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    Judge orders release of hundreds arrested during Chicago immigration raids

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    A federal judge has ordered the release of hundreds of people who were arrested over the last few months in the Chicago area amid the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration raids across the city.On Wednesday, US district judge Jeffrey Cummings ordered the justice department to produce a list showing which of the 615 possible class members are still in custody by 19 November, the Chicago Tribune reports.According to Cummings, he would allow the members’ release on a $1,500 bond as long as they have no criminal history or prior removal order. The ACLU of Illinois said that the order will mean the immediate release of 13 people who have been detained by federal officials.As part of Wednesday’s order, Cummings also prohibited the government from pressuring detainees to agree to voluntary deportation while their cases are pending, the Chicago Tribune added.The order comes after Donald Trump’s Operation Midway Blitz launched a series of aggressive immigration raids across Chicago during which federal agents have been accused of using excessive force against protesters including deploying tear gas and pepper spray.In a statement to the Guardian, ACLU’s Illinois chapter hailed Cummings’ decision, with its deputy legal director Michelle Garcia noting the 13 immediate releases.“In addition, more than 600 additional individuals may be released in a week on bond or ankle monitoring, while the parties determine if their arrests violated the consent decree,” Garcia added, referencing a 2022 consent decree that had been previously established concerning warrantless arrests in the Chicago area.The ACLU and the National Immigrant Justice Center had filed a lawsuit over allegations that federal agents violated the 2022 agreement by issuing warrantless arrests amid the latest immigration crackdowns across the city.Garcia went on to say: “Most importantly, the court committed to enforcing our agreement with the federal government – a step that creates a pathway for even more of the hundreds of people illegally arrested and detained during Operation Midway Blitz to be released. The court is holding ICE and CBP accountable for breaking the law.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMeanwhile, justice department lawyer William Weiland described Cummings’ decision as “highly significant” and requested that he halt any release order so he could consult with his superiors, the Chicago Tribune reported. Weiland further noted that at least 12 of the 615 individuals posed a substantial security concern and that the government needed more time to complete their vetting, the outlet added.Cummings has directed both the plaintiffs and defendants to file a status report by 21 November.Just last month, a coalition of immigration advocates – led by the Illinois chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union and the MacArthur Justice Center – filed a lawsuit against federal authorities, alleging “torturous” conditions at an ICE facility in the Chicago area. More

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      Texas’s Eagle Pass voters turned to Trump. A year later, some have doubts

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      Along southern Texas, the Rio Grande forms the US-Mexico border, an arrangement established after the end of the Mexican-American war. Eagle Pass, which had been known as El Paso del Águila, became the first US settlement on the Rio Grande.Swimming across the river has remained treacherous ever since. But migrants never stopped risking their lives to set foot on US soil – and in 2023, those numbers reach record highs as Eagle Pass, the seat of Maverick county, became the epicenter of growing backlash over the Biden administration’s immigration policies.In 2024, for the first time in a century, the Hispanic-majority border county voted for a Republican: Donald Trump. Trump won 14 out of 18 counties along the southern border, gaining the most support there of any Republican in three decades. But he made his biggest gains in Maverick, with 59% of the votes, increasing his support by 14% from 2020.While many supported Trump’s policies on border security, one year later some residents in Eagle Pass are increasingly uncomfortable with the tactics the administration has used across the country in keeping with its mass deportation agenda. Since Trump’s inauguration, federal agents have disrupted communities as they arrest parents who are with their children, show up at schools or daycare facilities, and accidentally sweep up US citizens.The intensity of the national crackdown is jarring for residents like Manuel Mello III who have been on the frontlines of border issues for decades. The chief of the Eagle Pass fire department, Mello explained that border crossings have always been part of the city’s history.Mello said his grandmother would pack food and water for those migrants that passed by. She would give them las bendiciones, or blessings in Spanish, and send them off. But what he saw at the Rio Grande in the last year of the Biden administration was unlike anything he had witnessed in his 33 years in the fire department.“We would get between 30 to 60 emergency calls a day about migrants crossing the river with a lot of injuries, some with broken femurs or this lady who had an emergency childbirth,” Mello said.In all 2024, the Eagle Pass fire department received more than 400 emergency calls and reported eight drownings. This year, the department has responded to fewer than 100 calls and reported only three drownings, according to numbers shared with the Guardian.“Now Eagle Pass has gone back to normal, but this is still a broken system. Because you’re deporting people doesn’t mean that you’re fixing it,” Mello said.A mile away, Ricardo Lopez and a group of friends gathered at a McDonald’s, as they do every week, to discuss some of the challenges facing Eagle Pass, a town in which 28,o00 people live.Not long after ordering coffee, Lopez and his friends, all bilingual men of Mexican descent, realized it has been almost a year since the last elections. They remembered the evolution of what was then an extraordinary series of events: from thousands of migrants swimming across the Rio Grande each day to foreign journalists wandering the town’s streets and Texas national guard troops grabbing lunch at local restaurants.“I think most people that live here can agree that it was the illegal immigration that was causing all the problems and that [Joe] Biden didn’t respond to the needs of the border,” said Lopez, 79, who recently ran for city council in Eagle Pass and lost. “After the last election I asked some of my friends, why did you vote for Trump? And they put it back to me: don’t you see what is happening? Though I don’t like the guy, he fixed the problem.”Just hours after taking office for a second time, Trump signed an order declaring a national emergency that allowed additional US troops to arrive at the southern border. But Trump didn’t only try to cut down on illegal immigration. The administration also terminated a mobile phone app created under Biden known as CBP One, which had allowed tens of thousands of people waiting in Mexico to cross into the US legally and apply for asylum.Since then, residents like Lopez have seen a dramatic change in Eagle Pass.At the height of the spike in migration in December of 2023, the border patrol recorded over 2,300 crossings a day in the Del Rio sector, home to Eagle Pass. In September of this year, it averaged just 30 crossings a day there, government data shows.Joshua Blank, research director of the Texas Politics project, a nonpartisan polling initiative by the University of Texas at Austin, said Maverick county was a reflection of broader political dynamics in the state, where Republicans were seeking to expand their appeal in blue-collar areas, including among Latinos.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Texas is a changing competitive landscape and more diverse than the country as a whole. If you try to appeal to Hispanics based on their Hispanicness, you might be missing the mark. And I think Democrats have probably failed in engaging with this group of people,” Blank said.Shortly after Biden entered the White House, Texas’s governor, Greg Abbott, had also launched Operation Lone Star in a bid to deter illegal immigration. The effort quickly raised concerns about its tactics, including the busing of thousands of migrants to Chicago, New York and Washington DC.As part of the initiative, an 80-acre base camp was built in Eagle Pass to house 1,800 Texas national guard soldiers. Troops deployed there by Texas and other Republican-led states have been seen standing on the US side of the border setting up coils of razor wire along the banks of the Rio Grande, ordering migrants to swim back to Mexico.Texas says Operation Lone Star had led to more than 500,000 apprehensions of undocumented people.On a recent afternoon, the Guardian observed armed Texas national guard troops walking and watching over the US-Mexico border atop shipping containers. No migrants were seen crossing the river from Mexico. In Piedras Negras, there wasn’t razor wire preventing access to the Rio Grande.While the migration dynamics have changed at the border, some longtime residents are not just concerned about the impact on people. They’re also worried about the degradation of the environment as a result of Trump and Abbott’s crackdown.Abbott used a natural disaster declaration to install floating buoys separated by saw-blades in the river as a part of Operation Lone Star. Shortly after, Jessie Fuentes, the owner of a kayaking company in Eagle Pass, filed a lawsuit, seeking to stop the installation of floating barriers.“The river was part of my grandfather’s upbringing, my father’s upbringing and mine, more than 200 years of experience as a family, and now it’s been mistreated with this militarization,” said Fuentes.“The river can’t defend itself so I sued the Texas government.” More

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      UK commentator detained by ICE after Israel criticism to be released, family says

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      The family of British political commentator Sami Hamdi, who was detained by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in late October while on a speaking tour in the US, say he is set to be released and will be able to “return home soon”.“The government has agreed to release Sami,” the family said in a statement on Monday. “He will be able to return home soon insha’Allah.”Hamdi was detained on 26 October at San Francisco international airport. At the time, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (Cair) said his detention appeared to be in retaliation for the Muslim political commentator’s criticism of Israel while touring the US, calling it a “blatant affront to free speech”, and called for his release.Later on 26 October, the Department of Homeland Security spokesperson, Tricia McLaughlin, said that Hamdi’s visa had been revoked and that he was in “ICE custody pending removal”.“Under President Trump, those who support terrorism and undermine American national security will not be allowed to work or visit this country,” McLaughlin said.In a separate statement that same day, the state department said that the US “has no obligation to host foreigners who support terrorism and actively undermine the safety of Americans. We continue to revoke the visas of persons engaged in such activity”.The Guardian reported last month that the US officials appeared to be referencing remarks Hamdi made following the 7 October 2023 Hamas attacks on Israel, as on 27 October, the DHS shared a video clip by the pro-Israel group Memri, in which Hamdi was recorded saying that Palestinians should “celebrate their victory” and asked if they had felt “euphoria” over what had taken place.Hamdi later sought to clarify his remarks. In another speaking engagement several days after the Hamas attacks he said: “We don’t celebrate blood lust, we don’t celebrate death and we don’t celebrate war” adding that “what Muslims are celebrating is not war, they’re celebrating the revival of a cause – a just cause – that everybody thought was dead, this is an important distinction … I don’t celebrate war, I don’t celebrate death.”In an interview with the Guardian in late October, Hamdi’s wife called the allegations against her husband “outrageous” and said the videos were “edited in a way to frame Sami in a horrible light and produced by an organization that is very well known to be anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, Islamophobic and out there to target people who are speaking up against the genocide against Palestinians”.On Monday, the California chapter of Cair, whose legal team has been representing Hamdi in court along with attorneys from the Muslim Legal Fund of America and The HMA Law Firm, confirmed in a statement that Hamdi had accepted an offer to leave the US voluntarily.They added that the immigration charging document filed “in his case alleged only a visa overstay – after the government revoked his visa without cause and without prior notice – and never identified any criminal conduct or security grounds”.“This agreement establishes that the government does not consider Hamdi a danger to the community or to national security,” Cair said.The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request from comment from the Guardian. More

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      How Mamdani is defying immigrant expectations by embracing his identity: ‘His boldness resonates’

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      Across the country, Donald Trump’s crackdown on immigrants has shaken neighbourhoods, torn apart families and engendered a sense of panic among communities. But in New York, on Tuesday night, Zohran Mamdani, the first Muslim mayor of New York, and an immigrant from Uganda, chose to underline his identity. “New York will remain a city of immigrants: a city built by immigrants, powered by immigrants and, as of tonight, led by an immigrant,” he told an ecstatic crowd at Paramount theater in Brooklyn.The son of a Muslim father and a Hindu mother, he was born in Kampala, raised in New York, and identifies as a democratic socialist. Almost every aspect of Mamdani’s identity had been an issue of contention during the election. Earlier this week, the Center for Study of Organized Hate published a report highlighting the surge in Islamophobic comments online between July and October, most of which labelled Mamdani as an extremist or terrorist.Two days before the election, a Super Pac supporting Andrew Cuomo had run an ad depicting Mamdani in front of the Twin Towers crashing down on 9/11. Earlier, it had artificially thickened and enlarged Mamdani’s beard to make him appear more menacing on a flyer circulated around the city. Towards the end of October, a tearful Mamdani had addressed these accusations in a moving speech in the Bronx. He vowed that as an immigrant, and especially as a Muslim: “I will no longer be in the shadows.”On Tuesday night in Brooklyn, he drove that point home: “I am Muslim. I am a democratic socialist. And most damning of all, I refuse to apologize for any of this.”Minhaj Khan, who works with the Indian American Muslim Council of North America, a New Jersey organisation that focuses on the tri-state area, told me what “Zohran offers is something different than any other Muslim candidate who fought an election anywhere in the United States: he took a pretty bold stand against the ill that is spoken about Islam and Muslims in this country and his boldness actually resonates a lot with the community right now.”“I think the way that he is not diminishing his identity and all the parts of his experience that have driven him to be pushing his affordability platform is huge,” said Alina Shen, the organising director of CAAAV Voice, the sibling organisation of Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence, which played a crucial part in engaging South Asian residents of the city in Mamdani’s campaign. “I think it’s part of what made him stand out as a political candidate, that he’s not changing who he actually is.”Mamdani also started his victory speech by quoting Eugene Debs, the American socialist who was the son of French immigrants, and borrowed the hopefulness for a new dawn in New York City from Jawaharlal Nehru’s famous address to Indians on the eve of the country’s independence: “A moment comes, but rarely in history, when we step out from the old to the new, when an age ends, and when the soul of a nation, long suppressed, finds utterance.”Khan, who moved to the US from India in the 1990s, said he was “proud” to hear Mamdani quoting Nehru from the podium. “Nehru was a man who brought everyone together,” Khan told me. “At the time of partition, it was a very vicious environment in India, and in that moment, Nehru stood up as a secular leader, brought people together.”In Khan’s eyes, Mamdani offers something similar: “Zohran’s campaign has shown how you can bring together Jews and Muslims and Hindus and Christians in this highly divisive time in this country.”View image in fullscreenMamdani’s own parents are both children of the Nehruvian age of Indian democracy, steeped in the ideas of pluralism.His father Mahmood Mamdani, a scholar of colonialism and a professor at Columbia University, was born to Gujarati Muslim parents in Mumbai. But he grew up in Kampala, Uganda, and first came to the United States on a scholarship to study at the University of Pittsburgh and became involved in the civil rights movement; he was among the students arrested for travelling to Montgomery, Alabama, from northern universities during the bus boycott led by Martin Luther King Jr.After finishing his master’s at Tufts University, Mahmood moved back to Uganda, only to be expelled from his adopted country as part of Idi Amin’s expulsion of the Indian diaspora, ending up at a refugee shelter behind the Kensington Palace in London. In the 1980s, Amin’s successor, Milton Obote stripped Mahmood of his Ugandan citizenship for criticizing government policies. His status as a thinker and writer only rose, culminating in a tenured professorship at Columbia University, where he continues to work today.The celebrated filmmaker Mira Nair, Zohran’s mother, was born in Orissa, on the other side of the subcontinent from Mumbai, in a family of high-ranking bureaucrats. While in her teens, she turned down a full scholarship to Cambridge University – the scars of British colonialism were still fresh in the Indian psyche – and instead went to attend Harvard. She spent her summers in New York city among the artists and writers, developing an affinity for theater and films. Her first forays into filmmaking explored the lives of residents of Old Delhi, an Indian newspaper dealer in New York, and strippers and street-children of Mumbai.It was while researching her second feature film, Mississippi Masala, which follows the lives of Ugandan Indians displaced by Idi Amin, that Nair first met Mahmood, as part of her research. In 1991, the same year the film was released, the couple got married, and had a son: Zohran Kwame Mamdani, who got his middle name in honour of Kwame Nkrumah, the Ghanaian revolutionary who became the country’s first president.Zohran spent the first five years of his life in Kampala, living in a bungalow overlooking Lake Victoria, where part of Mississippi Masala was shot. In a 2002 profile of Nair in The New Yorker, he was introduced as “Nair’s talkative doe-eyed son, Zohran, who exudes the charm of the well-loved, [and] is known by dozens of coinages, including Z, Zoru, Fadoose, and Nonstop Mamdani”.Like his father, Zohran lived an itinerant childhood. After his father moved to New York in a faculty apartment close to Columbia University, Zohran, leaving behind Kampala, was enrolled in the private Bank Street School in Manhattan. Evenings were spent in Riverside Park. At home, dinner guests included Columbia scholars like Edward Said and Rashid Khalidi, close friends of his father. For high school he went to a selective public school in the Bronx, and attended college in Maine, graduating in Africana Studies in 2014.Zohran’s first meaningful brush with the desperation among the city’s working-class families came during his work as a foreclosure prevention and housing counsellor in Queens. During the 2016 presidential election, he was inspired by the campaign of Bernie Sanders, which focused on costs-of-living, affordability and healthcare. Those same issues would go on to become the bedrock of his mayoral campaign. At a town hall in Brooklyn with Sanders this September, Zohran said it was Sanders’s campaign that first exposed him to the language of democratic socialism. During his term as the representative of New York’s 36th state assembly district, his most notable work was with the taxi drivers in the city.At a time when immigrants around the country are feeling increasingly threatened under the Trump administration, as masked agents of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) stalk the streets of American cities, harassing, arresting and deporting immigrants, Zohran’s campaign has cultivated a sense of hope among the community.“We are an organization made up of immigrants,” Irene Hsu, communications and media manager at CAAAV, said. “The people who work with us, they’re cooks, they’re restaurant workers, they’re cab drivers, they’re home care workers, they’re students, they’re teachers, they’re parents, they’re elderly folks who have retired from working jobs as construction workers. It’s all these people who really run the city. And I think that Zohran’s platform, which is their own platform, is about shifting the terrain of power in this country.”On Tuesday night, as the results started to trickle in, Faidra Tzedakis, who moved to New York from Greece in 2014, went to a watch party organised by the Democratic Socialists of America in Astoria, Queens. Tzedakis became a US citizen during the summer and has been grappling with what that means.“The previous generation had the American Dream of this nice big house with a fence, and a stable nine-to-five job and that, kind of, has died,” said Tzedakis, who grew up amid the economic crisis in Greece. “It doesn’t really exist anymore.”“I think this campaign just proves that immigrants and younger people and educated people have a voice, and there’s hope: like we can change things,” she said. “So I think that the new dream is that we would live in a world where our leaders speak up and stand up for reproductive rights, against genocides, against Islamophobia and antisemitism, and do their best to protect marginalized groups like undocumented immigrants.”“We’re not afraid of the money or the establishment anymore,” she said. “And we can create a world that is just more accepting, and, yeah, loving.” More

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      DHS head reportedly authorized purchase of 10 engineless Spirit Airlines planes that airline didn’t own

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      The secretary of the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS), Kristi Noem, reportedly authorized the purchase of Spirit Airlines jets before discovering the airline didn’t actually own the planes – and that the aircraft lacked engines.The bizarre anecdote was contained in a Wall Street Journal report released on Friday, which recounted how Noem and Corey Lewandowski – who managed Donald Trump’s first winning presidential campaign – had recently arranged to buy 10 Boeing 737 aircraft from Spirit Airlines. People familiar with the situation told the paper that the two intended to use the jets to expand deportation flights – and for personal travel.Those sources also claimed Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials had cautioned them that buying planes would be far more expensive than simply expanding existing flight contracts.Complicating matters further, Spirit, which filed for bankruptcy protection for the second time, in August, did not own the jets and their engines would have had to be bought separately. The plan has since been paused, according to the Journal.Meanwhile, Democrats on the House appropriations committee said in October that during this fall’s record-long government shutdown, the DHS had already acquired two Gulfstream jets for $200m.“It has come to our attention that, in the midst of a government shutdown, the United States Coast Guard entered into a sole source contract with Gulfstream Aerospace Corporation to procure two new G700 luxury jets to support travel for you and the deputy secretary, at a cost to the taxpayer of $200m,” Democratic representatives Rosa DeLauro and Lauren Underwood wrote in a letter to the DHS.A DHS spokesperson told the Journal that parts of its reporting about the plane purchases were inaccurate but declined to provide additional clarification.Congress had previously approved Trump’s so-called “big, beautiful bill” in July, which dedicates roughly $170bn for immigration and border-related operations, a sum that makes ICE the most heavily funded law enforcement agency in the federal government.In September, the Guardian reported that the Trump administration was moving immigrants detained as part of its deportation agenda in ways that violated their constitutionally protected rights, often by plane.Leaked data reviewed from charter airline Global Crossing (GlobalX) detailed the journeys of tens of thousands of immigrants who have been shuttled around the country before deportation. More

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      An Arizona town is dreading plans to turn its prison into an ICE facility: ‘It’s morally objectionable’

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      In an Arizona town where farmers have long wrested a living off the arid land, reports that a former prison complex may be turned into an immigration detention center have sparked a fierce backlash, with residents seeing the potential transition as the latest undesirable symbol of the Trump administration’s massive escalation of immigration enforcement.The facility in Marana, a town of about 63,700 people located north of Tucson, sprawls across a flat expanse of desert studded with scrubby bushes and hardy trees. It was shuttered almost two years ago, and the Management and Training Corporation, the private company that owns it, informed the town manager of company plans to operate a detention center in the prison.During a town hall meeting on 23 October, residents crowded into a school auditorium to learn more from representatives of local government and advocacy organizations about the plan. Many attenders spoke against the jailing of immigrants amid Donald Trump’s crusade to deport as many undocumented immigrants as possible.Karla Jones, one of the attenders, said she abhorred the idea of having a nearby detention center to hold immigrants – whose only crime in many cases is lacking US legal status, a civil offense – for extended periods of time. “That’s breaking up families,” she said. “And it’s people who are paying taxes, it’s people who are working. So I don’t want my community to support that.”Federal legislation passed in July provided $45bn for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to build more detention centers for adults and children as part of a larger $75bn, four-year package for the federal agency. To vastly increase detention capacity, the federal government is relying heavily on for-profit private companies that run prisons.The Utah-based Management and Training Corporation (MTC) is one of those companies. MTC built the Marana prison in the mid-1990s, when the population in the then largely farming community was about 2,000. It was the first private prison in the state.In 2013, Arizona bought the prison for $150,000. In December 2023, the state – citing high costs and a decreasing incarcerated population – closed it. This past summer, after Arizona lawmakers rejected a bill that would have leased the prison for $1 a year to the federal government for use as an immigration detention center – MTC paid the state $15m to get it back.View image in fullscreenMarana’s town manager, Terry Rozema, said there was little the town could do to prevent the use of the building complex as a detention center. “The facility is privately owned by MTC and is already properly zoned for use as a prison or an ICE facility. As such, the town doesn’t have authority to restrict its future use as long as it meets current zoning,” Rozema said in an emailed statement.Emily Lawhead, MTC’s director of communications, declined an interview but wrote in an email that the company was “in discussions with several public agencies that may have a need for additional bed space”. ICE did not respond to questions regarding plans to use the onetime prison, but an agency spokesperson cited the need for “greater detention capacity” due to “a significant number of arrests”.MTC already operates five immigration detention centers in California, New Mexico and Texas.Its record in Arizona is spotty. In 2015, the state canceled a contract with the company after a riot at a prison it operated in the town of Kingman left more than a dozen incarcerated people and guards injured. A subsequent investigation by the Arizona department of corrections concluded that the company had “a culture of disorganization, disengagement and disregard” for state policies. MTC did not respond to the Guardian’s questions about those allegations, but the company has previously described the investigation’s findings as flawed.Jennifer Allen, a member of the board of supervisors for Pima county, where Marana is located, said that given reports about the poor conditions facing ICE detainees across the country, she and her constituents were concerned about the treatment of people in the Marana facility if it were to be converted and about oversight of the facility. She criticized the federal government for showering immigration enforcement with resources while simultaneously cutting funding for social safety net programs for older adults, children and other vulnerable populations.At the town hall, the federal government received plenty of criticism for its aggressive immigration agenda. Many attenders spoke against not just having a detention center in the vicinity, but also about the impact of social harms of the crackdown. Some residents brought signs bearing the slogan “Stop the kidnappings, protect your neighbors”, alluding to forceful arrests of immigrants in their homes, at work and in the streets.Speaking to the crowd, Tucson resident Maximiliano Torres likened the Trump administration’s detention and deportation campaign to Arizona’s 2010 Senate Bill 1070, commonly known as the “show me your papers” law that empowered police to conduct immigration enforcement. Although police can still inquire about immigration status, it’s no longer required because courts have largely struck down the law as unconstitutional.Recalling the law’s impact, Torres told the crowd: “They turned [crossing the border without authorization] into a criminal act, so they could justify putting those people in prison and forcing the federal government to pay private prisons.”While Trump has repeatedly promised immigration enforcement efforts would be focused on undocumented immigrants who have committed crimes, statistics show that those being held in detention are primarily people without criminal convictions. As of September, 71.5% of the 59,762 immigrants in detention had no criminal conviction, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University. Many convictions involved traffic violations and other minor offenses.Under the Biden administration, immigrants with strong community ties and no serious brushes with the law would generally be released and be asked to check in with ICE periodically, since the government prioritized deporting people with criminal convictions, said Jennifer Ibañez Whitlock, senior policy counsel at the National Immigration Law Center. “Now everybody gets arrested, everybody gets detained,” she said.The Trump administration has significantly expanded mandatory detention to keep immigrants in confinement during proceedings to remove them from the country, she said. “More and more often, people are just giving up and agreeing to be deported instead of sitting in jail trying to fight their case,” the attorney said.In Marana, resident Tom Flynn left the town hall clutching one of the protest signs. He detests the possibility of an immigrant detention center in his town. “No 1, it’s morally objectionable,” he said. “No 2, it’s a detriment to the overall economy; it reduces the number of people who have been in the area, it depresses home values. And it’s so obviously politically driven.”Marlis Dinning said what she heard at the town hall about the possible detention center was disturbing. “It seems like all of this has happened behind closed doors,” she said. She’s against the detention of immigrants, many of them asylum seekers who entered the country legally, and who now “have no way to get citizenship”, she said.After the town hall, Jones was feeling quite unsettled by the overall discussion. But she vowed to participate in the mounting community pressure to keep the detention center at bay. “I really hope we can stop it from opening,” she said. More

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      ICE plans to open call center to help law enforcement locate unaccompanied minors

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      US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) plans to open a new call center to help law enforcement agencies track down unaccompanied migrant children.According to a homeland security department Request for Information (RFI) notice released this week, ICE stated there was an “immediate need to establish and maintain” a call center equipped with “data-enabled technology”.The agency said the center’s purpose was to “support partner encounters in the field … focused on locating unaccompanied alien children”.The facility, slated to open in Nashville, Tennessee, will operate 24 hours a day and is expected to handle between 6,000 and 7,000 calls daily. The document did not specify why Nashville was chosen for the call center. ICE anticipates the center will open by March and reach full operational capacity by June.In the RFI, ICE also asked potential contractors to outline what kinds of “enabling technology” they would recommend to “integrate partner and alien data with our systems to maximize call efficiency and reduce call time”.In response to a Guardian request for comment, assistant homeland security secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in an emailed statement: “Your reporting is inaccurate,” without providing any details.ICE did not immediately respond to a request for comment.In addition to the planned call center, CoreCivic Inc, the nation’s second-largest private prison operator, is headquartered in Nashville. Since Donald Trump took office in January, the company has reported strong financial gains, announcing $538.2m in earnings for the second quarter of this year, a 9.8% increase over the same period last year.The surge in profits for private prison companies, along with those of technology firms such as Palantir, which recently secured a $30m contract with ICE to build a database aimed at streamlining detentions and deportations, comes amid an escalation in immigration raids nationwide. These actions have provoked fierce backlash from the public, Democratic lawmakers and civil rights groups alike.Reports of the planned ICE call center come as the Trump administration appears to have revived the practice of family separations in its renewed effort to deport millions, according to multiple cases reviewed by the Guardian. Immigration attorneys and former officials say the move is intended to pressure immigrants and asylum seekers to leave the US voluntarily.Meanwhile, in a memo obtained by the Guardian last month, the Trump administration laid out plans to offer migrant children $2,500 as a “one-time resettlement support stipend” in exchange for their self-deportation.This latest escalation builds on policies from Trump’s first term, which included a “zero-tolerance” approach that directed the justice department to prosecute anyone who crossed the border without legal status. That policy led to the separation of at least 5,500 migrant children from their parents and guardians at the US-Mexico border.After widespread backlash from the public, as well as from both Democrats and Republicans, Trump signed an executive order in 2018 to formally end the family separation policy. More

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      Armed US immigration agents drive off with toddler after arrest of father

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      Masked, heavily armed federal immigration agents arrested a US citizen in the parking lot of a Los Angeles Home Depot store, then entered his car and drove away with his toddler, who is also a US citizen, in the backseat.The child’s grandmother said the incident had left the whole family shaken. “I am devastated by what has happened to my son and demand an explanation,” she said at a press conference on Wednesday.The 32-year-old father was picked up during a major enforcement operation at the Home Depot in LA’s Cypress Park neighborhood on Tuesday morning. According to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), five undocumented immigrants were also arrested.Later that morning, Maria Avalos, the 32-year-old’s mother, got a call from an unidentified number. It was agents with the US Border Patrol, asking her to come pick up her one-year-old granddaughter. “We didn’t know what happened to her while she was in their care, and they wouldn’t give us information about when my son would be released or where he was,” Avalos said at a press conference on Wednesday.Avalos said she still has not been able to speak to her son to find out where he is being held. The incident was captured on video and first reported by the Los Angeles Times.Avalos said she had to wait for hours at an immigration office in downtown Los Angeles to take custody of her granddaughter, and was made to provide a birth certificate. “My granddaughter didn’t even know what was happening. She’s too small. She didn’t know what was happening to her father,” she said.The DHS has alleged that the 32-year-old “exited his vehicle wielding a hammer and threw rocks at law enforcement while he had a child in his car”. The agency did not respond to the Guardian’s questions about why agents drove away with the child rather than wait for another family member to come pick her up from the parking lot.The agency added: “He was arrested for assault and during his arrest a pistol was found in his car, that is reported stolen out of the state of New York. The individual has an active warrant for property damage.”Avalos did not comment on the agency’s accusations, and said that the family is searching for a lawyer to represent her son. She believes he was targeted because of the color of his skin, she said.It frightened her, she added, to later see videos from bystanders who had recorded her son’s arrest. In a video reviewed by the Guardian, bystanders are heard yelling in alarm as multiple heavily armed agents extort the father, and then enter his car and drive away. The agent in the passenger seat is holding a gun in his hands.At one moment, the father drops his weight to the ground, but masked agents pull him up and continue escorting him away from his daughter.“I was sad to see my son throw himself on the floor to stop them from taking his daughter,’ she said. “He was protecting his daughter.” She was also alarmed to see masked agents, who were heavily armed, drive away with her granddaughter. “This is something very, very frightening, because it’s not clear who these people are,” she said.Immigrants’ advocates have raised alarm about the incident, which is one of several cases where agents have arrested parents or guardians in front of their children. This summer, officials in Waltham, Massachusetts confirmed that a 13-year-old was abandoned on the street after an immigration raid. In southern California, a 19-year-old and a minor child were left behind after their father was arrested at a gas station.“Surely there is a better way of enforcing their policies in a way that does not separate families or place tender aged children like this child in questionable circumstances,” said Renee Garcia, the communications director at the legal aid nonprofit ImmDef. “I think that it’s absolutely traumatizing for a child to be placed in that situation.”“This is insane, what we are witnessing in this country,” said Jorge-Mario Cabrera, the communications director of Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles (Chirla), an advocacy organization. “This should not be happening.”Avalos said she is hoping her son will be able to return home soon. “My son is a good, quiet, hard-working person. He works in the restaurant industry and just got his new job. And his family is everything to him,” she said.“He is the best dad. And his little girl follows him wherever he goes. She is safe now, though. She needs her father. And I need my son back.” More

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      Pall of ICE spoils weekend celebrations in Chicago: ‘I think people are just scared’

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      For 40-year-old Cecilia Romero, the days before and after Halloween are not just any other holiday. It’s the time of year when she can take her kids trick-or-treating in the neighborhood she’s from – and a connection to her own past when she would go celebrate as a little girl.She remembers years of streets brimming with families and children, with street vendors selling food and cempasúchil, the marigolds that loved ones place on altars for Day of the Dead – or Día de los Muertos – from 1 to 2 November.But this year, things are much, much different – because of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids that have been happening in and around Chicago since early September.“Clearly, it’s because of ICE,” Romero said. Referring to how JB Pritzker, the Illinois governor, had unsuccessfully requested that the Trump administration pause immigration enforcement operations for the Halloween weekend which began Friday, she added: “I think people are just scared. It’s just kind of sad that kids are not allowed to have fun on a day where they should be [kids].”In the Chicago neighborhoods of Pilsen and Little Village, Halloween, All Saints Day on 1 November, and Día de los Muertos collectively play an important part in bringing the community together to celebrate, mourn and pray as a whole. This year, amid ICE enforcement and raids, the celebrations were a lot more muted. At any point throughout years past, the corridors of 18th Street in Pilsen and 26th Street in Little Village would be packed with people. Those same corridors were much more empty for hours at a time when the Halloween weekend began Friday on this occasion.Prior to Pritzker’s plea to let families celebrate Halloween, federal agents released pepper spray on 25 October in Old Irving Park in an incident that led to the cancellation of a Halloween parade. On Friday, ICE operations in Evanston got out of control, according to neighbors, close to Chute middle school. Federal agents used pepper spray and arrested three US citizens, according to NBC 5 Chicago, on allegations of “violence against law enforcement”.Marco DeSantiago, 49, grew up on Chicago’s South Side, but has been taking his kids to Pilsen for the Halloween festivities for the last 12 years. And he said the changed tone for the revelry this time was striking.“I guess the big difference this year is you could just feel [the] sadness,” DeSantiago said. “It’s a somberness, we feel personally, I could just see [it] in people’s faces. It’s not a joyous occasion.“You’re kind of doing it to keep it going for the kids but everybody, I think, is feeling pretty sad and upset.”He said that in years past more businesses and people had their doors open to trick-or-treaters – more street vendors were on the street, and the vibe was happier and more celebratory.Instead, it felt more like a solemn occasion, he said, adding: “It’s definitely a different feeling.”View image in fullscreenAt nearby soccer fields owned by the Catholic church and school St Procopius, an annual Día de los Muertos celebration featured the usual elaborately decorated altars with photos of deceased loved ones. The tributes had their favorite snacks and items they owned – rosaries or bags, or even Pond’s face cream, and the iconic orange marigolds, in some cases substituted for a plastic alternative, along with votive candles, decorated skulls, as well as many depictions of the Virgin Mary.Yet a lower attendance than usual was obvious to those who went.“It would be packed from the afternoon till the end, like there will be people coming in and out and so you can definitely see a change or a shift – but I don’t think that has to do with the [lack of] motivation or the love for the holiday,” said Isabel Hernández, 27, who was sitting next to an intricate altar for her grandmother, Lorenza Hernández. “I think it’s more so part of the fear right now of … what’s going on in the city, in the country.”Hernández feels particularly sad for people who might be mourning a recent loss – but, due to the ICE raids, might not feel comfortable or safe enough to be able to celebrate with others or partake in the traditions.“I don’t think the grieving is going to ever just go away, but I think you just have to heal with time … or be able to control it some more,” she said. “I can’t even imagine, for those that just recently lost someone … what they’re experiencing seeing people celebrating and then not being able to celebrate with others. I think that’s really hard.”Hernández’s mom, Cecilia, said that it was important for her and her loved ones to keep going with their traditional celebrations despite the pervading sadness.“One of the questions was like, ‘Should we have this event take place?’” Cecilia, 52, said. “For me personally, I was like, ‘Yes, let’s have it,’ because we don’t want what’s happening out there with ICE [to] take that away from us.”For Romero, she just wants to continue celebrating like she used to. “Hopefully, ICE will leave,” she said. “We don’t want them here. We don’t need them here. You know, our city – and I think our country – has been doing fairly well without them coming in.” More