https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/video-state-representative-turned-away-at-ice-facility/vi-AA1LBOka
The 22-year-old philosophy student from China did not expect any problems after his 29-hour flight arrived at a Texas airport this month as he was on his way to study at the University of Houston.
His paperwork was in order. He was going to study humanities — not a tech field that might raise suspicions. He had a full scholarship from the U.S. school and had previously spent a semester at Cornell University for an exchange program with no issues.
But the student, who asked to be identified only by his family name, Gu, because of the political sensitivities of the matter, was stopped, interrogated and 36 hours later, put on a plane back to China.
He also was banned from coming back for five years, abruptly halting his dream for an academic career in the United States.
“There is no opportunity for the life I had expected,” Gu said.
He is one of an unknown number of Chinese students with permission to enter the United States who have been sent back to China or faced intense questioning after their arrival, drawing strong protests from Beijing and showing the uncertainty from President Donald Trump’s shifting policies.
His administration has quickly pivoted from a plan to revoke visas for Chinese students to Trump himself saying he would welcome hundreds of thousands of them, partly to help keep some American schools afloat.
The US has put restrictions on Chinese students
Even so, some officials and lawmakers have expressed suspicions about Chinese students, especially those who study advanced technologies such as quantum computing and artificial intelligence, and their possible links to the Chinese government and military. Some lawmakers want to ban Chinese students altogether.
There’s no immediate data available on how many Chinese students with valid visas have been interrogated and repatriated from U.S. airports in recent weeks. U.S. Customs and Border Protection did not respond to a request for that data or for comment on Chinese students being questioned or sent back.
In recent days, Trump said he told Chinese President Xi Jinping that “we’re honored to have their students here.” But he also added, “Now, with that, we check and we’re careful, we see who is there.”
The Chinese Embassy said it has received reports involving more than 10 Chinese students and scholars being interrogated, harassed and repatriated when entering the U.S.
“The U.S. side has frequently carried out discriminatory, politically driven and selective law enforcement against Chinese students and scholars, inflicting physical and mental harm, financial losses, and disruptions to their careers,” the Chinese Embassy said in a statement.
They were repatriated under the pretext of “so-called ‘visa issues’ or ‘might endanger U.S. national security,’” the embassy said.
The students and scholars were taken into small rooms for extended interrogation, repeatedly questioned on issues unrelated to their academic work, and forced to wait long hours in cold rooms without blankets or quilts, the embassy said. Some relied on aluminum foil to keep warm, and some were detained for more than 80 hours, it said.
Such acts by the U.S. side “run counter to the statements” made by Trump, the embassy said, accusing some U.S. departments and law enforcement personnel of not “faithfully acting on the president’s commitment.” The White House didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
In a Friday interview with the conservative news site Daily Caller, Trump said “it’s very insulting to a country when you say you’re not going to take your students.” The interview was published on Sunday.
“I think what we’re doing is the right thing to do. It’s good to get along with countries, not bad, especially, you know, nuclear-powered countries,” Trump said.
One Chinese student had no concerns as he headed to the US
Gu told AP that he liked his Cornell experience so much that he applied for a master’s program to study philosophy in the U.S.
Despite reports of stricter policies by the Trump administration, Gu said he wasn’t too worried, not even when he was first stopped and taken to a room for questioning by a customs officer after landing at George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston. His belongings were searched, and his electronics were taken away, he said.
After the officer went through the devices, he started interrogating Gu, focusing on his ties to the Chinese Communist Party, Gu said.
He said his parents are party members, but he has never joined, though he — like nearly all Chinese teens and young people — is a member of the party’s youth arm, the Communist Youth League.
The customs officer also grilled him on his connections to the governmental China Scholarship Council, which popped up in his chat history. Gu said it came up in his chats with his schoolmates, but he did not receive money from the Chinese government.
Three rounds of interrogation lasted 10 hours, before Gu was told he was to be deported. No specific reason was given, he said, and the removal paperwork he provided to AP indicated inadequate documentation.
By then, he had hardly slept for 40 hours. The waiting room where he was kept was lit around the clock, its room temperature set low.
“I was so nervous I was shaking, due to both being freezing cold and also the nerves,” Gu said. “So many things were going through my head now that I was being deported. What should I do in the future?”
It would be another day before he was put on a flight. Now, Gu is considering appealing the decision, but that might take years and cost thousands of dollars.
One down, 599,999 to go! But they’ll probably admit thousands of Chinese science and engineering students, who will be much more adept at stealing defense and proprietary information than this unfortunate philosophy student.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said Sunday that immigration operations will soon be expanded in Chicago, confirming plans for a stepped-up presence of federal agents in the nation’s third-largest city as President Trump continues to lash out at Illinois’ Democratic leadership.
Noem’s comments came a day after Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson struck back against what he called the “out-of-control” plan to surge federal officers into the city. The Chicago Police Department will be barred from helping federal authorities with civil immigration enforcement or any related patrols, traffic stops and checkpoints during the surge, according to an executive order Johnson signed Saturday.
The Homeland Security Department last week requested limited logistical support from officials at the Naval Station Great Lakes to support the agency’s anticipated operations. The military installation is about 35 miles north of Chicago.
“We’ve already had ongoing operations with ICE in Chicago … but we do intend to add more resources to those operations,” Noem said during a Sunday appearance CBS News’ ”Face the Nation.”
Noem declined to provide further details about the planned surge of federal officers. It comes after the Trump administration deployed National Guard troops to Washington, saying they were needed to target crime, immigration and homelessness, and two months after it sent troops to Los Angeles.
Trump lashed out against Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker in a social media posting Saturday, warning him that he must straighten out Chicago’s crime problems quickly “or we’re coming.” The Republican president has also been critical of Johnson.
Johnson and Pritzker, both Democrats, have denounced the expected federal mobilization, noting that crime has fallen in Chicago. They are planning to sue if Trump moves forward with the plan.
In his order signed Saturday, Johnson directed all city departments to guard the constitutional rights of Chicago residents “amidst the possibility of imminent militarized immigration or National Guard deployment by the federal government.”
Asked during a news conference about federal agents who are presumably “taking orders,” Johnson replied: “Yeah, and I don’t take orders from the federal government.”
Johnson also blocked Chicago police from wearing face coverings to hide their identities, as most federal immigration officers have done since Trump launched his crackdown.
The federal surge into Chicago could start as early as Friday and last about 30 days, according to two U.S. officials who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss plans that had not been made public.
Pritzker, in an interview aired Sunday on “Face the Nation,” said that Trump’s expected plans to mobilize federal forces in the city may be part of a plan to “stop the elections in 2026 or, frankly, take control of those elections.”
Noem said it was a Trump “prerogative” whether to deploy National Guard troops to Chicago as he did in Los Angeles in June in the midst of protests there against immigration raids.
“I do know that L.A. wouldn’t be standing today if President Trump hadn’t taken action,” Noem said. “That city would have burned if left to devices of the mayor and governor of that state.”
Unlike the recent federal takeover of policing in Washington, the Chicago operation is not expected to rely on the National Guard or military and is focused exclusively on immigration, rather than being cast as part of a broad campaign against crime, Trump administration officials have said.
Chicago is home to a large immigrant population, and both the city and the state of Illinois have some of the country’s strongest rules against cooperating with federal immigration enforcement efforts. That has often put the city and state at odds with the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda.
Johnson’s order builds on the city’s longtime stance, that neither Chicago nor Illinois officials have sought or been consulted on the federal presence and they stand against Trump’s mobilization plan.
During his news conference Saturday, Johnson accused the president of “behaving outside the bounds of the Constitution” and seeking a federal presence in Democratic cities as retribution against his political rivals.
“He is reckless and out of control,” Johnson said. “He’s the biggest threat to our democracy that we’ve experienced in the history of our country.”
In response, the White House contended that the potential flood of federal agents was about “cracking down on crime.”
“If these Democrats focused on fixing crime in their own cities instead of doing publicity stunts to criticize the President, their communities would be much safer,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in an email Saturday.
Critics have noted that Trump, while espousing a tough-on-crime push, is the only felon ever to occupy the White House.
A federal judge temporarily blocked the Trump Administration from deporting hundreds of unaccompanied children back to their home country of Guatemala, just as some of the children were boarded on planes and ready to depart.
The last-minute order wrapped up a frenetic legal battle that began in the early hours of Sunday morning, when immigration advocacy groups filed an emergency lawsuit after discovering shelters holding unaccompanied children were abruptly told to prepare them for deportation within two hours.
District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan issued a temporary block on the deportations at 4 a.m. and called a hearing for Sunday afternoon. That hearing was moved forward when she heard the deportations were already underway, and the judge issued a temporary restraining order blocking deny deportations for 14 days.
“I do not want there to be any ambiguity about what I am ordering,” Judge Sooknanan said, adding that the government “cannot remove any children” while the case is ongoing.
The judge ordered the children to be taken off the planes and made clear that her ruling applies to all Guatemalan minors who arrived in the U.S. without their parents or guardians.
Some children were taken off planes as they were waiting to take off on the tarmac. A government lawyer said in the hearing that one plane had taken off, but later came back when the order was issued.
In their lawsuit, lawyers from the National Immigrant Law Center (NILC) said the children—who are in the custody of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR)—were due to be handed over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and deported to Guatemala on Sunday.
The ORR sent memos to shelters holding the children on Saturday telling them to “take proactive measures to ensure [unaccompanied children] are prepared for discharge within 2 hours of receiving this notification.” The memo called for the shelters to “have two prepared sack lunches” and one suitcase per child.
The NILC attorneys said in the lawsuit that they were filing on behalf of “hundreds of Guatemalan children at imminent risk of unlawful removal from the United States,” aged between 10 and 17 years.
The lawsuit said the estimated 600 children had “active proceedings before immigration courts across the country,” and removing them from the country violated the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008, the Immigration and Nationality Act, and the Constitution.
“All unaccompanied children — regardless of the circumstances of their arrival to the United States — receive the benefit of full immigration proceedings, including a hearing on claims for relief before an immigration judge,” the attorneys wrote in the lawsuit.
“Congress provided even further procedural protection to unaccompanied minors in removal proceedings by mandating that their claims for asylum be heard in the first instance before an asylum officer in a non-adversarial setting rather than in an adversarial courtroom setting,” they added.
Judge Sooknanan granted the plaintiffs’ request for a restraining order to block the deportations early Saturday morning “to maintain the status quo until a hearing can be set.”
At the hearing on Sunday, lawyers for the U.S. government insisted that the children were being repatriated with their parents. Justice Department attorney Drew Ensign said it was “outrageous that the plaintiffs are trying to interfere with these reunifications.”
That claim was contested by the immigration advocacy groups and attorneys for some of the children, who said at least some of the children said they did not want to return and some faced danger back in Guatemala.
“I have conflicting narratives from both sides here,” Sooknanan said.
“Absent action by the courts, all of those children would have been returned to Guatemala, potentially to very dangerous situations,” she added.
Ensign told Judge Sooknanan the deportations were underway when the order was issued and that he believed one plane had taken off, but had come back.
Minutes after the hearing ended, the Associated Press reported that five charter buses pulled up to a plane parked at an airport near the border in Harlingen, Texas, where deportation flights are known to depart from.
Efrén C. Olivares, vice president of litigation and legal strategy at the National Immigration Law Center, said the deportations could have caused the children “irreperable harm.”
“In the dead of night on a holiday weekend, the Trump administration ripped vulnerable, frightened children from their beds and attempted to return them to danger in Guatemala,” he said in a statement following the ruling.
“We are heartened the Court prevented this injustice from occurring before hundreds of children suffered irreparable harm. We are determined to continue fighting to protect the interest of our plaintiffs and all class members until the effort is enjoined permanently,” he added.
The ORR, which lies within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), said the deportations were the result of an agreement between the U.S. and Guatemala. Attorneys representing the children were sent memos informing them that the “Government of Guatemala has requested the return of certain unaccompanied alien children in federal custody for the purposes of reunifying the UAC with suitable family members.”
“This communication is provided as advance notice that removal proceedings may be dismissed to support the prompt repatriation of the child,” the memo, which was reviewed by TIME, said.
White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller criticized Sooknanan for blocking the deportations.
“The minors have all self-reported that their parents are back home in Guatemala. But a Democrat judge is refusing to let them reunify with their parents,” he wrote on X.
The Department of Health and Human Services did not respond to a request for comment. ICE did not respond to a request for comment.
https://time.com/7313641/deportation-guatemala-ice-judge-blocked
