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in US Politics‘People are scared to go out’: fear of Ice agents forces cancellation of US summer festivals
For Orlando Gutierrez in Kansas City, the thought of cancelling his community’s summer Colombian Independence Day festival first surfaced “the week after the inauguration” in January, “when the raids started happening”. The decision was rooted in “trying to be safe”, Gutierrez said. “We’re not talking about folks that are irregular in terms of their immigration status. You only have to look a certain way and speak a certain language and then you’re in danger.”For decades prior to 2025, the event had gone on interrupted – “in rain, in extreme heat” – and hosted thousands of Colombians and non-Colombians alike, Gutierrez said. “Our mission is to share our culture with people that don’t know it,” he added. “To not have the opportunity – that’s where it hurts the most.”In Donald Trump’s second term as president, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) has been historically expansionist: it now aims for an unprecedented 3,000 minimum arrests a day. Its agents have thrown undocumented people, residents with protected legal status, and even American citizens into a deportation system that increasingly does not respect due process.Out of fear of being targeted indiscriminately, cultural and musical events from coast to coast – block parties and summer concerts in California; Mexican heritage celebrations in Chicago; soccer fan watch parties in Massachusetts – have been postponed or canceled altogether. Even religious gatherings are no longer perceived as safe from Ice. In San Bernardino, California, Bishop Alberto Rojas has dispensed his congregation from the obligation to attend mass out of fear of deportation raids.Every decision to cancel is heartbreaking. In Philadelphia, Carnaval de Puebla, which was scheduled for April, made the call to cancel in February, said organizer Olga Rentería. “We believe this is not a time to celebrate,” Rentería explained, “but a time to remain united, informed, and strong.” In Los Angeles, organizers of Festival Chapín, a celebration of Guatemalan culture, have postponed the event from this August to October. “It was really hard to take that decision,” Walter Rosales, a restaurateur and one of the event’s organizers, told the Guardian. “We have a lot of attendees; more than 50,000 people every year. People have hotels, they have flights. We hire people to be there. But I think it was the best [choice.] The first thing we want is the security of the people.”View image in fullscreenRosales said he hopes that by waiting a few months, Festival Chapín can take place amid a different political climate, one in which Ice sticks to promises made by Trump to target primarily undocumented people with criminal records.But mass raids are likely to get more frequent: the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, legislation forced through Congress by Republicans and signed into law by Trump on the Fourth of July, will slash social programs while funding Ice at levels comparable to the budget of the US army.It means that even huge stars are questioning whether concerts are safe for their fans. When the Puerto Rican superstar Bad Bunny announced a recent tour that skips the continental US altogether, social media speculation centered on the notion that the artist did not want to put his fans in Ice’s crosshairs. That theorizing was in part fueled by Bad Bunny’s own dips into the wider political conversation: he’s called Ice agents “sons of bitches” on social media and his “NUEVAYoL” video – in which the Statue of Liberty is garlanded with the Puerto Rican flag – is a lovely and grand ode to New York’s immigrants.View image in fullscreenOf avoiding the US on his upcoming tour, the artist himself has only said that, after touring regularly in the US in recent years, more dates at this time were “unnecessary”. (A representative for Bad Bunny did not respond to a request for comment.)Gabriel Gonzales, the bandleader of the Los Angeles Latin music ensemble La Verdad, said some of their gigs have had to be cancelled this summer. “A lot of people are very scared to go out,” he said. “It’s kind of like the pandemic all over again.”But as La Verdad continue to perform around Los Angeles and elsewhere, Gonzales is finding new meaning in playing live amid the Trump administration’s policies.“It’s not like a rebellion,” he said. “It’s more like a resistance. As musicians, we are there to take people away for a few moments. I see communities pulling together and I feel like everything is going to be OK.”For Joyas Mestizas, a Seattle-based Mexican folk dance youth group, which cancelled their annual festival this year, the plan is to be “more creative” going forward. “But we’re not going anywhere,” said the group’s co-director, Luna Garcia. “If I have to teach kids out of my basement, I’ll do it. The kids are going to dance.”For some organizers of cultural events for Latino communities, pushing through and executing their plans despite fears of raids has become its own kind of crusade.In July, federal agents were spotted on the premises of Chicago’s National Museum of Puerto Rican Arts & Culture just days before the institution was scheduled to hold its annual Barrio Arts Festival. The museum said the agents entered the property, “refused multiple requests to present a warrant, badge, or identification”, and “informed museum staff that they were assessing entry and exit points for upcoming events that may draw undocumented attendees”.(In a statement, homeland security said agents “staged and held a quick briefing in the Museum’s parking lot in advance of an enforcement action related to a narcotics investigation”.)In response to the presence of the federal agents, the museum decided not to cancel the festival – but, rather, to ensure it would go forward without endangering its attendees. Veronica Ocasio, the museum’s director of education and programming, said that in the days before Barrio Arts, she and her team “met non-stop” in order to create “as tight a security plan as we could”. The museum is located inside Chicago’s Humboldt Park; in order to cover the park’s 200 acres, Ocasio and her co-organizers assembled a group of volunteer immigration advocates who created a trigger warning and stood guard on rotation for the entirety of the two-day festival. If Ice agents were spotted, the museum was ready to shut down the event, close the gates, and bunker in place – holding attendees inside until the agents left. The plan then called for Ocasio and other museum employees to stand out front with immigration attorneys, holding the fort.View image in fullscreenDelia Ramirez, an Illinois congresswoman, was also a key part of the museum’s plan. In order to head off potential Ice raids, Ramirez as well as other elected officials were on the premises “around the clock”, she said. “State representatives, city council folks, the mayor. All to protect constituents from homeland security.”“The president has taken away people’s healthcare so he can hire more Ice agents to terrorize communities,” added Ramirez, but that doesn’t mean “there’s no oversight or accountability. At a time where the federal government wants to harm you, we will keep each other safe”. For Ramirez, Barrio Arts Festival was “a beautiful showing of people saying to Ice, ‘not here, not now, not ever’.”Beyond her support for local cultural events, Ramirez is attempting to push back on Ice action more broadly: she’s a co-sponsor of the No Anonymity in Immigration Enforcement Act which would prohibit Ice from the now-common practice of carrying out their deportation actions while masked. “People are freaking the hell out,” she said. “They don’t know whether it’s an Ice agent who is going to criminalize them with no due process or it’s someone who wants to rob them. No other law enforcement agency does this.”Ultimately, not only did the Puerto Rican event in Chicago go on without interruption, but it was “our largest, most well attended Barrio Fest in our twenty-five year history”, Ocasio said. “We stood against intimidation and we created a blueprint for festivals in the city of Chicago.” The museum has already shared the safety plan it developed on the fly with organizers of upcoming events representing the local Colombian and Mexican communities.Ahead of New York’s Colombia Independence Day festival – held in July in Corona, a working class neighborhood in Queens – organizers were similarly concerned about the possibility of Ice raids. They took precautions by bordering off the event, marking it as private, and creating a single entrance point where they would have stopped Ice agents operating without a warrant, organizers told the Guardian. Like Chicago’s Barrio Arts Festival, they had lawyers on hand from a local legal services organization. Ultimately, like Barrio Arts, they too set a new attendance record, with around 20,000 festival goers.View image in fullscreenCatalina Cruz, a New York state assembly member who helped plan the Colombian festival, said that all the precautions she and her fellow organizers took “doesn’t explain why so many people came out – from all over the city and beyond”. She credited attendees with a certain kind of mental fortitude: “I’m not in their minds, but I don’t think they were giving a fuck about the president.”Of course, that fuzzy feeling of having put on a successful mass event for the Latino community in the era of all-pervading fear of Ice isn’t a panacea. As Cruz put it: “What would have really stopped [Ice] if they wanted to get in? As we have seen in the case of California” – where federal agents have forcefully and en masse raided parks and working farms – “not a goddam thing.”Newly flush with cash thanks to the Big Beautiful Bill, Ice is now actively recruiting waves of new agents – to, in their words, “defend the homeland” – by offering $50,000 signing bonuses and student loan forgiveness. Tom Homan, the Trump administration’s border czar, has promised to “flood the zone” with Ice agents in New York and other sanctuary cities.But on that Sunday in Queens, the Colombian festival ticked along beautifully with no sight or sound of the federal government’s aggressive deportation machine. Vendors pushed street-cart ceviche and plastic pouches full of high-octane primary-color beverages: “Coctelitos, coctelitos!” Seemingly every other person wore the powerful yellow jersey of the Colombian national soccer team. Twentysomethings salsa’d next to older family members grooving in their wheelchairs.When a performer with serious pipes sang the Star Spangled Banner, everybody perked up. When she followed it up with the national anthem of Colombia, throat-bursting singalongs broke out. After she wrapped up, the DJ smashed the ehh-ehh-EHH horns and, all together, folks chanted: “Viva Colombia! Viva Colombia!” More
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in US PoliticsTrump administration denies daily quota for immigration arrests
In a new court filing, attorneys for the Trump administration denied the existence of a daily quota for immigration arrests, despite reports and prior statements from White House officials about pursuing a goal of at least 3,000 deportations or deportation arrests per day.In May, reports from both the Guardian and Axios revealed that during a meeting with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) leaders on 21 May, the White House adviser Stephen Miller and the Department of Homeland Security secretary, Kristi Noem, demanded that immigration agents seek to arrest 3,000 people per day.Following that report, Miller appeared on Fox News in late May and stated that “under President Trump’s leadership, we are looking to set a goal of a minimum of 3,000 arrests for Ice every day.”He added that Trump “is going to keep pushing to get that number up higher each and every day”.However, in a court filing on Friday, lawyers representing the US justice department said that the Department of Homeland Security had confirmed that “neither Ice leadership nor its field offices have been directed to meet any numerical quota or target for arrests, detentions, removals, field encounters, or any other operational activities that Ice or its components undertake in the course of enforcing federal immigration law.”The filing is part of an ongoing lawsuit in southern California, where immigrant advocacy groups have sued the Trump administration, accusing it of conducting unconstitutional immigration sweeps in the Los Angeles area.In mid-July a judge issued a temporary restraining order barring immigration agents from detaining individuals based on factors such as race, occupation or speaking Spanish anywhere in the central district of California, which includes Los Angeles. On Friday, an appeals court upheld that order.Politico reported that during a hearing earlier this week in the case, the justice department lawyers were pressed on the reports regarding the alleged arrest quota, and a judge reportedly asked whether it was a “policy of the administration at this time to deport 3,000 persons per day?”.An attorney for the justice department, Yaakov Roth, reportedly responded “Not to my knowledge, your honor” per Politico.And in the government’s filing on Friday, the attorneys for the government said that the allegations of that the “government maintains a policy mandating 3,000 arrests per day appears to originate from media reports quoting a White House advisor who described that figure as a ‘goal’ that the Administration was ‘looking to set’”.“That quotation may have been accurate, but no such goal has been set as a matter of policy and no such directive has been issued to or by DHS or ICE” the attorneys added.The discrepancy was first reported by the Los Angeles Daily News and Politico.Neither DHS or Ice immediately responded to a request fro comment from the Guardian.In a statement to Politico, a White House spokesperson did not directly respond to questions about the discrepancy, but said that “the Trump Administration is committed to carrying out the largest mass deportation operation in history by enforcing federal immigration law and removing the countless violent, criminal illegal aliens that Joe Biden let flood into American communities.”A justice department spokesperson told the outlet that there is no disconnect between the DoJ’s court filings and the White House’s public statements.The spokesperson added that “the entire Trump administration is united in fully enforcing our nation’s immigration laws and the DoJ continues to play an important role in vigorously defending the president’s deportation agenda in court.”At various points during his 2024 election campaign, Trump claimed that he would target between 15 and 20 million people who are undocumented in the US for deportation.As of 2022, there were 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the US. More
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in US PoliticsGeorgia detainee with prosthetic legs who objected to flooded cell sent to solitary
A Liberian-born man detained by Ice in Georgia was put in solitary confinement after complaining about flooding in the common area outside his cell at the Stewart detention center that he said was potentially dangerous for his electronic prosthetic legs, the Guardian can reveal.Rodney Taylor recently spent three days in what CoreCivic calls a “restrictive housing unit” at Georgia’s Stewart detention center, after refusing to enter his cell because faulty air conditioning had left the floor in the area outside his cell covered with about an inch of water. That would be a potential disaster for Taylor, since his battery-powered, microprocessor-controlled prosthetic legs can’t get wet.It was only the latest episode for Taylor, a double amputee, since Ice agents detained him at his Loganville, Georgia, home on 15 January. His problems illustrate how ill-prepared the Trump administration is to meet the needs of immigration detainees with disabilities as they carry out mass deportation plans.“They don’t see you as an individual, but as someone being deported,” Taylor said. Taylor’s fiancee, Mildred Pierre, called the experience of monitoring his wellbeing during the last six months like “receiving blow after blow”.The Guardian first reported on Taylor’s case on 25 April. Since then, his challenges in detention have included the screws coming out of his prosthetic legs, causing him to fall and injure his hand, and being unable to obtain new, fitted prosthetic legs at a nearby clinic as a result of them being delivered without a charger for their battery. Then, once his fiancee brought a charger, a second appointment at the clinic two months later left him without results because the clinic was not familiar with Taylor’s model of prosthetics.The immigration detention system “can’t care for anybody beyond basic medical needs”, said Amy Zeidan, a professor of emergency medicine at Atlanta’s Emory University who has researched healthcare in the immigration detention system. The result: “mismanagement bordering on medical neglect” in cases like Taylor’s, she said.View image in fullscreenMeanwhile, Pierre has spent months “trying to figure out – who do I call? Who’s going to listen?”She has contacted Georgia’s senators, Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, as well as non-profit organizations that advocate for people with disabilities and immigrants. “I am afraid for Rodney,” she wrote to Ossoff’s office on Saturday, after her fiancee had the run-in with guards.Warnock’s office said he couldn’t comment casework involving individuals. Ossoff said he couldn’t comment on an individual’s casework.On Sunday, the day after Taylor refused to enter his cell, guards handcuffed him and placed him in solitary confinement – until Tuesday, when Stewart’s assistant warden released him. During this time, he received no water to drink, and could not charge the battery in his prosthetic legs, Pierre said.Brian Todd, a spokesperson for CoreCivic, the company that owns Stewart, wrote in an email that Taylor “is being regularly monitored by facility medical staff, with all known medical issues are being addressed, and our staff continuing to accommodate his needs”. He also said that solitary confinement “does not exist” at Stewart, and that it uses “restrictive housing units”. Experts have said that conditions in CoreCivic’s RHUs are the same as solitary confinement.Taylor was brought to the US from Liberia by his mother on a medical visa when he was a small child. He went through 16 operations. He has two fingers on his right hand. Now 46, he has lived in the US nearly his entire life, works as a barber, is active in promoting cancer awareness in his community and got engaged only 10 days before Ice detained him in January.Despite having a pending application for US residence – commonly known as a “green card” – Ice detained and locked up Taylor in January due to a burglary conviction he received as a teenager and for which the state of Georgia pardoned him in 2010, according to his attorney, who shared paperwork from his case with the Guardian.When he was detained, Taylor was only days away from being fitted for new prosthetics. Requests to Stewart to make an appointment for him to follow through on this appeared to be falling on deaf ears for four months. Then, after the Guardian’s story in April, Taylor received a visit from the warden. An appointment was made for late May.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionPierre had gotten Taylor’s clinic in Lawrenceville, Georgia, to send the new prosthetics to a clinic in Albany, Georgia, about 75 miles from Stewart, in February. Nonetheless, when guards took him, shackled, to the rural clinic on 23 May, no one from Stewart or the clinic had ensured that the battery would be charged.Not only that, when he returned in late July, the clinic could not calibrate the legs to his body, since staff was unfamiliar with his model of prosthetics. Using the new prosthetics for months without them being calibrated means he suffers severe pain in his left knee, Taylor told the Guardian.Also in recent months, the Guardian’s and other reporting brought visits from Warnock’s staff and the Georgia Advocacy Office, part of a national network of congressionally authorized non-profit organizations defending the rights of people with disabilities.But when Warnock’s staff met with Taylor, the warden stood outside the door watching through a glass window, and cut the visit short after 15 minutes, Taylor said. “I only had time to answer two or three questions on a list,” he said.One thing that helps Taylor keep his spirits up is the relationships he’s made with fellow detainees. When he was in solitary confinement, several guards went to enter his cell, only to be blocked by a group of detainees. They said, ‘How could y’all do that to him? He’s a good guy,” according to Pierre.Meanwhile, despite the challenges, Taylor is trying his best to stay healthy, avoid any accidents and remain hopeful about his 12 August hearing before an immigration judge, which may result in a decision on whether the US deports him.“I gotta make sure I can be able to walk when I get out of here,” he said.
This article was amended on 1 August 2025 to clarify it was not Rodney Taylor’s cell, but the area outside it, that was flooded. More
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in US PoliticsJudge rules against Trump and extends deportation protections for 60,000 immigrants
A federal judge has ruled against the Trump administration’s plans and extended temporary protected status (TPS) for 60,000 people from Central America and Asia, including people from Nepal, Honduras and Nicaragua.TPS is a protection that can be granted by the homeland security secretary to people of various nationalities who are in the United States, preventing them from being deported and allowing them to work.The Trump administration has aggressively been seeking to remove the protection, thus making more people eligible for removal. It’s part of a wider effort by the administration to carry out mass deportations of immigrants.Homeland security secretary Kristi Noem can extend TPS to immigrants in the US if conditions in their homelands are deemed unsafe to return due to a natural disaster, political instability or other dangerous conditions. Noem had ruled to end protections for tens of thousands of Hondurans and Nicaraguans after determining that conditions in their homelands no longer warranted them.The secretary said the two countries had made “significant progress” in recovering from 1998’s Hurricane Mitch, one of the deadliest Atlantic storms in history.The designation for an estimated 7,000 from Nepal was scheduled to end on 5 August while protections allowing 51,000 Hondurans and nearly 3,000 Nicaraguans who have been in the US for more than 25 years were set to expire on 8 September.US district judge Trina L. Thompson in San Francisco did not set an expiration date but rather ruled to keep the protections in place while the case proceeds. The next hearing is on 18 November.In a sharply written order, Thompson said the administration had ended the migrant status protections without an “objective review of the country conditions” such as political violence in Honduras and the impact of recent hurricanes and storms in Nicaragua.If the protections were not extended, immigrants could suffer from loss of employment, health insurance, be separated from their families, and risk being deported to other countries where they have no ties, she wrote, adding that the termination of TPS for people from Nepal, Honduras, and Nicaragua would result in a $1.4bn loss to the economy.“The freedom to live fearlessly, the opportunity of liberty, and the American dream. That is all Plaintiffs seek. Instead, they are told to atone for their race, leave because of their names, and purify their blood,” Thompson said.Lawyers for the National TPS Alliance argued that Noem’s decisions were predetermined by President Donald Trump’s campaign promises and motivated by racial animus.Thompson agreed, saying that statements Noem and Trump have perpetuated the “discriminatory belief that certain immigrant populations will replace the white population.”“Color is neither a poison nor a crime,” she wrote.The advocacy group that filed the lawsuit said designees usually have a year to leave the country, but in this case, they got far less.“They gave them two months to leave the country. It’s awful,” said Ahilan Arulanantham, an attorney for plaintiffs at a hearing Tuesday.Honduras foreign minister Javier Bu Soto said via the social platform X that the ruling was “good news.”“The decision recognizes that the petitioners are looking to exercise their right to live in freedom and without fear while the litigation plays out,” the country’s top diplomat wrote. He said the government would continue supporting Hondurans in the United States through its consular network.Meanwhile in Nicaragua, hundreds of thousands have fled into exile as the government shuttered thousands of nongovernmental organizations and imprisoned political opponents. Nicaragua President Daniel Ortega and his wife and co-President Rosario Murillo have consolidated complete control in Nicaragua since Ortega returned to power two decades ago.The broad effort by the Republican administration’s crackdown on immigration has been going after people who are in the country illegally but also by removing protections that have allowed people to live and work in the US on a temporary basis.The Trump administration has already terminated protections for about 350,000 Venezuelans, 500,000 Haitians, more than 160,000 Ukrainians and thousands of people from Afghanistan and Cameroon. Some have pending lawsuits at federal courts.The government argued that Noem has clear authority over the program and that her decisions reflect the administration’s objectives in the areas of immigration and foreign policy.“It is not meant to be permanent,” justice department attorney William Weiland said. More
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in US PoliticsHow an 18th-century law enabled internment – and may do so again
Naoko Fujii’s great-grandfather Jotaro Mori was out fishing when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941.When Mori returned home hours later, the FBI was waiting at his door, ready to arrest him under a wartime law that declared citizens of foreign adversaries “alien enemies”. He was detained without due process and spent the next four years in concentration camps across the western US, including the infamous camp Lordsburg in New Mexico where two elderly Japanese internees were killed. The government seized his home and laundry business so that when he was released, he was left with nothing.“There was no warrant, no charges, no evidence he ever did anything,” said Fujii, who added that, at the time of his arrest, her great-grandfather had been living in America for more than four decades. “He was picked up just because he’s Japanese.”In March, Donald Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 for just the fourth time in US history, deporting scores of Venezuelan migrants, without due process, to a mega-prison in El Salvador. Civil rights groups challenged the administration’s authority to use the law, which is now being heard by the conservative 5th circuit court of appeals.As the case looks likely to soon reach the supreme court, advocates and legal experts pointed to the dangerous precedent established by the last time the law was invoked, which led to the mass incarceration of both immigrants and US citizens of Japanese descent.“The Alien Enemies Act normalized the idea of internment and targeting people not based on their conduct but on their ancestry,” said Katherine Yon Ebright, counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice and leading expert on the history of the 18th-century law.The law stipulates that, when war is declared, “all natives, citizens, denizens, or subjects of the hostile nation” over the age of 14 can be apprehended or removed. This means anyone who was born or holds citizenship in a country considered a “foreign adversary” is vulnerable, Yon Ebright said, whether or not they actually pose a national security threat.“By the structure of the law,” Yon Ebright said, “you can be targeted based on who you are and where you’re born, not what you’ve done.”The Alien Enemies Act was one of four laws passed as part of the sweeping Alien and Sedition Acts in 1798; the three others have since expired or been repealed. The law was invoked just three times in US history, all in times of war.On 7 December 1941, in the immediate aftermath of the Pearl Harbor attack, President Franklin D Roosevelt invoked the Alien Enemies Act to round up more than 31,000 Japanese, German and Italian nationals. Two months later, the law paved the way for executive order 9066, which directed 120,000 Japanese on the west coast – two-thirds of whom were US citizens – to internment camps across the country.In the 1940s, Japanese immigrants faced an impossible situation, said Aarti Kohli, executive director at the legal services group Asian Law Caucus. Discriminatory federal laws barred them from becoming naturalized citizens, which made them targets under the Alien Enemies Act.“It’s a catch-22,” Kohli said. “They were targeted because they weren’t citizens, but they also couldn’t become citizens.”The Trump administration invoked the law to deport more than 200 Venezuelan migrants it accused of being members of the transnational criminal gang Tren de Aragua. Similar to Japanese internees, experts say, Venezuelan deportees were not given a chance to disprove the government’s accusations. In a 14 March memorandum, the Department of Justice claimed that the Alien Enemies Act allows federal law enforcement officers to conduct warrantless house raids and deportations without court hearings.Government deception is one throughline connecting the current and most recent invocations of the Alien Enemies Act, Kohli said.In 1983, the organization was part of a multi-team effort to clear the conviction records of three Japanese Americans held in wartime concentration camps. Their legal cases uncovered proof that the justice department suppressed, altered and destroyed intelligence reports that acknowledged Japanese Americans did not pose a military threat to the US.Similarly, Kohli said, multiple intelligence agencies have contradicted Trump’s claim that the Venezuelan government is controlling Tren de Agua – which formed his rationale for invoking the Alien Enemies Act.Descendants of those who suffered under the law are fighting to ensure that history does not repeat itself. In January, dozens of groups representing former internees and their families endorsed a measure to repeal the statute, introduced by Senator Mazie Hirono and Representative Ilhan Omar.The legacy of the Alien Enemies Act is not confined to the US. More than 2,000 Japanese immigrants in Latin America were deported to the US for internment as part of an obscure hostage exchange program. The Latin Japanese internees were treated both as “alien enemies” and unlawful entrants whom the US tried to deport to warn-torn Japan, Yon Ebright said, a country that many had little memory of.Grace Shimizu’s father immigrated from Japan to Peru in the 1920s, when he was 18. He and his brothers operated a successful charcoal business in Lima that was blacklisted by authorities. When war broke out, the government seized the company and shipped the brothers to a US concentration camp.None of them ever returned to Peru, Shimizu said. After the war, her uncle and his family were deported to Japan. Her father fought his deportation order and, with the sponsorship of Japanese American relatives in California, lived out the rest of his life in the San Francisco Bay Area.“This kind of government abuse is not new,” said Shimizu, director of the Campaign for Justice: Redress Now for Japanese Latin Americans. But today, “there are many more individuals and communities targeted as ‘the enemy’, technological advances to enhance overreach and capacity, and twisted government policies, actions and justifications.” More
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in US Politics‘Cemetery of the living dead’: Venezuelans recall 125 days in notorious El Salvador prison
Arturo Suárez struggles to pinpoint the worst moment of his incarceration inside a prison the warden boasted was “a cemetery of the living dead”.Was it the day inmates became so exasperated at being beaten by guards that they threatened to hang themselves with their sheets? “The only weapon we had was our own lives,” recalled the Venezuelan former detainee.Was it when prisoners staged a “blood strike”, cutting their arms with broken pipes and smearing their bedclothes with crimson messages of despair? “SOS!” they wrote.Or was rock bottom for Suárez when he turned 34 while stranded in a Central American penitentiary prison officers had claimed he would only leave in a body bag?Suárez, a reggaeton musician known by the stage name SuarezVzla, was one of 252 Venezuelans who found themselves trapped inside El Salvador’s notorious “Cecot” terrorism confinement centre after becoming embroiled in Donald Trump’s anti-immigrant crusade.After 125 days behind bars, Suárez and the other detainees were freed on 18 July after a prisoner swap deal between Washington and Caracas. Since flying home to Venezuela, they have started to open up about their torment, offering a rare and disturbing glimpse of the human toll of President Nayib Bukele’s authoritarian crackdown in El Salvador and Trump’s campaign against immigration.View image in fullscreenSuárez said conditions inside the maximum security prison were so dire he and other inmates considered killing themselves. “My daughter’s really little and she needs me. But we’d made up our minds. We decided to put an end to this nightmare,” he said, although the prisoners stepped back from the brink.Another detainee, Neiyerver Rengel, 27, described his panic after guards claimed he would probably spend 90 years there. “I felt shattered, destroyed,” said the Venezuelan barber, who was deported to Cecot after being captured in Irving, Texas.Trump officials called the Venezuelans – many of whom had no criminal background – “heinous monsters” and “terrorists” but largely failed to produce proof, with many seemingly targeted simply for being Venezuelan and having tattoos.Norman Eisen, the executive chair of Democracy Defenders Fund, which is helping Rengel sue the US government for $1.3m, called the “abduction” of scores of Venezuelans a stain on his country’s reputation. “It is shocking and shameful and every patriotic American should be disgusted by it,” said Eisen, who expected other freed prisoners to take legal action.Suárez’s journey to one of the world’s harshest prisons began in Chile’s capital, Santiago, where the singer had moved after fleeing Venezuela’s economic collapse in 2016.One day early last year, before deciding to migrate to the US, Suárez watched a viral YouTube video about the “mega-prison” by the Mexican influencer Luisito Comunica.Bukele officials had invited Comunica to film inside Cecot as part of propaganda efforts to promote an anti-gang offensive that has seen 2%of the country’s adult population jailed since 2022. Suárez, then a fan of El Salvador’s social media-savvy president, was gripped. “Wouldn’t it be great if we could afford a package tour to go and visit Cecot?” he recalled joking to his wife. Little did the couple know that Suárez would soon be languishing in Cecot’s cage-like cells, sleeping on a metal bunk bed.View image in fullscreenAfter entering the US in September 2024, Suárez worked odd jobs in North Carolina. In February, three weeks after Trump’s inauguration, he was detained by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents and, in mid-March, put on a deportation flight, the destination of which was not revealed. When the plane landed, its passengers – who were instructed to keep its blinds closed – had no idea where they were. The penny dropped when one detainee disobeyed the order and spotted El Salvador’s flag outside. “That’s when we understood … where we were heading – to Cecot,” he said.Suárez described the hours that followed as a blur of verbal abuse and beatings, as disoriented prisoners were frogmarched on to buses that took them to Cecot’s cell block eight.Suárez said the men were forced to shave their heads and told by the warden: “Welcome to hell! Welcome to the cemetery of the living dead! You’ll leave here dead!”As he was dragged off the bus, Suárez, who is shortsighted, said he asked a guard for help because his spectacles were falling off: “He told me to shut up, punched me [in the face] and broke my glasses.”“What am I doing in Cecot?” Suárez recalled thinking. “I’m not a terrorist. I’ve never killed anyone. I make music.”Rengel had almost identical memories of his arrival: “The police officers started saying we were going to die in El Salvador – that it was likely we’d spend 90 years there.”Noah Bullock, the head of the El Salvador-focused human rights group Cristosal, said activists had heard very similar accounts from prisoners in other Salvadoran jails, suggesting such terror tactics were not merely the behaviour of “bad apple prison guards”. “There’s clearly a culture coming from the leadership of the prison system to inculcate the guards into operating this way, [into] using dehumanising and physical abuse in a systematic way.”View image in fullscreenSuárez said the Venezuelans spent the next 16 weeks being woken at 4am, moved between cells holding between 10 and 19 people, and enduring a relentless campaign of physical and psychological abuse. “There’s no life in there,” he said. “The only good thing they did for us was give us a Bible. We sought solace in God and that’s why nobody took their own life.”The musician tried to lift spirits by composing upbeat songs, such as Cell 31, which describes a message from God. “Be patient, my son. Your blessing will soon arrive,” its lyrics say.The song became a prison anthem and Suárez said inmates sang it, one day in March, when the US homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, visited Cecot to pose by its packed cells. “We aren’t terrorists! We aren’t criminals! Help!” the Venezuelans bellowed. But their pleas were ignored and the mood grew increasingly desperate, as the inmates were deprived of contact with relatives, lawyers and even the sun. “There came a point where we had no motivation, no strength left,” Rengel said.Only in mid-June was there a glimmer of hope when prisoners were given shampoo, razors and soap and measured for clothes. “They obviously wanted to hide what had happened from the world,” said Suárez, who sensed release might be close. One month later the men were free.Suárez said he was determined to speak out now he was safely back in his home town of Caracas. “The truth must be … heard all over the world. Otherwise what they did to us will be ignored,” said the musician, who admitted he had once been an admirer of Bukele’s populist campaigns against political corruption and gangs. “Now I realise it’s just a complete farce because how can you negotiate with human lives? How can you use human beings as bargaining chips?” Suárez said.A spokesperson for El Salvador’s government did not respond to questions about the prisoners’ allegations. Last week, the homeland security department’s assistant secretary, Tricia McLaughlin, dismissed prisoners’ claims of abuses as “false sob stories”.Suárez hoped never to set foot in El Salvador or the US again but said he forgave his captors. “And I hope they can forgive themselves,” he added. “And realise that while they might escape the justice of man they will never be able to escape divine justice.” More
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in US Politics‘Hundreds’ of people have been removed from ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ detention camp, says Florida governor
Florida has begun deporting people from the notorious “Alligator Alcatraz” detention camp, the state’s governor said, and deportations are expected to increase in the coming weeks.At a press conference at the controversial facility, Ron DeSantis said “hundreds of illegals have been removed” from the facility. He later clarified that most of those were flown from Alligator Alcatraz to other detention facilities in the US. DeSantis, who has built a political career on his anti-immigration views, said 100 people had been deported from the US.“I’m pleased to report that those flights out of Alligator Alcatraz by [the Department of Homeland Security] have begun. The cadence is increasing,” DeSantis said. “We’ve already had a number of flights. … Hundreds of illegals have been removed from here,” De Santis said.He added: “We look forward to this cadence increasing.”Officials said two or three flights have so far departed, but didn’t say where those flights were headed.Last week, a number of non-profit organizations demanded the closure of the facility, which is based in the rural Everglades region, about 40 miles (64km) from Miami.The facility’s conditions are reportedly appalling, advocates said, with detained immigrants sleeping in overcrowded pods, along with sewage backups “resulting in cages flooded with feces”, and, in addition, “denial of medical care”. Advocates said the 39-acre camp, which was built in a matter of days, now holds more than 1,000 men in “flood-prone” tents.Donald Trump said the jail would be reserved for immigrants who were “deranged psychopaths” and “some of the most vicious people on the planet” who were awaiting deportation, but in mid-July it emerged that the jail contains hundreds of detainees with no criminal records or charges. Democrats have sued DeSantis, demanding access to the facility.Kevin Guthrie, executive director of the Florida division of emergency management, said the facility had grown, in less than a month, to have a current capacity of 2,000 people. That will increase to 4,000, he said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionGuthrie defended conditions inside the facility, claiming that “whether it’s Florida standard or national standard [of conditions and services in detention facilities], we meet or exceed the higher standard”.Since the jail opened in early July, the Trump administration and local officials have specifically touted the brutality of the facility, including its remote location in a wetland surrounded by alligators, crocodiles, pythons and swarms of mosquitoes. Officials have also seemed to revel in the crude name the facility has been given, echoing the long-shut and notoriously harsh Alcatraz prison in San Francisco Bay. More