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    Trump Administration Tied Migrants to Gang Based Largely on Clothes or Tattoos, Papers Show

    The Trump administration has granted itself the authority to summarily deport Venezuelan migrants accused of being members of a violent street gang on the basis of little more than whether they have tattoos or have worn clothing associated with the criminal organization, new court papers show.The papers suggest that the administration has set a low bar for seeking the removal of migrants whom officials have described as belonging to the street gang, Tren de Aragua. This month, the White House ordered the deportation of more than 100 people suspected of being members of the gang under a powerful wartime statute, the Alien Enemies Act, and have denied them any due process to challenge the allegations against them.In the court papers, submitted over the weekend, lawyers for the Venezuelan migrants produced a government document, titled “Alien Enemy Validation Guide,” that laid out a series of criteria administration officials are required to meet to designate the men as members of Tren de Aragua.The document established a scoring system for deciding whether the migrants were in fact members of the gang, which is often referred to as TdA, asserting that eight points were required for any individual to be identified as a member.According to the document, any migrant who admitted to being a member of the gang was assigned 10 points, meaning that they were automatically deemed to belong to the group and were subject to immediate deportation under the Alien Enemies Act.But the document also asserts that officials can assign four points to a migrant simply for having “tattoos denoting membership/loyalty to TDA” and another four points if law enforcement agents decide that the person in question “displays insignia, logos, notations, drawings, or dress known to indicate allegiance to TDA.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Trump Deportation Fight Reaches Supreme Court

    The Trump administration asked the justices to allow it to use a wartime law to continue deportations of Venezuelans with little or no due process.The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court on Friday to allow it to use a rarely invoked wartime law to continue to deport Venezuelans with little to no due process.The emergency application arrived at the court after a federal appeals court kept in place a temporary block on the deportations. In its application to the Supreme Court, lawyers for the administration argued that the matter was too urgent to wait for the case to wind its way through the lower courts.In the government’s application, acting Solicitor General Sarah M. Harris said the case presented “fundamental questions about who decides how to conduct sensitive national-security-related operations in this country.”“The Constitution supplies a clear answer: the president,” Ms. Harris wrote. “The Republic cannot afford a different choice.”The case will offer a major early test for how the nation’s highest court will confront President Trump’s aggressive efforts to deport of millions of migrants and his hostile posture toward the courts. Mr. Trump has called for impeaching a lower-court judge who paused his deportations.The case hinges on the legality of an executive order signed by Mr. Trump that invokes the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. The order uses the law to target people believed to be Venezuelan gang members in the United States.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    A Video From Tufts Captures the Fear and Aggression in Trump’s Crackdown

    The tactics on display in the arrest of Rumeysa Ozturk were not new — plainclothes officers, faces obscured — but as ICE actions ramp up, scrutiny may increase.Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish citizen and a Muslim, was heading out to break her Ramadan fast with friends Tuesday night when she was detained by agents from the Department of Homeland Security.The security video looked like a scene from an undercover sting operation against a 30-year-old Turkish graduate student in her white coat and backpack.Rumeysa Ozturk was walking down a street in Somerville, Mass., on Tuesday when she was surrounded by federal agents wearing dark sweatshirts, some of their faces obscured by black masks. As they pulled off her backpack and handcuffed her, the terrified student let out a cry. One officer explained, “We’re the police.”As the Trump administration ramps up its deportation efforts, critics say tourists, foreign students and other legal immigrants are being subjected to aggressive arrest tactics usually reserved for criminal suspects. They have been swarmed by teams of masked agents in masks, zip-tied and bundled into unmarked vehicles.The tactics are not particularly new. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials declined to answer questions about tactics on Thursday, but former officials said federal immigration agents do wear street clothes to avoid giving away their presence before an arrest. They also can wear face coverings to avoid being singled out and doxxed online.Deborah Fleischaker, a former ICE chief of staff under the Biden administration, said that plainclothes ICE agents have long been allowed to detain undocumented immigrants, though they are required to show their badges when making such arrests.What is shifting are the targets — immigrants with valid visas and legal status. In Ms. Ozturk’s case, supporters say she appears to have merely been a co-author of an editorial in a student newspaper criticizing Tufts’s support for Israel.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    What We Know About the Detentions of Student Protesters

    The Trump administration is looking to deport pro-Palestinian students who are legally in the United States, citing national security. Critics say that violates free speech protections.Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that the State Department under his direction had revoked the visas of more than 300 people and was continuing to revoke visas daily.Pool photo by Nathan HowardThe Trump administration is trying to deport pro-Palestinian students and academics who are legally in the United States, a new front in its clash with elite schools over what it says is their failure to combat antisemitism.The White House asserts that these moves — many of which involve immigrants with visas and green cards — are necessary because those taken into custody threaten national security. But some legal experts say that the administration is trampling on free speech rights and using lower-level laws to crack down on activism.Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Thursday that the State Department under his direction had revoked the visas of more than 300 people and was continuing to revoke visas daily. He did not specify how many of those people had taken part in campus protests or acted to support Palestinians.Mr. Rubio gave that number at a news conference, after noting that the department had revoked the visa of a Turkish graduate student at Tufts University. He did not give details on the other revocations.Immigration officials are known to have pursued at least nine people in apparent connection to this effort since the start of March.The detentions and efforts to deport people who are in the country legally reflect an escalation of the administration’s efforts to restrict immigration, as it also seeks to deport undocumented immigrants en masse.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Un tribunal de apelaciones mantiene el bloqueo de las deportaciones que invocan la Ley de Enemigos Extranjeros

    El tribunal dijo que, aunque se necesitaban más argumentos, los abogados de los migrantes probablemente tendrían éxito en sus alegaciones de que a los venezolanos se les había denegado el debido proceso.Un tribunal federal de apelaciones de Washington mantuvo el miércoles, por el momento, el bloqueo del uso por parte del gobierno de Donald Trump de una ley invocada de manera inusual para tiempos de guerra para deportar sumariamente a migrantes venezolanos acusados de pertenecer a una violenta banda.En una votación de 2 a 1, un panel del Tribunal de Apelaciones de Estados Unidos para el Circuito del Distrito de Columbia dijo que era probable que los migrantes venezolanos tuvieran éxito en sus alegaciones de que el gobierno no puede utilizar la ley de guerra, la Ley de Enemigos Extranjeros, para trasladarlos sumariamente a una prisión en El Salvador sin una audiencia.“El plan de expulsión del gobierno niega a los demandantes siquiera un hilo del debido proceso, aunque el gobierno reconozca su derecho a la revisión judicial de su expulsión”, escribió la jueza Patricia A. Millett.La decisión asestó un duro golpe a los esfuerzos del gobierno de Trump por impulsar su programa de migración mediante la ley de guerra, pero la orden subyacente expirará de todos modos dentro de unos días. Es probable que el juez James E. Boasberg, presidente del Tribunal Federal de Distrito de Washington, vuelva a pronunciarse sobre la conveniencia de dictar una orden judicial de mayor duración.A mediados de marzo, Boasberg dictó una orden de restricción que prohibía al gobierno de Trump utilizar la Ley de Enemigos Extranjeros para expulsar sumariamente a los venezolanos que, según él, pertenecen a la banda Tren de Aragua. Su orden no prohíbe al gobierno detener a esos hombres ni deportarlos tras las audiencias previstas en la ley de migración usual.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    ICE Agents Detain University of Alabama Doctoral Student

    A spokeswoman for the school said the detainment occurred off campus, but it was not immediately clear why the student had been targeted.A doctoral student at the University of Alabama was detained by federal immigration authorities, the university said in a statement on Wednesday, one of more than half a dozen students who have been targeted by the Trump administration in recent weeks.The student was not named by the school, but online records from Immigration and Customs Enforcement indicate that Alireza Doroudi, an Iranian citizen, was detained by the agency. Alex House, a spokeswoman with the University of Alabama, which is in Tuscaloosa, Ala., said that the student was detained off campus. It was not clear why the student was targeted, and U.S. immigration officials did not immediately respond to questions on Wednesday evening.Earlier this month, Mahmoud Khalil, a recent Columbia University graduate and leader of pro-Palestinian campus demonstrations who has permanent U.S. residency, was arrested by federal immigration officers in New York. Though he has not been charged with any crime, the Trump administration has described comments made by Mr. Khalil as antisemitic and argued that he should be deported.And on Tuesday, Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish doctoral student at Tufts University in Massachusetts who had a student visa, was taken into federal custody. Sunil Kumar, the president of Tufts University, wrote in an email to students, staff and faculty members on Tuesday night that Tufts administrators had been told the student’s visa had been terminated.The Crimson White, a student-run newspaper at the University of Alabama, first reported on the detainment of Mr. Doroudi on Wednesday afternoon.According to a LinkedIn page listed as belonging to Mr. Doroudi, he studied mechanical engineering at the University of Alabama and specialized in metallurgical engineering, which focuses on metals used to produce industrial products. Last year, he wrote on LinkedIn that he was “thrilled to share” his first published paper as a Ph.D. researcher. More

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    Venezuela Accepts Flight Carrying Deportees From U.S. for First Time in Weeks

    The Trump administration sent a flight carrying deportees from the United States to Venezuela on Sunday, the first such flight since the Venezuelan government reached an agreement with the Trump administration on Saturday to resume accepting them.Diosdado Cabello, Venezuela’s interior minister, invited journalists to an airport near Caracas, the capital, on Sunday at 8 p.m. for the arrival of the flight, which the government said was part of what it is calling the Return to the Homeland. The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees U.S. Immigration and Customs, confirmed that a deportation flight to Venezuela had landed and that it was carrying 199 people.The Trump administration has made it a priority to get the Venezuelan government to agree to accept flights carrying people deported from the United States. In recent years, hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans have entered the country amid a historic surge in migration, and during his campaign, President Trump vowed to carry out mass deportations and to send home migrants.However, because the United States has limited diplomatic relations with the autocratic regime of Nicolás Maduro, the U.S. government has not been able to send regular deportation flights to Venezuela.After briefly agreeing to accept flights after Mr. Trump took office, Mr. Maduro ceased doing so weeks ago, after the Trump administration revoked a Biden-era policy that had allowed more oil to be produced in Venezuela and exported.Mr. Maduro then came under intense pressure from the Trump administration. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on social media that Venezuela would face new, “severe and escalating” sanctions if it refused to accept its repatriated citizens. This weekend, it announced it would take flights again beginning on Sunday.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    Venezuela Says It Will Resume Accepting U.S. Deportation Flights

    Venezuela announced Saturday that it had reached an agreement with the Trump administration to resume accepting deportation flights carrying migrants who were in the United States illegally, with the first one landing as soon as Sunday.Part of Venezuela’s willingness to accept the flights appeared related to the plight of Venezuelan migrants whom the Trump administration recently sent to notorious prisons in El Salvador with little to no due process. In a statement on Saturday, a representative for the Venezuelan government said: “Migration isn’t a crime, and we will not rest until we achieve the return of all of those in need and rescue our brothers kidnapped in El Salvador.”The White House did not respond to a request for comment Saturday, though one of the president’s close allies, Richard Grenell, said earlier this month that the Venezuelans had agreed to accept the flights.Venezuela’s autocratic leader, Nicolás Maduro, suspended the deportation cooperation after the Trump administration revoked a Biden-era policy that allowed more oil to be produced in Venezuela and exported.Since the suspension of the flights, Mr. Maduro has come under intense pressure from the Trump administration, which has been pressing various Latin American nations to take in more deportees. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on social media that Venezuela would face new “severe and escalating” sanctions if it refused to accept its repatriated citizens.Venezuelans have crossed the U.S.-Mexico border in record numbers in recent years, in response to the economic and social crisis consuming the nation, which Mr. Maduro blames on U.S. sanctions against his regime.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More