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immigration
Venezuelan Sent to CECOT by Trump Seeks $1.3 Million in US Legal Fight
"What happened to Adrián Rengel is government-sanctioned torture and a failure to recognize his humanity because he happened to be an immigrant."
Mar 24, 2026
One of the more than 200 Venezuelan men whom US President Donald Trump sent to a notorious prison in El Salvador last year, Neiyerver Adrián León Rengel, sued the United States of America in a federal court on Tuesday, seeking $1.3 million in damages.
León Rengel entered the United States at a port of entry in June 2023, during the Biden administration, for a pre-scheduled appointment, at which "he underwent screenings and provided his biometrics," according to the complaint, filed in Washington, DC. He was released and scheduled to appear before an immigration judge in April 2028.
However, the filing details, after Trump returned to office, León Rengel "was wrongly identified as a member of the gang Tren de Aragua (TDA), repeatedly denied due process, falsely imprisoned, intentionally deceived, and—ultimately—illegally sent to El Salvador in blatant violation of a court order."
León Rengel was sent to El Salvador's Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT), where Human Rights Watch found deportees were subjected to "systematic torture."
He told CBS News in Spanish that "there came a point when I thought about hanging myself with the sheet they gave us... It was hell. Total hell."
As CBS—which eventually aired an investigation into the prison despite interference from editor-in-chief Bari Weiss—reported Tuesday:
León Rengel was arrested once in the US after a traffic stop and pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor for possession of drug paraphernalia in Texas, documents show. León Rengel said the car where the material was found was not his. He said he paid a small fine.
Beyond that misdemeanor, León Rengel's lawyers said he has no criminal history, and that he was deported despite having an active immigration case and lacking a deportation order. Justice Department records reviewed by CBS News do not list a deportation order for León Rengel and show he had an immigration court hearing scheduled for April 2028.
León Rengel said he was identified as a Tren de Aragua gang member because of a tattoo on his left hand of a lion with a hair clipper on its mouth. He said he has cut hair in the US and Venezuela, and denies having any gang ties. Other former CECOT prisoners have similarly said they were accused of gang membership because of their tattoos.
DHS told the network that "this illegal alien was deemed a public safety threat as a confirmed associate of the Tren de Aragua gang and processed for removal from the US." The department declined to provide any evidence to support its claim that he is a TDA member, saying that doing so would "undermine" national security.
León Rengel was ultimately freed from CECOT and returned to Venezuela as part of a prisoner swap last summer. He is the first of the deportees to file such a lawsuit under the Federal Tort Claims Act.
"This case reveals an illegal and morally bereft plan of action at the highest levels of our government to defy a federal court, strip a man of his rights, and hand him over to a foreign government for torture to prove a political point," said retired Amb. Norm Eisen, co-founder and executive chair of Democracy Defenders Fund, in a statement.
"Adrián Rengel spent four months in abhorrent, inhumane conditions because senior officials chose to flout the rule of law," he continued. "We are filing suit today to get justice for him. The rule of law applies no matter what the political aims of the administration."
In addition to Eisen's group, León Rengel is represented by the law firm Mariziani, Stevens & Gonzalez, with support from the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC).
"What happened to Adrián Rengel is government-sanctioned torture and a failure to recognize his humanity because he happened to be an immigrant. He deserves his day in court," said LULAC CEO Juan Proaño. "His four months of illegal confinement is the devastating outcome of a system designed to treat Latino immigrants as criminals simply because of where they were born or the color of their skin."
"Rengel and others were stripped of due process, lied to about where they were being sent, and handed over to a foreign dictatorship to be tortured in America's name," Proaño added. "The United States government had the power to stop this, and they chose not to. The court should deliver the justice the executive branch intentionally denied him."
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Minnesota Sues Trump Admin Over Killings of Good and Pretti, Shooting of Sosa-Celis
"These shootings are just three examples of the violent actions committed by federal agents in Minnesota during the surge," the complaint notes.
Mar 24, 2026
Minnesota officials on Tuesday sued the Trump administration over its refusal to cooperate with state investigators probing the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by federal agents earlier this year, as well as the shooting of Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis, who was wounded but survived.
Agents with the US Department of Homeland Security and its immigration agencies descended on Minnesota's Twin Cities and surrounding communities in January. Protests and national outrage over President Donald Trump's "Operation Metro Surge" mounted after a series of related shootings in Minneapolis, leading to the current funding fight in Congress that has partially shut down DHS.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer Jonathan Ross fatally shot Good, a 37-year-old US citizen, on January 7; an unidentified agent shot Sosa-Celis, a Venezuelan national, on January 14; and Border Patrol agent Jesus Ochoa and Customs and Border Protection officer Raymundo Gutierrez fatally shot Pretti, a 37-year-old US citizen and nurse, on January 24.
"These shootings are just three examples of the violent actions committed by federal agents in Minnesota during the surge," stresses the new lawsuit, filed in a Washington, DC federal court by Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty, and Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension Superintendent Drew Evans.
"Federal agents also carried out illegal stops, sweeps, arrests, and dangerous raids in sensitive public spaces," the complaint notes. "The surge created widespread fear among Minnesota residents, both citizens and noncitizens. It caused hundreds of millions of dollars in economic harm. And it flooded Minnesota's federal courts with lawsuits challenging the unlawful detentions that resulted from the operation."
With the three shootings, "Minnesota authorities responded to the scene of each shooting to investigate" and "expected federal cooperation," the filing explains. "At the scene of the first two incidents—the killing of Renee Good and the shooting of Julio Sosa-Celis—federal agents initially indicated that they would work with Minnesota authorities and share relevant information. State investigators thus began their work in reliance on that understanding."
"But in both cases, federal agents quickly reneged on their pledges to cooperate. Instead of sharing information, federal authorities took exclusive possession of evidence that had been collected, and they denied Minnesota investigators access to key information," the document details. "At the scene of the third shooting—the killing of Alex Pretti—federal immigration officers physically blocked investigators of the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) from accessing the scene. That physical obstruction persisted even after state officials obtained a judicial warrant authorizing access to the scene."
The filing points out that when "faced with unprecedented noncooperation," the plaintiffs submitted formal requests to DHS and the US Department of Justice—which are named as defendants, as are their leaders, outgoing Secretary Kristi Noem and Attorney General Pam Bondi. Noem's replacement, Markwayne Mullin, was sworn in Tuesday afternoon.
"Defendants' responses to those requests—indeed, by and large, their refusal to respond at all—confirm that the federal government has adopted a policy and practice of refusing Minnesota authorities access to investigative materials relating to uses of force by federal immigration officers deployed to Minnesota as part of Operation Metro Surge," the complaint says.
Emphasizing Minnesota's "authority and responsibility to protect against and address violence within its borders," as well as the history of cooperation between federal and state authorities in significant criminal investigations, the plaintiffs are asking the court to rule the administration's policy of noncooperation and their resulting refusal to comply with these shooting probes unlawful.
According to The Associated Press, while the two departments haven't responded to requests for comment, Moriarty of Hennepin County told reporters that "we are prepared to fight for transparency and accountability that the federal government is desperate to avoid."
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Trump State Dept. Accused of ‘Largest Fee Fraud in History’ of US Immigration System
An immigration researcher at the Cato Institute found that the Trump administration is "raking in billions of dollars in immigration fees and not providing the adjudications that applicants are entitled to."
Mar 24, 2026
The US State Department under President Donald Trump has been accused of stealing more than a billion dollars from immigrants and sponsors in what experts are calling “the largest fraud in the history of the US immigration system.”
A report published last week by the Cato Institute, written by director of immigration studies David J. Bier, found that the State Department and Department of Homeland Security were receiving millions of applications from immigrants whom Trump has made ineligible for legal status and pocketing the fees without ever processing the requests.
"The US government collected over $1 billion in immigration fees then refused to process the applications," said Austin Kocher, a fellow at Immigration Lab and a professor at Newhouse and Syracuse University in a social media post breaking down the report on Monday. "No denials. No refunds. Just silence."
The report zeroes in on a series of policies signed by Trump and enacted by Secretary of State Marco Rubio and US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) head Joseph Edlow, which have collectively barred nationals from 92 countries from immigrating to the US.
One proclamation signed by Trump in December bans legal entry and most visas for the nationals of 40 nations—including Cuba, Venezuela, Nigeria, Iran, and Haiti—based on nationality. A memo sent by Edlow extended the freeze to many USCIS immigration-benefit applications for people from targeted countries already living in the US, including work authorization and permanent residency filings
Another State Department policy bans visa applications from immigrants in 75 countries from being processed indefinitely, purportedly based on data showing that residents of those countries use welfare at disproportionately high rates.
These policies block more than 320,000 people abroad from entering the US and potentially as many as 561,000 potential permanent residents when those already living in the US are considered.
Although people from these countries are categorically denied immigrant visas and most other visa types under a series of travel bans signed by Trump, the government is still collecting fees for visas, work permits, and green cards.
The report cited evidence that the department has directed consular officers that they "should not counsel applicants or advise them" that they are subject to the bans when they come in for their interviews, because it "could be seen as pre-adjudication."
Upon revealing this directive last month, immigration attorney Curtis Morrison described it as a way that "embassies scam visa applicants subject to the travel ban out of fees."
As Bier explained:
To immigrate to the United States or to obtain authorization to work or travel internationally, noncitizens must usually pay a fee to have their applications processed. USCIS’s immigration fee revenues were nearly $7 billion, and the Consular Affairs budget was about $6 billion.
The fees stack up. For instance, to sponsor a spouse, a US citizen must pay a $675 fee to USCIS to petition for their spouse to obtain lawful permanent residence. Then, the immigrant must pay $1,440 to adjust status from temporary to permanent residence. That application takes so long that people usually pay $560 for the spouse to receive an employment authorization document, so the total fees can add up to $2,675.
Bier estimated that more than 2 million applications were affected by the bans, with fees coming primarily from work permit filings and permanent residency or immigrant visa applications.
He explained that these fees are difficult to track precisely because the government does not publish detailed statistics on them. He was also forced to rely on out-of-date fee statistics from 2023-24 because the Trump administration "has simply stopped publishing most statistics."
That said, Bier noted that the numbers are most likely to “understate reality” because they include only those who likely had their requests processed in the past year, not those whose processing was delayed by backlogs.
Of the more than $1 billion in fees the Trump administration would have collected for services it never rendered, data from previous years suggested that about $543 million came from Cuban immigrants, who filed about 935,000 applications during the period under review.
The next highest were Venezuelans, who paid an estimated $138 million in fees. Iranians, Haitians, and Afghans were also among the nationalities with the highest numbers of unprocessed applications.
The Trump administration has used high-profile instances of fraud committed by members of immigrant groups, such as Somalis in Minneapolis, to cast aspersions upon entire nationalities and target them for immigration bans and attacks by federal law enforcement.
However, as Bier explained before the Senate Judiciary Committee last month, based on the findings of a Cato report, "immigrants aren't to blame" for most welfare fraud, accounting for just 5% of it, 31% less per capita than native-born US citizens.
He argued that the Department of Homeland Security "isn't anti-fraud" but instead "openly carrying out the largest fraud in the history of the US immigration system... raking in billions of dollars in immigration fees and not providing the adjudications that applicants are entitled to."
"DHS and State can deny anyone who fails to make their case. Instead, this administration is pocketing thousands of dollars from hardworking Americans and their relatives, including spouses and minor children of US citizens, and then not even looking at their applications," he said. "This is a scam. This is fraud."
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