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migrant rights
ICE Detention Is Even Deadlier Under Trump 2.0
At least 25 people have died in ICE custody since President Donald Trump returned to office, making 2025 the deadliest year for people in ICE custody since 2004.
Dec 13, 2025
Gabriel Garcia-Aviles was a 56-year-old grandfather with a work permit who’d been living in the US for over 30 years. He was a beloved member of his Southern California community.
This fall, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents detained Garcia-Aviles and sent him to the Adelanto immigration detention center. He died around a week later, with ICE only informing his family that he was in critical condition once he was on his deathbed.
At the hospital, his daughter Mariel found him “unconscious, intubated,” and with “dried blood on his forehead.” He had “a cut on his tongue and blood on his lips” and “broken teeth and bruising on his body,” according to reporting from LA Taco. No clear cause of death was given, leaving his family shattered and still searching for answers.
That’s the second death this year at Adelanto.
Ultimately Congress must defund and dismantle ICE, end the unnecessary and inhumane system of immigration detention, and create more legal pathways to citizenship, among other reforms.
Ismael Ayala-Uribe, a 39-year-old former DACA recipient from Orange County, lived in the US for nearly 35 years. ICE apprehended him while he was working at a car wash and sent him to Adelanto on August 22. He died a month later of an abscess after reportedly being denied lifesaving medical treatment.
ICE didn’t inform his family that he’d been hospitalized. They only learned of Ayala-Uribe’s death the following day after a police visit.
At least 25 people have died in ICE custody since President Donald Trump returned to office, making 2025 the deadliest year for people in ICE custody since 2004. Over 65,000 others remain detained, also the highest number in years. Immigrants with no criminal record remain the largest group in immigration detention. According to ProPublica, ICE has also detained over 170 US citizens this year.
Adelanto, owned and operated by the GEO Group, is among ICE’s sprawling network of mostly private, for-profit detention facilities notorious for human rights abuses. But it’s hardly alone.
From the Krome Detention Center in Florida to the Karnes County detention facility in Texas, people in ICE custody are routinely subjected to abysmal conditions and medical neglect. The detention population has increased by 50% this year, which experts have warned could lead to more deaths.
Rights groups have been issuing warnings like these for years.
In 2024, the American Civil Liberties Union and Physicians for Human Rights examined the deaths of 52 people who died in ICE custody between 2017 to 2021 and concluded that 95% of those deaths would have been “preventable or possibly preventable” with appropriate medical care. The researchers also found ICE’s oversight and accountability mechanisms “critically flawed.”
These problems have only worsened as immigration arrests have escalated as part of the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant agenda. Recent US Senate investigations uncovered dozens of cases of medical neglect, insufficient or rotten food, foul water, and pregnant women forced to sleep on the floor in ICE detention facilities this year.
Watchdog groups and lawmakers have found that ICE has repeatedly failed to comply with its own protocols, ignored congressional inquiries, and denied members of Congress entry to facilities, even though they have the authority to conduct unannounced oversight visits.
ICE acts increasingly like a rogue agency, refusing to follow US and international law. Yet the “Big Beautiful Bill” Trump signed this year includes $45 billion for ICE to build new prisons housing adults and children, which all but ensures more abuses and preventable deaths. Meanwhile, private prison companies continue to profit.
It doesn’t have to be this way. More oversight would help safeguard civil and human rights. But ultimately Congress must defund and dismantle ICE, end the unnecessary and inhumane system of immigration detention, and create more legal pathways to citizenship, among other reforms.
Legislation recently introduced by US Reps. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.) and Adam Smith (D-Wash.) would be a step forward. If passed, it would repeal mandatory detention and phase out privatized detention.
As more families are ripped apart, our nation of immigrants stands at a crossroads. It can continue on this path of extreme cruelty and systemic abuse, or it can uphold human rights and dignity for all people.
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From Fields to Kitchens, the Fight Against Extreme Heat Is a Fight for Workers’ Lives
Worker organizing points the way forward, reminding us that the fight for safe working conditions is inseparable from the fight for dignity, racial justice, and migrant rights.
Oct 13, 2025
As temperatures shattered records across North America this summer, Jeremiah, a greenhouse worker in Ontario’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker program, stepped inside a plastic tunnel where the heat doubled the 32°C (89.6°F) outside. Within hours, workers fainted and vomited, while supervisors worried only about the plants. Another day, Jeremiah himself had to be carried out on a cart after collapsing.
Unwilling to put up with the conditions any longer, Jeremiah and his coworkers came together on one of the season’s worst days to demand managers implement safer conditions. Using broken Spanish, “tu casa, mucho calor,” they signaled to fellow Mexican, Guatemalan, and Honduran workers to walk out in unison, knowing they’re stronger when united.
Jeremiah’s story is not unusual. Across the food chain, from farm fields and greenhouses to warehouses and kitchens, workers are enduring escalating, life-threatening heat. What is new is how boldly they are organizing for change.
I have been an organizer with Justicia for Migrant Workers (J4MW) for 25 years. In that time, I have seen how rising temperatures and more frequent heatwaves have transformed the daily lives of migrant and food system workers. And I have also witnessed something else: workers resisting, demanding protections, and refusing to be sacrificed to profit and climate inaction.
The climate crisis is not some distant threat; it is here, bearing down on workers who already face some of the most exploitative conditions.
Workers themselves are the most credible experts on what is happening. At a 2024 People’s Tribunal hosted by the Food Chain Workers Alliance (FCWA), dozens of testimonies revealed the same pattern: temperatures climbing, employers refusing to adapt, and workers bearing the cost.
Lelo, a farmworker from Washington, remembers when rain was the biggest concern back when he started picking berries in 2012. "When I started picking berries, I didn’t see workers pass out… in 2022 I saw and heard about many."
A farmworker in Florida, with 18 years in the fields, reported temperatures now reaching 105°F (40.5°C) with little protection from managers. "The bosses do not adapt… There are times when they give us water, but when we tell them it's over, they don't give us more.”
Heat dangers are not limited to farm workers. Lorena, a warehouse worker in Illinois, described how tin roofs trap suffocating heat. “Employers could give workers water or 15 minutes every hour to get some fresh air, or reduce the speed of the machines, but they don’t,” she said. “The office managers don’t notice it because they’re comfortable with air conditioning.”
Ingrid, a restaurant worker in New York, spoke about kitchen conditions: “The heat is overwhelming, tiring, and it lasts all day. There’s no time to go to the bathroom or get a drink of water. The only thing we can do is hydrate before we get in and use wet towels on our bodies while we work.”
These are not isolated grievances; they are the lived realities of a workforce that feeds millions while being denied basic safety.
International agencies have started to catch up. The World Health Organization and World Meteorological Organization recently warned that “protecting workers from extreme heat is not just a health imperative but an economic necessity.” Their new report underscores what workers have long said: Productivity drops as temperatures rise, and unchecked exposure leads to kidney disease, heatstroke, and premature death. According to the International Labour Organization, more than 2.4 billion people worldwide are exposed to workplace heat stress. That is nearly1 in every 3 workers on Earth.
Yet policymakers in North America are moving backward. In Ontario, the provincial government promised heat protections in 2023, only to quietly kill them a year later. In the United States, agricultural and construction lobbyists have stalled a federal heat stress law. These retreats are not neutral; they are a direct assault on racialized and immigrant working-class communities, who make up the backbone of the food system.
Faced with government inaction, workers are taking the lead. This summer, on one of the hottest days yet, Ontario farmworkers and allies staged a street protest. They fried eggs on the pavement outside the Ministry of Labour and inside a car that reached 68°C (154.4°F). Their message was unmissable: The conditions we endure at work are deadly. When the minister refused to act, they called it what it was—environmental racism.
Acts of resistance like these are multiplying. Whether walking off the job, holding tribunals, or staging creative protests, workers are asserting that survival should not depend on employer goodwill. They are demanding enforceable regulations: access to shade and water, mandated rest breaks, and the right to stop work in unsafe conditions. And they are insisting that climate justice is part of migrant justice. Because for local workers and seasonal guest workers alike, it's nearly impossible to exert your right to protections when employers can hold the threat of immigration law over your head. That's why we support permanent status for all migrant workers.
This is a fight that stretches across borders and industries. Under guest worker schemes like Canada’s Seasonal Agricultural Worker Program or the US H-2A system, bosses often pit workers of different nationalities against one another. Yet when Jeremiah and his colleagues risked retaliation to walk out together, they showed the power of cross-border solidarity. That spirit echoes in warehouses, restaurants, and processing plants where workers are refusing to be divided by language, status, or immigration papers.
The climate crisis is not some distant threat; it is here, bearing down on workers who already face some of the most exploitative conditions. Governments may drag their feet, but workers are on the move. Their organizing points the way forward, reminding us that the fight for safe working conditions is inseparable from the fight for dignity, racial justice, and migrant rights.
When the heat rises, so do workers. And if we want a food system that is sustainable, just, and resilient in the face of climate change, we must follow their lead.
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Trump’s Attacks on Citizenship Reveal a Deeper Problem with ‘Citizenship’ Itself
We must reimagine a world where freedom and equality are guaranteed to all, no matter their status.
Aug 14, 2025
There are two main paths to citizenship in the United States: birthright, which is guaranteed to those born on US soil or to citizen parents, and naturalization, a process applied for after immigrating.
The Trump administration is attempting to upend these long-held and widely accepted rules, arguing for an end to birthright citizenship, which is constitutionally protected, while attacking the naturalization status of populations across the country.
These attacks on citizenship come amid a substantial investment in immigration crackdowns. The so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” allocates an unprecedented $178 billion toward immigration enforcement, a figure higher than the military budgets of entire nations and a price tag 13 times greater than Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) already booming budget.
And we know exactly what this expansion will be used for.
America’s immigration system must honor human rights for everyone, especially those at the margins.
In just the first few months of the Trump administration, ICE agents donning masks and unmarked clothing have surveilled, interrogated, and kidnapped individuals off the streets en masse. Arbitrary arrest quotas fill overcrowded, inhumane, and unsanitary detention centers. And despite claims that only “criminals” are being targeted, people of all backgrounds—including students, politicians, children, and U.S.-born citizens—are being arrested and abused, stripped of their dignity and humanity.
Trump is undoubtedly culpable for these abuses. But he did not invent the playbook. He simply adapted the rules long built into this country’s citizenship policies—both the implicit and explicit ones.
US citizenship has always been negotiated between those the state deemed worthy and unworthy. Race and gender have long restricted individuals from obtaining citizenship and the privileges granted with it. The 14th Amendment, the guarantor of jus soli, transformed the status and rights of all those to come—myself included. I would not be a US citizen without this code.
But documents and formalities cannot erase the existence of an informal, second-class citizenry that continues to pervade American society.
Native Americans, Indigenous peoples native to these lands, were denied this framework of legality and excluded from guaranteed citizenship for generations. Systems of oppression, domination, and exclusion allowed white bodies to be favored over Black and brown ones—even when they held and waved that landmark document, demanding their civil liberties be guaranteed and protected. Those born in U.S. territories like Puerto Rico and Guam continue to lack meaningful electoral rights and, in American Samoa’s case, even citizenship itself.
An examination of the difficult and lengthy naturalization process reveals further discrepancies. Volume 12 Part F states that individuals must possess “good moral character” to become naturalized, a measure that is both vague and arbitrary. Any conduct or act that deviates from a community’s moral standard is grounds for both denial of citizenship and denaturalization if citizenship is already obtained.
But how is morality defined? Immoral behavior is outlined by the state—murder, aggravated felonies, genocide, and torture are some examples listed. But aggravated felonies also include failing to appear in court. So when we see ICE arresting immigrants at court hearings and scaring others from appearing out of fear of arrest, suddenly the intent behind these actions becomes clear.
In this system, any action or inaction becomes punishable—including the “crime” of being an immigrant. Notably, this “moral character” clause has existed since the Naturalization Act of 1790—a reminder that these pursuits are not a recent political development but built into our founding documents.
Now, the Justice Department is expanding its criteria for denaturalization, using the definitions established by Congress centuries ago. A recent Justice Department memo orders those accused of involvement with terrorist, gang, or cartel groups to be targeted for deportation or even stripped of their citizenship, an indicator of their “immoral character.”
But the administration’s definition of “terrorism” and “criminal involvement” is both flawed and targeted. Kilmar Abrego Garcia, accused of being a member of MS-13, an international criminal gang, was wrongfully deported and imprisoned in El Salvador without due process—a move that was actually illegal, given that a court order barred his deportation to El Salvador on account of the gang threats and violence he faced there.
In another example, Rümeysa Öztürk, a PhD student at Tufts, cowrote an op-ed criticizing the university’s response to resolutions passed by its student body about Israel’s violations of international law. She was subsequently kidnapped and detained in an ICE prison for months.
These are simply two instances of a series of repeated offenses committed by the US government. In an effort to apprehend and throw out immigrants en masse, the state criminalizes individuals for free speech and seeking asylum.
Elsewhere, the right to vote is denied to citizens the US deems unworthy of representation. Essential rights and civil liberties are being stripped from legal residents, mitigating access to the freedoms that have defined America for centuries. More and more individuals are sorted into different tiers of citizenship, soon leaving few with the guarantee of liberty and justice promised to all.
For all its extremism and cruelty, the Trump administration is simply using the tools already available to them. Citizenship requirements contain too many loopholes that are easily exploited. So for progressives, opposing restrictive immigration policies is not enough. We must move beyond an idea of “citizenship” that only guarantees rights according to an individual’s status and reimagine a world that respects the freedom and equality of all people no matter their status.
If “morality” is a requirement for entry, then anything can be redefined as “immoral.” Economic metrics of inclusion fail for the same reason. Nations should not prioritize people solely based on what they can provide to employers. The argument that “immigrants help our economy” only emphasizes the need for individuals with economic value.
America’s immigration system must honor human rights for everyone, especially those at the margins. Those seeking asylum, refuge, education, or simply a better life should not be denied access to civil liberties and fundamental freedoms.
Aren’t these the true American values?
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On World Refugee Day, Human Rights Defenders Slam Trump's 'Inhumane and Cruel' Decrees
"When we protect refugees, we protect our values and the belief that everyone deserves a chance to live free and safe," said congresswoman and refugee Ilhan Omar.
Jun 20, 2025
Amid President Donald Trump's barrage of executive orders banning refugee entry into the United States and ending protected status for immigrants from some of the world's most unsafe and destabilized countries, Amnesty International led human rights defenders Friday in a World Refugee Day plea to the U.S. administration and other governments to "protect, not punish" people seeking refuge from violence, repression, and impoverishment.
Trump's dizzying attacks on refugees and other immigrants started at the beginning of his first term and continued apace upon his return to the White House. The Republican president signed decrees declaring an "invasion" of "aliens" and ordering the border sealed; barred asylum claims on U.S. soil, ramped up migrant detention in a boon to the private prison industry, and deputized state and local police for purposes of immigration enforcement.
The president has also deployed the military to the border, expanded expedited removal, rolled back temporary protected status (TPS) programs, suspended nearly all refugee resettlement, revived the "remain in Mexico" migration management policy, halted international humanitarian aid programs, and moved to end constitutionally guaranteed birthright citizenship.
Refugees and asylum-seekers from countries including Afghanistan, Cameroon, Cuba Haiti, Nepal, Nicaragua, and Venezuela have been stripped of TPS, a move with life-and-death implications for many people, including Afghans who risked their lives to aid the U.S. invasion and occupation of a country now ruled by the Taliban they opposed. Refugees fleeing Russia's ongoing invasion of Ukraine are also in limbo following the Trump administration's suspension of a temporary humanitarian program.
Meanwhile, Trump has admitted a number of white South Africans as refugees, citing bogus claims of "white genocide" amplified by white nationalist figures including multibillionaire Elon Musk and senior adviser Stephen Miller. Some of these Afrikaners now say they have been left stranded without adequate support from the government that ostensibly welcomed them into the United States.
"At the same time, the United States has escalated mass immigration raids, is detaining and separating families, is unlawfully removing individuals from the U.S. with no due process guarantees, and is criminally prosecuting individuals for the way in which they entered the country—treating people in need of international protection as criminals," Amnesty International said Friday.
According to Amnesty:
These harmful policies have rippled across the region. Costa Rica and Panama have accepted deportation flights of third-country nationals from the United States—many with ongoing asylum claims—leaving them stranded with limited access to humanitarian assistance and international protection. El Salvador is complicit in the enforced disappearance of hundreds of Venezuelans illegally expelled from the U.S. under the guise of the Alien Enemies Act in the notorious [Terrorism Confinement Center] prison, who were in the midst of ongoing court processes, were arrested while complying with their immigration obligations, were already granted protections in the United States including under the Convention Against Torture, and were labeled as gang members for their tattoos or connection to the Venezuelan state of Aragua with no other evidence.
"On World Refugee Day, we are witnessing a devastating erosion of the rights of people seeking safety and asylum protections across the Americas," Amnesty International Americas director Ana Piquer said in a statement Friday.
World Refugee Day rally with diverse faith communities denouncing the Trump administration shutting the door to refugees.
[image or embed]
— Guthrie Graves-Fitzsimmons (@guthriegf.bsky.social) June 20, 2025 at 8:56 AM
"The Trump administration has issued a barrage of executive actions which have halted the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program and make it nearly impossible to seek asylum in the United States, placing countless lives at risk," Piquer added. "These policies have already resulted in thousands of people being forcibly returned to places where their lives or safety are at risk. Currently, there is no longer any way for people to seek asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border. This is not only unlawful but inhumane and cruel."
Congresswoman Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), a refugee from Somalia, marked World Refugee Day in a social media post saying, "As the Trump administration attacks refugees, turning their pain into political stunts, closing doors when we should be opening them, we have a responsibility to stand with refugees no matter where they come from."
"When we protect refugees, we protect our values and the belief that everyone deserves a chance to live free and safe," Omar added.
Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) posted Friday on Bluesky: "This World Refugee Day, I'm thinking of the millions of people displaced by persecution and violence. I condemn the Trump [administration's] decision to halt refugee resettlement—slamming the door on thousands of people who have been properly vetted and approved to come to the U.S."
Amnesty noted that "the situation is further exacerbated by the U.S. government's severe cuts to foreign assistance, which have weakened shelters and frontline organizations that provide lifesaving support to people seeking safety and internally displaced people."
"From Costa Rica to Mexico to the Haiti-Dominican Republic border, organizations have been forced to scale back or close food, shelter, and legal and psychosocial programs for people seeking safety, just as need grows," the group continued.
"On World Refugee Day, Amnesty International urgently calls on states in the Americas to protect, not punish, people seeking safety," Amnesty added. "States must immediately restore access to asylum, reverse discriminatory policies, and uphold their obligations under international law. We stand in solidarity with people across the region who have been forced to flee their homes in search of safety and dignity. Seeking safety is a human right. It's time for governments to act like it."
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How Will We Respond to Immoral Laws Targeting Refugees Today?
The Republican Party now seeks to criminalize every aspect of helping a person who has fled a life of torture, violence, and suffering. Will we obey?
May 25, 2025
A person escapes slave labor, torture, rape, and murder, and illegally crosses a border to a land where such crimes are outlawed, to a land where people have the right to work for wages and are protected by the law. Anyone in this “Free Land” who harbors or aides such an escapee is subject to federal prosecution, fines, and imprisonment. Yet to turn them over to federal authorities returns these people to a life of wanton violence and suffering.
This was the United States in 1850 when Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Law, legislation requiring that all escaped slaves be returned to the slave owner and that officials and citizens in free states must cooperate. Aiding or harboring a slave meant prison and steep fines. Habeas corpus was suspended under this law. Citizens were required to return a runaway slave to the chains of bondage or face the wrath of the federal courts.
Americans in 1850 had to decide where they stood, with the newly passed federal law or with their conscience. The risk was great, for both the runaway slaves and those Americans who might help them.
Our choice on such a momentous issue determines not just our place on the right or wrong side of history but determines the fate of people impacted by our decision.
Today, the Republican Party, the very party which grew from the outrage over the wickedness of the Fugitive Slave Act, now seeks to criminalize every aspect of helping a person who has fled a life of torture, violence, and suffering. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 has been updated and amended for the fleeing refugees of 2025.
On April 25, 2025, U.S. officials arrested Hannah Dugan, a Wisconsin judge, and charged her with helping a man in her court evade immigration authorities. It is alleged she hindered immigration agents who appeared in the courthouse to arrest the man without a judicial warrant. She faces numerous federal charges.
We are only four months into Trump’s Second Term of Cruelty. Where will we be a year from now? Two years from now? How draconian will the laws be then?
Americans living in the border states of the 1850s were called upon to answer the question of what they would do when a runaway slave appeared in their community. Would they violate federal law and help, or would they turn the desperate families back over to the slaveholders, to the “manstealers,” as the bounty hunters were then called.
Many in the border state of Pennsylvania—Quakers, Amish, Brethren—followed their faith and funneled these runaways to freedom. In Lancaster County, Republican Congressman Thaddeus Stevens allegedly hid slaves in a cistern in his backyard as he facilitated their road to freedom. He was an oathbound member of Congress violating U.S. law to save lives.
In retrospect, it is easy to know what the right thing to do was in the case of slavery and The Underground Railroad. That issue today is clear for us. We know where we would stand: for freedom, for those fleeing slavery. But back then the issue was not so clear. Our choice on such a momentous issue determines not just our place on the right or wrong side of history but determines the fate of people impacted by our decision.
Will we help or hinder a person in need?
Will we violate immoral law to save a life?
Will we risk fines and imprisonment?
These questions were asked and answered by many Americans in 1850. How will we answer them today?
So often we wish to be part of a moment of great historical importance, a moment when we have to take a risk to save another, to take a stand when others wouldn’t. We feel certain we would know the right thing to do. If only such a moment would come our way.
Today, that moment comes not in the form of storming a beachhead or taking a hill in battle. It is not marching for civil rights in Birmingham or Selma. And it is not hiding a runaway slave in your attic, though the similarities to that particular act of conscience are striking. Today it is whether to provide shelter and safety to a refugee fleeing violence in their home country, a person illegally in the United States.
How will we respond this time? In this century? In this historic moment?
Is a refugee illegally entering this country to flee institutional violence different than a slave illegally entering a free state to escape slavery? Especially when that institutional violence has been precipitated by the U.S. repeatedly intervening and destabilizing the home country of the refugee?
In 1958, legendary peace activist Philip Berrigan asked a youth retreat group the following question: “What's it going to be with you? Are you going to go through life playing both ends against the middle, playing cozy, not committing yourself, sitting on the fence?”
That question is as potent, and as dangerous, today as it was then. For us, and for the victims in the breach.
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Supreme Court Extends Block on Trump's Alien Enemies Act Deportations
One attorney in the case called the ruling "a powerful rebuke to the government's attempt to hurry people away to a gulag-type prison in El Salvador."
May 16, 2025
For the second time in less than a month, the U.S. Supreme Court on Friday ruled against the Trump administration's dubious use of an 18th century law to deport immigrants including at least one person with protected status without due process.
In a 7-2 ruling—with far-right Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito dissenting—the high court found that President Donald Trump violated Venezuelan migrants' right to due process as a class by trying to fast-track their deportation to the notorious Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) prison in El Salvador by invoking the 1798 Alien Enemies Act during peacetime.
The ruling is not a repudiation of Alien Enemies Act deportations and focuses solely on migrants' due process rights.
"Notice roughly 24 hours before removal, devoid of information about how to exercise due process rights to contest that removal, surely does not pass muster."
"The detainees' interests at stake are accordingly particularly weighty," the court's opinion states. "Under these circumstances, notice roughly 24 hours before removal, devoid of information about how to exercise due process rights to contest that removal, surely does not pass muster."
"But it is not optimal for this court, far removed from the circumstances on the ground, to determine in the first instance the precise process necessary to satisfy the Constitution in this case," the court continued and, referring to the federal appellate court that "erred in dismissing the detainees' appeal for lack of jurisdiction," said that "we remand the case to the 5th Circuit for that purpose."
Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU's Immigrants' Rights Project and lead counsel in the case, said Friday that "the court's decision to stay removals is a powerful rebuke to the government's attempt to hurry people away to a gulag-type prison in El Salvador."
"The use of a wartime authority during peacetime, without even affording due process, raises issues of profound importance," Gelernt added.
The Supreme Court opinion noted the case of Kilmar Abrego García, a Maryland man with protected status who was wrongfully deported to CECOT in March. Last month, the high court unanimously ruled that Trump must facilitate Abrego García's return to the United States. The Trump administration has resisted the order, despite the president proclaiming that "if the Supreme Court said, 'Bring somebody back,' I would do that."
Steve Vadeck, a professor at Georgetown Law Center, told CNN Friday that "because lower courts have blocked use of the [Alien Enemies Act] in every other district in which the president has sought to invoke it, that means it's effectively pausing all removals under the act until the 5th Circuit—and, presumably, the Supreme Court itself—conclusively resolves whether they're legal and how much process is due if so."
On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Stephanie Haines—who was appointed by Trump—issued the first court ruling supporting Alien Enemies Act deportations.
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Can We Build a World of Sanctuary Cities?
A sanctuary city is a place of reverence, committed to the enormous value that all people are fully human. This is the first step to true collective safety.
May 08, 2025
As U.S. President Donald Trump and friends claim control over the country, celebrating their war on migrants—“the enemy” of the moment, whom they’ve created and dehumanized—much of America writhes in shock and irony as it looks on.
The president who hates criminals is also our criminal-in-chief. But fortunately (for him), he’s above the law! Court rulings don’t apply to him—not when he’s busy keeping America safe from the boogeymen. To be an exalted leader, you need to keep a serious percentage of the populace in a state of simple-minded fear: The enemy are very, very bad people. They belong to gangs. They eat our pets. But I will protect you.
I’ll reopen Guantánamo. I’ll reopen Alcatraz. And the electorate can sigh with a sense of relief and safety. He’s bringing back our greatness—that is to say, our racist certainty. He’s recreating a country that real Americans can understand... one that’s like them.
Reopening Gitmo, reopening Alcatraz—depriving innocent and marginalized people of the right to pursue life—will not keep us safe.
At least this is how it seems. But before I get too deeply immersed in Trump-inspired sarcasm, let me grapple with some deeper reality as well. American “greatness” has primarily been military in nature: us vs. somebody! The nation’s mainstream consciousness, be it Democratic or Republican, cannot stop playing war. At least this has been the case throughout my lifetime.
As Jessica Schulberg and Paul Blumenthal recently pointed out at Huffington Post, for instance, the Bush-era War on Terror helped give birth to Trump’s war on migrants: today’s terrorists, the “invaders” of the present moment. They quote J. Wells Dixon, an attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, who represented Gitmo detainees under Bush. He notes that Trump’s initial plan to open Gitmo was “an effort to outsource detention and torture to avoid the constraints of U.S. law. It’s the natural consequence and evolution of what we’ve seen throughout the last 20 years, certainly with the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program and the use of black sites overseas.”
However, to Trump’s frustration, there was “too much rule of law” at Gitmo, making matters too difficult to turn the hellish site into a dumping ground for thousands of migrants. Trump’s waging war! The last thing he needs is rule of law. So his next step was to work out an agreement with El Salvador’s authoritarian president, Nayib Bukele, allegedly paying El Salvador some $6 million to send American migrants to the country’s maximum-security hellhole, the Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo. This would allow Trump’s war to continue.
As Schulberg and Blumenthal write:
On March 15, shortly after ICE sent all migrants in Guantánamo back to U.S. facilities, Trump signed an executive order, claiming that Tren de Aragua had “invaded” the U.S., and that any Venezuelan migrant age 14 or older with alleged ties to the gang could be removed under the Alien Enemies Act, an 18th-century wartime authority only previously invoked during the War of 1812 and both World Wars.
Some good—or at least hopeful—news from all this is that the opposition to Trump’s war-gaming isn’t sheerly marginal. The opposition is also politically structural, such as, for instance the existence of sanctuary cities—whose governments refuse to cooperate, or allow their police departments to cooperate, with ICE, despite the risks they face for doing so.
For instance, a few days ago, the Trump administration sued Colorado and the city of Denver “for allegedly,” according to Truthout, “obstructing federal immigration enforcement. The suit objects to sanctuary policies—local initiatives to protect immigrant communities from federal deportation efforts—and argues that such policies encroach on federal authority.”
“This move follows Donald Trump’s recent executive order instructing the DOJ to penalize sanctuary cities, including threatening to withhold federal funding.”
Obviously, this is no small challenge to face. Maybe Trump will wind up succeeding with his authoritarian agenda—God help the migrants, God help all so us—and if that happens, humanitarian opposition will have to continue nonetheless, no matter how difficult things get. But opposition is also present right now. So is political belief in a higher value than waging war and defeating an “enemy.”
In response to the federal lawsuit against Denver, a statement from the mayor’s office declared that the city “will not be bullied or blackmailed, least of all by an administration that has little regard for the law and even less for the truth.”
This is not simply an “us vs. them” confrontation between the Trump-MAGA world and progressives. The confrontation is both pragmatic and spiritual: What keeps us safe? Reopening Gitmo, reopening Alcatraz—depriving innocent and marginalized people of the right to pursue life—will not keep us safe. What we must embrace and learn to understand, both individually and collectively, is what I call empathic sanity: the ability to live as one, to value everyone’s full humanity.
Turns out there are more than 200 sanctuary cities in the United States. As George Cassidy Payne writes at Medium, a sanctuary city is a place of reverence, committed to the enormous value that all people are fully human. All people are equal.
“In this context,” he writes, “sanctuary cities offer more than a geographical claim. They challenge us to look past a person’s nationality and recognize their humanity. They call us to prioritize their place of residence, viewing them as global citizens, not by their place of birth. In the sanctuary, people are treated with radical respect; here, no one has the right to harm another without their consent, nor to judge anyone based on their skin color, accent, citizenship status, or nation of origin.”
This sounds like a first step in the creation of international security.
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Trump’s Border Militarization Scheme Threatens the Rule of Law
As presidential overreaches pile up, they underscore the urgent need for Congress and the courts to reassert their roles as checks on executive authority.
May 03, 2025
U.S. President Donald Trump has turned a 60-foot-wide strip of federal land that spans three states on the southern border into a “military installation” to “address the emergency” he previously declared over unlawful immigration and drug trafficking. Trump’s memo authorizing this action seems designed to sidestep the Posse Comitatus Act, which normally bars federal armed forces from conducting domestic law enforcement. The apparent plan is to let the military act as a de facto border police force, with soldiers apprehending, searching, and detaining people who cross the border unlawfully.
This move could have alarming implications for democratic freedoms. Moreover, it continues a pattern of the president stretching his emergency powers past their limits to usurp the role of Congress and bypass legal rights. He has misused a law meant to address economic emergencies to set tariffs on every country in the world. He declared a fake “energy emergency” to promote fossil fuel production. And he dusted off a centuries-old wartime authority to deport Venezuelan immigrants, without due process, to a Salvadoran prison notorious for human rights violations.
As presidential overreaches pile up, they underscore the urgent need for Congress and the courts to reassert their roles as checks on executive authority.
The Posse Comitatus Act and the Military Purpose Doctrine
Last week, the military announced that soldiers deployed on the New Mexico-Mexico border will have “enhanced authorities” because they are on land that has now been designated part of Fort Huachuca, Arizona—a military installation located more than 100 miles away. The new authorities include the power to “temporarily detain trespassers” on the “military installation” and “conduct cursory searches of trespassers... to ensure the safety of U.S. service members and Department of Defense (DOD) property.”
Searching and apprehending migrants would ordinarily run afoul of the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits federal armed forces from directly participating in civilian law enforcement activities unless doing so is expressly authorized by Congress or the Constitution. The law stems from an Anglo-American tradition, centuries older than the Constitution, of restraining military interference in civilian affairs. It serves as a critical check on presidential power and a vital safeguard for both personal liberty and democracy.
Having turned much of the southern border into a “military installation,” the administration now takes the position that anyone crossing the border without authorization in those areas is not just violating immigration law but also trespassing on a military installation.
Nonetheless, several exceptions exist. The most significant is the Insurrection Act—a law that Trump floated using to address unlawful migration (although for now, his secretaries of defense and homeland security are reportedly recommending against such a move). In authorizing soldiers to conduct apprehensions and detentions on lands that have been newly designated as a “military installation,” the president is relying on a lesser-known loophole in the Posse Comitatus Act known as the “military purpose doctrine.”
The doctrine, conceived by the executive branch and endorsed by the courts, holds that an action taken primarily to further a military purpose does not violate the Posse Comitatus Act even if it provides an incidental benefit to civilian law enforcement. A textbook example is the circumstance in which a person has driven drunk onto a military base. Soldiers may legally detain the intruder until civilian law enforcement arrives to take them into custody. This does not violate the Posse Comitatus Act because the primary purpose of the military’s activity is not to enforce the laws against driving while impaired, but to maintain order on the base and protect military assets and personnel.
Having turned much of the southern border into a “military installation,” the administration now takes the position that anyone crossing the border without authorization in those areas is not just violating immigration law but also trespassing on a military installation. Federal troops thus have a legitimate military reason, the argument goes, to apprehend, search, and detain migrants without violating the Posse Comitatus Act and without the president needing to invoke the Insurrection Act at all.
Evaluating the Legality of the Order
Using the military purpose doctrine to justify direct military involvement in immigration enforcement is a transparent ruse to evade the Posse Comitatus Act without congressional authorization. The doctrine is meant to apply only in cases where any law enforcement benefit is purely incidental. Here, the situation is the opposite.
The nominal justification for apprehending and detaining migrants who cross the border is protecting the installation. But the installation itself was created to apprehend and detain migrants, as well as to secure their removal. In the memo, this is described as “sealing the border” and “repelling the invasion” at the border. No matter how the Trump administration frames those activities, however, they are civilian law enforcement functions. He cannot turn them into military operations by misusing the language of war. These civilian law enforcement activities are not “incidental”—they are the reason for creating the installation. And apprehending migrants who “trespass” on the installation is the primary way in which this law enforcement mission will be furthered.
If emergency powers can be invoked for border security at a time when unlawful border crossings have reached a historic low, there is little to prevent a president from declaring fake emergencies to invoke these alarming powers.
This use of the military is fundamentally different from the border deployments that have occurred in recent presidential administrations, from George W. Bush to Joe Biden. The military’s role until now has been limited to logistical support, such as assisting border agents with surveillance, infrastructure construction, and transportation. Providing such support does not constitute direct participation in law enforcement, so it does not violate the Posse Comitatus Act. Having soldiers perform core law enforcement duties like apprehending or detaining people, however, steps over the legal boundary.
The move also skirts a separate statute requiring congressional approval of any Pentagon takeover of more than 5,000 acres of federal lands except “in time of war or national emergency.” Here, in order to transfer control of land from the Interior Department, Trump is relying on a declaration of national emergency he issued on January 20 to address the “invasion” at the southern border, in which he asserted that “our southern border is overrun.” But on March 2, Trump triumphantly posted on social media that “the Invasion of our Country is OVER,” adding that in the preceding month, “very few people came.” His administration continues to tout the fact that unlawful border crossings are now at their lowest level in decades. U.S. Customs and Border Protection data from March confirms a 95% decline in monthly unauthorized crossings.
Leaving aside the question of whether an emergency, properly defined, existed on January 20 (it didn’t), the Trump administration has made a powerful case that there is no emergency now. Trump should be revoking the emergency declaration, not relying on it to transfer federal lands to the Department of Defense.
Why It Matters
Aside from legal concerns, there are practical reasons why the U.S. armed forces shouldn’t be enforcing immigration law. Federal troops are trained to fight and destroy an enemy; they’re generally not trained for domestic law enforcement. Asking them to do law enforcement’s job creates risks to migrants, U.S. citizens who may inadvertently trespass on federal lands at the border, and the soldiers themselves. And it pulls our armed forces away from their core mission of protecting the United States from foreign adversaries at a time when the military is already stretched thin.
Using the military for border enforcement is also a slippery slope. If soldiers are allowed to take on domestic policing roles at the border, it may become easier to justify uses of the military in the U.S. interior in the future. Our nation’s founders warned against the dangers of an army turned inward, which can all too easily be turned into an instrument of tyranny.
Trump’s misuse of emergency powers similarly has larger implications. Emergency declarations unlock enhanced powers contained in 150 different provisions of law. Many of these are far more potent than the ability to transfer federal lands to the Department of Defense. They include the authority to take over or shut down communications facilities, freeze Americans’ assets, and control domestic transportation. If emergency powers can be invoked for border security at a time when unlawful border crossings have reached a historic low, there is little to prevent a president from declaring fake emergencies to invoke these alarming powers.
The Role of the Courts and Congress
Unfortunately, the president’s abuses could be difficult to check. The Posse Comitatus Act is a criminal statute, and those who violate it may be prosecuted. But it’s unclear whether violations may serve as a basis for migrants to challenge their detention. As for Trump’s misuse of emergency powers, courts generally are reluctant to probe a president’s decision that an emergency exists (although in this case, the administration’s own statements might be sufficient to overcome the presumption of deference). And as the law currently stands, it is very difficult for Congress to terminate a national emergency declaration or undo actions that presidents take using their emergency powers.
These challenges highlight the urgent need for Congress to establish meaningful checks on the use of emergency powers and domestic deployment authorities. Last year, legislation that would have made it much easier for Congress to terminate emergency declarations passed out of committees in the House and Senate with near-unanimous support from both Democrats and Republicans. Similar legislation was introduced in January by Republican Rep. Andy Biggs of Arizona. The Brennan Center has also proposed several key changes to the Posse Comitatus Act that would close the loopholes that threaten to swallow the law.
It may not be possible to pass these reforms soon, but the fight against executive overreach is not just a short-term one. Understanding the ways in which Trump’s actions threaten the rule of law today can help build support for enacting reforms in the future.
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To Honor the Earth, Let Us Tear Down the Walls in Our Hearts
Let Earth Day push our awareness beyond the invisible borders we have created and beyond the invisible money god who holds us hostage.
Apr 25, 2025
Let Earth Day be every day! Let it transcend the present state of politics and our economic hierarchy. Let it open us to the future we long for but do not yet envision.
We live on one vulnerable, extraordinary planet. We are not its overlords; we are part of an evolving circle of life, which we are still trying to understand. And we can only understand it if we also value it, ever so deeply. Earth Day is also Love Day.
Oh God, let it flow beyond the invisible borders we have created. To that end, I call forth the late Pope Francis, who died two days ago as I write—a day before Earth Day 2025. He was 88. Unlike most world leaders, he saw the need to transcend the present worldview—including religion—that currently holds the planet hostage.
The necessary changes humanity must make are collective, but also individual, at least in the sense that we must open our hearts and look for solidarity... with one another, with all of life.
As Nathan Schneider, a University of Colorado professor and contributor to the Jesuit publication America Magazine, noted recently in a Democracy Now interview, Pope Francis was insistent on linking major political issues, such as protecting the planet’s ecosystem and halting the war on migrants. “Justice for both,” Schneider said. We must “counter the idea of disposability.”
This is a cry from the depths of our soul. Value the planet. Value all of humanity. We have to reach beyond the world we think we know and, as the Pope put it, according to Schneider, “learn from the periphery.”
The migrant crisis and the climate crisis are intertwined. The Pope “called for solidarity across borders. He called for taking down the idols of our world—the things that we think are real that really aren’t: borders created with imaginary lines.”
That is to say: Tear down that wall, this is a wall we’ve built in our own hearts. Planet Earth is a single entity; our complex differences are interrelated. Yes, conflict is inevitable, but dehumanizing those with whom we disagree is never the answer. Yes, this is an inconvenience for those in power—and for those who want, and feel entitled, to use up the planet for personal gain. Humanity, as Pope Francis understood, is at an extraordinary transition point: beyond exploitation.
As Cynthia Kaufman writes:
The forces that are tearing apart the fabric of our world are part of a global set of practices that have developed over the past 500 years that allow people and companies to pursue profit for its own sake without regard for the needs of others. Over those centuries, destructive practices based on capitalism, slavery, colonialism, and particular forms of patriarchy have been woven into the ways that politics, economics, and culture function...
Rather than trying, under these difficult circumstances, to reestablish a new accord with the exploitative systems that dominate our world, the time is ripe to dig deeply and try to uproot those systems at their cores. That will involve building alternative ways of meeting our needs, fighting against the structures that support the current system, and rethinking our understanding of our social world. If a new accord between capital and labor is not likely to be established any time soon, our best hope is to work to build a social world based on principles of solidarity.
Principles of solidarity? This is a huge leap for the part of humanity that assumes itself to be in control of the future. Kaufman is not talking about an alliance of good guys against bad guys, but solidarity in a total way: solidarity with the planet and its extraordinarily complex ecosystem. “Solidarity” values continuous learning, understanding, and protecting, not simply controlling. That is to say: environmental stewardship.
According to the Earthday website:
It is widely acknowledged that Indigenous people, despite making up just 5% of the global population, protect a significant amount of the planet’s remaining biodiversity. Traditional Ecological Knowledge is a term for the collective Indigenous knowledge and beliefs about nature and man’s place in it, and serves as an alternative to the more objective and resource-oriented Western worldview of the environment as something to be exploited.
I would put it this way: Planet Earth has a soul.
I say this in a non-religious way, without a sense of explanatory understanding, just a sense of wonder. The planet itself is alive. And life itself should be what we value most, not... money (the invisible god).
As Earthday notes:
Like the Maōri, many Indigenous communities consider themselves “guardians” of their local environmental resources.
Within the 2.7 million square miles of the Amazon Rainforest, there are approximately 400 distinct tribes which call the rainforest home. The Guajajara tribe, in the Brazilian state of Maranhão, are particularly known for their fierce protection of their local forests from illegal loggers, and continue to risk their lives daily for their home.
Let Earth Day push our awareness beyond the invisible borders we have created and beyond the invisible god who holds us hostage. I don’t say this with a simple shrug but, rather, without knowing how this will happen—just that it must. The necessary changes humanity must make are collective, but also individual, at least in the sense that we must open our hearts and look for solidarity... with one another, with all of life. This is what I have called empathic sanity. Real change is impossible without it.
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Understanding How Trump Is Building His Mass Deportation Machine—So We Can Halt It
Such an apparatus has a potentially fatal flaw: In order to function effectively, millions and millions of people must be willing to go along with it.
Mar 12, 2025
“Flights to Guantánamo Bay have begun. The worst of the worst have no place in our homeland.”
With those words the U.S. government announced the fate awaiting “criminal aliens” in its custody.
On a military base in El Paso, Texas, masked men in combat fatigues paraded a group of young Venezuelan immigrants, their hands cuffed and their ankles shackled, in front of the cameras, before loading them onto a waiting Air Force C-17, which was to deliver its human cargo to Naval Station Guantánamo Bay overnight.
This is the fate envisioned by the architects of the deportation machine for America’s “tired,” its “poor,” its “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”
Once there, they were to be incarcerated in the infamous Camp 6, held incommunicado in the same cells where al Qaeda suspects were once held in indefinite detention, and guarded by the 1st Battalion, 6th Marine Regiment. Meanwhile, a tent city, which could ultimately house as many as 30,000 detainees, rises around the prison.
Though most of those immigrants have since been returned to Venezuela, the Pentagon has pledged to continue using the base for the “temporary detention of illegal aliens who are pending return.”
Back on the mainland, the Department of Defense (DOD) is deploying thousands of troops to “seal the borders”; the Department of Justice (DOJ) is deputizing its agents to round up undocumented immigrants; Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is mobilizing to meet its daily quota of 1,200 to 1,500 arrests, armed with target lists, surveillance technology, and “less-lethal” weapons; and immigration detention facilities are to be built on military bases across the country.
And that’s not all either. Entire families are set to be detained, and the grim family-separation policy of the first Trump administration revived. Humanitarian parole is to be revoked, refugees rejected, and asylum-seekers returned. And cities, counties, and states that dare to defy the deportation regime are to be punished.
The machinery of mass deportation has been set in motion in a nightmarish fashion. It is meant to be impossible to stop—or at least to appear that way. Still, history teaches us that such a machine, like any other, can be brought to a halt, if only we understand how the apparatus actually works.
Here, then, is a simple, step-by-step guide to how the Trump administration plans to build the machinery necessary to “complete the largest deportation operation in American history.”
1. Declare a State of Emergency
“Today, I will sign a series of historic executive orders,” Trump pledged in his Inaugural Address. “With these actions, we will begin the complete restoration of America and the revolution of common sense.”
That “revolution” in immigration enforcement did indeed begin with a barrage of such orders, many lifted directly from the Project 2025 playbook.
First among them was the declaration of a state of emergency in this country’s borderlands. According to the National Emergencies Act of 1976, this allows the military to be called up for domestic duties, whether to the southern border, Guantánamo Bay, or anywhere else the president sees fit.
2. Equate Immigration With an “Invasion”
“I have determined that the current situation at the southern border qualifies as an invasion,” reads another order signed on January 20, citing Article IV of the Constitution.
“Accordingly,” the order continues, “I hereby suspend the physical entry of any alien engaged in the invasion.” It goes on to authorize operations to “repel, repatriate, or remove” noncitizens.
This is the logical conclusion of years of far-right propaganda about a “Third World,” “Hispanic,” or “alien” “invasion” of the United States, which, over time, has spread from the stuff of 8chan manifestos to the preambles of presidential proclamations.
3. Expand Immigration and Customs Enforcement
The architecture of ICE is slated to expand to levels not seen since its founding in 2003.
The agency reportedly made more than 14,000 arrests in the first three weeks of Trump’s second term. With it still supposedly failing to meet its quotas, however, officials want to double the size of the force.
Now, Senate Republicans are proposing no less than $175 billion in new spending on immigration enforcement, while the House GOP is looking to fund that spending spree with billions of dollars in cuts to Medicaid and other essential social services.
4. Draft the Department of Justice
ICE is no longer to bear its burden alone. Since Trump’s inauguration, the DOJ, including the U.S. Attorney’s Offices, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), have been pressed into the service of the deportation machine.
The FBI, for instance, has been tasked with finding “identifying information and/or biometric data relating to noncitizens located illegally in the US”—data that will fuel the detention-to-deportation pipeline.
“We’ve got special agents, intelligence analysts, and more, supporting DHS [Department of Homeland Security] teams across the country,” said then-Acting FBI Director Brian Driscoll, “from New York and Chicago to El Paso, Newark, and Denver.”
5. Deputize Local Law Enforcement
ICE has also partnered with local police departments, county sheriff’s offices, and departments of correction through a program known as 287(g) to “identify and remove incarcerated criminal aliens” before they can be freed.
In New York City, Mayor Eric Adams has typically promised to reopen an ICE office on Rikers Island, purportedly as part of a quid pro quo with the Trump administration.
And in February, Florida became the first state to sign a statewide 287(g) agreement, which would train officers of the Florida Highway Patrol and State Guard to “interrogate any suspected alien or person believed to be an alien.”
6. Criminalize all Immigrants as “Criminal Aliens”
When White House Press Secretary Katherine Leavitt was asked how many of those arrested since January 20 had a criminal record and how many were “just in the country illegally,” she replied, “All of them. Because they illegally broke our nation’s laws, and therefore, they are criminals.”
Tellingly, fewer than half of the 8,200 people arrested in the first two weeks of the Trump administration had criminal convictions of any kind. And of the approximately 4,400 detained in the first two weeks of February, more than 1,800 had never been charged with a crime.
7. Hunt for “Criminal Aliens” Everywhere
“Police, open the door! Policía, abra la puerta!”
Those words echoed across a Denver apartment complex, as ICE agents with long guns backed by BearCat tactical vehicles went door-to-door, asking residents for identification. Twenty-nine members of the Cedar Run community were rounded up in one go.
But ICE and its partners are not just hunting for undocumented immigrants in their homes. Thanks to a rule change instituted by DHS, federal agents are also pursuing their prey in locations previously deemed too “sensitive” for immigration enforcement purposes like schools, hospitals, courtrooms, and churches (though a federal judge in Maryland has already forbidden the Trump administration from carrying out such actions in certain houses of worship).
8. Collect Biometric Data
Another of Trump’s executive orders announced his intention to reauthorize the DOJ and DHS to collect DNA samples from all detained “non-United States persons.”
This DNA collection program is just one part of a vast surveillance apparatus that has been built up over the years, which now requires vast troves of biometric and biographic data to be collected, stored, and analyzed.
Increasingly, that task has fallen to for-profit firms. Since 2020, the federal government has spent an estimated $7.8 billion on such surveillance technologies, including a $96 million contract with Peter Thiel’s data-mining firm Palantir.
9. Put Immigrants in Prisons
The most recent data shows that America’s immigrant detention centers are already over capacity, with 41,500 beds and 43,759 inmates. ICE is now seeking to more than triple that capacity.
Trump pledged, on Day One, that he would allocate “all legally available resources” to immigrant detention, evidently including America’s prisons. In February, the Federal Bureau of Prisons took in the first ICE detainees at facilities in Atlanta, Los Angeles, Miami, Philadelphia, and elsewhere.
The policy also embraces military bases. The Northern Command is currently “providing facilities at Buckley Space Force Base… to enable [ICE] to stage and process criminal aliens within the US.”
10. Privatize Immigrant Detention
More than 90% of such detainees are already overseen by private contractors. Now, ICE is planning to warehouse thousands more by leasing mobile structures from a shipping container company.
And a new plan, floated by former Blackwater CEO Erik Prince, would sell the government “outside assistance” in the form of privatized “processing camps,” along with a “small army” of private citizens with the power to arrest and detain immigrants.
For the prison industry, the deportation drive has proven to be a profitable enterprise indeed. “This is truly one of the most exciting periods in my career,” said CoreCivic’s CEO on a recent call with investors.
11. Bring Back Family Detention
During the first Trump administration, America was haunted by the specter of immigrant children in cages. Now, the architect of the president’s “zero-tolerance” policy and recently appointed “border czar” Tom Homan plans to revive family detention on a whole new scale.
Family detention centers, according to the Detention Watch Network, have a “well-documented history of negligence and abuse.” Despite that sordid history, ICE is reportedly readying a “Request for Proposal” (RFP) for “detention facilities intended specifically for families.”
At the same time, the administration is making it harder for sponsors of immigrant children to free them from detention.
12. Send Asylum-Seekers to Other Countries
The deportation machine is no longer simply an American enterprise. It is now an international affair, with Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Panama already taking in thousands of “third-country deportees.”
“We have offered the USA the opportunity to outsource part of its prison system,” says El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, whose prisons are rife with human rights violations.
In Panama, hundreds of deportees of Central and East Asian origin were recently locked in a hotel, then relocated to a makeshift camp in the middle of the jungle. “It looks like a zoo, there are fenced cages,” according to one eyewitness.
13. Designate Gangs as “Foreign Terrorist Organizations”
One of the president’s most egregious orders asserts that alleged gang affiliations are sufficient to warrant a “terrorist” designation.
Declaring it “time for America to wage war on the cartels,” Trump has specifically targeted Mexican, Central American, and Venezuelan nationals suspected of having ties to the drug cartels, Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13), or the Tren de Aragua gang, seeking their “expedited removal” or their “total elimination.”
The same order signals the president’s intention to invoke the Alien Enemies Act, a wartime law dating to 1798, which would subject “all natives, citizens, denizens, or subjects” of a “hostile” nation to being “apprehended, restrained, secured, and removed, as alien enemies.”
14. Deport International Students and Workers Who Protest U.S. Policy
“To all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we put you on notice: come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you.” So warned the statement accompanying the president’s January 29 executive order, which singled out supposedly “pro-Hamas aliens and left-wing radicals” in higher education for “removal.”
Authorities have evidently already begun implementing that order, with reports of Arab students facing deportation for participating in pro-Palestine protests. Over the weekend, ICE agents showed up at the door of Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian activist at Columbia University whose green card had reportedly been revoked by the Trump administration. While in government custody, Khalil was disappeared for several days.
“I’ve seen enough,” says Abed Ayoub, executive director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, “to know that targeting is happening.”
15. Freeze Refugee Admissions
“Refugee arrivals to the United States have been suspended until further notice.” That was the message on January 21 from the Office of Refugee Resettlement, now under the leadership of a senior ICE official. With a stroke of the pen, President Trump has frozen America’s Refugee Admissions Program.
In so doing, he has left at least 10,000 refugees in legal limbo, while abandoning hundreds of thousands more to their fates in places like Afghanistan, the Congo, and Myanmar.
Ultimately, the president would make one exception to the rule—for white South Africans. An executive order signed on February 7 would “promote the resettlement of Afrikaner refugees” as a protected class.
16. Terminate Temporary Protected Status
Under the new administration’s policies, hundreds of thousands of Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, Ukrainians, and Venezuelans, among others, are set to lose their Temporary Protected Status (TPS)—a form of humanitarian parole that permitted asylum-seekers from those countries to continue living and working in the U.S.
Citizenship and Immigration Services has announced an “administrative pause” on all pending parole requests, while DHS, claiming parole is a right “to which no alien is entitled,” has authorized its agents to strip immigrants of such protections.
ICE agents have already started making arrests of TPS holders in Texas.
17. Undermine the Principle of Birthright Citizenship
Of all the president’s orders, the most consequential for citizens is the one that would rescind birthright citizenship, which would deny the rights guaranteed by the 14th Amendment to “persons born or naturalized in the U.S.”
In practice, it would mean stripping citizenship rights from children born here to mothers who are “unlawfully present” or whose presence is “lawful but temporary.”
For now, the order has been blocked by a Seattle judge’s injunction, but it will undoubtedly fall to the Supreme Court to decide its fate (and the fate of the Constitution of which it’s a part).
18. Investigate Citizens Who Would Defend Immigrant Rights
As it happens, immigrants and their American-born children are not the only ones in the crosshairs. Federal agents are now actively soliciting bids for “internet-based threat risk mitigation and monitoring services” in order to surveil suspected political enemies on social media.
That initiative is part of what could become a coast-to-coast crackdown. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has, ominously enough, launched a “formal investigation” into a local radio station, the San Francisco-based KCBS 740 AM, for reporting on the whereabouts of ICE agents.
And only recently, Tom Homan, designated the “border czar” by President Trump, invited the Department of Justice to investigate Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), reportedly in retaliation for a “Know Your Rights” training session held under the auspices of her office.
19. Punish “Sanctuary” cities, Counties, and States
On Day One of the president’s second term, the White House announced that it was going on the warpath against “sanctuary” jurisdictions, where local laws place limits on the involvement of law enforcement in the business of immigration.
Since then, the Sanctuary Cities Enforcement Working Group within the Office of the Associate Attorney General has been engaged in an all-out lawfare campaign against cities, counties, and states suspected of being insufficiently cooperative.
And on February 19, Trump signed yet another executive order cutting off federal funding for such jurisdictions, so that “federal payments to States and localities do not, by design or effect, abet so-called ‘sanctuary’ policies.”
20. Manipulate the Truth
All the while, the deportation machine’s defenders have been seriously manipulating the truth.
First, ICE has turned images of inmates in captivity into a televised spectacle, with federal agents bringing film crews and TV celebrities with them for ride-alongs, even as they covered up evidence of their more controversial tactics.
Second, the agency has attempted to make itself look better by rewriting history and gaming the Google algorithm by manipulating the timestamps on thousands of press releases from the first Trump administration.
Finally, ICE has scrubbed all mention of the foreign nationals held in Guantanamo from its public communications. For days on end, 177 detainees effectively disappeared.
This is the fate envisioned by the architects of the deportation machine for America’s “tired,” its “poor,” its “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”
In the end, however, such an apparatus has a potentially fatal flaw. In order to function effectively, millions and millions of people must be willing to go along with it.
The moment too many Americans cease to cooperate, that machinery will begin to break down in a serious fashion.
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