All posts tagged "immigration"

'Buyer's remorse': Trump voters apologize for electing him as GOP gerrymander backfires

GOP gerrymandering in Texas is predicted to backfire as Democrats seize the opportunity to claim a regretful bloc of key President Donald Trump voters, according to a new report.

A southern Texas congressional district has become more favorable for Democratic challengers as a Hispanic community that "flocked" to Trump in 2024 experiences significant regret, Politico reported Sunday.

"I don't think Latino voters that voted in 2024 will stick around," Massey Villarreal, a Houston-based businessman who used to chair the Republican National Hispanic Assembly, told Politico. "[Trump] is targeting the Latino community. He's separating families. He's breaking businesses."

Ronnie Cavazos, president of the South Texas Builders Association, apologized for supporting Trump after the immigration crackdown.

"Let's be real. We voted for this," Cavazos said. "I'll take the blame."

Incumbent Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-TX) said he asked House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) if he should thank him or the White House for the new districts because "Hispanics are having buyer's remorse."

Cuellar and Rep. Vicente Gonzalez (D-TX) are planning to win the South Texas districts by platforming on economic discontent and anger at Trump's immigration crackdown.

Republicans' "plan backfired, and now we're seeing Latinos shift back to our party, the same Latinos that they thought they had in the bag," said former sheriff's deputy Johnny Garcia, a Democrat running against businessman Carlos De La Cruz.

"Whether I'm at church, at the grocery store, while I'm in activities with my children, I'm hearing those same concerns — that people are feeling frightened in the community," said Republican candidate Monica De La Cruz, the sister of Carlos De La Cruz. She admitted Latinos are turning against Trump's immigration crackdown.

Monica De La Cruz said that Republican congressional leadership should make sure immigration is "focused on cartels, on traffickers and on violent criminals."

Conservative judge rams brakes on Trump trucker project amid rage-fueled fight with states

President Donald Trump's Freedom Haulers program was dealt a major setback by a conservative federal judge who froze his administration's sweeping records demand, newly revealed court records show.

Freedom Haulers, a Department of Transportation campaign to fast-track commercial trucking licenses for military veterans, was hit with an administrative stay amid a court battle with multiple states, Politico legal reporter Josh Gerstein revealed Saturday.

The program, which aims to replace tens of thousands of immigrant drivers stripped of licenses in the Trump administration's crackdown.

Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy raged on social media that the program was "ILLEGALS OUT, VETERANS IN."

Judge Anthony Trenga, a Virginia judge appointed by former President George W. Bush, signed an administrative stay that halted the Trump administration's push to collect commercial driver data from the association that manages states' shared licensing database, court records show.

Multiple states, led by Illinois, are suing the Department of Transportation to stop the data grab. The court granted the administrative stay after the coalition of states filed an emergency motion for a temporary restraining order earlier this week.

It bars the Association of American Motor Vehicle Administrators from handing over the information and directs that the association is "enjoined from providing the demanded data and information to any defendant, or any other agency acting in coordination with defendants," slamming the door on a possible workaround by the Trump administration.

The order also blocks the Trump administration from retaliating while the case proceeds. The Department of Transportation and Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration are "enjoined from taking any adverse actions to implement or enforce" the demand, the order reads, "including, without limitation, terminating or threatening to terminate AAMVA's federal contracts or funding, or terminating or threatening to terminate the Plaintiff States' federal contracts or funding."

The records fight is the enforcement engine behind Freedom Haulers. According to the states' lawsuit, in order to strip commercial licenses from immigrant drivers at scale, the administration needs the underlying data, including the names, birthdates, license numbers, and Social Security numbers for millions of drivers held in the state-run system.

Trump 'mega' hearings punish people who don't even know they've been to court: report

President Donald Trump's administration has been using a "mega master" calendar to target people who don't know their case has been taken to court, according to a new report.

According to reporting by The Guardian, the Trump administration is ordering immigrants removed from the U.S. without them being physically present to find out about it. Immigrants are being scheduled for "mass hearings" at the last minute, where they are receiving removal orders by default.

"There's people that are walking around, going about their business, without realizing that they have a removal order on their record," Katie Fleming, the director of public education and engagement at the Acacia Center for Justice, told The Guardian.

The Guardian described it as the latest tactic in Trump's mass deportation plan, and it noted that Trump ranted against due process for immigrants and suggested the U.S. needs to "get rid of judges" in immigration courts.

In one courtroom featured in The Guardian's reporting, a young judge who had only been in her role for about a month, Brittany Rodriguez, read through a list of 15 people who had missed their hearings and now face deportation. The other immigrants who were in the courtroom mostly didn't have legal representation.

"I don't have a lawyer. I only have God," one immigrant told Rodriguez, who became a judge after a career in immigration enforcement, according to The Guardian.

"These are kind of ways to skirt you getting a final hearing where you can actually present evidence for relief you're seeking in immigration court," Brandon Marrow, who researches the federal government's "mega master" calendar hearings, told The Guardian.

The Guardian reported that some of these mega masters bring in 150 people per session while disproportionately and intentionally singling out those without lawyers.

Retired immigration judge Paul Schmidt told The Guardian that the Executive Office for Immigration Review, an agency in the Department of Justice, has flipped from its original mission of providing immigrants a last line of defense to helping speed up deportation orders.

"They abandon the real mission of the agency, which is to provide fair hearings and due process to as many people as possible," Schmidt said. "And instead sort of run it as an adjunct of DHS enforcement, with the only real objective to be being [able to] enter as many removal orders as you can, as fast as you can."

DOJ accidentally blurts true motive lurking underneath Trump's voter-roll crusade

The Department of Justice accidentally revealed the real motive behind its demand for 40 states' voter rolls, a Nevada judge noted.

On Friday, U.S. District Judge Anne Traum tossed a case by the DOJ that sought to take Nevada's voter rolls in a crusade by President Donald Trump ahead of the midterms. The Trump DOJ is now 0-for-22 in its lawsuits seeking to grab state voter rolls.

In the order dismissing the DOJ's lawsuit against Nevada Secretary of State Francisco Aguilar, Traum highlighted a concession buried in the Trump administration's own paperwork. She noted that it tied the voter-roll grab, which the administration called a push for "voter integrity," to Trump's deportation agenda.

According to the ruling, a Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel opinion admitted the government was seeking states' "full, unredacted voter rolls to ensure that they 'are complying with Congress's demand to remove those who are ineligible to vote from their rolls - whether due to illegal presence in this country or otherwise.'"

The same OLC opinion went further by conceding that "this activity may have incidental immigration consequences by providing [the Department of Homeland Security] updated information regarding the location of illegal aliens," Traum noted.

DHS is the parent agency of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which has been detaining and deporting record levels of immigrants and has generated controversy over its violent enforcement tactics.

The admission undercut the DOJ's stated rationale, according to Traum. The Trump administration had insisted Nevada "must" hand over a voter file containing "all fields, including the registrant's full name, date of birth, residential address," and either a driver's license number or partial Social Security number, according to the order. Aguilar's office rejected the demand as "unprecedented in its scope, its [lack of] purported basis, and its purported urgency."

Traum found the DOJ never justified the request at all in two letters it sent to Aguilar. Neither, she wrote, "purported to allege facts showing a need for an investigation into Nevada's state election system." Quoting a parallel ruling, she said the government provided "no basis—none."

'Insane' detail flagged in Trump order: 'Way more bizarre than anyone is saying'

An immigrant expert on Friday flagged an unusual detail in President Donald Trump's new birthright citizenship order.

David J. Bier, Cato Institute Director of Immigration Studies, argued in a lengthy X thread that the order has unprecedented consequences for citizenship.

"The new birthright citizenship order is way more bizarre than anyone is saying. 1) The text requires agencies to deny CURRENT US CITIZENS citizenship docs if either parent 'IS' an alien enemy, foreign govt employee, regardless of their status at birth," Bier wrote on X.

Trump lost his birthright citizenship case in June when the Supreme Court voted to uphold the law and reject the president's executive order. He signed two new executive orders on Aug. 6, claiming he wanted to crack down on "birth tourism" and narrow the terms around U.S. citizenship.

"Contrast with the first birthright order: they **deleted** the timing phrase to open the citizenship claims of current US citizens whose parents did not even fall into the excluded category at birth. Do they think they can take away people's citizenship?" Bier wrote.

"Strangely, this means that the order doesn't apply to kids of parents who fell into the category at birth, but don't when the kid requests a passport. 2) Trump also deleted this from the 1st order, which means that this new order applies retroactively to pre-order births!" Bier explained.

Bier described why this was so strange — that the president cannot determine who gets to be a citizen.

"The justification for all this is INSANE," Bier wrote. "He's saying he can deem whoever he wants to be 'outside of the USA.' The extraterritorial fiction means that these people wouldn't be subject to US law. No, the president can't just decide that certain people are outside of US law!"

Trump also cannot bypass U.S. law when it comes to citizenship for children of diplomats.

"So we have this bizarre, incoherent order backed up by the most insane legal theory imaginable. No, President Trump can't decide that people aren't subject to US law, and of course, he's not actually going to give immunity to foreign terrorists and visa fraudsters," Bier wrote.

Trump could consider one exemption, Bier added. "He might give out immunity cards to anyone who gives him $1 million.... remember 'not subject to US jurisdiction' here applies even to state and local laws."

ICE tells Army wife she's 'famous' before yanking her off deportation flight: report

An Army soldier's wife was pulled off a deportation flight to Brazil this week by federal agents who explained she was "famous," according to reports on Friday.

An Associated Press investigation identified Maisa Lopes Eliaser as one of dozens of military spouses and parents who had been detained following the Trump administration's rollback of protections for military families as part of its broader mass deportation efforts, The Boston Globe reported.

Eliaser's husband, Staff Sergeant Alexis Jaramillo has served in the Army for 11 years and went public about what happened to his wife, who was ripped from his side during what the couple, their son and translator thought was an adjustment-of-status appointment on July 8 in Montgomery, Alabama.

Eliaser was on a deportation flight bound for Brazil Wednesday when ICE officers onboard got a mid-flight call about her case, according to The Globe.

An ICE officer offered Eliaser the choice to returning to the U.S. Once the plane landed, other detainees were taken away and Eliaser stayed on and was taken back to Louisiana.

ICE officers reportedly told her she had become "famous" because footage related to her case was circulating online.

"Who made the call? We don’t know," Jaramillo said. "But someone made the phone call, and then she came back."

Jaramillo said he had to take leave from his training duties at Fort Polk, Louisiana, while his wife was in custody.

Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ), a former Navy officer, had looked into his Eliaser's case, Jaramillo said.

Danitza James, who leads Repatriate Our Patriots, an organization that supports military families facing deportation and assisted with Eliaser's case, responded to her release.

"This family’s reunion is proof of what’s possible when people set politics aside and do right by those who serve," James said. "We won’t stop until every military family facing detention gets the same chance at justice."

Although he was told there would be no further issues with his wife's case, Jaramillo is still worried. He said his wife was treated like "an animal" and has been struggling with sleep.

"It felt like I was in a nightmare," Eliaser said. "I could not believe what was happening until I returned to my house. Day by day, I’m trying to recover from this trauma."

DHS slammed for contorting law 'beyond recognition' to 'hide elephants in mouseholes'

A federal appeals court rejected the Trump administration's bid to jail longtime undocumented immigrants without bond in a major setback to his mass deportation plan.

On Thursday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit handed down a 2-1 decision that held that immigrants who crossed into the country without inspection years ago are governed by a statute that permits release on bond. It shot down the Trump administration's argument that they're subject to a mandatory-detention provision that it used to hold them indefinitely.

The Trump administration argued that anyone deemed an applicant for admission is necessarily "seeking admission" and can be detained without a bond hearing. The court rejected the framing in its ruling.

"Because we conclude that the term 'seeking admission' means seeking lawful entry," Judge Lara Montecalvo wrote. The case centered on Guerrero Orellana, who "already entered the country unlawfully," the court noted, adding, "We hold that he is not 'seeking admission.'"

For the majority "to conclude otherwise would defy the plain language of the statute," Montecalvo argued.

At oral argument, attorneys for the Trump administration similarly argued that the immigrants seeking admission had not "yet" entered lawfully. Montecalvo rejected it, writing that the argument "contorts the plain meaning of 'entry'...beyond recognition."

The ruling unwinds a July 2025 Department of Homeland Security policy that was later made binding by the Board of Immigration Appeals. It reclassified longtime residents into no-bond detention.

The shift helped drive an effort by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to detain a population of roughly 73,000 by January 2026, according to the court's opinion, which described it as "the highest level" of detention ever recorded. The court noted that the Trump administration's practices were contrary to historic practices.

"Over three decades, five administrations implemented the disputed statutes just as we conclude today that their texts require," Montecalvo wrote, adding that Congress "does not...hide elephants in mouseholes."

Trump judge quietly flags 'blank check' that could end birthright citizenship

A Trump-appointed judge used a moot deportation case to map out how a president's "invasion" declaration could end birthright citizenship.

On Thursday, the full Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals dismissed an ACLU lawsuit challenging President Donald Trump's use of the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to deport three Venezuelans. The Trump administration deported them by saying they were members of the gang Tren de Aragua, which Trump claimed was perpetrating an "invasion."

The court called the move by the Trump administration "unobjectionable" in its opinion and dismissed the lawsuit as moot because the three had already been deported. However, in a piece for Reason published shortly after the decision, legal scholar Ilya Somin flagged an argument made by Judge James Ho that he said gives Trump a "blank check" for more sweeping actions.

Ho wrote that courts had no role in reviewing a president's invasion call.

"Determining the existence of a state of invasion is a quintessentially executive prerogative — not a judicial one," Ho wrote. "Judges may not review the President's determination of an invasion."

He then tied that theory to a broader target, writing that affirming Trump's power to declare an invasion would reach "any number of other cases and controversies that likewise turn on a state of invasion." Ho hinted at what he had in mind by attaching to that line a citation to Sen. Jim Banks' op-ed "To fix birthright citizenship, declare a foreign invasion," and to a bill by Rep. Brandon Gill (R-TX) that aims to end birthright citizenship during a declared "invasion."

Somin, who co-authored an amicus brief against the Trump administration, warned that it wouldn't stop with an assault on birthright citizenship.

According to Somin, Ho's "absolute deference" turns emergency powers into "blank checks the president can invoke any time he wants." Somin said that "would allow the federal government to suspend the writ of habeas corpus (and thereby detain people - including U.S. citizens - without due process) at any time."

Somin even noted that a Department of Justice attorney agreed that the Trump administration could respond to the 1960s "British Invasion" by deporting The Beatles under the Alien Enemies Act.

Marco Rubio ripped after boast undone by Trump himself: 'You sure about that?'

Secretary of State Marco Rubio's statement about American citizenship quickly backfired as online critics pointed out how his boss proved him wrong.

In a Wednesday post on X, Rubio slammed what he called "Birth Tourism," which is often brought up in MAGA circles, and pushed President Donald Trump's talking point about immigrants coming to the United States to have babies.

"American citizenship is not for sale," Rubio wrote. "But elaborate birth tourism rings are profiting off the exploitation of America's laws -coaching foreigners to defraud the U.S. visa system, arranging travel and housing, and even forging documents, all to enable foreign nationals to obtain citizenship for their children."

The post went on, with Rubio announcing a "Birth Tourism Prevention Task Force" set up by the State Department that has revoked "more than 600 visas from foreign nationals across the globe" in the past month.

However, critics also lined up to point out that Rubio's main thesis was disproven by Trump's own policies, namely the gold card visa program that would allow someone to come into the U.S. for $5 million, even though the program has mostly been stalled.

"Tell me more about the Trump gold card," former GOP operative Rick Wilson wrote in response to Rubio's post. "Citizenship is quite literally for sale."

"The first sentence is not true," wrote former GOP congressional staffer Sofia Kinzinger. "Donald Trump offered a pathway to U.S. citizenship to those willing to pay $5 million for his 'Trump Gold Card.'"

"It's literally for sale," agreed progressive news personality Alex Cole, adding a picture of the visa with the header "The Trump Gold Card is Here."

Similarly, the official press office account for Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom asked Rubio, "You sure about that?" while adding a picture from the State Department's website saying, "The Trump Gold Card is Here."

The first sentence is not true.

Donald Trump offered a pathway to U.S. citizenship to those willing to pay $5 million for his “Trump Gold Card.” https://t.co/90HWJ78DlS
— Sofia B. Kinzinger (@sofiakinzinger) August 12, 2026

'Absolutely wild' footage of ICE confronting driver sparks outrage: 'Out of control'

Another video of civilians confronted by federal immigration agents is drawing online outrage amid President Donald Trump's crackdown.

On Tuesday, footage circulated on social media showing masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents shouting and pointing a gun at an unarmed woman in Falls Church, Virginia. Critics, including members of Congress, reacted with harsh condemnation of how the Trump administration is using ICE.

According to Aaron Fritschner, the deputy chief of staff for Rep. Don Beyer (D-VA), ICE agents pulled a gun on "a U.S. citizen born and raised" in the Northern Virginia area. "Chillingly, they claimed she 'almost ran them over' until she told them she had video proving that was a lie," Fritschner wrote.

Twice this year, ICE agents have fatally shot someone after claiming they weaponized their vehicle, including in Minnesota and in Texas.

The video shows a handful of ICE agents outside the woman's car, with one pointing a gun at the driver and shouting, "You almost ran us over! Stop playing!" The driver responded, "You're so full of s---" and told the agent to "go f--- yourself."

In a post on X, Beyer responded to the incident, writing, "While I am relieved that she is safe, the habitual dishonesty and dangerous and unjustified escalation seen in this video matches what we have seen from ICE agents across the country." He added, "This kind of misconduct and threat of force against members of our communities cannot be tolerated. I will be demanding answers and consequences."

Reactions came from across the nation, with Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ) posting, "This is the same kind of behavior that led to the murder of two American citizens. Trump's violent goon squad is out of control. We need to completely clean house and rebuild from the bottom."

Immigration policy analyst Aaron Reichlin-Melnick posted more dash-cam footage from another angle and described the scene as "absolutely wild." He noted how "an ICE officer jumps out of a van and pulls a gun on this woman immediately before lying."

Journalist Pablo Manríquez applauded that "brave citizen telling a gang of lying, cowardly ICE agents to go f---- themselves, this time with a gun in her face."