to the DOJ. “Later that same day, he and two other individuals were seen using an upended stop sign as a makeshift battering ram, which resulted in significant damage to the main entry door to the ICE building,” according to the department.

Judge Youlee Yim You, appointed by former President Barack Obama, said she decided to release Hoopes with a GPS ankle monitor in part because some in the community showed up to support the defendant in the courtroom, Oregon Public Broadcasting reported.

Before Hoopes’s release, two federal judges rejected the DOJ’s pleas to detain transgender suspect Adam Lansky, who is accused of throwing Molotov cocktails at a Tesla dealership in January, aiming a rifle at a witness who drove away and returning the next month to fire shots into the building, court documents show.

The DOJ warned in court that Lansky was “a competitive shooter” and former member of the Socialist Rifle Association, a left-wing firearm education and training group with chapters across the U.S. “The [improvised explosive devices] used by Lansky were all manufactured by him using everyday items, empty glass bottles, gasoline, fabric, etc., all these items remain easily accessible to Lansky in the community if released,” prosecutors wrote in a July 9 filing.

Obama-appointed Judge Stacie Beckerman nonetheless ordered Lansky’s release to a halfway house, where individuals receive more freedom to pursue employment and other activities than in jail. Beckerman argued in court that Lansky’s alleged behavior was an “outlier event,” according to The Oregonian.

The DOJ appealed the decision to Judge Adrienne Nelson, who also rejected its request. Former President Joe Biden appointed Nelson as the first black woman to serve on Oregon’s U.S. District Court.

Judge Beckerman also moved anti-ICE defendant Julie Winters on July 8 to a halfway house, The Oregonian reported. Winters tried to light an incendiary device next to a Portland ICE building, threw a large knife at a federal officer without hitting the officer and pulled a second knife on officers who were restraining him at an anti-ICE protest on June 24, the DOJ has alleged.

An attorney for Lansky did not respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment. Court records do not yet list attorneys for Hoopes or Winters.

Beckerman said Winters, who identifies as transgender, should be released from jail because officers put him in solitary confinement rather than house him with male or female inmates, according to The Oregonian. The DOJ, however, said his behavior is “extraordinarily concerning” because he is also charged in a state case with assaulting a police officer in December.

The DOJ did not respond to a request for comment.

Blue State Judges Refuse To Jail Leftists Charged In Violent Attacks
Democrat-appointed federal judges in Oregon have repeatedly refused to jail suspects charged with violence at ICE facilities and an Elon Musk-owned Tesla store.

https://dailycaller.com/2025/07/29/blue-state-judges-refuse-jail-leftists-charged-violent-attacks

Daily Mail: Court rules on Trump’s birthright citizenship plan

Posted on by
Reply

A federal appeals court delivered a blow to Donald Trump’s executive order ending birthright citizenship, deeming it unconstitutional. It’s the latest step in an ongoing battle between Trump and various judges in states far over his plan to deny citizenship to U.S.-born children of illegal migrants.

The ruling from a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals comes after Trump´s plan was also blocked by a federal judge in New Hampshire. It brings the issue one step closer to coming back quickly before the Supreme Court.

The 9th Circuit decision keeps a block on the Trump administration enforcing the order that would deny citizenship to children born to people who are in the United States illegally or temporarily. ‘The district court correctly concluded that the Executive Order´s proposed interpretation, denying citizenship to many persons born in the United States, is unconstitutional. We fully agree,’ the majority wrote.

The 2-1 ruling keeps in place a decision from U.S. District Judge John C. Coughenour in Seattle, who blocked Trump´s effort to end birthright citizenship and decried what he described as the administration´s attempt to ignore the Constitution for political gain. The White House and Justice Department did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment.

The Supreme Court has since restricted the power of lower court judges to issue orders that affect the whole country, known as nationwide injunctions. But the 9th Circuit majority found that the case fell under one of the exceptions left open by the justices.

…

The Citizenship Clause of the 14th Amendment says that all people born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to U.S. jurisdiction, are citizens. Justice Department attorneys argue that the phrase ‘subject to United States jurisdiction’ in the amendment means that citizenship isn´t automatically conferred to children based on their birth location alone. The states – Washington, Arizona, Illinois and Oregon – argue that ignores the plain language of the Citizenship Clause as well as a landmark birthright citizenship case in 1898 where the Supreme Court found a child born in San Francisco to Chinese parents was a citizen by virtue of his birth on American soil.

Appeals court finds effort to end birthright citizenship illegal
It’s the latest step in an ongoing battle between Trump and various judges in states far over his plan to deny citizenship to U.S.-born children of illegal migrants.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14934995/Court-decision-Donald-Trump-birthright-citizenship.html

Guardian: ‘Daddy, police!’: new video shows Ice arresting Oregon father at preschool

Posted on by
Reply

Chiropractor Mahdi Khanbabazadeh still in detention after being seized by masked agents in daycare parking lot

New video has been released showing masked immigration officers taking an Oregon father into custody while dropping off his child at a Portland-area preschool last week.

In four clips obtained and verified by Oregon Public Broadcasting, Mahdi Khanbabazadeh, a 38-year-old chiropractor, can be seen asking US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents to “wait for three minutes” because “there is a baby in the car”. Minutes later, after the child exited the vehicle, the video shows Ice officers breaking the driver’s side window of the car.

Three of the video clips were taken by a dashboard camera; in the fourth, taken by a witness, an onlooker can be heard saying, “This is not OK, and no one here will identify themselves to me,” as masked agents handcuff and escort Khanbabazadeh away.

Ice arrested Khanbabazadeh outside Guidepost Montessori school in Beaverton, Oregon, on 15 July. A citizen of Iran, Khanbabazadeh entered the United States on a student visa. Ice said the father had overstayed his visa, but his family told local news that he was married to a US citizen and had already applied and interviewed for a green card.

Immigration agents stopped Khanbabazadeh en route to the daycare, but allowed him to proceed to the school to drop off his child. There, Ice said he “stopped cooperating, resisted arrest and refused to exit his vehicle”. In a statement, the agency added that officers broke a window, and the child was not harmed.

Khanbabazadeh is still being held at a detention center in Tacoma, Washington, according to local news reports.

Oregon Public Broadcasting obtained the four video clips from Khanbabazadeh’s family.

The first video, recorded at 8.17am, shows Khanbabazadeh rolling down his window during a traffic stop.

As Khanbabazadeh searches for his identification, his child says, “Daddy, police!” from a carseat in the back of the car. In response to a question about where they are headed, Khanbabazadeh says, “Daycare.”

In the second video clip, recorded at 8.32am from what appears to be the daycare parking lot, Khanbabazadeh implores officers to wait. “There is a baby in the car,” he says. “Is it hard to wait for three minutes?”

In the third and final dashcam video, recorded at 8.42am, an Ice officer breaks through the driver’s side window of the car. Khanbabazadeh can be heard saying, “I am getting out,” to which a masked Ice agent replies: “Well, you should have done it already.”

In the final video, taken by a bystander, Ice agents handcuff Khanbabazadeh while he is pressed up against his car. Khanbabazadeh can be heard saying, “I’m Iranian, I don’t know why they are doing this. I am a doctor,” while the bystander says, “No one here will identify themselves.”

Randy Kornfield, who was dropping off his four-year-old grandson at the Montessori school during Khanbabazadeh’s arrest, told Oregon Public Broadcasting that one of the school’s teachers asked the officers to identify themselves. He said the agents got into a heated exchange with the teacher at the request.

This was the first confirmed federal immigration arrest at an Oregon school, according to local news. Local and state leaders, including Beaverton’s mayor, Lacey Beaty; the Oregon governor, Tina Kotek; and Congresswoman Andrea Salinas, condemned the arrest.

Good civics lesson for the little kiddies! Next week they’ll be learning how to do Nazi salutes.

‘Daddy, police!’: new video shows Ice arresting Oregon father at preschool
Chiropractor Mahdi Khanbabazadeh still in detention after being seized by masked agents in daycare parking lot

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jul/22/ice-arrest-video-preschool-oregon

Washington Post: ICE declares millions of undocumented immigrants ineligible for bond hearings

Posted on by
Reply

A memo from ICE’s acting director instructs officers to hold immigrants who entered the country illegally “for the duration of their removal proceedings,” which can take months or years.

The Trump administration has declared that immigrants who arrived in the United States illegally are no longer eligible for a bond hearing as they fight deportation proceedings in court, according to documents reviewed by The Washington Post.

In a July 8 memo, Todd M. Lyons, acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, told officers that such immigrants should be detained “for the duration of their removal proceedings,” which can take months or years. Lawyers say the policy will apply to millions of immigrants who crossed the U.S.-Mexico border over the past few decades, including under Biden.

In the past, immigrants residing in the U.S. interior generally have been allowed to request a bond hearing before an immigration judge. But Lyons wrote that the Trump administration’s departments of Homeland Security and Justice had “revisited its legal position on detention and release authorities” and determined that such immigrants “may not be released from ICE custody.” In rare exceptions immigrants may be released on parole, but that decision will be up to an immigration officer, not a judge, he wrote.

The provision is based on a section of immigration law that says unauthorized immigrants “shall be detained” after their arrest, but that has historically applied to those who recently crossed the border and not longtime residents.

Lyons, who oversees the nation’s 200 immigration detention facilities, wrote that the policy is expected to face legal challenges.

ICE did not respond to requests for comment. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Rodney Scott issued similar guidance last week; that agency also did not respond to questions.

The sweeping new detention policy comes days after Congress passed a spending package that will allocate $45 billion over the next four years to lock up immigrants for civil deportation proceedings. The measure will allow ICE to roughly double the nation’s immigrant detention capacity to 100,000 people a day.

Since the memos were issued last week, the American Immigration Lawyers Association said members had reported that immigrants were being denied bond hearings in more than a dozen immigration courts across the United States, including in New York, Virginia, Oregon, North Carolina, Ohio and Georgia. The Department of Justice oversees the immigration courts.

“This is their way of putting in place nationwide a method of detaining even more people,” said Greg Chen, senior director of government relations for the American Immigration Lawyers Association. “It’s requiring the detention of far more people without any real review of their individual circumstances.”

Immigration hawks have long argued that detaining immigrants is necessary to quickly deport those who do not qualify for asylum or another way to stay in the United States permanently. They say detaining immigrants might also discourage people from filing frivolous claims, in hopes of being released as their cases proceed in the backlogged immigration courts.

“Detention is absolutely the best way to approach this, if you can do it. It costs a lot of money obviously,” said Mark Krikorian, executive director for the Center for Immigration Studies, which favors enforcement. “You’re pretty much guaranteed to be able to remove the person, if there’s a negative finding, if he’s in detention.”

In its 2024 annual report, however, ICE said it detains immigrants only “when necessary” and that the vast majority of the 7.6 million people then on its docket were released pending immigration proceedings. Keeping them detained while their case is adjudicated has not been logistically possible, and advocates have raised concern for migrants’ health and welfare in civil immigration detention.

Immigrants are already subject to mandatory detention without bond if they have been convicted of murder or other serious crimes, and this year the Republican-led Congress added theft-related crimes to that list after a Georgia nursing student, Laken Riley, was killed by a man from Venezuela who had been picked up for shoplifting and not held for deportation.

Immigration lawyers say the Trump administration is expanding a legal standard typically used to hold recent arrivals at the southern border toa much broader group — including immigrants who have lived in the United States for decades. Many have U.S. citizen children, lawyers say, and likely have the legal grounds to defend themselves against deportation.

Forcing them to remain in detention facilities often in far-flung areas such as an alligator-infested swamp in Florida or the Arizona desert would make it more difficult to fight their cases, because they will be unable to work or easily communicate with family members and lawyers to prepare their cases.

“I think some courts are going to find that this doesn’t give noncitizens sufficient due process,” said Paul Hunker, an immigration lawyer and former ICE chief counsel in the Dallas area. “They could be held indefinitely until they’re deported.*

ICE is holding about 56,000 immigrants a day as officers sweep the nation for undocumented immigrants, working overtime to fulfill Trump’s goal of deporting 1 million people in his first year. Officials have reopened family detention centers that the Biden administration shuttered because ofsafety concerns, stood up soft-sided facilities such as one in the Everglades, and begun deporting immigrants with little notice to alternative countries such as conflict-ridden South Sudan.

Immigration lawyers say the new ICE policy is similar to a position that several immigration judges in Tacoma, Washington, have espoused in recent years, denying hearings to anyone who crossed the border illegally.

The Northwest Immigrant Rights Project in Seattle filed a lawsuit in March on behalf of detainees challenging the policy, arguing that their refusal to consider a bond hearing violated the immigrants’ rights.

The original plaintiff in the case, Ramon Rodriguez Vazquez, has lived in Washington state since 2009, works as a farmer and is the “proud grandfather” of 10 U.S. citizens, court records show. His eight siblings are U.S. citizens who live in California.

He also owns his home, where ICE officers arrested him in February for being in the United States without permission. In April, a federal judge in Washington found that he has “no criminal history in the United States or anywhere else in the world” and ordered immigration officers to give him a bond hearing before a judge. A judge denied him bond and he has since returned to Mexico, his lawyer said.

But that decision does not apply nationwide, lawyers said.

Aaron Korthuis, a lawyer in the case, said Rodriguez is typical of the type of immigrants who now face prolonged detention as they fight deportation in immigration courts. He called the government’s new interpretation of bond hearings “flagrantly unlawful.”

“They are people who have been living here, all they’re doing is trying to make a living for their family,” Korthuis said in an interview. He said the policy “is looking to supercharge detention beyond what it already is.”

ICE declares millions of undocumented immigrants ineligible for bond …
archived 15 Jul 2025 00:05:00 UTC

https://archive.is/vMvoj#selection-673.0-847.222

Independent: Not so fast, sir … One Capitol Hill bureaucrat stands in the way of Trump’s ‘Big Beautiful’ Fourth of July

Posted on by
Reply

But on Thursday, the Senate parliamentarian, Elizabeth MacDonough, said the Republicans’ plan to cap a tax that states use to raise money for Medicaid did not pass the narrow rules of budget reconciliation, known as the “Byrd rule,” which determines what can be included in a reconciliation bill.

To make matters worse for Republicans, MacDonough’s office struck key parts of the immigration provisions in the bill. Specifically, she killed a $1,000 fee for anyone applying for asylum, a $100 minimum fee to advance a continuance in an immigration court, a $250 minimum fee to apply for the diversity visa lottery, a mandatory $400 processing fee for the same visa, a $5,000 minimum fee to sponsor a child who comes to the United States unaccompanied and money to expand the expedited removal of noncitizen immigrants arrested for crimes.

Oops! But somehow it did pass the Senate on July 2. 🙁

Not so fast, sir … One Capitol Hill bureaucrat stands in the way of Trump’s ‘Big Beautiful’ Fourth of July
Not so fast, sir … One Capitol Hill bureaucrat stands in the way of Trump’s ‘Big Beautiful’ Fourth of July – Republicans now have to rewrite a key part of their plan for Medicaid with vacation clock ticking

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/not-so-fast-sir-one-capitol-hill-bureaucrat-stands-in-the-way-of-trump-s-big-beautiful-fourth-of-july/ar-AA1HyLPz