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      How an 18th-century law enabled internment – and may do so again

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      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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      ‘Cemetery of the living dead’: Venezuelans recall 125 days in notorious El Salvador prison

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      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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      ‘Hundreds’ of people have been removed from ‘Alligator Alcatraz’ detention camp, says Florida governor

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      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

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      She fled Cuba for asylum – then was snatched from a US immigration courtroom

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      Jerome traveled a thousand miles from California to El Paso, Texas, so he could accompany Jenny to her immigration hearing. He and his wife had promised to take her after she had fled Cuba last December, after the government there had targeted her because she had reported on the country’s deplorable conditions for her college radio station.Everything should have been fine. Jenny, 25, had entered the United States legally under one of Joe Biden’s now-defunct programs, CBP One. By the end of the year, she could apply for a green card.But a few days before her hearing, Jerome started to feel like something was off. Jenny’s court date had been abruptly moved from May to June with no explanation. Arrests at immigration courthouses peppered the news.And when Jenny went before the court, the government attorney assigned to try to deport her asked the judge to dismiss her case, arguing vaguely that circumstances had changed.View image in fullscreenInstead, the judge noted that Jenny was pursuing an asylum claim and scheduled her for another court date in August 2026 – the best possible outcome.“She turned around and looked at me and smiled. And I smiled back, because she understood that she was free to go home,” Jerome said.But as Jenny left the courtroom and approached the elevator to leave, a crowd of government agents in masks converged on her and demanded she go with them. Just before she disappeared down a corridor with the phalanx of officers, she turned back to look at Jerome, her face stricken, silently pleading with him to do something.“I said, ‘She’s legal. She’s here legally. And you guys just don’t care, do you? Nobody cares about this. You guys just like pulling people away like this,’” Jerome recalled telling the agents. “And nobody said a word. They couldn’t even look me in the eye,” he told the Guardian.Footage of her apprehension was taken by those advocating for her and shared with the Guardian.Now Jenny is languishing in immigration custody. Her hearing for August 2026 has been replaced with a date for next month when the government attorney might once again attempt to dismiss her case, and her case been transferred from a judge who grants a majority of asylum applications to one with a less than 22% approval rate.“There’s no heart, there’s no compassion, there’s no empathy, there’s no anything. [It’s] ‘We’re just going to yank this woman away from you, and we don’t care,’” Jerome said. The Guardian is not using his or Jenny’s full name for their safety.Similar scenes have played out again and again at immigration courthouses across the country for weeks, as people following the federal government’s directions and attending their hearings are being scooped up and sent to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detention.The unusual tactics are happening while Donald Trump and his deputy chief of staff for policy, Stephen Miller, push for Ice to make at least 3,000 daily arrests – a tenfold increase from during Biden’s last year in office. Ice agents have suddenly become regulars at immigration court, where they can easily find soft targets.At first, the officers appeared to focus arrests on a subset of migrants who had been in the US for fewer than two years, which the Trump administration argues makes them susceptible to a fast-tracked deportation scheme called expedited removal. Ice officers seem to confer with their agency’s attorneys, who ask the judge to dismiss the migrants’ cases, as they did with Jenny. And, if judges agree, the migrants are detained on their way out of court so that officials can reprocess them through expedited removal, which allows the federal government to repatriate people with far less due process, sometimes without even seeing another judge.View image in fullscreenBut reporting by the Guardian has uncovered how Ice is casting a far wider net for its immigration court arrests and appears also to be targeting people such as Jenny whose cases are ongoing and have not been dismissed. The agency is also snatching up court attendees who have clearly been in the US for longer than two years – the maximum timeframe that according to US law determines whether someone can be placed in expedited removal – as well as those who have a pathway to remain in the country legally.After the migrants are apprehended, they’re stuffed into often overcrowded, likely privately run detention centers, sometimes far from their US-based homes and families. They’re put through high-stakes tests that will determine whether they have a future in the US, with limited access to attorneys. And as they endure inhospitable conditions in prisons and jails, the likelihood of them having both the will to keep fighting their case and the legal right to stay dwindles.“To see individuals who are law-abiding and who have received a follow-up court date only to be greeted by a group of large men in masks and whisked away to an unknown location in a building is jarring. It breaks my understanding and conception of the United States having a lawful due process,” said Emily Miller, who is part of a larger volunteer group in El Paso trying to protect migrants as best they can.One woman Miller saw apprehended had come to the US legally, submitted her asylum petition the day of her hearing, and was given a follow-up court date by the judge before Ice detained her.“My physical reaction was standing in the hallway shaking. My body just physically started shaking, out of shock and out of concern,” Miller said. “I have lived in other countries where I’ve been a stranger in a strange land and did not speak the language or had limited language abilities. And as a woman, to be greeted by masked men is something we are taught to fear because of violence that could happen to us.”Elsewhere in Texas, at the San Antonio immigration court earlier this month, a toddler dressed in pink and white overalls ran gleefully around the drab waiting room. Far more chairs than people lined the room’s perimeter, as if more attendees had been expected. A constantly multitasking employee at the front window bowed her head in frustration as the caller she was speaking to kept asking more questions. Self-help legal pamphlets hung on the wall – a reminder that the representation rate for people in immigration proceedings has plummeted in recent years, and the vast majority of migrants are navigating the deportation process with little to no expert help.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn one of the courtrooms, a family took their seats before the judge. Their seven-year-old boy pulled his shirt over his nose, his arms inside the arm holes. The government attorney sitting with a can of Dr Pepper on her desk promptly told the judge she had a motion to introduce, even as the family filed their asylum applications. She wanted to dismiss their cases, she said, as it was no longer in the government’s best interest to proceed.The judge said no. She scheduled the family for their final hearings just over a year later. And she warned them, carefully, that Ice might approach them as soon as they left her courtroom. What happened next, she said, was not in her control.Her last words to the family: “Good luck.”Men in bulletproof vests were hanging around in the hallway, but the family safely made it into the elevator and left the courthouse for the parking lot. Stephanie Spiro, associate director of protection-based relief at the National Immigrant Justice Center (NIJC), said that for the most part, Ice is leaving families with children alone (with notable exceptions). It’s “single adults” they’re after, people who often have loved ones in the US depending on them, but whose immigration cases involve them alone, she said.A few days later, two such adults – a man and a woman – separately went before a different immigration judge in San Antonio, whose courtroom had signs encouraging people to “self-deport”, the Trump administration’s phrase for leaving the country voluntarily before being removed.The government attorney that day moved to dismiss both the man’s and the woman’s cases, which the judge granted, dismissing the man’s case even before the government attorney had given a reason why.Using a Turkish interpreter, the judge then told the man it was likely that immigration authorities would try to put him into expedited removal – despite the fact that he had entered the US more than two years earlier.Soon after, the woman – who had been in the country for nearly four years – went before the court without a lawyer. The judge tried to explain to her what might happen if her case were dismissed, but as he finished, she admitted in Spanish: “I haven’t understood much of what you’ve told me.”View image in fullscreenThe woman went on to say that she was deep in the process of applying for a visa for victims of serious crimes in the US – a visa that provides a pathway to citizenship. But the judge was upset with her for not also filing an asylum application, and he threatened to order her repatriated. It was the government attorney who “saved” her, the judge said, by requesting the case be dismissed instead.As soon as the woman walked out of the courtroom, agents approached her and directed her out of the hallway, into a small room. Around the same time, outside the building, men wearing gaiters over their faces ushered a group of people into a white bus, presumably to be transported to detention.Spiro of the NIJC, meanwhile, works in Chicago and said she and fellow advocates have documented Ice officers in plainclothes coming to immigration court there with a list of whom they’re targeting – and court attendees are apprehended whether or not their case is dismissed.“People are getting detained regardless,” Spiro added. “And once they’re detained, it makes it just so much harder to put forth their claim.”Migrants picked up at the court in Chicago have been sent to Missouri, Florida and Texas – to detention spaces that still have capacity, but also to where judges are more likely to side with the Trump administration for speedier deportations. Many of them end up far from their loved ones, and a lag in Ice’s publicly accessible online detainee locator has meant some of them have at times essentially disappeared.As word of mouth has spread among immigrant communities in Chicago about these arrests, the once bustling court has gone eerily quiet, Spiro said. That, in turn, could have its own serious consequences, as no-shows for hearings are often ordered deported.“They don’t want to leave their house because of the detentions that are happening,” Spiro said of Chicago’s immigrants. “So to go to court, and to go anywhere – they don’t want to come to our office. To go anywhere where there’s federal agents and where they know Ice is trying to detain you is just terrifying beyond, you know, most people’s imagination.” More

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      ‘Deterrence is boring’: the US troops at sharp end of Trump’s border crackdown

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      Inside an armored vehicle, an army scout uses a joystick to direct a long-range optical scope toward a man perched atop the US-Mexico border wall cutting across the hills of this Arizona frontier community.The man lowers himself toward US soil between coils of concertina wire. Shouts ring out, an alert is sounded and a US Customs and Border Protection SUV races toward the wall – warning enough to send the man scrambling back over it, disappearing into Mexico.The sighting on Tuesday was one of only two for the army infantry unit patrolling this sector of the southern border, where an emergency declaration by Donald Trump has thrust the military into a central role in deterring migrant crossings at US ports of entry.“Deterrence is actually boring,” said 24-year-old Sgt Ana Harker-Molina, giving voice to the tedium felt by some fellow soldiers over the sporadic sightings. Still, she said she takes pride in the work, knowing that troops discourage crossings by their mere presence.“Just if we’re sitting here watching the border, it’s helping our country,” said Harker-Molina, an immigrant herself who came from Panama at age 12 and became a US citizen two years ago while serving in the army.View image in fullscreenUS troop deployments at the border have tripled to 7,600 and include every branch of the military – even as the number of attempted illegal crossings has plummeted and Trump has authorized funding for an additional 3,000 border patrol agents, offering $10,000 signing and retention bonuses.The military mission is guided from a new command center at a remote army intelligence training base alongside southern Arizona’s Huachuca mountains. There, a community hall has been transformed into a bustling war room of battalion commanders and staff with digital maps pinpointing military camps and movements along the nearly 2,000-mile border.Until now, border enforcement had been the domain of civilian law enforcement, with the military only intermittently stepping in. But in April, large swaths of the border were designated militarized zones, empowering US troops to apprehend immigrants and others accused of trespassing on army, air force or navy bases, and authorizing additional criminal charges that can mean prison time.The two-star general leading the mission says troops are being untethered from maintenance and warehouse tasks to work closely with border patrol agents in high-traffic areas for illegal crossings – and to deploy rapidly to remote, unguarded terrain.View image in fullscreen“We don’t have a [labor] union, there’s no limit on how many hours we can work in a day, how many shifts we can man,” said Maj Gen Scott Naumann of the army. “I can put soldiers out whenever we need to in order to get after the problem and we can put them out for days at a time; we can fly people into incredibly remote areas now that we see the cartels shifting” course.At Nogales, army scouts patrolled the border in full battle gear – helmet, M5 service rifle, bullet-resistant vest – with the right to use deadly force if attacked under standing military rules integrated into the border mission. Underfoot, smugglers for decades routinely attempted to tunnel into stormwater drains to ferry contraband into the US.Naumann’s command post oversees an armada of 117 armored Stryker vehicles, more than 35 helicopters, and a half-dozen long-distance drones that can survey the border day and night with sensors to pinpoint people wandering the desert. Marine Corps engineers are adding concertina wire to slow crossings, as the Trump administration reboots border wall construction.Naumann said the focus is on stopping “got-aways” who evade authorities to disappear into the US in a race against the clock that can last seconds in urban areas as people vanish into smuggling vehicles, or several days in the dense wetland thickets of the Rio Grande or the vast desert and mountainous wilderness of Arizona.Meanwhile, the rate of apprehensions at the border has fallen to a 60-year low.View image in fullscreenNaumann says the falloff in illegal entries is the “elephant in the room” as the military increases pressure and resources aimed at starving smuggling cartels – including Latin American gangs recently designated as foreign terrorist organizations.He says it would be wrong to let up, though, and that crossings may rebound with the end of scorching summer weather.“We’ve got to keep going after it; we’re having some successes, we are trending positively,” he said of the mission with no fixed end date.The Trump administration is using the military broadly to boost its immigration operations.“It’s all part of the same strategy that is a very muscular, robust, intimidating, aggressive response to this – to show his base that he was serious about a campaign promise to fix immigration,” said Dan Maurer, a law professor at Ohio Northern University and a retired army judge advocate officer. “It’s both norm-breaking and unusual. It puts the military in a very awkward position.”View image in fullscreenThe militarized zones at the border sidestep the Posse Comitatus Act, an 1878 law that prohibits the military from conducting civilian law enforcement on US soil.“It’s in that gray area. It may be a violation – it may not be. The military’s always had the authority to arrest people and detain them on military bases,” said Joshua Kastenberg, a professor at the University of New Mexico School of Law and a former air force judge.Michael Fisher, a security consultant and former chief of the border patrol from 2010 to 2016, calls the military expansion at the border a “force multiplier” as border patrol agents increasingly turn up far from the border.“The military allows border patrol to be able to flex into other areas where they typically would not be able to do so,” he said.At daybreak on Wednesday in Arizona, Spc Luisangel Nito scanned a valley with an infrared scope that highlights body heat, spotting three people as they crossed illegally into the US, in preparation for the border patrol to apprehend them. Nito’s unit also has equipment that can ground small drones used by smugglers to plot entry routes.View image in fullscreenNito is the US-born son of Mexican immigrants who entered the country in the 1990s through the same valleys he now patrols.“They crossed right here,” he said. “They told me to just be careful because back when they crossed they said it was dangerous.”Nito’s parents returned to Mexico in 2008 amid the financial crisis, but the soldier saw brighter opportunities in the US, returned and enlisted. He expressed no reservations about his role in detaining undocumented immigrants.“Obviously it’s a job, right, and then I signed up for it and I’m going to do it,” he said. More

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      Immigration agents told a teenage US citizen: ‘You’ve got no rights.’ He secretly recorded his brutal arrest

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      On the morning of 2 May, teenager Kenny Laynez-Ambrosio was driving to his landscaping job in North Palm Beach with his mother and two male friends when they were pulled over by the Florida highway patrol.In one swift moment, a traffic stop turned into a violent arrest.A highway patrol officer asked everyone in the van to identify themselves, then called for backup. Officers with US border patrol arrived on the scene.Video footage of the incident captured by Laynez-Ambrosio, an 18-year-old US citizen, appears to show a group of officers in tactical gear working together to violently detain the three men*, two of whom are undocumented. They appear to use a stun gun on one man, put another in a chokehold and can be heard telling Laynez-Ambrosio: “You’ve got no rights here. You’re a migo, brother.” Afterward, agents can be heard bragging and making light of the arrests, calling the stun gun use “funny” and quipping: “You can smell that … $30,000 bonus.”The footage has put fresh scrutiny on the harsh tactics used by US law enforcement officials as the Trump administration sets ambitious enforcement targets to detain thousands of immigrants every day.“The federal government has imposed quotas for the arrest of immigrants,” said Jack Scarola, an attorney who is advocating on behalf of Laynez-Ambrosio and working with the non-profit Guatemalan-Maya Center, which provided the footage to the Guardian. “Any time law enforcement is compelled to work towards a quota, it poses a significant risk to other rights.”Chokeholds, stun guns and laughterThe incident unfolded at roughly 9am, when a highway patrol officer pulled over the company work van, driven by Laynez-Ambrosio’s mother, and discovered that she had a suspended license. Laynez-Ambrosio said he is unsure why the van was pulled over, as his mother was driving below the speed limit.Laynez-Ambrosio hadn’t intended to film the interaction – he already had his phone out to show his mom “a silly TikTok”, he said – but immediately clicked record when it became clear what was happening.View image in fullscreenThe video begins after the van has been pulled over and the border patrol had arrived. A female officer can be heard asking, in Spanish, whether anyone is in the country illegally. One of Laynez-Ambrosio’s friends answers that he is undocumented. “That’s when they said, ‘OK, let’s go,’” Laynez-Ambrosio recalled.Laynez-Ambrosio said things turned aggressive before the group even had a chance to exit the van. One of the officers “put his hand inside the window”, he said, “popped the door open, grabbed my friend by the neck and had him in a chokehold”.Footage appears to show officers then reaching for Laynez-Ambrosio and his other friend as Laynez-Ambrosio can be heard protesting: “You can’t grab me like that.” Multiple officers can be seen pulling the other man from the van and telling him to “put your fucking head down”. The footage captures the sound of a stun gun as Laynez-Ambrosio’s friend cries out in pain and drops to the ground.Laynez-Ambrosio said that his friend was not resisting, and that he didn’t speak English and didn’t understand the officer’s commands. “My friend didn’t do anything before they grabbed him,” he said.View image in fullscreenIn the video, Laynez-Ambrosio can be heard repeatedly telling his friend, in Spanish, to not resist. “I wasn’t really worried about myself because I knew I was going to get out of the situation,” he said. “But I was worried about him. I could speak up for him but not fight back, because I would’ve made the situation worse.”Laynez-Ambrosio can also be heard telling officers: “I was born and raised right here.” Still, he was pushed to the ground and says that an officer aimed a stun gun at him. He was subsequently arrested and held in a cell at a Customs and Border Protection (CBP) station for six hours.Audio in the video catches the unidentified officers debriefing and appearing to make light of the stun gun use. “You’re funny, bro,” one officer can be overheard saying to another, followed by laughter.Another officer says, “They’re starting to resist more now,” to which an officer replies: “We’re going to end up shooting some of them.”Later in the footage, the officers move on to general celebration – “Goddamn! Woo! Nice!” – and talk of the potential bonus they’ll be getting: “Just remember, you can smell that [inaudible] $30,000 bonus.” It is unclear what bonus they are referring to. Donald Trump’s recent spending bill includes billions of additional dollars for Ice that could be spent on recruitment and retention tactics such as bonuses.Laynez-Ambrosio said his two friends were eventually transferred to the Krome detention center in Miami. He believes they were released on bail and are awaiting a court hearing, but said it has been difficult to stay in touch with them.Laynez-Ambrosio’s notice to appear in court confirms that the border patrol arrived on the scene, having been called in by the highway patrol. His other legal representative, Victoria Mesa-Estrada, also confirmed that border patrol officers transported the three men to the border patrol facility.The Florida highway patrol, CBP, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not respond to requests for comment before publication.‘We are good people’Laynez-Ambrosio was charged with obstruction without violence and sentenced to 10 hours of community service and a four-hour anger management course. While in detention, he said, police threatened him with charges if he did not delete the video footage from his phone, but he refused.Scarola, his lawyer, said the charges were retaliation for filming the incident. “Kenny was charged with filming [and was] alleged to have interfered with the activities of law enforcement,” he explained. “But there was no intended interference – merely the exercise of a right to record what was happening.”In February, Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, signed an agreement between the state and the Department of Homeland Security allowing Florida highway patrol troopers to be trained and approved by Ice to arrest and detain immigrants. While such agreements have been inked across the US, Florida has the largest concentration of these deals.View image in fullscreenFather Frank O’Loughlin, founder and executive director of the Guatemalan-Maya Center, the advocates for Laynez-Ambrosio, says the incident has further eroded trust between Florida’s immigrant community and the police. “This is a story about the corruption of law enforcement by Maga and the brutality of state and federal troopers – formerly public servants – towards nonviolent people,” he said.Meanwhile, Laynez-Ambrosio is trying to recover from the ordeal, and hopes the footage raises awareness of how immigrants are being treated in the US. “It didn’t need to go down like that. If they knew that my people were undocumented, they could’ve just kindly taken them out of the car and arrested them,” he said. “It hurt me bad to see my friends like that. Because they’re just good people, trying to earn an honest living.”

      The Guardian is granting anonymity to Laynez-Ambrosio’s mother and the men arrested in the footage to protect their privacy More

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      One day inside the deportation machine at a federal immigration court in New York

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      A brother is torn from his sister. A father arrives for his immigration hearing with his family, only to find that they will be leaving without him. A woman, seemingly relieved after emerging from her hearing, finds that her life is about to change when she is apprehended by federal officials waiting just outside the door.These are just some of the moments that happened on a single day in the Jacob K Javits federal building at 26 Federal Plaza in New York City, the largest federal immigration courthouse in Manhattan.Courthouse detentions have been one of many flashpoints in the Trump administration’s expanding crackdown on immigration, as federal authorities seek to arrest 3,000 people a day. There have been reports of arrests at courthouses across the country, from Phoenix to Los Angeles to Chicago, turning routine hearings into scenes fraught with anxiety and fear. A recently filed class-action lawsuit against the Trump administration seeks to bar the practice of courthouse arrests.View image in fullscreenView image in fullscreenImmigration court presents an especially precarious situation. Not showing up for a hearing can have serious consequences, but as the Guardian observed in the hallways outside courtrooms in New York, showing up also has serious consequences. Even though some people had been granted follow-up hearings, they were detained by federal officials in the hallway and rushed to a stairwell for holding elsewhere in the building. On 18 June, representatives Jerry Nadler and Dan Goldman attempted to conduct oversight on the building’s 10th floor, where people have been held, sometimes for days at a time, but were rebuffed by federal officials. Recently released footage shows the harsh conditions faced by people held on the 10th floor.What follows is a visual timeline of a single day inside the halls of the Jacob K Javits federal building, where some people found their lives forever changed.8.57am – A family walks towards a courtroom past masked federal agents. Only the father has a hearing, and his family would not be allowed to enter the room with him. They would have to wait elsewhere.View image in fullscreen9.51am – A federal agent checks a stack of documents containing identifying information for people slated for detention.View image in fullscreen10.11am – Federal agents load a detained man into an elevator.View image in fullscreen10.17am – Federal agents wait.View image in fullscreen10.30am – Federal agents lead a detained man to a stairwell.View image in fullscreenView image in fullscreen11.25am – The New York City comptroller, Brad Lander, left, escorts a man to the elevator after his hearing. Lander has made regular appearances at the federal building to observe cases and help people leave the building. He was arrested on 17 June as he was attempting to help escort someone out. A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said Lander “was arrested for assaulting law enforcement and impeding a federal officer”, though video evidence of the encounter debunks that allegation. He was subsequently released the same day.View image in fullscreen11.45am – After successfully escorting a man to the elevator, Lander then returns to a courtroom to observe another case. At 11.45am, he stands in the doorway and announces to federal agents that a man named Carlos has been granted a follow-up hearing in 2029. He asks the assembled agents if they would allow him to return for that hearing. No one says anything in response.View image in fullscreen11.46am – Chaos breaks out as multiple federal agents grab Carlos while his sister screams.View image in fullscreenView image in fullscreen11.55am – Court employees had informed a sketch artist that she wouldn’t be allowed inside the courtrooms at the federal building, despite the fact that such artists are generally permitted in courtrooms where cameras are banned, as in high-profile federal trials. The sketch artist resorts to drawing the scene in the hallway. She would subsequently be allowed into the courtroom.View image in fullscreen12.58pm – A half-eaten snack bar sticks out of a tactical vest.View image in fullscreen1.51pm – After emerging from a hearing, a woman is immediately apprehended by a masked federal agent who asks for her name and to look at her documents. Upon reviewing her documents, the agent tells her she can leave. “Have a nice day,” he says in Spanish.View image in fullscreen2.11pm – Federal agents detain the father from the family observed at 8.57am and lead him to a stairwell. The Guardian later observed a photojournalist telling the man’s family in Spanish that he had been arrested. Their oldest child broke down in tears as the other two slept, after waiting for him for hours after their arrival. The mother said he had no criminal history and that their asylum cases were in progress.View image in fullscreenView image in fullscreen2.58pm – The last woman to emerge from her hearing holds a stack of documents in her hand, and she smiles briefly before a masked agent whose T-shirt reads “police” apprehends her. Her smile fades to an expression of fear as she learns that she will not be allowed to leave. Federal agents then rush her to a stairwell.View image in fullscreenView image in fullscreenView image in fullscreen More

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      Trump push to ban birthright citizenship unconstitutional, US court rules

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      Donald Trump’s effort to repeal birthright citizenship has hit another a stumbling block, with a federal appeals court in San Francisco declaring the president’s attempt unconstitutional.The three-judge ruling panel in the 9th US circuit court of appeals echoed a district court in New Hampshire that blocked the executive order earlier this month.“The district court correctly concluded that the executive order’s proposed interpretation, denying citizenship to many persons born in the United States, is unconstitutional. We fully agree,” the verdict said.The case is now one stop further on the long road to the US supreme court.Trump’s executive order banning birthright citizenship was signed just hours after the president took office on 20 January and was immediately challenged in a spread of courts across the country. It has faced a tumultuous legal battle ever since. Birthright citizenship is a legal principle that allows nearly everyone born on US soil to become a US citizen.In under a month since the executive order’s filing, multiple judges across the country have filed injunctions blocking the order.Trump’s administration then took to the supreme court to fight the injunctions. In a major decision, the US supreme court ruled that injunctions by the lower courts were exceeding their given authority, effectively transforming the mechanics of the US justice system. The verdict did not address the legality of the birthright citizenship ban itself.A loophole was left, however, for those looking to fight the executive order – class action lawsuits. In opposition to the executive order, New Hampshire judge Joseph LaPlante recognized babies across the US as a class that would be affected by the lawsuit and said depriving them of citizenship constituted irreparable harm.Birthright citizenship was embedded in the US constitution’s 14th amendment in 1868, overturning the infamous 1857 Dred Scott decision and giving citizenship to formerly enslaved Americans. It was strengthened in 1898 in the Wong Ark case, which upheld the citizenship of American-born Wong Kim Ark in the face of the Chinese Exclusion Act. Indigenous Americans were historically excluded from birthright citizenship, which changed with the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924.Long a fringe issue in rightwing circles, the effort to repeal birthright citizenship was brought back into Congress in 1991 and has appeared regularly since. Trump’s executive order, constitutional or not, marks its furthest foray into the mainstream.At time of writing the Trump administration was yet to comment on the ruling. More