US immigration

Subterms

    More stories

    • 163 Shares159 Views

      in US Politics

      ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ to be vacated in compliance with court order to shut it

      by

      Florida’s immigration jail known as “Alligator Alcatraz” will probably be empty of detainees within days, a state official has said, indicating compliance with a judge’s order last week that the facility must close.The Republican governor Ron DeSantis’s administration appealed the order by federal court judge Kathleen Williams that the tented detention camp in the Florida Everglades, which attracted criticism for its harsh conditions, must be dismantled within 60 days.But in an email reported Wednesday by the Associated Press, Kevin Guthrie, executive director of the Florida department of emergency management, which operates the jail on behalf of the federal government, appeared to confirm it would be shuttered.“We are probably going to be down to 0 individuals within a few days,” Guthrie wrote to Mario Rojzman, a Miami Beach rabbi who has been helping to arrange chaplaincy services.Representatives for Rojzman confirmed the authenticity of the memo to the news agency. Guthrie’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.The Miami Herald had previously reported that hundreds of detainees were moved from “Alligator Alcatraz” to other immigration facilities in the state in advance of Williams’s ruling.On Monday, protesters who have maintained an almost permanent presence at the gates of the jail reported seeing convoys of buses driving out.Maxwell Frost, a Florida Democratic congressman, said that he was told during a tour last week that only about 300 to 350 detainees remained.“Alligator Alcatraz” was touted by Donald Trump as a holding camp for up to 3,000 undocumented immigrants as they awaited deportation. The jail, he said, was reserved for “the most vicious people on the planet”.Since it opened in early July after being hastily constructed in late June at a remote disused airstrip about 50 miles (80km) west of Miami, it drew waves of criticism. Several lawsuits sought its closure, and there have been claims that hundreds of those detained had no criminal records or active proceedings against them.Williams’s ruling was a significant victory for a coalition of environmental groups and the Miccosukee Tribe of Indians, who claimed the camp had caused permanent and irreparable damage to the ecologically fragile wetland and its wildlife.Another lawsuit, filed by groups including the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), claimed detainees were abused by jail staff, and that their human and constitutional rights were denied because they were refused access to attorneys and due process.The plaintiffs said the Everglades facility was not needed, especially because Florida plans to open a second immigration detention facility in the north of the state that DeSantis has dubbed “deportation depot”.Williams had not ruled by Wednesday on a request by attorneys for the state to stay her order of closure. In her original 82-page ruling, she said she expected the population of the facility to decline within 60 days by transferring detainees to other facilities, and once that happened, fencing, lighting and generators should be removed.She wrote that the state and federal defendants could not bring anyone other than those who are already being detained at the facility onto the property.The environmental groups and Miccosukee tribe had argued in their lawsuit that further construction and operations should be stopped until federal and state officials complied with federal environmental laws. Their lawsuit claimed the facility reversed billions of dollars spent over decades on environmental restoration.State officials have signed more than $245m in contracts for building and operating the facility at a lightly used, single-runway training airport in the middle of the rugged and remote Everglades. The center officially opened on 1 July.In their lawsuits, civil rights attorneys described “severe problems” at the facility which were “previously unheard-of in the immigration system”. Detainees were being held for weeks without any charges, had disappeared from the online detainee locator maintained by the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (Ice), and nobody at the facility was making initial custody or bond determinations, they said.Detainees also described worms turning up in the food, toilets that did not flush, flooding floors with fecal waste, mosquitoes and other insects everywhere and malfunctioning air conditioning that alternated the temperature between near freezing and extreme heat. More

    • 125 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      Grand jury declines to indict alleged Washington DC sandwich thrower

      by

      Grand jurors have rebuffed federal prosecutors by refusing to approve a criminal indictment against a man who allegedly threw a sandwich at a law enforcement agent in protest against Donald Trump’s deployment of armed troops on the streets of Washington DC.It is the second time in recent days that a grand jury had declined to vote to indict a person accused of assaulting a federal officer and signaled strong public objection to Trump’s decision to send national guard troops and federal agents onto the streets of the US capital, purportedly to crack down on violent crime.The case of Sean Charles Dunn, who was accused of hurling the sub-style sandwich, became a cause celebre after video of the episode went viral on social media.Dunn, 37, a former justice department paralegal, was initially charged on 13 August after being accused of throwing a sandwich at a Customs and Border Protection officer who was patrolling an area of Washington’s north-west district known for its bars and restaurants with other agents.Footage shows a man, presumed to be Dunn, confronting an officer as he stood on the kerbside. He then threw a soft object at point-blank range, hitting the agent in the chest, before running off with the officer and several of his colleagues in pursuit.The complaint against Dunn states that he stood close to the officer and called him and his colleagues “fascists” and shouted: “I don’t want you in my city.”After the incident, the Trump administration posted footage of a large group of heavily armed officers going to Dunn’s apartment, heightening the attention the case attracted. Posters depicting Dunn lofting a sandwich have since appeared around the nation’s capital.It is rare for federal prosecutors to fail to secure charges at a grand jury hearing, given that they control the information that jurors hear and defendants’ lawyers are prohibited from being in the courtroom.It is unclear if prosecutors will continue to seek to press charges against Dunn, which they could do by withdrawing the felony charge and refiling it as a misdemeanor, which does not need an indictment.But even that would amount to a symbolic climbdown for the Trump administration, which has demanded that offenses by prosecuted under the most serious federal charges, which carry heavier sentences.Dunn is due to appear before a magistrate judge on 4 September in a hearing intended to determine whether a crime was committed.The spurning of the indictment against him mirrors the case of Sidney Lori Reid, against whom federal prosecutors failed three times in 30 days to secure an indictment of a felony assault against an FBI officer, after she was arrested during an immigration protest last month.Prosecutors on Monday reduced the charges to a low-level misdemeanor, suggesting that they had inflated the accusations against her.On the same day, a judge dismissed all charges against a man who was arrested last week at a Trader Joe’s store after police alleged he had two handguns in his bag.Judge Zia M Faruqui said prosecutors had violated Torez Riley’s constitutional rights in charging him, declaring: “Lawlessness cannot come from the government.”A flurry of defendants have been charged with federal crimes over relatively minor infractions that would normally be handled by local courts, if they resulted in criminal charges at all, since Trump’s highly controversial troop deployment. Critics have condemned the deployment as an attempted military takeover of a city run by the president’s Democratic opponents and motivated by a desire to intimidate rather than to stamp out crime. More

    • 125 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      Court tosses Trump lawsuit against Maryland judges over US deportations

      by

      A federal judge on Tuesday dismissed an unprecedented lawsuit filed by the Trump administration earlier in the summer against all 15 judges serving on Maryland’s federal district court – a case that opposed pausing some deportations from the state.In a 37-page ruling, US district judge Thomas Cullen of Virginia’s western district – who was nominated and confirmed to his position during Donald Trump’s first presidency – wrote that “any fair reading of the legal authorities cited by defendants leads to the ineluctable conclusion that this court has no alternative but to dismiss”.“To hold otherwise,” Cullen added, “would run counter to overwhelming precedent, depart from longstanding constitutional tradition, and offend the rule of law.”The Trump administration had challenged an order issued by Maryland’s chief district judge that temporarily barred the government from deporting undocumented immigrants for two business days if they filed challenges to their detention. Trump’s justice department argued that the order exceeded the court’s authority and violated federal law.But Cullen, who was nominated to the bench by Trump in 2020 and was assigned the case because all Maryland district judges were named as defendants, wrote that the judges were “absolutely immune” from lawsuits over their judicial actions. And Cullen said that instead of suing, the administration should have challenged the order though other legal channels, such as appealing against the order.“As much as the executive fights the characterization, a lawsuit by the executive branch of government against the judicial branch for the exercise of judicial power is not ordinary,” Cullen wrote.“In their wisdom, the constitution’s framers joined three coordinate branches to establish a single sovereign. That structure may occasionally engender clashes between two branches and encroachment by one branch on another’s authority. But mediating those disputes must occur in a manner that respects the judiciary’s constitutional role.”He added that if the administrations’s arguments “were made in the proper forum, they might well get some traction”. But he said that “as events over the past several months have revealed, these are not normal times – at least regarding the interplay between the executive and this coordinate branch of government”.It was “no surprise that the executive chose a different, and more confrontational, path entirely”, Cullen’s ruling said.“Instead of appealing any one of the affected … cases or filing a rules challenge with the judicial Council, the executive decided to sue – in a big way.”In a footnote, Cullen also criticized the Trump administration’s attacks on judges across the country throughout his second presidency, which began in January.“Over the past several months,” he said, Trump administration officials had described federal district judges around the country as “left-wing”, “liberal” “activists”, “radical”, “politically minded”, “rogue”, “unhinged”, “outrageous, overzealous, [and] unconstitutional”, “[c]rooked,” and worse.“Although some tension between the coordinate branches of government is a hallmark of our constitutional system, this concerted effort by the executive to smear and impugn individual judges who rule against it is both unprecedented and unfortunate,” Cullen wrote.Among the judges named in the lawsuit was US district judge Paula Xinis, who ruled in April that the Trump administration had unlawfully deported Kilmar Ábrego García to El Salvador and ordered the US to return him. More

    • 188 Shares189 Views

      in US Politics

      The case against Kilmar Ábrego García is a study in sadistic absurdity | Moira Donegan

      by

      In a way, you could think of the brief stint that Kilmar Ábrego García spent in a Tennessee jail after his return from a Salvadorian prison camp in June as a kind of protective custody. Ábrego, a Maryland resident who had never been charged with any crime either in the US or in his native El Salvador, became a symbol of the Trump administration’s ambitiously sadistic anti-immigration efforts when he was kidnapped by Ice agents in March and sent without due process to Cecot, an enormous prison in El Salvador from which few detainees are ever released, as a result of what representatives for the Trump immigration authorities called an administrative error. Ábrego became a symbol for the several hundred men who had been deprived of their liberty and deported to the distant foreign prison without due process and in defiance of both American and international law.It was only after extensive public pressure on the issue – including visits to Cecot and demands to see Ábrego from prominent Democratic politicians, including Chris Van Hollen, a Maryland senator – that Ábrego was returned to the US. The Trump administration ginned up a fake, face-saving excuse for his return, claiming Ábrego needed to be tried for alleged crimes in the US. But that was never anything but a cover, a lie to avoid admitting that they were bringing him back under political pressure and that such pressure could make them cave again. Still, Maga does not forgive Ábrego for his innocence; its adherents decided to make an example of him. Now, released from jail on those trumped-up and unproven allegations, Ábrego has been arrested again by Ice. This time, the Trump administration says it plans to deport him to Uganda – a country he has never been to – as part of a new third-country deportation scheme recently blessed by the supreme court.The Trump administration has continued to pursue Ábrego, in spite of his obvious innocence, because they see the outcry over his accidental arrest and deportation as an unacceptably embarrassing stain on their anti-immigrant agenda. His arrest exposed the cruelty, randomness and essential malignant incompetence of Trump’s vast, unaccountable, reckless, violent and now extremely monied anti-immigrant armed corps: that they arrested an innocent man and deported him to potentially eternal exile and imprisonment in a country he had fled without notice, process, or legal authority left many Americans – and not only migrants – terrified of what might happen to their neighbors, their loved ones or themselves. The plain injustice of his case briefly served to unify anti-Trump forces, sway public sentiment against the crackdown and provoke an uncharacteristic degree of visible public action by elected Democrats. To the Trump administration, this could not stand. Now, they have set about punishing Ábrego for his role as proof of their own malignant idiocy.Without proof, and without much plausibility, Ábrego has been alleged by the Trump administration to be the author of various crimes and malfeasances. They admit that deporting him was a mistake but also want us to believe that he is the sort of person who should be deported – a human trafficker, in one fantasy; a gang leader, in another. That there is no proof for these allegations is beside the point: the point is that the Trump administration is claiming authority over reality itself, claiming the ability to decide what is true and what is false, and to reclassify every migrant – and in particular every Latino male – as a criminally dangerous threat that must be eliminated.Ábrego, then, must be guilty because the Trump administration arrested him, and because they can do no wrong. He must be guilty because he is a migrant, and innocence and immigration are mutually exclusive. He must be guilty, too, because his case made them do something that they did not want to do: admit a mistake, face public pressure, reverse an action, and – worst of all – show weakness. And he must be guilty because he has become a symbol of all the immigrants they plan to deport, all the Americans whose rights they plan to trample on, all the past and future victims of their program.Shortly after his rearrest by Ice on Monday, a judge ordered that the Trump administration not deport Ábrego to Uganda, as it planned. Because the Trump administration has willfully defied court orders in order to carry out deportations in the past, the judge who addressed the justice department lawyer representing the White House was explicit. “Your clients are absolutely forbidden from removing Mr Abrego from the United States,” she told them. “You understand this?” The government lawyer said he did, though this does not mean that the order will be followed.Ábrego now finds himself suffering the worst of a Kafkaesque absurdity, in which the law is arbitrary, malignant, unreliable, sadistic and totally divorced, in its rationale or result, from anything he has actually done. His predicament is not a little like that of Joseph K, the protagonist of The Trial, who finds himself arrested and imprisoned for a crime that is not revealed to him, and petitioning endlessly against the unfeeling representatives of a remote, cold and pitiless authority. He was selected for the Trump machine’s sadism at random, by the force of their own racist incompetence; it is still unclear whether he will ever manage to escape it.The injustice of Ábrego’s situation transcends his personal character – indeed, part of the absurdity is how indifferent the Trump administration is to what kind of man Ábrego might be. But from what we can see ourselves, he seems like a man capable of great moral feeling. On the steps of the courthouse on Monday, just moments before he headed inside to what was certain to be his re-arrest by Ice, Ábrego addressed a crowd of well-wishers in Spanish. “Regardless of what happens here today in my Ice check-in,” he said, “promise me this: that you will keep fighting, praying, believing in dignity and freedom. Not only for me – for everyone.”

      Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist More

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      Judge halts Trump administration from deporting Kilmar Ábrego García for now

      by

      Kilmar Ábrego García – who has been thrust into the middle of an acrimonious deportation saga by the second Trump administration – has been detained after reporting to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents in Baltimore on Monday, but a judge later ruled that he cannot be deported for now.His detainment comes just three days after his release from criminal custody in Tennessee.“The only reason he was taken into detention was to punish him,” Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, an attorney representing Ábrego, told a crowd of supporters outside a Baltimore Ice field office on Monday. “To punish him for exercising his constitutional rights.”The attorney also said his client filed a new lawsuit on Monday morning challenging his potential deportation to Uganda and his current confinement. Hours later, US district judge Paula Xinis issued a temporary halt to Ábrego’s possible deportation.Xinis, who was appointed by former president Obama, told justice department lawyers that the government is “absolutely forbidden” from deporting Ábrego until she holds an evidentiary hearing scheduled for Friday.Xinis further instructed that Ábrego must remain at his detention center in Virginia. She then asked deputy assistant attorney general Drew Ensign whether her order was sufficient for the justice department to follow, which he agreed it was.“Your clients are absolutely forbidden at this juncture to remove Mr. Abrego Garcia from the continental United States,” Xinis told Ensign.The judge also raised concerns about accusations that the justice department attempted to pressure Ábrego by threatening deportation to Uganda if he did not plead guilty to human trafficking.Ábrego faced threats of being deported to Uganda after recently declining an offer to be deported to Costa Rica in exchange for remaining in jail and pleading guilty to human smuggling charges, according to a Saturday court filing.“The fact that they are holding Costa Rica as a carrot and using Uganda as a stick to try to coerce him to plead guilty for a crime is such clear evidence that they are weaponizing the immigration system in a matter that is completely unconstitutional,” Sandoval-Moshenberg said.The lawsuit Ábrego filed early on Monday asks for an order “that he is not allowed to be removed from the United States unless and until he has had full due process”, said Sandoval-Moshenberg.“The main issue, aside from the actual conditions in that country is – is that country actually going to let him stay there?” the attorney said. “They can offer to send him to Madrid, Spain, and unless Madrid, Spain, is going to let him remain in that country, essentially what it is – is a very inconvenient layover on the way to El Salvador, which is the one country that it has already determined that he cannot be sent to.”The Costa Rican government has agreed to offer Ábrego refugee status if he is sent there, court filings from Saturday show. A judge in 2019 ruled that Ábrego cannot be deported to El Salvador.Before walking into his appointment at the Baltimore Ice field office, Ábrego addressed a crowd of faith leaders, activists, and his family and legal team organized by the immigrant rights non-profit Casa de Maryland.“My name is Kilmar Ábrego García, and I want you to remember this – remember that I am free and I was able to be reunited with my family,” he said through a translator, NBC News reported. “This was a miracle … I want to thank each and every one of you who marched, lift your voices, never stop praying and continue to fight in my name.”After Ábrego entered the building, faith leaders and activists rallied to demand Ábrego’s freedom, chanting “Sí, se puede” (roughly “yes, we can”) and “we are Kilmar” as well as singing the hymn We Shall Not Be Moved with an activist choir.“Laws have to be rooted in love, because love does not harm us,” a senior priest at Maryland’s St Matthew Episcopal church identified as Padre Vidal said through a translator.Ábrego entered the US without permission in about 2011 as a teenager after fleeing gang violence. He was subsequently afforded a federal protection order against deportation to El Salvador.The 30-year-old sheet metal apprentice was initially deported by federal immigration officials in March. Though Donald Trump’s administration admitted that Ábrego’s deportation was an “administrative error”, officials have repeatedly accused him of being affiliated with the MS-13 gang, a claim Ábrego and his family vehemently deny.During his detention at El Salvador’s so-called Terrorism Confinement Center (Cecot), Ábrego was physically and psychologically tortured, according to court documents filed by his lawyers in July.Following Ábrego’s wrongful deportation, the Trump administration faced widespread pressure to return him to the US, including from a supreme court order that directed federal officials to “facilitate” his return.In June, the Trump administration returned Ábrego from El Salvador, only to charge him with crimes related to human smuggling, which his lawyers have rejected as “preposterous”. His criminal trial is expected to begin in January.Ábrego’s detention comes amid growing concern about the Trump administration’s accelerating mass deportations campaign. Protesters across the US are rallying against the federal government’s crackdown on immigrants in Washington DC, the nation’s capital, while activists in Maryland and nationwide are pushing Democratic officials to end contracts with Avelo Airlines, which is the only passenger airline that conducts deportation flights for Ice.Shortly after Ábrego’s detention on Monday, the US homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, said on social media that Ice had arrested him and was “processing him for deportation”.“President Trump is not going to allow this illegal alien, who is an MS-13 gang member, human trafficker, serial domestic abuser, and child predator to terrorize American citizens any longer,” she wrote.Glenn Ivey, the Democratic congressman representing the Maryland district where Ábrego and his family live, said his constituent’s detention was a “total abuse of power” by the federal government and a tactic to save them from “being embarrassed” due to a lack of evidence to find him guilty in court.Ábrego’s mistreatment has become a flashpoint political issue within the district and beyond, Ivey said.“I think if they [the administration] are waiting for people to forget about it or get tired of it, they’ve gotten a big surprise on that front,” Ivey said.

      Shrai Popat contributed reporting More

    • 163 Shares169 Views

      in US Politics

      When immigration shows up at daycare: crackdown in DC terrifies families and workers

      by

      Early on Tuesday morning, as parents went to drop off their young children at a bilingual childcare center in north-west Washington DC, they received a message from the administrator saying that unmarked cars were parked directly outside.Shortly after 8am, federal agents in tactical vests arrested two people unaffiliated with the center, the administrator said.“While these activities are not connected to our program, we are closely monitoring the situation and taking extra precautions to ensure everyone feels safe entering and leaving the building,” read the message to parents, reviewed by the Guardian.Foram Mehta, whose son attends the daycare, said she had feared immigration raids there for months, but her fears escalated when Donald Trump sent national guard troops and federal agents to Washington two weeks ago. She said she was concerned about her own safety as a brown person, even though she’s an immigrant in the country lawfully, and also worries for her undocumented neighbors.She, and other Washington residents, including undocumented parents and caregivers, said they were avoiding parts of the city where federal agents have been reported, and she said her parents who are visiting were “strictly forbidden to go anywhere alone – even down the street to the grocery store”.In a city already upended by the second Trump administration’s mass firings of government workers, Trump’s decision to take over the city’s police force, send thousands of federal agents to Washington, and ramp up immigration enforcement has left many residents on edge and grappling with how to go about their lives in a city that no longer feels safe. The return to school for most public schools on Monday has cast that in sharp relief.The White House said on Friday that 719 people had been arrested since the start of the federal crackdown, with many hundreds of them immigrants in the country without legal documents. On the ground, that has looked like federal agents patrolling the streets for undocumented immigrants, setting up checkpoints at busy intersections, stopping delivery drivers and pedestrians, and detaining immigrants at their places of work.The crackdown has especially been affecting parents and caregivers as the new school year begins. Parents told the Guardian they were scared to send their children to school. Nannies are calling out or asking to be escorted to and from work. Daycares are having to implement new safety precautions.Once off limits for immigration enforcement and arrests, schools and daycares feel as if they are no longer safe for employees and for children, many Washingtonians said.Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (Ice) did not respond to the Guardian’s request for comment. Last week, Ice’s acting director, Todd Lyons, told NBC that Washington parents should not expect to see Ice officers at schools on the first day Monday, but that they may come to school campuses in the future.“It’s gotten to the point where people are scared to be out and about,” said Amie Santos, a Washington resident who lives near the daycare. “Nothing about this is making DC safer.”For many Washingtonians, the potential targeting of people and institutions that care for small children has been especially alarming. Multiple people told the Guardian they were struggling with childcare, as so many who work as nannies or in childcare centers are immigrants.Claire, a mom who asked not to use her real name due to fears about her undocumented nanny, said her caretaker called out of work last week with short notice, saying she was concerned about reports of increased police and arrests.View image in fullscreen“She said there’s a very heavy police presence and she’s hearing all of these stories from other nannies and from friends and acquaintances that there are all of these checkpoints,” Claire said. “She said she and her husband are both staying home and not coming into work, either of them.”Claire gave her the week off and is working to figure out options to make her more comfortable to return to work this week, including offering to pick her up from her home.The nanny, who has been in the country for almost three decades, has a teenage child, and “she is so concerned about deportation – that something could happen to her and her husband – that she has asked if we would take care of her child if that were to happen”, Claire said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionOther parents said they were driving their children to the neighboring state of Maryland to meet their nannies who live there, or that their nannies have been staying inside rather than venturing outside, or driving throughout the city rather than walking.In a neighborhood parents group, a mom on Tuesday shared a document template for parents to fill out and give to their nannies as they escort their children around the city.“In the event that [NANNY’S NAME] is detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) or any other law enforcement authority, this letter affirms that [CHILD’S NAME] is my child and should be immediately returned to me, [HER/HIS MOTHER/FATHER/PARENT] and legal guardian,” the template reads. “Under no circumstance should [CHILD’S NAME] be taken into government custody or placed in foster care.”With the new school year beginning in the middle of Trump’s federal takeover, parents are also concerned about what might be happening at schools.Sebastien Durand, the director of facilities at a public charter school in north-west DC whose role involves student safety, said the school had engaged with families this week before the school year begins.“It was made clear to us that they are all extremely scared,” he said. “Quite a bit of them were actually asking if we can go back to a pandemic era-type of school where they didn’t have to come to school and we had to provide something remote.”He said he explained to them that legally they can’t do that, but the school decided to use its own funds to run buses from the closest Metro station to the campus for at least the next two weeks. The school is concerned about attendance, he said, especially with rates still lower than desired since the pandemic.For children that have already started the school year, the first week has been fraught. Santos’s five-year-old son started kindergarten on Monday at school in north-west DC. On the second day of school, there were unmarked police cars with agents who appeared to be in tactical gear parked in front of the school, she said. That evening, parents were told the school was enhancing security measures and all students, parents and caretakers would be required to wear colored lanyards with photo identification to enter school grounds. The school will also be running a bus for students and caretakers from the Metro to the parking lot.“As you can imagine, it’s been hard,” Santos said. “We had to talk to our son about what was going on, why there was increased security, the importance of kindness, that not everybody feels safe and welcome.“With kids going back to school, there are intimidation factors at play,” she added, “and it’s creating an aggressive environment that I don’t think is conducive to learning or to children.” More

    • 150 Shares199 Views

      in US Politics

      Burner phones, wiped socials: the extreme precautions for visitors to Trump’s America

      by

      Keith Serry was set to bring a show to New York City’s Fringe festival this year, but pulled the plug a few weeks out. After 35 years of traveling to the United States, he says he no longer feels safe making the trip.“The fact that we’re being evaluated for our opinions entering a country that, at least until very recently, purported to be an example of democracy. Yeah, these are things that make me highly uncomfortable,” said Serry, a Canadian performer and attorney.“You’re left thinking that you don’t want to leave evidence of ‘bad opinions’ on your person.”Serry is among a substantial cohort of foreign nationals reconsidering travel to the US under the Trump administration, after troubling reports of visitors facing intense scrutiny and detention on arrival.In March, a French scientist who had been critical of Donald Trump was refused entry to the US after his phone was searched. An Australian writer who was detained and denied entry in June said he was initially grilled about his articles on pro-Palestinian protests, and then watched as a border agent probed even the most personal images on his phone. He was told the search uncovered evidence of past drug use, which he had not acknowledged on his visa waiver application, leading to his rejection. German, British and other European tourists have also been detained and sent home.More than a dozen countries have updated their travel guidance to the US. In Australia and Canada, government advisories were changed to specifically mention the potential for electronic device searches.On the advice of various experts, people are locking down social media, deleting photos and private messages, removing facial recognition, or even traveling with “burner” phones to protect themselves.In Canada, multiple public institutions have urged employees to avoid travel to the US, and at least one reportedly told staff to leave their usual devices at home and bring a second device with limited personal information instead.“Everybody feels guilty, but they don’t know exactly what they’re guilty of,” said Heather Segal, founding partner of Segal Immigration Law in Toronto, describing the influx of concerns she’s been hearing.“‘Did I do something wrong? Is there something on me? Did I say something that’s going to be a problem?’”She advised travelers to assess their risk appetite by reviewing both the private data stored on their devices and any information about them that’s publicly accessible, and to consider what measures to take accordingly.US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) has broad powers to search devices with minimal justification. Travelers can refuse to comply, but non-citizens risk being denied entry. CBP data shows such searches are rare; last year, just over 47,000 out of 420 million international travelers had their devices examined. This year’s figures show a significant increase, with the third quarter of 2025 reflecting an uptick in electronic device searches higher than any single quarter since 2018, when available data begins.“Anecdotally, it seems like these searches have been increasing, and I think the reason why that’s true is, undoubtedly, I think they are more targeted than before,” said Tom McBrien, counsel at the Electronic Privacy Information Center.“It seems like they are targeting people who they just don’t generally like politically.”Travelers who are concerned about their privacy should consider minimizing the amount of data they carry, McBrien said.“The less data you have on you, the less there is to search, and the less there is to collect,” he said. Beyond using a secondary device, he suggested securely deleting data, moving it to a hard drive or storing it in a password-protected cloud account.A Department of Homeland Security (DHS) spokesperson rejected claims that CBP had stepped up device searches under the new administration or singled out travelers over their political views.“These searches are conducted to detect digital contraband, terrorism-related content, and information relevant to visitor admissibility, all of which play a critical role in national security,” the spokesperson told the Guardian in a statement.“Allegations that political beliefs trigger inspections or removals are baseless and irresponsible.”The statement acknowledged, however, that there had been heightened vetting under Trump and the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Under the leadership of the Trump Administration and Secretary Noem, we have the most secure border in American history,” it said. “This has allowed CBP to focus to actually vet and interview the people attempting to come into our country.”Alistair Kitchen, the Australian writer who was denied entry to the US in June, said the DHS’s denial of political targeting directly contradicts what he was told on arrival.Border officials “bragged actively that the reason for my targeting, for my being pulled out of line for my detainment, was explicitly because of what I’d written online about the protests at Columbia University”, he told the Guardian.While he doesn’t plan to return to the US under the Trump administration, Kitchen said that if he ever did, he would either not take a phone or bring a burner.“Under no conditions would I ever hand over the passcode to that phone,” he added. “I would accept immediate deportation rather than hand over the passcode. People should think seriously before booking travel, especially if they are journalists or writers or activists.”Various foreign nationals told the Guardian they are rethinking travel plans for tourism, family visits, academic events and work.Donald Rothwell, a professor who teaches international law at the Australian National University, says he no longer plans to accept speaking invitations to the US over fears of being detained or denied entry – which, he noted, could also trigger red flags on his record for future travel.He’s even considered traveling without a device at all, but is concerned his academic commentary in the media could be used against him regardless.“I might be commenting on matters that could be quite critical of the United States,” he said. “For example, I was very critical of the legal or lack of legal justification for the US military strikes on Iran in June.”Kate, a Canadian whose name has been withheld due to privacy concerns, said she has wrestled with complicated decisions about whether to travel across the border to see American relatives, including for an upcoming wedding. During a trip earlier this year, she deleted her social media apps before going through customs.Despite DHS assurances that travelers are not flagged for political beliefs, she said “it’s hard to believe things that this government is saying”.“It would be really nice to have trust that those kinds of things were true, and that these kinds of stories that you hear, while absolutely horrific, are isolated incidents,” she said.“But I do feel like in many ways, the United States has sort of lost its goodwill.” More

    • 238 Shares99 Views

      in US Politics

      ‘I would not feel safe’: Americans on the sorrow – and relief – of leaving Trump’s US for Europe

      by

      The scramble began in November as news broke that Donald Trump had been re-elected. Benjamin and Chrys Gorman had long said they would leave the US before seeing Trump inaugurated again, giving them exactly 76 days to sell their home, cars and most of their belongings and move four people, three dogs and two cats to Barcelona.“I was saying: we’ve got more time than that, it won’t go that fast,” said Gorman. “My wife said no, we need to be out of here – not just on inauguration day, but a few days before. And she was so right.”Within hours of taking office, Trump signed an executive order defining sex as only male or female. The change was to be reflected on official documents, sowing confusion over what it meant for Americans with the non-binary identification of “X” in their passports.Relief gripped the Gormans as they watched it play out from afar. “Our kid’s passport has an X gender marker,” said Gorman. “So we managed to escape just in time.”View image in fullscreenSince Trump’s return to power, relocation firms from London to Lisbon and Madrid to Milan say they’ve seen a surge in inquiries from Americans. Undaunted by the gains made by the far right across the continent, many Americans cite a desire to escape the US’s increasingly polarised climate and an administration whose wide range of targets has included immigrants, diversity measures and political opponents.Statistics suggest that the barrage of interest is translating into action; in the first two months of the year, US applications for Irish passports were at their highest level in a decade – up 60% from the same period last year. In the first three months of the year, France reported a rise in the number of long-stay visa requests from Americans, while in March, the number of Americans who had solicited British citizenship in the 12 months before surged to its highest since record-keeping began in 2004.While the figures remain relatively small given the size of the US population, the movement has been galvanised by a steady drip of celebrity announcements. Rosie O’Donnell said in March that she had moved to Ireland, describing it as “heartbreaking to see what’s happening politically” in the US, while Ellen DeGeneres recently cited Trump’s re-election to explain why she and her wife, Portia de Rossi, had moved to the Cotswolds in 2024. Earlier this month, Jimmy Kimmel revealed that he had acquired Italian citizenship, saying that the US under Trump was “just unbelievable”.Across Europe, governments and institutions have sought to capitalise on the exodus, launching programmes aimed at attracting stateside talent or, in the case of one enterprising Italian village, seeking to bolster its population with disgruntled Americans.Among the first was France’s Aix-Marseille University, which in March put out an offer of “scientific asylum” for researchers reeling from Trump’s crackdown on academia. Three months later, the university said it had received more than 500 inquiries for the 20 spots.View image in fullscreenThose selected included Lisa, a biological anthropologist who was preparing to move her husband, a school teacher, and two children across the Atlantic. “When Trump was re-elected, the feeling was: ‘We gotta go,’” she told the Guardian earlier this summer. She asked that her last name not be used to protect her university in the US from reprisals.The sentiment had strengthened as she watched the Trump administration take aim at universities, dismantle research funding and undermine science. “We’re months into this presidency, and a lot has already happened. I can’t imagine what’s going to happen in another three and a half years.”The opportunity to swap the northern US for southern France was welcome, but not without its drawbacks. “It is a big pay cut,” she said. “My kids are super gung-ho. My husband is just worried that he won’t find a job. Which is my worry too, because I don’t think I’ll be able to afford four of us on my salary.”In January, as thousands of Trump faithful turned up in Washington DC for a televised viewing of his inauguration, Deborah Harkness knew the time had come to act on her longstanding dream of moving to southern Spain. “As soon as he was inaugurated, I started making plans,” she said.Months later she was in Málaga, watching as Trump’s administration sought to drastically reshape the judiciary, public broadcasting, higher education and immigration. “What frightens me most is how normalised it’s all become,” she said. “The chaos, the cruelty, the disinformation – that’s how authoritarianism takes hold.”The view was echoed by Monica Byrne, who in 2023 left North Carolina for Cork, Ireland. Trump was a factor in her decision, but only in that she saw his rise to power as a symptom of the bigger issues facing the US. “I didn’t know whether Trump specifically was going to come back, but I knew fascism was,” she said. “So it was more about the abject failure of the Democrats and knowing they weren’t going to protect us from fascism generally.”View image in fullscreenTrump’s re-election cemented her decision to remain abroad and enrol in a master’s programme in Ireland. “I get frustrated when people say: ‘You’re very lucky or you must be happy you’re not there,’” she said. “There is some degree of that, but 90% of the people I care about and love are in the States and are affected.”In Barcelona, Gorman and his family have been slowly settling into the rhythms of the city. “So many things have just been shockingly better,” he said. “For example, my wife was saying that the other day she was walking along La Rambla and a car backfired. And she was the only person who ducked.”While they were thrilled to have left behind the gun violence and shooter drills of the US, the challenge was now in explaining to their loved ones that they were unlikely to return home once Trump’s term ends. “I don’t foresee this movement ending with the end of the Trump administration … I think that the rot is much deeper,” said Gorman.“If he wouldn’t have a huge base of support, Trump is just, you know, your crazy uncle yelling things on a porch. That base of support needs to be addressed. Why was there support for this kind of fascism?” he added. “And that’s a much deeper question. I would not personally feel safe going back to a country that doesn’t fully reckon with its fascist impulses.” More