All posts tagged "immigration"

Ex-ICE official aghast as Trump officials hatch ‘prison ships’ plot for immigrants: NYT

The Trump administration is weighing a costly new immigration enforcement tool that a former official warns “raises serious concerns at every step.”

Officials have held early talks about loading migrants onto ships, including ferries and a 500-foot former training vessel, and sailing them to Central and South America, The New York Times reported Thursday, citing two U.S. officials.

The trips could stretch for days and cost millions of dollars apiece, far more than the deportation flights the government already relies on.

One official, who requested anonymity because of the plan's sensitivity, told the Times that the Training Ship Golden Bear, docked in California, is among the vessels under consideration. Defense Department officials have also contacted companies about ships in Europe, the official said.

The Golden Bear spent 30 years as a training ship for cadets at Cal Poly Maritime Academy before the school retired it this summer. It is unclear what authority the federal government would use to press it into service.

A second official, from the Department of Homeland Security, stressed that the idea remained hypothetical and that no decisions had been made.

In a statement, DHS said it is "assessing all our resources, to maximize efficiency and continue to deliver on President Trump's mission of securing the homeland for all Americans." The Pentagon did not comment.

Claire Trickler-McNulty, a former top Immigration and Customs Enforcement official under President Joe Biden, said the concept amounts to detention at sea.

"What ICE is functionally contemplating is prison ships," she told the Times. "That raises serious concerns at every step."

She warned that moving people through international waters for days "raises hard questions about which laws apply and who has jurisdiction if something goes wrong," adding that "holding hundreds of people on a ship is also an enormous operational and safety challenge."

Trickler-McNulty, who also worked at DHS as a career official under former President Barack Obama and during Trump's first term, said staff had floated ideas like ships and trains before but never seriously pursued them.

It remains unclear whether detainees would be held for the entire voyage, where they would sleep or whether receiving nations would accept the arrangement. Possible destinations include El Salvador, Honduras and Venezuela.

The Times noted that the proposal also recalls a notorious 1950s federal campaign that expelled hundreds of thousands of Mexicans, in part by sea. In August 1956, 40 passengers leapt from one ship near Tampico, Mexico, and five drowned, the Times reported at the time. Mexico shut down the operation by September.

Trump White House blindsided DHS by freezing cleared order amid internal 'tension': report

The Trump White House stopped a cleared Homeland Security order weeks before the midterms, catching some inside the department by surprise.

The Department of Homeland Security had approved a notice this month ending temporary protected status for roughly 200,000 Salvadorans before the White House intervened, Politico reported on Tuesday, citing an administration official and three other people close to the Trump administration.

The protections were due to lapse three weeks ago unless extended, and the Trump administration has yet to make a call either way. DHS and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services had signed off on the notice for publication in the Federal Register when the White House stepped in.

"It just came down from the White House," said Mark Krikorian, who leads the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington think tank that backs tighter immigration limits and stronger enforcement. "They may just be thinking, let's make this go away for six months until after the election, not because it's going to have any direct effect on the election. They just don't want the news stories about this."

The White House sent Politico's questions to DHS. A department spokesperson repeated an earlier statement that an announcement would be "made at an appropriate time" and that "Salvadoran individuals present in the U.S. under TPS retain protection."

The pause reflects the competing pressures on the Trump administration heading into November. Some of Trump's most loyal backers worry he has softened, while independents and Hispanic Trump voters argue he has overreached. Texas, home to the nation's second-largest Salvadoran community, is also hosting a fiercely contested Senate race.

Business leaders have leaned on the White House as well.

"Texas has the second-largest Salvadoran population next to Los Angeles, and in terms of just how long this population's been around, these are employees connected to some very high-level donors and business leaders that have reached out to the president and senior officials," another person close to the administration told Politico.

One of the sources close to the Trump administration told Politico the delay shows "tension within the White House about what to do." Any decision will be "unpopular with somebody no matter what," the source warned.

"The politics of it go both ways. There's a perception that if [Trump] were to let them stay, that that would somehow have some kind of political benefit for some Republican candidate somewhere, or for him?" the person said. "On the other hand, it's also contributing to the frustration with some people on the more hawkish side for enforcement that the president's gone soft."

'This is insane': Fury after DHS deported dissident despite 'torture' warning

A decision by the Department of Homeland Security to deport a high-profile foreign dissident is alarming immigration experts who fear the worst.

On Wednesday, the New York Times reported that the Trump administration fast-tracked the deportation of Ecuadorian politician Jose Serrano, a critic of President Daniel Noboa, last month. Serrano was accused of criminal activity, but an immigration judge found it likely he would be tortured if deported back to Ecuador, Times reporter Nicholas Nehamas noted in a post on X.

The deportation prompted outcry online as the Trump administration bypassed the immigration courts to remove Serrano. Nehamas also noted that Serrano had been arrested in Miami last year, just days after former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem met with Ecuador's president.

In a post on X, immigration policy expert Aaron Reichlin-Melnick noted that The Times also reported that three immigration appeals judges appointed by the Trump administration overruled the decision of the immigration judge who ordered that Serrano couldn't be sent back because he faces likely torture.

"This is insane," Reichlin-Melnick reacted. "DOJ officials who by law are required to exercise independent judgment appear to have been ordered to overturn torture protections granted to a political opponent of a Trump ally, with the deportation flight fueled up and ready for their preordained decision."

Political scientist Norman Ornstein simply described the whole incident as "disgraceful."

"Donald Trump's assaults on the democratic process in South America continue unchecked," warned Grant Stern, the executive editor of Occupy Democrats.

Serrano is now being held in El Encuentro, a maximum-security prison modeled after El Salvador's notorious CECOT facility, according to the Times. His lawyers say that during a monitored video call, masked guards photographed and filmed him while he was naked and told him the footage would be sent to Noboa. Ecuadorean officials have denied he was mistreated.

CNN throws right-wing firebrand's pro-ICE tweets back in his face as he faces deportation

A CNN anchor dug up tweets by far-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos supporting Immigration and Customs Enforcement after he was detained by the very agency.

On Friday, CNN anchor Brianna Keilar looked back at posts by Yiannopoulos that supported aggressive ICE enforcement as she spoke about his arrest at a New Orleans airport.

"Just a year ago, Yiannopoulos appeared to be quite supportive of ICE's approach," Keilar noted as she read posts by him. One 2025 tweet read, "California needs ICE checkpoints at supermarket entrances, gas stations, strip malls, intersections, and government buildings with on-the-spot deportation for anyone who can't prove they're in the U.S. legally."

Keilar asked veteran political commentator Bill Kristol what he thought and what he's seen from the Trump administration in terms of how they're messaging Yiannopoulos' arrest.

"I don't know if they're going to message about it or they're just showing, 'See, we want to deport anyone who's here illegally,'" Kristol said. "I mean, they are fanatics about mass deportation. We shouldn't, we really can't lose sight of the forest for the trees."

Kristol said that Yiannopoulos is "getting a little bit of maybe his own medicine here since he was gloating about the deportation of others, especially people with dark-color skins or foreign accents and so forth."

Yiannopoulos is a British national, according to the Department of Homeland Security, so "he's going to be put on a plane back to London," Kristol pointed out. "He's not going back to the Central African Republic like some people from Central America are being deported in the middle of the night there," Kristol said.

"He's not like these 300,000 Haitians who came here, got Temporary Protected Status, contributed to their communities, had low crime rates, were living lawful lives here in the U.S.," Kristol added. "The administration removes their Temporary Protected Status, and presto, they're illegal."

'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."