A year into Trump’s mass purge of immigrants from the United States, it’s beyond debate that the people orchestrating and conducting the raids, round-ups and deportations have committed more grievous crimes than the vast majority of the people they’ve harassed, assaulted, arrested, jailed and sent into exile. They’ve committed crimes against the Constitution of the government they’re acting in the name of and they’ve used the force, often violent force, of the federal government against innocent people. They’ve lied to Congress and federal judges. They’ve systematically violated judicial orders. They’ve denied people the most fundamental right guaranteed to residents, regardless of legal status, in the US: the right to due process of law.

The man running Trump’s border policy, Thomas Homan, was under FBI investigation for accepting grocery bags stuffed with cash to steer contracts to the Trump administration. The man running Border Patrol’s commando squads, the maniacal Gregory Bovino, was excoriated by a federal judge for lying in a deposition about the circumstances of his violent crackdowns on protesters in Chicago.

Traditional sanctuaries–churches, schools, day care centers, hospitals and courthouses–have been violated. Members of Congress, including a U.S. senator, have been roughed up and arrested. Religious leaders have been tear-gassed, tasered and beaten. People have been deported to squalid prisons in unstable countries on continents they’ve never visited, never mind lived on. Arrest warrants and deportation orders have been post-dated and falsified.

For years, the libertarian right has warned about the militarized takeover of law enforcement. Using an entirely fictitious “immigrant invasion” as an excuse, Trump chucked these constitutional anxieties aside, along with the Posse Comitatus Act, and ordered federal troops into DC, Chicago, LA, Memphis and Portland.

People have been detained and deported for their political views and columns they’ve written. People have been deported for embarrassing the government. People have been deported for the hats and shoes they wear and their tattoos. Babies have been ripped out of their mothers’ arms. Children as young as four years old have been forced to defend themselves in immigration court. The torture cells of El Salvador’s most notorious prison were rented out for more than 200 Venezuelans swept up and deported in secret flights that violated a federal judge’s order. Conditions in US detention prisons are just as bad, if not worse.

The vast majority of those arrested had no criminal record. Many of them were arrested at their jobs washing cars, mowing lawns, cultivating plants, putting roofs on houses. Others were arrested while checking in with their immigration officers or showing up for scheduled court hearings. Apparently, it’s much easier to abduct people who are abiding by the law, than those who aren’t. Who knew?

People are being grabbed off the street or chased down in their cars because they “look” like they might be immigrants. Dozens, perhaps hundreds of American citizens, have been illegally stopped, interrogated, tasered, tear-gassed, arrested and detained by masked ICE and Border Patrol agents, who have routinely dismissed documents, even REAL IDs, as forgeries. Several American citizens have been wrongly deported. Racial profiling in the service of deportation has been sanctified by the Supreme Court, with Brett Kavanaugh calling such stops a minor inconvenience, even when they result in specious arrests.

Since Trump bought off most of the large law firms at the beginning of his term, most of the legal heavy-lifting to expose the corruption and criminality of the administration’s immigration crackdown has been done by small firms and non-profits, who have routinely kicked the government’s ass in courtrooms from Portland to Nashville, Las Cruces to Boston. ICE has proven itself to be a lawless agency whose mission is to spread terror through immigrant communities across the US. But they’ve succeeded in turning much of the country against them. Public support for immigration has climbed to record highs.

Block by block, city by city, the barbarous legions of ICE are being confronted, driven back and defeated. The Trump/Miller pogrom against immigrants is failing in all of its objectives except one: to inflict maximum cruelty on a vulnerable population that it has used as a scapegoat for the decline of the American economy, resulting from four decades of ruthless neoliberal policies. This shameful episode will stand as the ghastly hallmark of this misbegotten administration.

– JSC

+++

“Many people — many nations — can find themselves holding, more or less wittingly, that ‘every stranger is an enemy’. For the most part this conviction lies deep down like some latent infection; it betrays itself only in random, disconnected acts, and does not lie at the base of a system of reason.

– Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz

+ On January 31, Julio Noriega, a US citizen born in Chicago, was walking in Berwyn, Illinois, to get a pizza when ICE descended on him, placed him in handcuffs, and shoved him into a van with other shacked men. His wallet, which held his ID and Social Security card proving his citizenship, was confiscated. He was detained overnight before being released without a record of what occurred.

+ At 5:30 in the morning of January 27, Jhony Godoy Gregerio was driving with his brother Bayron to work in Maywood, Illinois, when he was pulled over. Bayron was wearing an ankle bracelet mandated by ICE. The officer asked if his name was “Brian.” After Jhony answered “no,” the officer opened the car door and pulled Jhony from the car, his hands and feet cuffed. As multiple trucks carrying 15 armed officers surrounded the vehicle, the officer said he was from ICE. The ICE agent didn’t show Jhonny a warrant, and he has no criminal history other than a few traffic citations. He was taken to Indiana, and before he was able to contact his wife and child or a lawyer, he transferred to the same Louisiana prison where ICE sent Mahmoud Khalil. Jhony has been living legally in the US for 15 years.

That same day, Jhony’s brother Marco Godoy Gregerio, who was driving in a second car, was also pulled over and arrested by ICE. The ICE agent also asked Marco if he was “Brian.” Marco said, “No,” and handed the officer his ID from the Guatemalan consul’s office. As armed ICE agents surrounded his car, Marco was told to turn the car off and that he was going to be placed under arrest. He wasn’t told why, and he wasn’t shown a warrant. Marco had no criminal record. Like his brother Jhony, he was taken into custody, held in Indiana, and quickly transferred to Louisiana without being able to contact his family or a lawyer. He was held for 25 days before being able to request bond from an immigration judge.

+ On January 26, ICE agents surrounded an apartment building in Chicago where Sergio Bolanos Romero lived. As he got into his car and started driving to work, he was pulled over by armed ICE agents who told him to exit the vehicle and demanded he show them proof of his immigration status. After Sergio didn’t provide any, he was handcuffed, taken to a parking lot, which served as an ICE processing center, and then transferred to a jail in Wisconsin. It turned out that ICE had mistaken Sergio for the target of a planned raid who lived in the same building, even though Sergio’s car did not match ICE’s intended target.  Sergio had not committed a crime and was not shown a warrant for his arrest. He was released two days later.

+ On January 29, ICE pulled over Bernandino Randa Marinas on his way to work in Chicago. After handing his ID to an ICE agent, Bernandino was ordered to keep his hands on the steering wheel of his car and not to move. He was held this way for around 40 minutes before one of the ICE officers told him he was under arrest. When Bernando asked to see a warrant, the officer quickly flashed him his cell phone. But he was not shown a Notice to Appear, and at the time of his arrest, there were no pending proceedings against him. Bernandino has lived in the US for more than 20 years, has two children who are US citizens, and a third is due in May. He has no criminal history. 

+ On the morning of February 6, 2025, Jose Ortega Gonzalez was arrested by ICE while driving to work in Kansas. Jose has lived in the US for 20 years and is the father of children who are US citizens. Armed ICE officers surrounded his car and demanded his immigration papers. Jose told them he didn’t have proof of his legal status on him. He was then asked if he’d been arrested for drug trafficking. Jose told the officers he had no criminal history besides a couple of traffic tickets. Jose was then handcuffed, taken to a local police station, and then to an ICE detention center, where he was held for three weeks before seeing a judge who freed him on bond.

+ On January 26, Abel Orozco Ortega was driving back from the grocery store to the same Lyons, Illinois house he’s lived in for 15 years when he was stopped and arrested by ICE. The ICE agents had mistaken him for his son, Abel Jr., who is more than two decades younger. After Abel handed an ICE officer his driver’s license, the immigration cop reached inside Abel’s car window, unlocked and opened the door, then grabbed Abel’s arm and told him he was under arrest. He was hauled out of the car, cuffed, and put into an ICE vehicle. Abel’s son Eduardo came out of the house to see what was going on. As Eduardo, who is a US citizen, tried to speak with his father, the driver of the ICE car drove over his foot. These traumatic events caused Abel to experience a severe health episode, which required his hospitalization. After he was discharged from the hospital, ICE transferred him to a detention center in Indiana, where he remains. Abel Ortega has no criminal record and was never shown a warrant for his arrest. 

+ On the morning of January 27, ICE agents showed up at an apartment building in Chicago. They were looking for a man named Carlos. When one of the residents of the apartment told them no one named Carlos lived there, eight ICE officers busted through the door and began searching the apartment. They found 24-year-old Jockneul Hernandez Rojas in his room watching television while in bed. The officer told him to get dressed and that he was under arrest. Jockneul was handcuffed and led out of the building. Jocknuel was not shown a warrant and had no criminal record. He had previously been issued a Notice to Appear by ICE, but the immigration court had dismissed the case against him. Jocknuel was taken to the ICE center in Indiana and then swiftly transferred to Louisiana, where he was later released on the orders of an immigration judge.

+ In the early morning hours of January 28, federal agents broke down the door of Raul Lopez Garcia’s house in Elgin, Illinois. They located Raul in an upstairs bedroom, where they handcuffed him and confiscated his identification documents. He was taken to an ICE facility for processing. Raul was not shown a warrant for his arrest and had no criminal record. ICE later claimed that they encountered Raul while looking for his stepson. Raul was eventually released on bond by a federal judge.

+ ICE agents broke down the door of Senen Becerra Hernandez’s Chicago apartment, looking for his roommate. Senen was placed in handcuffs and ordered to wait outside for more than an hour as they looked for the target of their raid. Instead of releasing him, the ICE officers took Senen to a detention center. ICE later justified his warrantless arrest by falsely claiming that he didn’t live at the address and had no community ties. In reality, Senen lived in the apartment where the raid occurred, had a job, and attended a local church.

+ At 11 AM on February 7, an ICE team entered El Potro’s Mexican Café and Cantina in Liberty, Missouri. The 10-member team was armed and dressed in tactical gear. Several of the agents wore masks over their faces. One of the ICE agents told the cafe owner they were looking for someone and ordered him to make all his employees available for questioning. They didn’t provide a name, show him a photograph, or provide a warrant. Still, the owner felt he had to comply. 

As two ICE agents guarded the door, the employees were rounded up and placed in separate booths in the restaurant, where each employee was ordered to provide their ID. One employee was almost immediately placed in handcuffs, while the others were detained in the booths for more than two hours as ICE seized the employment records from the restaurant. At 12:30, 12 employees were placed in handcuffs, marched out of the cafe, and taken into custody. Eleven workers were detained in Kansas, while another was taken to Kentucky and later to Indiana. All but two of the workers were soon released on minimal bonds. One was deported, and the other remains in detention. 

+ In their mass roundups of alleged members of the Tren de Aragua gang, ICE has been using tattoos as justification to deport noncitizens to a life of hard labor and torture in Salvadoran prisons. Among those deported are: a tattoo artist who entered the US legally seeking asylum: a teenage boy in Arlington, Texas, who got a tattoo on his left hand of a rose with paper money as its petals because, his sister said, he thought it “looked cool;” and a 26-year-old man whose tattoos his wife claims are unrelated to any gangs, never mind TdA.

+ Here’s the declaration of immigration attorney Linette Tobin on the arrest and deportation to El Salvador of her client Jerce Reyes Barrios, a professional soccer player and dissident from Venezuela who was seeking asylum in the US as a political refugee.

1. I am the immigration attorney for Jerce Reyes Barrios, born in [sic] January 16, 1989 in Venezuela.

2. In February and March 2024, Mr Reyes Barrios marched in two demonstrations in Venezuela, protesting the authoritarian rule of Maduro. At the second demonstration, he was detained and taken to a clandestine building where he was tortured (electric shocks and suffocation) along with other demonstrators.

3. Shortly after his release, he fled Venezuela for the United States. He registered with CBP One in Mexico, then presented himself to CBP officials on the day of his appointment. He was taken into custody and detained at Otay Mesa Detention Facility in September 2024. 

4. We applied for asylum, withdrawal of removal, and CAT protection in December 2024. His final individual hearing is set for April 17, 2025, before Judge Robinson at the Otay Mesa immigration court.

5. On March 15, 2025, Mr. Reyes Barrios was deported to El Salvador with no notice to counsel or family. It was not until March 18, 2025, that counsel was able to reach an ICE official and learn that he had, in fact, been deported.

6. Mr. Reyes Barrio was/is a professional soccer player in Venezuela. He has never been arrested or charged with a crime. He has a steady employment record as a soccer player, as well as a soccer coach for children and youth.

7. Initially, Mr Barrios was placed in maximum security at Otay Mesa and accused of being a Tren de Aragua gang member. The accusation is based on two things. First, he has a tattoo on his arm of a crown sitting atop a soccer ball with a rosary and the word “Dios.” DHS alleges that this tattoo is proof of gang membership. In reality, he chose the tattoo because it is similar to the logo for his favorite soccer team, Real Madrid. See the logo below.

8. Second, DHS reviewed his social media posts and found a photo of Mr. Reyes Barrios making a hand gesture that they allege is proof of gang membership. In fact, the gesture is a common one: It means “I Love You” in sign language and is commonly used as a Rock-and-Roll symbol.

9. After submitting a police clearance from Venezuela indicating no criminal record, multiple employment letters, a declaration from the tattoo artist who rendered the tattoo, and various online images showing similar soccer ball/crown tattoos and explaining the meaning of the hand gestures, Mr Reyes Barrios was transferred out of maximum security.

10. Nevertheless, on March 10th or 11th, he was transferred from Otay Mesa to Texas without notice. Then, on March 15, 2025, he was deported to El Salvador. Counsel and family have lost all contact with him and have no information regarding his whereabouts or condition.

+ If this is how they’re treating opponents of Maduro, imagine how they’re treating dissidents of the Bukele regime in El Salvador.

+ How does ICE justify these arrests and deportations to Buekele’s concentration camp-like prison, where torture, food deprivation and killings are commonplace? In truly Kafkaesque terms: “the lack of specific information about each individual actually highlights the risk they pose. It demonstrates they are terrorists with regard to whom we lack a complete profile.”

+ In late February, the Canadian actress Jasmine Mooney was kidnapped by ICE after she tried to renew her work visa at the US/Mexico border. She was cuffed, thrown into a van, held prisoner for 12 days, denied access to a lawyer, made to sleep on concrete floors and given a forced pregnancy test before being sent back to Canada with no explanation from DHS officials for the brutality of her treatment. Mooney described her surreal ordeal in vivid terms for an article in The Guardian.

+ On March 5, Ranjani Srinivasan was told by email that her student visa had been revoked after she attended a couple of protests and liked some social media posts in support of Palestinians in Gaza. Ranjani, a 37-year-old architect from India who was on the verge of completing her doctoral program in urban planning at Columbia, withdrew from school and fled to Canada after ICE knocked on her dorm door and accused her of advocating “violence and terrorism.” In an interview with Boston radio station WBUR, Ranjani said:

I’m not a terrorist sympathizer. I’m not pro-Hamas. And I think it’s really dangerous to label any free speech that somebody disagrees with, or any sort of peaceful objection to global issues, as terrorism. I think it just creates a climate of fear where people are scared to share their opinions. There’s a feeling that your visa could be revoked for even the simplest political speech, and the whole point of an American university is to have debate and nuance about ideas to contest them freely. I think there’s a general fear of doing that now.

+ On March 7, Fabian Schmidt was detained by immigration officers at Logan Airport in Boston on his way back from Luxembourg. Schmidt holds a green card and has lived and worked in the US since moving to the States with his mother in 2007. He became a permanent resident in 2008 and has worked in the US as an electrical engineer ever since. As ICE officers interrogated him and demanded he surrender his green card, his partner, a cardiologist and US citizen, waited for him for four hours at the airport. During his detention, Schmidt was stripped naked, placed in a cold shower, and deprived of food, water, and medication. He collapsed before being hospitalized at Mass General. After his release from the hospital, Schmidt was taken to an ICE facility in Burlington, Mass., and then transferred to an ICE jail in Rhode Island. Schmidt’s green card had recently been renewed and there were no pending legal cases against him. He wasn’t served with a warrant at the time of his arrest and wasn’t permitted to contact his family for three days. Schmidt has an 8-year-old daughter who is a US citizen.

+ On March 9, a French space researcher was subjected to a “random” search upon arrival in the US. His phone and computer were confiscated and searched. The DHS agents found a series of text messages describing Trump’s treatment of scientists, which they used to accuse him of harboring a “hatred of toward Trump that could be described as terrorism.” He was held in custody overnight and deported back to Europe the next day. Agence France Press later reported that DHS had accused him of “hateful and conspiratorial messages” and had referred him to the FBI.

+ On March 12, Dr. Rasha Alawieh was detained by immigration officials at Boston’s Logan Airport. She was told that her visa had been revoked and that she would be deported back to Lebanon, where she’d been visiting her parents. Her phone and computer were confiscated. Dr. Alawieh works at Brown Medicine and Rhode Island Hospital. She had secured an H-1B visa that doesn’t expire until 2027. She was trained in the U.S. at Ohio State, the University of Washington, and Yale as a transplant surgeon. She hasn’t been convicted or accused of a crime. In court filings, ICE claimed to have discovered photos on her phone that were “sympathetic” to leaders of Hezbollah. It turns out that the images weren’t Dr. Alaweigh’s but had been posted to a group chat she belonged to.

+ On March 17, masked ICE agents arrested Badar Khan Suri outside his own in Arlington, Virginia. Bara is an Indian national with a student visa who was doing post-doctoral research at Georgetown University. The agents told Badar his visa had been revoked and he would be deported to India. Badar has no criminal record and is married to a US citizen. Badar’s lawyer, Hassan Ahmad, told Politicothat he had been targeted because of his wife’s Palestinian heritage. In a sworn statement, Badar’s wife, Mapheze Saleh, said the detention of her husband “has completely upended our lives…Our children are in desperate need of their father and miss him dearly. As a mother of three children, I desperately need his support to take care of them and me.” A  federal court blocked Badar’s deportation.

+++

+ ICE is knowingly renditioning innocent people and sending them to a prison where the night-time sadism of Abu Ghraib is the operational plan 24/7…

+ The ACLU filed a sworn declaration from a Venezuela woman asylum seeker whom ICE detained and wanted to deport to El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act; she says she overheard ICE officials on the plane to El Salvador conversing about that court ruling ordering them to turn the plane back to the US. ICE defied the court order and renditioned the detainees to El Salvador despite stopping for “hours” to refuel. The Venezuelan asylum seeker was later returned to the Webb Detention Center in Laredo, Texas…

On Friday, we were told to gather our belongings and put on the bus at Webb [County detention center in Laredo, Texas] and sat in the bus for about 5 minutes and then were taken back to Webb.

Saturday morning, we were again told to gather our belongings and get on the bus. We went to the airport, and eight women were put on the plane with me.

When we got on the plane, there were already over 50 men on the plane. I could see other migrants walking to the plane, but we took off before any additional people boarded. Within a couple of minutes, I overheard two US government officials talking, and they said, “There is an order saying we can’t take off, but we already have.”

I asked where we were going and we were told that we were going to Venezuela. Several other people on the plane told me they were in immigration proceedings and awaiting court hearings in immigration court.

We were not allowed to open our window shades.

We landed somewhere for refueling. We were there for many hours. We were arm and leg shackled the whole time.

We took off again and landed fairly quickly. I was then told we were in El Salvador. 

While on the plane the government officials were asking the men to sign a document and they didn’t want to. The government officials were pushing them to sign the document and threatening them. I heard them discussing the documents and they were about the men admitting they were members of TdA.

After we landed but were still on the plane, a woman opened the shade. An officer rushed to close the shade and pulled her down by her shoulders to try and stop her from looking out. The person who pushed her down had HOU-O2 written on his sleeve.

I saw out the window for a minute and I saw men in military uniforms and another plane. I saw men being led off the plane. Since I’ve been back in the US, I have seen news coverage, and the plane I saw looks like the one I’ve seen on TV with migrants from the US being delivered to El Salvador.

+ Neri Alvarado was working as a baker in Dallas when ICE showed up asking to see his tattoo. “We’re here because of your tattoos. We are  finding and questioning everyone who has tattoos,” an ICE agent told him. Neri explained that the rainbow-colored ribbon on his arm was an Autism Awareness tattoo honoring his 15-year-old brother with autism. The ICE examined Neri’s phone and told him he was clean. But another agent ordered him kept in detention. Then, he was renditioned to El Salvador without any explanation. His only crime was having a tattoo.

+ ICE is trying to deport Yunseo Chung, a 21-year-old Columbia student who attended pro-Palestine protests. Chung came to the US from South Korea with her family at age SEVEN. She’s been a lawful permanent resident for more than a decade. She was the valedictorian of her high school class. She faced a disciplinary hearing from Columbia, which found she did not violate the university’s policies. Despite being cleared of any crimes or infractions (even that of trespassing on her own campus), ICE agents showed up at her parent’s house and told them her green card had been revoked. Armed ICE agents showed up twice at her campus apartment looking for her. On Wednesday, a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order stopping the Trump administration from detaining Yunseo.

+ A little after five in the evening on Tuesday, Runeysa Ozturk, a Ph D candidate at Tufts University, was accosted on the streets of Somerville, Mass., outside of Boston by hooded and masked agents, who initially refused to identify who they were and then falsely claimed they were “the police.” They were, in fact, ICE. Runeysa’s backpack, purse, and phone were seized. She was placed in cuffs, forced into a black van, and taken away. She was told her student visa had been revoked, and she was going to be deported. Ozturk, a Turkish citizen, was here legally, had committed no crimes, and wasn’t charged with a crime by ICE when they kidnapped her. Her sole offense? Co-writing an op-ed in the Tufts student paper opposing Israel’s mass killings of Palestinians. Even though a federal judge had ordered ICE to keep her in Massachusetts until a hearing on her status could take place, she was transported to an ICE detention jail in Louisiana.

+ On Thursday, Marco Rubio admitted that he’d personally revoked Runeysa’s visa and smeared her without evidence as being a terrorist sympathizer and a supporter of Hamas. “We do it every day,” Rubio boasted. “Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visas.” Rubio said he’s already revoked 300 student visas and intends to revoke many more.

Jonathan Karl, ABC’s This Week: Do they have any due process at all?

Thomas Homan, Trump’s Border Czar: Due process…what was Laken Riley’s due process?

+++

+ Kilmar Abrego Garcia came to the US in 2012 to escape being recruited into a Salvadoran gang that had terrorized his family for more than two years. In 2016, he met his future wife, Jennifer Stefania Vasquez Sura, a US citizen living in Maryland. They eventually moved in together and Kilmar helped raise her two children. They later had a child together. Each of the three kids had some form of disability. Kilmar, according to Jennifer, was an attentive and devoted father to all of the children. He held a steady job, he stayed out of trouble, and then he was busted in 2019 while waiting to apply for a job at Home Depot and accused of being a member of the M-13 gang in Long Island, where he’d never been. During his hearing, Abrega adamantly denied any gang ties. The cops said they arrested him because “he was wearing a Chicago Bulls hat and a hoodie and that a confidential informant advised that he was an active member of MS-13 with the Westerns clique.” 

Jennifer Vasquez Sura wrote in a deposition that she was so fearful Kilmar would be deported that she arranged for them to get married while he was in jail: “I coordinated with the detention center and a local pastor to officiate our wedding. We were separated by glass and were not allowed physical contact. The officers had to pass our rings to each other. It was heartbreaking not to be able to hug him.”

Relying on the bogus testimony from a confidential informant, the immigration judge issued a removal order but barred his deportation to El Salvador, agreeing that there was a serious threat to Abrego Garcia’s life if he was returned home. The judge ordered his release and required him to regularly check-ins with ICE, which Abrego Garcia faithfully did.

So things stood until March 12, 2025, when ICE agents stopped Abrego Garcia’s car as he was driving his 5-year-old son home from school. He was cuffed, told his immigration status had been revoked and that he would be deported. The agents took him to a detention center in Baltimore. When Kilmar was finally able to talk with Jennifer on the phone, he told her the ICE agents once again accused him of being a member of M-13, saying bizarrely they’d watched the family frequently visit a certain restaurant and that they had photos of Kilmar playing basketball.

On the morning of March 15, Kilmar called Jennifer again to let her know he’d been transferred to Louisiana. “That call was short and Kilmar’s tone was different,” Jennifer wrote in her deposition. “He was scared. He was told he was being deported to El Salvador. He was told he was being deported to El Salvador to a super-max prison called ‘CECOT.’” Jennifer hasn’t heard from him since.

Then, on Monday of this week, the Trump administration admitted in a court filing that Abrego Garcia had been deported to El Salvador in violation of a court order. By accident, they claimed, the result of an “administrative error:” (Which sounds like the excuse for everything that happened in the last two months.) “On March 15, although ICE was aware of his protection from removal to El Salvador, Abrego Garcia was removed to El Salvador because of an administrative error.” Even so, the Trump administration argued the court had no power to order the return of Kilmar from the custody of the nation that he had fled 13 years ago in fear for his life.

The entire case against Kilmar, dating back to 2019, has the smell of a frame-up. When Kilmar’s lawyers attempted to contact the detective who filled out a form in 2019 accusing him of links to MS-13, they discovered that the police department had no record of his arrest. Even more damning, the detective who filled out the fatal form had been suspended.

Despite the outrageous facts of the case, instead of admitting their grotesque error, the Trump administration went on the offensive, sending JD Vance out to smear Kilmar on FoxNews, where he called him “a convicted MS-13 gang member with no legal right to be here. He had also committed some traffic violations; he had not shown up for some court dates. This is not exactly ‘father of the year’ here.” Trump’s Jesus-worshipping press spokesperson Kathline Leavitt threw even more toxic slime at Kilmar, calling him a “criminal,” a “foreign terrorist,” and a “heinous individual.”

All lies.

Abrega Garcia has no criminal record and his wife and kids miss him and worry about his fate in Naghib Bukele’s lethal dungeon.

+ In 2024, José Gregorio González came to the US from Venezuela to donate a kidney needed to save the life of his brother José Alfred Pacheco, who suffers from late-stage renal failure. But before the operation could take place, González was swept up by an ICE raid in Chicago that a neighbor described as “an ambush.” González’s request for asylum had been denied, but an immigration judge had allowed him to stay in the US for the time being because Venezuela was refusing to accept any deportation flights from the US. González hadn’t any criminal history in the US and wasn’t served with a warrant at the time of his arrest. After public outrage over his detention, Gonzalez was temporarily released until after the operation could take place, at which time he would be deported.

+ The Washington Post explains that this is far from the only case where noncitizen relatives have been deported while caring for relatives with terminal illnesses, though not as terminal as the sickness of the country that is deporting them:

Last month, a child brain cancer patient in Texas and her four siblings — all U.S. citizens — were deported to Mexico along with their undocumented parents who had removal orders as the family was en route to a Houston hospital for her treatment. An undocumented Mexican woman in the Los Angeles area fared better — ICE arrested her in February, but an immigration judge allowed her to post bond as she was the caregiver for an American daughter with bone cancer.

+ On March 27, a mother and her three children were kidnapped by ICE in Sackets Harbor in northern New York, the hometown of Tom Homan, who’s commanding the immigration raids for Trump. All four of them were handcuffed, including a third grader, and kept in detention for 11 days. They were finally released this week after more than 1,000 people showed up to protest their baseless arrests.

+ The Los Angeles United School District said plainclothes ICE agents tried to question students at two elementary schools in Los Angeles on Monday but were denied entry by administrators. Superintendent Alberto Carvahlo said the agents falsely claimed they had parental permission to question the kids.

+ Here’s the declaration of Luis Alberto Castillo Rivera, who entered the United States legally from Venezuela, had committed no crimes while in the US, yet was kidnapped without a warrant by ICE and sent to the notorious Camp 6 at Guantanamo Bay, where he was fed wretched food, kept shackled in solitary confinement for 23 hours a day, denied medical care, mocked and humiliated by guards, saw a prisoner beaten by guards for refusing to return a toothbrush, had their Bibles and passports seized and were denied phone calls with family and lawyers for two weeks…

+++

+ First, you get away with deporting non-criminal non-citizens. Then you try to deport non-criminal citizens whose ethnicity you dislike.  Last week, Juan Carlos Gomez-Lopez, a 20-year-old Georgia man of Mayan heritage, was pulled over and arrested by Florida Highway Patrol for “being an undocumented immigrant over the age of 18 who had illegally entered the state of Florida.” There were just two problems. First, the enforcement of DeSantis’s punitive immigration law Gomez-Lopez supposedly violated, has been blocked by a federal court. Second, Gomez-Lopez is a US citizen. When Gomez-Lopez appeared for his arraignment before the local court, his advocates presented the judge with his birth certificate and Social Security card as proof that he is a natural-born US citizen. Leon County Judge LaShawn Riggins said, “In looking at it and feeling it and holding it up to the light, the court can clearly see the watermark proving this is an authentic document.” Riggins said there was no probable cause for his detention, but that her hands were tied because ICE had asserted jurisdiction and wants him sent to a detention center for deportation. 

“It’s like this dystopian nightmare of poorly written laws,” said Thomas Kennedyof the Florida Immigrant Coalition. “We’re living in a time when this man could be sent to El Salvador because, what? Is he going to be treated as a stateless person?”

+ Meanwhile, in Boston: “Immigration attorney Nicole Micheroni says she was born at Newton Wellesley Hospital, grew up in Sharon, Massachusetts, and was educated at Wellesley College. So, anyone can imagine her surprise when she says she received an emailed letter from the Department of Homeland Security, telling her to self-deport within 7 days…”

+ And in Arizona, CBP targeted another Bostonian: Rioles Saeed, a lawyer now living in Tucson, received a notice from Border Patrol telling her to leave the country or be forcibly deported. Saeed is an American citizen who was born in Boston. Saeed: “I thought this was for one of my clients but then i saw that it was addressed only to me. With the dot gov, it said it was from CBP…There is a true recklessness coming from the government and shows an intimidating attitude towards our immigrant clients.”

+ Alec MacGillis, Pro Publica: “Kseniia Petrova left Russia in protest of Putin and found work at a Harvard lab, w/ a valid visa. She arrived with only a backpack.  CBP stopped her recently at Logan for failing to declare frog embryos she had brought from Paris for her lab. This would normally come with a fine. Instead, she is in prison in Louisiana.  “I feel like something is happening generally in America. Something bad is happening. I don’t think everybody understands.”

 

+ We’re watching the Milgram Experiment breakout in real-time, as hundreds of ICE agents commit sadistic acts against innocent people, they’d never imagined themselves ever doing back in Sunday School…(At least I hope they’d never imagined themselves doing it): A Guatemalan immigrant with no Massachusetts criminal record was arrested Monday on Tallman Street in New Bedford after federal agents shattered the glass on his vehicle with axes, as he and his wife waited inside the car for their lawyer to arrive. Like so many others, he was detained without a warrant.

+ The former cop who sent gay makeup artist, Andry Jose Hernandez, Romero to a hellhole of a prison in El Salvador is a known liar, who was put on a Brady List of cops whose testimony should not be trusted at trial. He also drove drunk into a family’s house and falsified his overtime hours.

+++

American citizens are being routinely caught in Trump’s deportation dragnet, detained, jailed, and threatened with deportation, even a four-year-old with cancer and a pregnant mother who would have given birth to an American citizen. When ICE’s “mistakes” are revealed, usually through the presentation of a birth certificate days after the false arrest, the typical response has been to blame the victims. That’s if they haven’t already been deported. 

Take the case of 19-year-old Jose Hermosillo, who was detained by Border Patrol outside Tucson on April 8 and held for 10 days in the privately run Florence Correctional Center before being released. Hermosilla, who has a learning disability, told his jailers he was an American citizen. They told him to tell his lawyer. At that point, Jose Hermosillo didn’t have a lawyer. Two days later, Jose told an immigration judge the same thing. Federal prosecutors requested a week-long delay in the case. And Jose, who is the father of a six-month-old American citizen, was held for another seven days until his family could finally present the court with his birth certificate.

After his release, DHS smeared Hermosillo, blaming him for his own arrest and detention. In a post on Twitter (of all places), DHS said: “Hermosillo’s arrest and detention were a direct result of his own actions and statements.” In trying to cover their own cruel blunders, DHS officials alleged “that Jose Hermosillo approached Border Patrol in Tucson, Arizona, stating he had ILLEGALLY entered the U.S. and identified himself as a Mexican citizen.”

This was a convenient concoction, a fiction. Hermosilllo hadn’t been in Mexico and he’s not a Mexican citizen. To support their self-serving claim, DHS said Hermossilo signed a transcript of an alleged interview attesting to this version of events. But Hermosilla can’t read or write. He can only scratch out his name, according to his girlfriend. 

What really happened is quite different, tragic even. Hermosillo lives in Albuquerque and had traveled to Tucson with his girlfriend to visit her family. While in Tucson, he suffered a seizure and was taken by ambulance to the hospital. He was treated and released, unsure exactly where he was or how to return to his girlfriend. 

Hermosilla flagged down what he thought was a police car to ask for directions. It turned out to be Border Patrol. He told the officer he was staying in Tucson but was lost.

The BP officer responded harshly, “You’re not from here. Where are you from?

“New Mexico,” Hermosilla said.

“I don’t believe you,” the BP cop said. “Show me your papers?”

Hermosilla told him he’d left his New Mexico ID at his girlfriend’s family’s place.

“I’m not stupid,” the cop told him. “I know you’re from Mexico.”

Then the cop arrested Hermosilla, told him to sign some papers, and then deposited him in a cell with 15 other men, where he was served cold food and denied his medications for the next 10 days.

“I told them I was a US citizen,” Hermosillo told Arizona PM. “But they don’t listen to me.”

+++

+ On Friday, Federal Judge Terry Doughty, a Trump appointee, issued an order saying that DHS had apparently deported a 2-year-old American citizen to Honduras with “no meaningful” process, even though the girl’s father, also a US citizen, fought to keep her in the country.

+ The ACLU reported that on Friday, the New Orleans field office of ICE deported two families with minor children. Three of the children (age 2, 4 and 7) are US citizens. One of the children suffers from a rare form of metastatic cancer. The citizen child was deported without medications or being able to consult with their doctors, even though ICE was fully briefed about the child’s dire medical condition. One of the mothers is pregnant. Both families have lived in the US for many years. 

According to the ACLU, “ICE held the families incommunicado, refusing or failing to respond to multiple attempts by attorneys and family members to contact them. In one instance, a mother was granted less than one minute on the phone before the call was abruptly terminated when her spouse tried to provide legal counsel’s phone number.”

+ Aldo Martinez-Gomez, a US citizen living in California, received a DHS notice on April 11, threatening “criminal prosecution” and fines if he does not depart within seven days, even after he showed them his birth certificate. “Do not attempt to remain in the United States,” the letter warned. “The government will find you.’ Martinez-Gomez: “I’m just trying not to be one of the government’s mistakes.”

+  At 8:30 in the morning on Friday, U.S. Marshals entered a county courthouse in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and arrested trial judge Hannah Dugan on charges that she had obstructed the arrest of a noncitizen. Trump officials, including FBI director Kash Patel and Attorney General Pam Bondi, publicly gloated over her arrest, as did Trump, who posted a photo of the judge wearing a medical mask on his Truth Social feed.

Shockingly (right?), the facts are a little different from what the Trumpites have presented. Flores was in Dugan’s courtroom on another matter, when ICE agents entered and attempted to arrest him without a warrant. Dugan ordered the agents out of her court and told them to contact the supervising judge. Then she escorted Flores and his attorney out the back of the courtroom to a public hallway.

Flores Ruiz was not, as Patel crudely asserts, a “perp.” He hadn’t been accused of “perpetrating” any crime, except that of being in the US without papers. There was no “increased danger” to the public because there was never any “danger” to begin with, except to Flores Ruiz. He was later detained by ICE and jailed without incident. Surely, judges have sovereignty over their own courtrooms and have the authority to demand to see a warrant before an arrest is made inside their chambers.

Of course, this is yet another provocation, pushing the limits of executive power to see how far it reaches. It seems as if Trump is heeding Bukele’s advice at the White House that you need to “get rid of the judges.” In 2021, the Salvadoran despot removed all five judges from the nation’s supreme court and fired its attorney general.

+++

+ Two weeks after a family from Maryland moved into a new rental house in Oklahoma City, 20 armed ICE agents burst into their home. “I didn’t know who they were,” the mother later said. “It was dark. All the lights were off. I kept asking them, ‘Who are you? What are you doing here? What’s happening? And they said, ‘We have a warrant for the house, a search warrant.’”

+ “You can’t just walk up to people with brown skin and say, ‘Show me your papers,” said U.S. District Court Judge Jennifer L. Thurston, before issuing a preliminary injunction forbidding the Border Patrol from conducting warrantless immigration stops throughout a wide swath of California.

+ Sophie’s Choice, American-style: A Guatemalan woman will be given “the choice” of whether she wants to take her newborn, a US citizen born in Tucson on Wednesday, with her when she is deported, CBP says. CBP placed guards outside her maternity ward room and refused to let her speak to a lawyer…

+ Two weeks after a family from Maryland moved into a new rental house in Oklahoma City, 20 armed ICE agents burst into their home. “I didn’t know who they were,” the mother later said. “It was dark. All the lights were off. I kept asking them, ‘Who are you? What are you doing here? What’s happening? And they said, ‘We have a warrant for the house, a search warrant.’”

Flashing the warrant, ICE raided the house, seizing cellphones, computers, and the family’s life savings.  While ICE agents ransacked the house, they forced the mother and three daughters to stand outside in their underwear. “We are citizens!” the mother screamed at the ICE officers. “You have guns pointed in our faces. Can you just reprogram yourself and see us as humans, as women?”

+ ICE arrested an Afghan who provided security for US troops in Afghanistan, who was in the country legally as his asylum claim was being processed, and who had no criminal record. In the charging document, ICE lied to the court about his status. Let this be a lesson to any foreign national that you can’t trust the US to live up to its commitments. We’ll chuck you out when we have no use for you, for any reason at all or no reason at all, back into the hands of people who may want you dead…

+ If your cause is so righteous, why do you have to resort to such vile forms of trickery and deception?

+ ICE “mistakenly” arrested a US Marshall in Arizona because he looked the type. We’ve gone from showing probable cause as a basis for arrests to “he fits the general description” (ie, male and Hispanic), let’s haul him in and sort it out later….

+ Like many family members of people ICE detained during its raid on Ambiance Apparel in Los Angeles last Friday, Yurien Contreras has not heard from her father, Mario Romero, and has no idea how is doing: “I witnessed how they put my father in handcuffs, chained him from the waist and ankles. My family and I haven’t had communication with my dad. We don’t know anything.”

+ Jose Ortiz, one of the men arrested in the LA worksite raids, has lived in LA for 30 years. After 18 years on the job, he had advanced to the role of floor manager when ICE arrested him without a warrant and with no criminal record.

+ A few days ago, 75 Democrats voted for a Congressional Resolution praising ICE. Today, ICE manhandled, threw to the ground, cuffed, and detained US Senator Alex Padilla for trying to attend a press briefing by DHS Secretary. Kristi Noem…Whose side are you on?

+ Sen. Alex Padilla: “If that’s what they do to a United States Senator with a question, imagine what they do to farm workers, day laborers, cooks, and the other nonviolent immigrants they are targeting in California and across the country. Or any American that dares to speak up.”

+ ICE released photos of National Guard troops, not “guarding” against “rioters,” but assisting in raids on immigrants…

+75 Democrats joined with House Republicans to vote for a Resolution thanking ICE for its role in implementing Trump’s Mass Deportation operations…

+ You want to know what kind of people work for ICE, they’re the type that mocks and laughs at a mother, sobbing on the street outside her house while holding her infant son in her arms as masked men haul away her husband for no explicable reason: When Roberto Diego Alvarez left for work in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, he was seized by ICE officers, thrown to the ground, then hauled away in handcuffs, while his wife Nicole, a 35-year-old US citizen, watched and cried as she clutched their 8-month-old son. Nicole later told Newsweek: “I learned from Diego that they were laughing at me in the car before leaving, pointing and saying, ‘I bet she is recording.’ I was hysterical. I had our son, Denver, who is 8 months old, in my arms. I couldn’t stop crying.”

+ Last Saturday, the management of the Los Angeles Dodgers told the singer Nezza to “do the national anthem in English tonight.” Instead, Nezza put on a Dominican Republic t-shirt and sang the anthem in Spanish. (Nezza was born in the US and is an American citizen.) Word of the Dodgers’ attempt to suppress Nezza ignited outrage among many in the LA Hispanic community. This is, after all, the team that evicted a predominantly Mexican community of 300 families from their homes in Chavez Ravine (without compensation) to build Dodger Stadium. Nezza’s defiant act and the local response to it almost certainly prompted the Dodgers to take this action on Thursday…

+ This was followed by the Dodgers agreeing to donate $1 million to “immigrant families” who have been traumatized by the ICE raids in LA…(Way to go, Nezza!)

+++

+ Pedro Luis Salazar-Cuervo was detained by Texas cops, who asked if he had tattoos. Salazar-Cuervo told the cops he didn’t, and in fact, he had none. Then the cops searched his phone and found a photo of Salazar-Cuervo standing next to a man who did have a tattoo. That was enough for ICE to label him a Tren de Aragua and have him deported to Bukele’s concentration camp prison in El Salvador without any trial or hearing. This week, a Texas judge agreed that he must be returned to stand trial in August for trespassing on private property, a misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in prison. The Trump administration has not indicated whether it will act on the court’s order.

+ Julio Noriega, a U.S. citizen, was walking around a suburb handing out his resume to local businesses when ICE surrounded him, handcuffed him, and detained him for 10 hours before checking his ID and releasing him.

+ A couple of notable cases from Immigration Defense, which is representing dozens of people arrested by ICE in LA in the last week: One of their clients is a man named Javier, a cancer patient who has lived in LA for more than 20 years without any criminal record.  If he isn’t released soon, he will miss his scheduled chemotherapy treatments. Another case is that of a day laborer who was granted asylum in the US 8 years ago. He was arrested twice by ICE this week. During the first arrest, he was held for eight hours and was on the verge of being transferred out of LA until ImmDef was able to prove his legal status. Then he was detained again.

+ Brad Lander, the comptroller of NYC (and NYT-endorsed mayoral candidate), was arrested by ICE at Immigration Court this week, after asking to see a warrant for people who were detained after an immigration hearing…

+ Lander after his release from ICE custody:

I’m happy to report I’m just fine. I lost a button. But I’m gonna sleep in my bed tonight, safe, with my family… At that elevator, I was separated from someone named Edgardo… Edgardo is in ICE detention and he’s not going to sleep in his bed tonight…There were posters on the wall… it said in English, ‘Are you detained and separated from your children?’ … We are normalizing family separation, we are normalizing due process rights violations, we are normalizing the destruction of constitutional democracy.

+++

+ Narciso Barranco was working as a landscaper at an IHOP in Santa Ana when ICE agents, who refused to identify themselves, grabbed him, threw him to the ground, repeatedly punched him in the face, and pepper-sprayed him. ICE later said he attacked them with a “weed whacker,” but videos of the abduction show no such attack. Barranco is the father of three sons, all of whom are US Marines.

+ Barranco’s son, Alejandro, on his father, after he’d been pepper-sprayed, body-slammed, punched, and bloodied by ICE: “He has always worked hard to put food on the table for us and my mom. He was always careful and did his taxes on time. He never caused any problems, and he is known as a kind and helpful person by everyone in our community. I believe my father was racially profiled. They didn’t ask him anything. They just started chasing him and he ran because he was scared. He didn’t know who was after him.”

+ “My mom looked at the rear mirror and she saw how my sister was attacked from the back,” Estrella Rosas told ABC7. “She was like: ‘They’re kidnapping your sister.’” Estrella’s sister, Andrea Velez, had just been dropped off at her workplace in downtown Los Angeles when ICE agents descended upon her. One masked agent grabbed Velez, lifted her off the ground and carried her away to an ICE fan, as her sister and mother shouted: “She’s a US citizen. They’re taking her. Help her, someone!” Velez, a 36-year-old graduate of Cal-Poly Pomona, disappeared into ICE custody. She was arrested without a warrant and wasn’t even asked for her identification. It took her lawyer more than a day to find out where she was being held.

Velez is one of at least 674 US citizens who have been wrongly arrested by ICE. More than 120 US citizens have been detained and at least 70 deported. After ICE was forced to admit Velez was a US citizen, they charged her with assaulting an ICE office. Velez is 4’11 and weighs about 85 pounds.

+ The LAPD officers seen in the videos of Velez’s abduction by ICE were only on the scene because someone had called 9-11 to report a kidnapping.

+ Iris Dayana Monterroso-Lemus was five months pregnant when she was arrested and abducted by ICE and sent to the Richwood Correctional Center in Louisiana, even though she’d committed no crime that needed “correction.” The prison guards refused to give her any prenatal care or an ultrasound, even after she pleaded for help and got sicker and sicker.. She told the prison doctor that she’d felt no fetal movement in days and was experiencing severe abdominal pain. After a steady flow of vaginal discharge for three days, she was finally hospitalized and kept in shackles as she experienced a miscarriage:

When I was delivering my baby, they didn’t even give me a little privacy. Imagine. A guard was sitting right there, watching me day and night. They even shackled my feet because they thought I might escape. Like I was some criminal. I told them, ‘What you’re doing to me isn’t right.’

+ 55-year-old Sae Joon Park, a Green Card holder and Purple Heart recipient, was forced to self-deport to South Korea, after living in the US for almost 50 years, during which time he served in the US Army, got shot in the back in combat, and spent years battling PTSD and addiction. The reason ICE came after him? A drug possession charge from 15 years ago. ” I can’t believe that this is happening in America,” Park told NPR in an interview before his departure. “That blows me away, like a country that I fought for.”

+ A deaf and mute Mongolian man named Bay, who was seeking asylum in the US, has spent more than 80 days at an ICE facility. During that time, he has not had an opportunity to see a judge or communicate with anyone who understands Mongolian Sign Language, according to his sister.

+ ICE raided a house in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, abducted a family and deported them to Brazil, including a two-year-old girl, who is a US citizen. The girl suffers from chronic health issues and is now considered a “non-citizen” in Brazil, where she has no rights to medical treatments under Brazil’s public health care system, and can’t enroll in daycare or school. She’s living in the country on a temporary visa that will expire in a few weeks, at which point she could be deported back to the US without her parents.

+ Bob, a 36-year-old from Brazil told Brandon Tauszik of Mother Jones: “What’s been going on in LA is we’ve just been seeing a lot of people come in and just ripping people out in a very intense way…rounding them up, like fucking stray dogs.”

+ LA City Councilman Hugo Soto-Martinez said this week that ICE showed up at a domestic violence shelter, looking to snatch the abused, not the abusers…

+ In 1988, Johnny Noviello was 10 years old when he moved from Canada to Daytona Beach with his family. He grew up in Florida and eventually obtained his green card, becoming a legal permanent resident of the United States. In May, he was detained by ICE after DHS revoked his green card, citing a drug offense from 2017. On Monday, Noviello was found dead in his cell at the Federal Detention Center in Miami, where he’d been incarcerated for the last six weeks, awaiting deportation to Canada. He was 49 years old. Noviello is the tenth person to die in ICE custody since Trump assumed office.

+ Sixty-seven-year-old Maddona Kashanian came to the US from Iran on a student Visa in 1978. After graduating from college and the Iranian Revolution, she applied for asylum. Her request was denied, but immigration officials granted her the right to remain in the US as long as she obeyed US laws and made regular check-ups with her immigration officers. In nearly 50 years, Kashanian never missed an appointment or was charged with a crime. 

Then, last week, Kashanian was at her home, working in her garden, when three unmarked vehicles pulled up in front of her house. Masked men got out and arrested Kashanian. She was tossed in the back of a pickup truck and taken to a local jail in Hancock County, Mississippi, where she spent the night. The next day, she was rendered to the South Louisiana ICE facility in Basile. Why was this harmless woman targeted? Because she’s Iranian at a moment when Trump was waging war on Iran. 

+++

+ George Retes was pulled over by ICE as he was driving near the violent raid on farm workers outside of Camarillo last Thursday. The ICE agents broke the windows of his car and pepper sprayed him, before taking him into custody. Retes is an American citizen and disabled US Army Veteran. He was held in federal lockup for four days , during which time his family and lawyer had no way of contacting him to find out where he was or inquire about his physical condition. He was released without charges on Sunday night. Is this what Thomas Homan meant when he told FoxNews that ICE can stop people based on their skin-color and “briefly” detain them without a warrant or probably cause until ICE is satisfied they’re American citizens?

+ George Retes: “Clearly it didn’t matter that I was a citizen, or a veteran, or that I identified who I was. They ignored everything I said, and they just they broke my window and they dragged me out. I let them know that I was a veteran and I wasn’t doing anything wrong, that I’m just trying to get to work.”

+ Reporter: Congressman, do you care if U.S. citizens accidentally get detained in ICE raids?

Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC): “No, I’m not concerned about that.”

+ A 35-year-old Irish tourist to the US had overstayed his visa by three days, when he was arrested by ICE, in the closing weeks of the Biden administration. Although he’d agreed to immediate deportation, he somehow he got buried in the system or lack thereof and was moved around to three different facilities after Trump took office. Because the detention centers were now overflowing, Trump’s ICE made a deal to lease prison beds from the Bureau of Prisons in Atlanta, where he was sent with dozens of other unfortunate souls abducted by the masked secret police. He languished there for more than three months in conditions he described as inhumane. Bunkbeds lacked ladders, the cells were teeming with mice and cockroaches, the prison clothes he was given were stained with shit and blood. The toilets didn’t flush, he was denied medication and doctor visits and fed “disgusting slop.” When he finally got his medicine, the prison guards threw it on the ground instead of handing it to him. “We were treated less than human.” After finally being released in March, he was deported to Ireland and banned from entering the US (where he’d come to visit his girlfriend) for 10 years.

+ A man posing as a bondsman rang the doorbell of a house in Arlington, Virginia near midnight. He began asking strange and misleading questions about the residents’ mother before pulling out a gun and forcing his way into the house. The man flashed a letter from ICE, but showed no ID or badge. He rummaged through the house, broke into a bedroom, threw a young woman and her uncle Orlando on the bed and asked for ID. He then handcuffed Orlando, who had been living in the US working construction for 20 years, marched him to his car, sedated him, and drove him around for several hours until the ICE office in Chantilly, Virginia to open. Orlando was deported a couple of days later to Honduras before the family could even contact a lawyer.

+++

+ The ICE agents who abducted her husband, Darwin Contreras, in a courthouse in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, wore “something you can get from Walmart,” said Elizabeth DeJesus. They didn’t say who they were or where they were taking him.

Darwin came to the US from El Salvador 20 years ago in search of his mother when he was seven years old. He was detained at the border instead and spent several years in foster care. Eventually, he was reunited with his mother and they moved to Bethlehem. He was a track star in high school and won a presidential fitness award from Barack Obama.

Since graduating, he has kept steady work and married an American citizen. He was nabbed by ICE after a routine court appearance. DeJesus says that Darwin is suffering mentally and physically while in ICE custody, awaiting a hearing: “When he got there, he was not adjusting well. He was not ok. His mental health was not good.”

+ Miguel Angel Ponce, a 33-year-old U.S. citizen born in College Station, Texas, was grabbed by ICE, handcuffed and detained for more than 2 hours. “I felt kidnapped,” he said. “They just put me in handcuffs and took me to another location.” The ICE agents said he “looked like” someone they were looking for—told him to “shave your beard” to avoid future arrest.

+ Will Kim came to the US from South Korea when he was five years old. He’s had a Green Card as a lawful permanent resident of the US for many years. Currently, Kim is a PhD student at Texas A&M, where he’s researching a vaccine for Lyme disease. Last week, he was detained at San Francisco International Airport. The feds have offered no reason for his arrest and have denied Kim access to his attorney, Eric Lee. Kim was allowed only a single brief call to his mother. The only blemish on his record is a minor marijuana possession charge, which was settled in a diversion program and should have been expunged. “My client Will Kim has a green card, grew up in the US, became a scientist & is researching Lyme disease vaccines,” Eric Lee wrote on Twitter.  “He has spent more than 7 days in a CBP airport detention ctr w/ no daylight, sleeping in a chair, no access to a lawyer. Another brutal attack on immigrants & science. Free Will!”

+ Jon Luke Evans, the only black police officer in the town of Old Orchard Beach, Maine, was detained by ICE after he attempted to purchase a gun for his job. After Evans’s arrest, Patricia Hyde, a spokesperson for ICE’s Boston office, smugly quipped: “The fact that a police department would hire an illegal alien and unlawfully issue him a firearm while on duty would be comical if it weren’t so tragic.” But Evans isn’t an illegal alien. He has a valid work permit that doesn’t expire until March 2030 and Maine is one of the states that allows immigrants to work as police officers. “We rely on the Department of Homeland Security’s E-Verify program to ensure we are meeting our obligations,” said the town’s Police Chief Elise Chard. “We are distressed and deeply concerned about this apparent error on the part of the federal government.”

+ Kenny Laynez is an 18-year-old American citizen living in Palm Beach, Florida. On his way to work on a landscaping crew, Kenny’s van was pulled over ICE, because he “looked like an illegal.[sic]” His mother, who is not a US citizen, was driving. Kenny was yanked from the van and held for more than 6 hours by ICE, after providing proof of his citizenship. During the arrest, Kenny’s cellphone recorded the giddy, juvenile banter of the ICE agents:

Agent 1: You got hit?

Agent 2: Nah, didn’t get hit, bro.

Agent 1: Oh, okay.

Agent 2: No, once she got the proper spread on, she was gone.

Agent: 1: You are funny, bro.

Agent 2: It was funny.

(Agents laughing.)

Agent 1: They’re starting to resist more now.

Agent 2: We’re going to end up shooting someone. If it keeps going like this because they’re going to end up fighting.

Agent 1: This kid goes like, this guy here: “You can’t do this. I’m not doing shit.”

Agent 2: We told you already to get out. You either get out or I am going to pull you out.

Agent 1: Right. Yeah.

Agent 2: God damn! Wow!

Agent 1: Nice!

Agent 2: Just remember, you can smell that with a $30,000 bonus.

Agent 1: Yeah! (agents laugh)

+ Jose Osman Gutierrez has been working for more than 7 years to support his family in Houston, Texas. He had no criminal criminal record when ICE raided his home at 7:13 in morning, with four young children inside. He was grabbed, roughed up and hauled off by the neck, eventually losing consciousness. All of this happening in front of his wife, Jennifer Garcia, who is 9 months pregnant. Jennifer, distraught at the prospect of giving birth alone to her fifth child, was pushed and shoved by ICE officers as she pleaded for her husband. As Jennifer crumpled to the street, her children and neighbors screamed: “She’s nine months pregnant! Call a doctor!!”

+++

+ ICE “targeted” a female priest for expedited removal. Yeonsoo Go is a South Korean national with a valid visa that does not expire until December 2025. She spent most of her life working to protect the rights of Korean immigrants—and was the first woman ordained by the Anglican Church of Korea. “I never imagined my own family would end up being a target of Trump,” Yeonsoo said.

“She’s staying at 26 Federal Plaza, which, as we know, is not actually a facility that has showers or beds or hot food. And so the detentions here are not only illegal, but they’re immoral,” said Rev. Matthew Heyd.

+ According to a new suit filed in the federal court for the Middle District of Louisiana, ICE illegally deported three children who are US citizens along with their noncitizen family members, including a two-year-old girl and a four-year-old boy with Stage Four kidney cancer. The children and their families were abducted by ICE in April when they showed up for scheduled hearings with immigration officials. The children were immediately separated from their families and denied contact with their parents or lawyers before they were deported to Honduras. The four-year-old cancer patient’s mother was not even allowed the opportunity to tell ICE officials about his perilous condition or arrange for his ongoing chemotherapy treatments. 

+ Just days after a federal appeals court upheld a ban on ICE using roving patrols and racial profiling to target immigrants, Trump’s secret police launched Operation Trojan Horse, a shock raid outside of a Home Dept in the Westlake area of Los Angeles. Posing as building contractors, ICE agents drove a yellow Penske van in front of a group of day laborers at 6:44 in the morning, asking in Spanish if any of them were looking for work. Then masked ICE agents, one of them wearing a cowboy hat, jumped out of the van and began grabbing people. In all, 16 men were arrested and taken into ICE custody in defiance of a federal appeals court.

+ Guess which person was charged with felony assault in this photo of an ICE agent hauling away a 4’10” woman, an American citizen abducted on her way to work in LA’s garment district…?

+ ICE is arresting white people for filming them arresting non-white people. Dan Mathers, a US citizen in Florida,  had been filming an ICE raid from a safe distance with a large row of hedges between them. He was not in any position to interfere with the raid. Mathers said he told one of the ICE agents that he “was short and it hurt his feelings.” Offended by the tweak about his height, the pumped-up ICE agent yelled, “You threatening me?” And then threw Mathers to the ground, arrested him and kept him in ICE custody for more than 10 hours, where he was prevented from contacting his family until 2:00 am the following morning.

+ We’ve gone beyond the “Show us your papers!” phase of intimidation, because your even your legal papers won’t save you and your children from being arrested, thrown in a sordid jail and deported for no logical reason at all…Consider the case of Sarah Shaw, a Washington mother from New Zealand who has legal residency in the US and works for the state, who was detained along with her 6-year-old son by ICE when she tried to re-enter the US from Vancouver, BC, after a trip to New Zealand to escort her two older children with their parents. Despite showing immigration officials her valid work visa, ICE claimed Shaw had overstayed her travel visa and shipped her and her child to the Dilley Detention Center in Texas. DHS officials ignored Shaw’s repeated pleas to allow her son, who has a valid travel visa, to enter the US. 

For the past three years, Shaw has worked as a youth counselor in a juvenile detention facility run by the Washington State Department of Children. She has no criminal record.  

Shaw’s attorney Minda Thorward: “Sarah is a survivor. She’s a fighter. She’s really strong. But she’s also very stressed out about all of this. She’s repeatedly requested that her son be released, even at the border DHS refused to permit that. So his detention is unlawful. He should not be there. He should not be in removal proceedings. None of that should be happening…There’s no reason to detain her. She has no criminal history. She simply made a paperwork mistake.”

+ Benjamin Marcelo Guerrero-Cruz, a student at Reseda High School in LA, was walking his dog in his Van Nuys neighborhood when he was grabbed by ICE, thrown to the ground and abducted. ICE officers first tied his dog to a tree. Then they cut the leash and let it run loose along one of the LA’s most heavily trafficked roads, Sepulva Boulevard.  

Cellphone videos of Benjamin’s arrest record the agents joking about the $2,500 bonuses they’ll receive for nabbing a teenager without any criminal record: “Thanks to him, we get to drink this weekend!”

Benjamin has lived in LA for more than three years with his single-parent mother and is a caretaker for both his six-year-old brother and his twin five-month-old brothers. According to his legal representative, Benjamin is currently “cramped in a holding cell with about 50 others… He is cold, scared, and one of the youngest there.” Meanwhile, his mother is distraught and too afraid to leave her apartment.

+ Masked ICE agents hit a landscaper in Beverly Hills with a taser and pepper spray. Cell phone video shows the man screaming in agony as agents roughly arrest him.

“I couldn’t see what was happening – I just could hear a man screaming ‘my eyes, my eyes!’” a witness said. Another bystander can be heard asking, “What did you taze him for? Why are you doing that?”

The man’s family members say ICE abducted and abused the wrong man, since the lawn maintenance worker has no criminal history. They showed no warrants. They just descended on the neighborhood, assaulted him, abducted him and left.

+ ICE has arrested and is trying to quickly depart Arman Momand, a Virginia High School student, who has a special visa reserved for Afghan families that aided the US military during the occupation of Afghanistan. According to Momand’s lawyer, “It’s a very, very difficult visa to get. It’s reserved for people who—at their own peril—assisted the American military in our operations.” Momand was seized by ICE agents at a court hearing on a December 2024 driving incident that was resolved by the court as a misdemeanor, a mere infraction that should not have affected his visa status and eligibility to stay in the US with his family. Instead, ICE plans to deport him just weeks before classes start at J.R. Tucker High School in Henrico, Virginia. Deportation back to Afghanistan will almost certainly put the young man’s life in jeopardy.

+ Lopez Benitez, a native of Paraguay, is a construction worker in Queens who has lived in the US for two years with his sister, both of whom are US citizens. He applied for asylum and has regularly attended his required immigration meetings. He has no criminal record. Yet when he showed up for a scheduled immigration hearing, he was grabbed by masked federal agents and pulled away from his family.ICE agents violently knocked to the ground one of Benitez’s sisters during his abduction. He was taken to the ICE processing center at Federal Plaza in Manhattan and held in a room without a bed, access to a shower, or a change of clothes for three days. Then he was shipped halfway across the country to the ICE detention center in Conroe, Texas. Benitez and his family weren’t told why he was detained for more than a week.

This week, federal Judge Dale Ho ordered ICE to return Benitez to New York and then release him from custody. In his ruling, Ho castigated the government for arresting lawful immigrants during or after court hearings. Ho writes that the Trump administration has turned attendance at immigration court proceedings into a game of “detention roulette” that violates due process.

+++

+ Back in April, Jesús Escalona Mújicas was on his way to his job at a construction site when he was pulled over by federal immigration officers and Texas police in a joint raid near Bryant, Texas. Escalona Mújicas, a 48-year-old native of Venezuela, was pressed against his car as his hands were bent behind his back and cuffed. He was taken to a neaby gas station where he was interrogated. He was then arrested and thrown in the immigration detention jail (aka, “Processing Center”) in Conroe, Texas. The officers who arrested him claimed to have a deportation order for Escalona Mújicas based on the Alien Enemies Act, which Trump had recently invoked to speed up deportations of alleged gang members from central and south America. An agent told him: “the President does not want to see Haitians, Nicaraguans, Cubans, or Venezuelans here.” Escalona Mújicas protested that he wasn’t a gang member and had a temporary work visa. But his denials were smugly dismissed by the arresting agents.

Soon after his arrest, ICE sent out a press release including a photo of Escalona Mújicas in handcuffs, wearing a John Deere sweatshirt with the caption: “documented Tren de Aragua gang member.” But the arrest report didn’t even get Escalona Mújicas’s nationality right, claiming that he was “an alien of El Salvadorian origin without legal status in the United States.” So it’s no surprise that they falsely arrested and then publicly smeared him as a “Tren de Aragua gang member,” even though his name was not listed in the admittedly problematic (for false positives) TxGANG database. What was the evidence the Trump administration used to as proof of Escalona Mújicas’s gang affliation? His Air Jordans.

In fact, Escalona Mújicas had no criminal history and had never heard of the Tren de Aragua gang until he got to the United States. When he lived in Venezuela, he worked as a forklift operator at Empresas Polar, the Venezuealan subsidary of Pepsi. Escalona Mújicas was deported back to Venezuela in May, but the Trump administration hasn’t rescinded its false accusation that he is a gang member, a slander that may well keep him from immigrating to any other country.