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Kristi Noem warns immigrants away from Super Bowl: ‘We’ll be all over that place’
by Evelyn Reynolds 4 October 2025, 16:49
Kristi Noem, Donald Trump’s homeland security secretary, has said that only Americans should attend next year’s Super Bowl and warned that Ice agents “will be all over” the event.Speaking to the rightwing podcaster Benny Johnson on Friday, Noem also said the NFL will “not be able to sleep at night” over its decision to choose Bad Bunny, the Puerto Rican rapper who has criticized the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration policies, as its half-time performer.Asked whether “there will be Ice enforcement at the Super Bowl”, Noem said: “There will be, because the Department of Homeland Security is responsible for keeping it safe, so I have the responsibility for making sure everybody goes to the Super Bowl, has the opportunity to enjoy it and to leave, and that’s what America is about.”She added: “So yeah, we’ll be all over that place … We’re going to enforce the law. So I think people should not be coming to the Super Bowl unless they’re law-abiding Americans who love this country.”Bad Bunny was confirmed as the headline act at the Super Bowl last week. In September, the musician said he had excluded the US from his upcoming world tour due to concerns over potential immigration raids.“There was the issue of – like, fucking Ice could be outside [my concert],” he told i-D magazine. “And it’s something that we were talking about and very concerned about.”The selection of the Puerto Rican has upset several conservatives, with Johnson complaining this week that Bad Bunny has “no songs in English”.Asked about the NFL choosing Bad Bunny, Noem said: “Well, they suck, and we’ll win, and God will bless us, and we’ll stand and be proud of ourselves at the end of the day, and they won’t be able to sleep at night, because they don’t know what they believe, and they’re so weak, we’ll fix it.”Noem’s insistence that Ice agents will be “all over” the Super Bowl appeared to clash slightly with the White House.On Friday, the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, told reporters: “As far as Ice being at the Super Bowl, as far as I’m aware there’s no tangible plan for that in store right now.”She added: “However, of course this administration is always going to arrest and deport illegal immigrants when we find them if they are criminals. We’re going to do the right thing by our country.” More
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Judge says prosecution against Kilmar Ábrego García for human smuggling may be illegal retaliation
by Evelyn Reynolds 4 October 2025, 14:40
A federal judge has concluded that the Department of Justice’s prosecution of Kilmar Ábrego García on human-smuggling charges may be an illegal retaliation after he successfully sued the Trump administration over his deportation to El Salvador.The case of Ábrego, a Salvadorian national who was a construction worker in Maryland, has become a proxy for the partisan struggle over Donald Trump’s sweeping immigration policy and mass deportation agenda.US district court judge Waverly Crenshaw granted a request late on Friday by lawyers for Ábrego and ordered discovery and an evidentiary hearing in Ábrego’s effort to show that the federal human-smuggling case against him in Tennessee is illegally retaliatory.Crenshaw said Ábrego had shown that there is “some evidence that the prosecution against him may be vindictive”. That evidence included statements by various Trump administration officials and the timeline of the charges being filed.The Departments of Justice and Homeland Security did not immediately respond to inquiries about the case on Saturday.In his 16-page ruling, Crenshaw said many statements by Trump administration officials “raise cause for concern”, but one stood out.That statement, by the deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche, on a Fox News program after Ábrego was charged in June, seemed to suggest that the Department of Justice charged him because he won his wrongful deportation case, Crenshaw wrote.Blanche’s ”remarkable statements could directly establish that the motivations for Ábrego’s criminal charges stem from his exercise of his constitutional and statutory rights” to sue over his deportation “rather than a genuine desire to prosecute him for alleged criminal misconduct”, Crenshaw wrote.Likewise, Crenshaw noted that the Department of Homeland Security reopened an investigation into Ábrego days after the US supreme court said in April that the Trump administration must work to bring him back.Ábrego was indicted on 21 May and charged on 6 June, the day the US returned him from a prison in El Salvador. He pleaded not guilty and is now being held in Pennsylvania.If convicted in the Tennessee case, Ábrego will be deported, federal officials have said. A US immigration judge has denied Ábrego’s bid for asylum, although he can appeal.The Salvadorian national has an American wife and children and has lived in Maryland for years, but he immigrated to the United States illegally as a teenager.In 2019, he was arrested by immigration agents. He requested asylum but was not eligible because he had been in the US for more than a year. But the judge ruled he could not be deported to El Salvador, where he faced danger from a gang that targeted his family.The human-smuggling charges in Tennessee stem from a 2022 traffic stop. He was not charged at the time.Trump administration officials have waged a relentless public relations campaign against Ábrego, repeatedly referring to him as a member of the MS-13 gang, among other things, despite the fact he has not been convicted of any crimes.Ábrego’s attorneys have denounced the criminal charges and the deportation efforts, saying they are an attempt to punish him for standing up to the administration.Ábrego contends that, while imprisoned in El Salvador, he suffered beatings, sleep deprivation and psychological torture. El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, has denied those allegations. More
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Small US college towns reel amid Trump immigration crackdown: ‘They need international students’
by Evelyn Reynolds 4 October 2025, 14:00
For a town of 20,000 residents a few miles from the Indiana state line in rural Ohio, the city of Oxford boasts an outsized number of international eateries.On High Street, the Phan Shin Chinese restaurant sits a few doors down from the Happy Kitchen, another Chinese food joint, which is next door to the Krishna Indian restaurant. There’s a French bakery and even a Uyghur restaurant selling central Asian fare.The diversity of international restaurants mirrors the student population attending Miami University, which in 2019 had a student body including more than 3,000 international students.But in recent years, the number of international students coming to study at US colleges has plummeted, a trend that could have devastating consequences for small college towns.It was the large number of Chinese students attending Miami University that prompted Fei Yang to open the MImian Chinese restaurant in Oxford, a full 60 miles from his home, in 2018.“There used to be 2,000 to 3,000 [Chinese] students but now there is like 300, 400 maybe,” says Yang. “Covid-19 stopped a lot of people coming. Before we used to make real Chinese food, now we make the American versions.”In fall 2019, Miami University admitted 2,895 international students, mainly from China, Vietnam, India, and elsewhere – last year, the number plummeted to 750. Since international students at Miami University are not receiving scholarships, they typically pay more than $65,000 in tuition, fees, housing and food, according to 2024-25 estimated cost of attendance figures, which represents a potential loss of about $140m for the university, local businesses and the thousands of workers they collectively employ.Across the US, an estimated 150,000 fewer international students are expected to study at US colleges and universities this fall compared to last year, a 40% drop.While the reasons are varied, the Trump administration’s response to protests on campuses against Israel’s war on Gaza has played a major role in fueling the falloff by driving fear of arrest and deportation into many would-be incoming international students.In June, the state department announced more severe screening and vetting processes for international students intending on studying in the US, including ordering applicants to turn their social media profiles public.Students from Turkey, Palestine, and Iran have been detained, imprisoned and deported or self-deported for expressing their first amendment rights, rights that are protected by the US constitution, regardless of whether they are citizens of the country or not. About 6,000 student visas have been revoked this year with some students seeing their visas revoked for alleged minor wrongdoings such as speeding.International student enrolment, however, has been in decline since before the current administration’s crackdown. The tariffs regime initiated on China during the first Trump administration, as well as Covid-19 pandemic travel restrictions in 2020, prompted a massive fall in students traveling to the US for higher education five years ago. In the years since, Chinese students have increasingly chosen to study in the UK and Australia in place of the US.While mid-sized and large cities and wealthy small towns such as Ithaca, New York, – home to Cornell University – can typically take the financial hit from the loss of thousands of international students due to their diversified economies, less affluent towns, whose economies have never fully recovered from the loss of students on-site during the pandemic, remain imperiled.According to the US Department of Commerce, international students are thought to have contributed around $50bn to the US economy in 2023 in tuition, rent, food, taxes and a host of other ways. In Ohio, Kentucky, and Iowa, which rank among the lowest states for GDP growth in the country, and which are Trump strongholds, their economies are set to lose as much as $200m, $45m and nearly $43m respectively. Florida’s economy could see losses reaching as much as $243m.“We tend to think that foreign students only go to big Ivy League schools in big cities. But if you look at a recent Brookings Institution report, it is clear that every school, small, medium and large, in every town or city – small, medium or large need income from international students,” says Tara Sonenshine, Edward R Murrow professor of practice in public diplomacy at Tufts University.In West Lafayette, Indiana, the 50,000 students who attend Purdue University make up the overwhelming majority of the city’s population. Almost one in four of those at Purdue in 2024 were international students, most paying full tuition and board costs. These students, many who attend to learn cutting-edge agriculture practices, help employ more than 10,000 people, making Purdue University the largest employer in the region.It’s a similar story for rural Illinois, where one-quarter of students at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign campus are from overseas – one of the highest ratios of any private or public college in the country. There, an international student studying for a four-year undergraduate degree can net the college and offshoot businesses about $200,000 in tuition and other fees.In Oxford, Ohio, one of the biggest issues international students help local businesses with is providing custom during the six-week period from mid-December to the end of January when there are no classes at Miami University. At that time, other than permanent residents, the only people in town are international students.“Our business community is very dependent on Miami University students. Oxford’s population is about 20,000, of which 17,000 or more are Miami University students,” says Oxford city manager Doug Elliott.“We have a lot of homes that were converted into student housing. That’s typical for small college towns like us.”Elliott notes that aside from the financial benefit, international students bring energy and diversity in the form of festivals and gatherings to parts of the US that would otherwise never get to experience the wider world.“Cutting off visas for international students, combined with demographic shifts in America and the declining enrolment in college, in addition to the general disdain for immigrant populations coming here,” says Sonenshine, “would all add up to chaos and potential closures of small schools who rely on a broader pool on enrolment.” More
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Every American should read this judge’s stirring rebuke to Trump | Austin Sarat
by Evelyn Reynolds 4 October 2025, 11:00
Democracy requires that we do more than look out for our own interests and defend our own rights. Ever since the birth of this nation, its citizens and leaders have echoed Benjamin Franklin’s admonition that “we must all hang together, or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.”In Donald Trump’s America, hanging separately seems to be the order of the day. This seems especially true when it comes to his treatment of this country’s millions of non-citizen residents.From the start of his political career, demonizing immigrants has been Trump’s stock in trade. Since his return to office, he has been unusually aggressive in his campaign to round up, detain and deport people whose citizenship status is questionable, and, in some cases, citizens have been caught up in the dragnet.The administration has repeatedly violated the constitution by targeting people because of how they look or the sound of their accents. It has even singled them out because of what they have said or written.On 30 September, Judge William Young of the United States district court of Massachusetts made clear that when it comes to freedom of speech, the constitution does not distinguish between people born in the United States and those who have come here as immigrants. His decision in American Association of University Professors v Rubio offers both a stirring civics lesson and an unusually personal rebuke against the Trump administration. The court found that the Trump administration had violated the right to free speech in its push to detain and deport pro-Palestinian foreign scholars.In his opinion, the judge went beyond the usual bounds of a judicial decision to note that the president “ignores everything … The Constitution, our civil laws, regulations, mores, customs, practices, courtesies – all of it; the President simply ignores it all when he takes it into his head to act”. Young added: “While the President naturally seeks warm cheering and gladsome, welcoming acceptance of his views, in the real world he’ll settle for sullen silence and obedience. What he will not countenance is dissent or disagreement.”The judge also accused the president of “bullying”.Legal purists who might applaud the judge’s reading of the constitution will be offended by seeing that kind of language in a judicial opinion. But what he did helps frame the danger Trump poses to the rights of immigrants in a way that connects them to the rest of us.Bravo, Judge Young.Recall the case of Mahmoud Khalil, a green card holder and graduate of Columbia University. He was arrested and detained in March for participating in pro-Palestinian protests on the Columbia University campus. He was held for more than a hundred days in Louisiana.As his lawyer said on Democracy Now: “If free speech means anything in this country,” he noted, it means “government agents can’t pick you up off the street and throw you into jail because of what you’ve said.” But that is exactly what the administration did, hoping to make an example out of Khalil and send a chilling message to other immigrants.Or how about Rümeysa Öztürk, a Tufts University graduate student, arrested by masked Ice agents for writing an op-ed calling on Tufts to do something to protect human rights in Gaza? As a Washington Post story notes, “Ozturk had committed no crime, yet her detention was a priority for the new Trump administration. US officials used the immigration system in unprecedented ways to covertly research and detain noncitizen students, relying on an investigative arm of the Department of Homeland Security whose work traditionally has focused on crimes such as drug smuggling and human trafficking.”“The effort to deport pro-Palestinian student activists,” the Post reports, “represented the Trump administration’s first major challenge to free-speech norms in the United States.” It had to know that what it was doing violated the First Amendment but went ahead anyway under the pretext that it was acting to prevent or punish terrorist activities.This is not the first time that immigrants have been punished for saying or doing things that an administration labelled dangerous. But since the middle of the 20th century, the supreme court has held that the government cannot deport people because of their views or what they say.At that time, Justice William Douglas explained that “freedom of speech and of the press is accorded aliens residing in this country” and that “the utterances made by … [them] were entitled to that protection”. Justice Frank Murphy joined him and stated: “Once an alien lawfully enters and resides in this country he becomes invested with the rights guaranteed by the Constitution to all people within our borders.”Young cited those views in his own opinion. “Noncitizens’ speech rights are,” he said, “identical to those of citizens.” He argued: “Political speech is not, on its own, a facially legitimate reason for expelling persons from this country.”After laying out in great detail all the things the Trump administration has done to violate that principle, including its mistreatment of Khalil and Öztürk, he called out Trump for ignoring the constitution and acting as if “the First Amendment’s protection of freedom of speech applies to American citizens alone”.Young called the case he was deciding “perhaps the most important ever to fall within the jurisdiction of this district court”.Citing the language of the first amendment – “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech” – the judge insisted: “‘No law’ means ‘no law.’ The First Amendment does not draw President Trump’s invidious distinction” between citizens and non-citizens, “and it is not to be found in our history”, Young wrote.That reference to “our history” suggests that Trump’s treatment of non-citizens is un-American. But Young was not finished.He added: “Triumphalism is the very essence of the Trump brand. Often this is naught but hollow bragging: ‘my perfect administration,’ wearing a red baseball cap in the presidential oval office emblazoned ‘Trump Was Right About Everything,’ or most recently depicting himself as an officer in the First Cavalry Division.”He criticized Trump for his “triumphal, transactional, imperative, bellicose, and coarse” language that “seeks to persuade – not through marshaling data driven evidence, science, or moral suasion, but through power”.Near the end of his opinion, Young quotes former president Ronald Reagan. “Freedom,” Reagan said, “is a fragile thing and it’s never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by way of inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation, for it comes only once to a people …”Returning to Trump, the judge goes on to say: “I’ve come to believe that President Trump truly understands and appreciates the full import of President Reagan’s inspiring message – yet I fear he has drawn from it a darker, more cynical message … [and that he] believes the American people are so divided that today they will not stand up, fight for, and defend our most precious constitutional values so long as they are lulled into thinking their own personal interests are not affected.”By going beyond the precise issue in this case, the free speech rights of immigrants, and going after Trump, Young’s opinion helps frame threats to the rights of immigrants in a way that connects them to the rest of us. He hopes to rekindle the spirit of Reagan and inspire Americans to prove Trump wrong by showing that they will “stand up, fight for, and defend our most precious constitutional values”.
Austin Sarat, William Nelson Cromwell professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College, is the author or editor of more than 100 books, including Gruesome Spectacles: Botched Executions and America’s Death Penalty More
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Trump administration to offer unaccompanied minors $2,500 to self-deport, memo reveals
by Evelyn Reynolds 4 October 2025, 00:21
The Trump administration wants to offer immigrant children $2,500 to self-deport, according to a memo obtained by the Guardian.The memo, sent by the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to legal providers representing unaccompanied children and reviewed by the Guardian, says that immigration officials have identified unaccompanied immigrant children 14 years of age and older in government custody who have expressed interest in voluntarily departing the US.The government “will provide a one-time resettlement support stipend of $2,500” to these children in exchange for their voluntary departure, the memo states. It notes that unaccompanied minors from Mexico will not be eligible.DHS confirmed the details of the memo and its plans to offer children money in a statement to the Guardian on Friday.The effort by the administration is a significant departure from longstanding immigration policy related to minors in US custody, according to experts. Although voluntary departure for unaccompanied immigrant children has always been an option, it typically requires consultation with attorneys and approval by a judge. The administration’s decision to incentivize children to engage in self-removal is new.The administration’s “message is confusing and seems to fly in the face of established laws and protocols that Congress passed to protect children from cyclical trafficking risks”, said Shaina Aber, executive director of the Acacia Center for Justice, in a statement. “We are concerned by messaging from the Department of Homeland Security that suggests children who were trafficked against their will into the US by cartels will be part of an incentive program aimed at getting children to waive their legal rights under the Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act.”Immigration lawyers and advocates have expressed alarm at the potential ramifications for children and their families. “We are mindful that this $2,500 incentive being offered to children in exchange for giving up their legal claims and accepting voluntary departure has the potential to exploit their unique vulnerabilities as unaccompanied minors in government custody,” said Marion “Mickey” Donovan-Kaloust at the Los Angeles-based legal aid group Immigrant Defenders Law Center, or ImmDef.“This policy pressures children to abandon their legal claims and return to a life of fear and danger without ever receiving a fair hearing,” said Murad Awawdeh, president of the New York Immigration Coalition. “The chaos built into this policy will devastate families and communities – and it is targeted to hurt children.”Children who arrive in the US or at a border without a parent or guardian are classified as unaccompanied minors, and are placed in the custody of the office of refugee resettlement (ORR), which is under HHS. Children are placed in federal government-run shelters until they can be reunited with family members vetted by the ORR, or with foster families, a process outlined in federal law.Since the Trump administration came into office, it has engaged in efforts to remove immigrant children from the US. The administration has attempted to roll back legal representation for minors, cutting back a federally funded program that provided legal aid for unaccompanied children.In late August, the administration prepared to hastily deport dozens of Guatemalan children. Many of the children had pending immigration cases and had not elected to leave the US, according to their lawyers.Dozens of children were roused from their beds at shelters and taken to an airport in the early morning hours and ushered onto flights – and were only released after a judge temporarily blocked the deportations.“We urge the public not to lose sight of the broader context in which this program is unfolding: a sustained assault on children’s access to legal counsel, dramatically prolonged detention periods, the expedited processing of deportation cases, and, most disturbingly, children being dragged from their beds in the middle of the night last month and threatened with deportation,” said Donovan-Kaloust.Members of Congress also have expressed concern about the treatment of immigrant children in US government custody. This week, led by the representative Delia Ramirez, those members wrote a letter to DHS opposing efforts to return immigrant children to their countries of origin.The letter, which has not previously been reported on, was submitted before the newest Trump administration memo incentivizing children to voluntarily return to their countries of origin. The members of Congress requested that DHS provide information on its push to return immigrant children to their home countries.“Given that we know the Trump Administration has no concern for keeping families together, we expect that DHS’s new policy will deprive children of due process and place them in grave danger of trafficking and other harm,” the members wrote.The newest directive was sent to ORR legal service providers on Friday morning, four days after the congressional letter.Dina Francesca Haynes, executive director of the Orville H Schell Jr Center for International Human Rights at Yale, said she questioned how children who are not old enough to enter into contracts on their own could be expected to consent to a legally complicated immigration decision.She said she is also concerned that the program will fuel family separations. Already, the Trump administration has issued stringent new restrictions on who can take custody of unaccompanied minors, requiring US identification, proof of income and in many cases a DNA test of family members seeking to reunite with children in ORR shelters or foster care. The new limits have made it especially difficult for immigrant families, and undocumented immigrants, to take custody of children.Haynes said she worries that children would feel pressured to accept a voluntary departure in order to protect their family members from being targeted or deported.“It’s just so astonishing that this is something that [the US] would be doing as a policy,” she said. “It’s coercing children who are already traumatized.”Earlier on Friday, rumors began spreading regarding the administration’s efforts to target children and incentivize them with money to voluntarily depart.According to a statement from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the “voluntary option gives UACs [unaccompanied children] a choice and allows them to make an informed decision about their future. Any payment to support a return home would be provided after an immigration judge grants the request and the individual arrives in their country of origin.”The offer is being made to 17-year-old unaccompanied children first, DHS said, despite the memo outlining that the deal is being offered to children as young as 14.The stipend program to urge children to depart the US echoes a similar scheme that the government devised to incentivize adults to self-deport. In May, the administration announced it would offer a $1,000 incentive to immigrants who “self-deport” using a government-designed app.Following the launch of that self-deportation program, it was unclear how many people partook in the scheme and whether any of them actually received the promised $1,000, Haynes said. “So I don’t know that the funds would actually be an incentive,” she said.Advocates have also raised alarm that children are increasingly being used as pawns in an effort to locate and deport their family members. Earlier this year, the Guardian reported that DHS was beginning to seek out unaccompanied immigrant children in operations nationwide in an attempt to deport them or pursue criminal cases against them or their adult sponsors.A recent Guardian investigation found that immigrant families are being threatened with separation from their children in order to coerce immigrants and asylum seekers to leave the US. In several cases, officials have forcibly separated immigrant children from their parents, and misclassified the children as “unaccompanied minors”, in an apparent effort to retaliate against families who have challenged deportation orders or insisted on their right to seek asylum. More
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All the US campus protesters have been released – except for her: ‘Most days I feel helpless’
by Evelyn Reynolds 3 October 2025, 19:51
Growing up in the West Bank, Leqaa Kordia was separated from family in Gaza by Israeli restrictions on movement between the territories. So aunts and uncles in Gaza would call from the beach there, allowing Kordia to share her cousins’ laughter and glimpse the waves.Now many of those relatives are dead, killed in the war that has destroyed much of the Gaza Strip. And more than 200 days after Kordia was swept up in the Trump administration’s crackdown on pro-Palestinian protesters, she despairs over being unable to give her family a voice.“Most days I feel helpless,” said Kordia, 32, speaking from a Texas immigration detention center where she has been jailed since March. “I want to do something, but I can’t from here. I can’t do anything.”Kordia, a Palestinian who has lived in New Jersey since 2016, was one of the first people arrested in the government’s campaign against protesters, many of them prominent activists. All the others have gained release.Only Kordia – mischaracterized by the government, largely overlooked by the public and caught in a legal maze – languishes in detention. That is, in part, because her story differs from those of most others who thronged campuses.When she joined demonstrations against Israel outside Columbia University, she wasn’t a student or part of a group that might have provided support. As the arrests of activists like Mahmoud Khalil drew condemnation from elected officials and advocates, Kordia’s case largely remained out of the public eye.And Kordia has been reluctant to draw attention to herself.In her first interview since her arrest, Kordia said recently that she was motivated to protest because of deep personal ties to Gaza, where more than 170 relatives have been killed. The government has cast those ties as suspect, pointing to Kordia’s money transfers to relatives in the Middle East as evidence of possible ties to terrorists.Lawyers for the Department of Homeland Security didn’t reply to calls for comment. An agency spokesperson declined to answer questions about the case.In a blistering decision this week, a federal judge found the Trump administration unlawfully targeted protesters for speaking out. That ruling isn’t binding, though, in the highly conservative district where Kordia’s case is being heard.“The government has tried again and again to muster some kind of justification to hold this young woman in custody indefinitely,” said her immigration attorney, Sarah Sherman-Stokes. “It doesn’t seem to matter to them that they have no evidence.”Kordia grew up in the West Bank city of Ramallah. Her parents divorced when she was a child and her mother remarried, eventually becoming a US citizen. In 2016, Kordia came to the US on a visitor’s visa, staying with her mother in Paterson, New Jersey, which is home to one of the nation’s largest Arab communities.Soon after, Kordia enrolled in an English-language program and obtained a student visa. Her mother applied to let Kordia remain in the US as the relative of a citizen.The application was approved, but no visas were available. Government lawyers say Kordia has been in the US illegally since she left school in 2022, surrendering her student status and invalidating her visa. Kordia said she believed then that her mother’s application assured her own legal status and that she mistakenly followed a teacher’s advice.Kordia worked as a server at a Middle Eastern restaurant on Paterson’s Palestine Way while helping to care for her half-brother, who has autism.Those routines were upended in October 2023, after Hamas attacked southern Israel, killing about 1,200 people and taking 251 hostage. Israel responded with a massive military campaign, killing more than 66,000 Palestinians.In calls with relatives in Gaza, “they were telling me that: ‘We’re hungry. … We are scared. We’re cold. We don’t have anywhere to go’,” Kordia said. “So my way of helping my family and my people was to go to the streets.”Kordia said she joined more than a dozen protests in New York, New Jersey and Washington DC. In April 2024, she was arrested with 100 other protesters outside Columbia University’s gates in upper Manhattan – charges quickly dismissed by prosecutors and sealed.Soon after winning office for a second time and returning to the White House, this January, Donald Trump issued executive orders equating the protests with antisemitism. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) intelligence analysts began assembling dossiers on noncitizens who criticized Israel or protested the war, based on doxing sites and information from police.In March, immigration agents showed up at Kordia’s home and workplace, as well as her uncle’s house in Florida. “The experience was very confusing,” she said. “It was like: why are you doing all this?”Kordia hired a lawyer before agreeing to a 13 March meeting with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) officials in Newark. She was detained immediately and flown to Prairieland Detention Facility, south of Dallas.Once there, she was assigned a bare mattress on the floor and denied religious accommodations, including halal meals, her lawyers said.When her cousin, Hamzah Abushaban, visited Kordia about a week after her arrest, he was taken aback by the dark circles under her eyes and her state of confusion.“One of the first things she asked me was why was she there,” Abushaban said. “She cried a lot. She looked like death.”“I must’ve asked her a thousand times, like, you’re sure you didn’t commit a crime?” he said. “What she thought and I thought was probably going to be a few more days of being detained has turned into almost, what, seven months now.”Kordia said that she didn’t understand the reasons for her detention until a week or two later, when a television at the facility was tuned to news of protester arrests.“I see my name, literally in big letters, on CNN and I was like, what’s going on?” she said.Administration officials touted Kordia’s arrest as part of the deportation effort against those who “actively participated in anti-American, pro-terrorist activities”. A DHS press release noted her arrest the previous year at a “pro-Hamas” demonstration, mistakenly labeling her as a Columbia student.Court papers show New York police gave records of her dismissed arrest to DHS – an apparent violation of a city law barring cooperation with immigration enforcement. Federal officials told police the information was needed in a criminal money-laundering investigation, a police spokesperson later said.At a bond hearing weeks later, government attorneys argued for Kordia’s continued detention, pointing to subpoenaed records showing she had sent “large amounts of money to Palestine and Jordan”.Kordia said she and her mother had sent the money, totaling $16,900 over eight years, to relatives. A $1,000 payment in 2022 went to an aunt in Gaza whose home and hair salon had been destroyed in an Israeli strike. Two more payments last year went to a cousin struggling to feed his family.“To hear the government accusing them of being terrorists and accusing you of sending money to terrorists, this is heartbreaking,” Kordia said.An immigration judge, examining transaction records and statements from relatives, found “overwhelming evidence” that Kordia was telling the truth about the payments.That judge has twice ordered her released on bond. The government has challenged the ruling, triggering a lengthy appeals process – highly unusual in immigration cases that don’t involve serious crimes.Typically, when the government goes after someone for overstaying a visa, they are rarely arrested, let alone held in prolonged detention, said Adam Cox, a professor of immigration law at New York University.“The kind of scale and scope and publicness of the campaign against student protesters by the Trump administration is really nothing like we’ve seen in recent memory,” said Cox, who studies the rise of presidential power in immigration policy.Kordia has sought release in federal court, the same path taken by Khalil and others. Whether she succeeds may depend on an appeals court in New York, which heard arguments this week from government attorneys who contend that such relief should be largely off-limits to noncitizens.Khalil, who was freed in June, said he had followed Kordia’s case closely, asking lawyers to relay messages and reminding his supporters “that there is one person left behind”.As detention stretches on, Kordia said it’s been difficult to follow developments in the war, let alone maintain contact with relatives caught in the conflict.But it’s provided many hours to think about a time when the war is finally over and she can find peace.That would start by being reunited with her mother and other relatives, she said, and maybe one day having a family of her own. She dreams of opening a cafe and introducing people to Palestinian culture through food. She wants to pursue an American life.“That’s all I wanted, to live with my family in peace in a land that appreciates freedom,” she says. “That’s literally all that I want.” More
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Nature, books and naked bike rides: Portlanders push back on Trump claims that city is ‘like living in hell’
by Evelyn Reynolds 3 October 2025, 19:34
In Portland, Oregon, a city Donald Trump claims to have seen “burning down to the ground” on his television, residents are pushing back on the US president’s false depiction of their tranquil city as a war zone.Trump, who refuses to accept firsthand accounts from Oregon’s governor and the Portland mayor that the widespread unrest he thinks he’s seen on television is not actually happening, has ordered the military in to the Pacific north-west city.Portland police made three arrests on Thursday night after fistfights broke out between demonstrators and a pro-Trump influencer from Washington DC at an Ice field office, and 200 national guard troops are expected to arrive in the coming days. But a visit to the Ice field on Thursday afternoon showed that, far from being “under siege” by militants, there were fewer than 10 protesters on the sidewalk, nearly outnumbered by journalists.Now residents, frustrated with the president’s false claims that Portland is “war ravaged”, are showing a different side of their city from the one depicted by Trump and Fox News.A raft of Instagram and TikTok videos from Portlanders are poking holes in Trump’s claim that life in their city is “like living in hell”, showcasing verdant hiking trails, trees in rich fall colors and a thriving food scene. Plans are also being drawn up for the most Portland of all possible responses: an Emergency Naked Bike Ride against “the militarization of our city”.View image in fullscreenOn a rainy Thursday in the city, the kitchen at Kann, Portland’s award-winning Haitian restaurant, was busy preparing for dinner. Jokes about Trump’s war were shared at Coava, a cafe with a single-origin coffee menu that changes seasonally which is popular with Japanese tourists. Business was brisk at Powell’s Books, the downtown icon which inspired the new protest slogan: “Portland isn’t a war zone; it’s a bookstore with a city around it.”The parking lot was full at Providore Fine Foods, a culinary marketplace whose owner, Kaie Wellman, said she was concerned about how Trump’s “threats against our city” could be “devastating for local businesses” like hers, which worked so hard to survive the pandemic only to be hit first by Trump’s tariffs and now his “100% false” portrayal of a minor protest at the Ice field office in the city’s south waterfront district. “It’s really profoundly upsetting,” she said.Wellman, a fifth-generation Oregonian, is opening a bistro this month in the Portland Art Museum’s new Mark Rothko Pavilion, a $110m expansion that has taken a decade to complete. “It really is such a cornerstone for our community, for downtown Portland, to have such a significant new building,” she said. She describes her leap of faith in opening a new restaurant just blocks from where the 2020 protests for racial justice took place as “a love letter to Portland and what a vibrant community we are.“One of the main reasons that we’re opening up this cafe downtown, and do what we do here in town, is because of our deep love for the state and for the city. And to see it portrayed anything less than what it is, you know, is just so frustrating. It’s a place that people want to come and live and raise their families. And it’s kind of unmatched in beauty,” Wellman said.View image in fullscreen“Yes, we’ve had issues here, but we’ve had the same issues that basically every other city around this world has had. And we’re coming at these issues from a thoughtful place and not trying to sweep them away. But the issue that’s being portrayed right now does not exist in this town.”Asked about Trump’s claims of lawlessness, Wellman said it was “not the case at all”. “And I am in the south waterfront at least two to three times a week because my 92-year-old mother lives in the south waterfront,” she added. “So I can tell you firsthand what’s been happening down there. And what I have seen, at the quote-unquote very worst, it’s still been peaceful protests. Maybe there’s been some strong words thrown around.”“I would say right now, if there is any disturbance that’s been going on, it’s Black Hawk helicopters that are circling around a neighborhood that is filled with many retirees and older people … causing all of them fear and a lack of sleep,” she added.View image in fullscreenBack at the Ice field office protest, Amanda Cochran, a US army veteran, was holding a homemade sign that read “Vets Against Militarization” on one side, and “Immigrants Are Not the Enemy’ on the other. She wore a tour shirt for the Canadian rock band Three Days Grace with the lyrics “Let’s start a riot.”“I’m here because I’m really fed up with the fact that Trump is talking about using the military to go into cities and to train the forces,” she said.“I served in the US army for six years and this is my first time ever protesting,” she said. “I just felt really strongly that if we don’t stand up and say something then this could easily become a militarized country and the citizens will be under the control of the military, and I don’t think that that is OK, and that’s not what I fought for.“Us veterans, we have the privilege of being able to express our opinions because we’re out, and hopefully we can kind of give those soldiers that don’t want to be there a voice. If enough of us show up, maybe Trump will back off,” she added.Across the street, the Fox News correspondent Bill Melugin, who has been reporting from inside the facility, prepared for a live hit out front, accompanied by three men with covered faces who appeared to be private security guards.Just to their left, a young protest organizer, Jack Dickinson, who achieved a measure of viral fame this week for the chicken costume he wears to mock Trump, was being interviewed for the local news.Why a chicken? One of the advantages of the costume, Dickinson explained, is that “it disarms people.“We’re dealing with a real influx of rightwing agitators right now,” he continued. “It becomes difficult for them to interact in certain ways, I think, when there’s the chicken suit, but not just the chicken suit, it’s then somebody who tries to have a conversation with them about the soybean situation that we’re facing right now,” referring to the collapse in crop prices for US farmers due to Trump’s trade war with China.View image in fullscreen“We do not want this to escalate,” he said, agreeing with local officials who suggest that Trump wants to provoke a response from the protesters.“There is definitely a desire for a response. We saw this most clearly on Sunday night because for that protest, we had 30 people that were down here associated with rightwing Twitter accounts or rightwing YouTube channels,” Dickinson said. “There is a clear desire to get somebody reacting in a way that they can frame as a justification for what they are doing. And Portland just isn’t giving them what they want.” More
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Trump revives family separations amid drive to deport millions: ‘A tactic to punish’
by Evelyn Reynolds 2 October 2025, 11:00
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The Trump administration has revived the practice of separating families in order to coerce immigrants and asylum seekers to leave the US, attorneys and former immigration officials allege.In several cases, officials have retaliated against immigrants who challenged deportation orders by forcibly separating them from their children, a Guardian investigation found. The officials misclassified the children as “unaccompanied minors” before placing them in government-run shelters or foster care.The new practice has taken effect as the administration has also issued stringent new limits on who can take custody of unaccompanied minors – which advocates say keep thousands of children away from their relatives.“This is a tactic to punish people for not acquiescing,” said Faisal Al-Juburi, head of external affairs at the legal aid group Raíces. “It’s a tactic to get immigrants to relent, to agree to self-deport.”The recent separations echo the “zero tolerance” policy of the first Trump administration, when the US systematically separated more than 5,600 migrant children from their parents and caregivers at the US-Mexico border. Images of agents pulling children from their parents’ arms and placing them in overcrowded metal cages sparked domestic and international outrage, and Donald Trump ended the policy.But seven years later, hundreds of parents have still been unable to reunify with their children; the administration lost track of many of the families it tore apart. Though the new separations so far appear less pervasive than the original policy, experts and attorneys said that it could result in another crisis of prolonged, permanent separations.“I would say that the main difference is just that the separations are now happening all over the country, as opposed to at the border, concentrated in areas where you could visibly go see it,” said Michelle Brané, a former Department of Homeland Security (DHS) official who served under the Biden administration. “But the rest of it is not that different. The objective is still to be cruel and send a message that people should not come to the US – that they should leave.”Family separation is one of several ways in which the US government is, increasingly, moving immigrants around the country – shuffling detainees through a vast, chaotic system that advocates say is intentionally cruel.An analysis of leaked flight records and US government detention data, as well as interviews with immigrants, attorneys and former officials, revealed that immigrants are increasingly moved without notice away from their families, communities and legal counsel – leading to apparent violations of constitutional due-process rights.The Guardian reviewed leaked flight data from Global Crossing Airlines, the charter company that operates the majority of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) flights, and found that the vast majority of these trips during the first three months of the second Trump administration were between domestic US airports. The airline transported nearly 44,000 immigrants – including 1,000 children – during that time. US detention data revealed that since the inauguration, nearly 2,350 kids under the age of 18, including 36 infants, have been booked into immigration detention centers around the country.In cases reviewed by the Guardian, parents were moved between detention centers several times after being separated from their children – and in the process were unable to coordinate calls with their kids or their lawyers. Amid the chaos, immigration experts and advocates have the raised alarm that the government could, as it did during the first Trump administration, lose track of where it is sending parents and children – resulting in indefinite or permanent separations.View image in fullscreenThe Department of Homeland Security (DHS) did not respond to the Guardian’s request for comment.For LW, a 37-year-old mother who came to the US with her 10-year-old son in April seeking political asylum, returning to China was not an option.LW told her lawyers and immigration officers that she had been sexually assaulted by multiple high-ranking government officials in China. After reporting an assault to the police, Chinese government operatives threatened her with imprisonment – or death. That’s what was awaiting her in China, she told US immigration agents.In a sworn declaration in her immigration case that her lawyers shared with the Guardian, LW alleged her pleas to allow her and her son to remain together while they applied for asylum were ignored by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents in San Diego, California, who forced the mother and son into an unmarked vehicle, and began driving them toward the local airport. According to her sworn declaration, agents told her if she refused to get on a flight back home, the government would take her son away from her.At the airport, the agents tried to drag LW toward the terminals. “I said I needed a lawyer, but they refused, telling me that nobody would want to help me,” she said in her declaration. “Desperate and terrified of what might happen, I dropped to the ground and the officers let me go.”Later that day, she said they drove her and her son back to a CBP facility in San Diego – and then moved them to an Ice facility in Texas. But a month later, she said, immigration agents followed through on their threat: they took her son away and placed him in foster care.Her lawyers said that she and her son have now been separated for nearly five months. He turned 11 in the interim.LW remains detained at an Ice facility in New Mexico, while her son has been placed at a government shelter for unaccompanied minors in New York.Her lawyers from Raíces have repeatedly petitioned for her release, arguing that her prolonged separation from her son was in violation of a court settlement that had blocked family separations during the first Trump administration. But Ice told LW’s lawyers that the settlement did not apply in this case. LW said agents told her she could be reunited with her son if she agreed to accept deportation to China.The DHS has said it always gives parents a choice. “Rather than separate families, Ice asks parents if they want to be removed with their children or if the child should be placed with someone safe the parent designates,” Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for the DHS, told the Guardian in September.But in each of the cases reviewed by the Guardian, lawyers said their clients weren’t offered a real choice. In some instances, parents were not fully informed of their options prior to being separated from their children. In others, none of the available options were safe, or possible.LW couldn’t choose to leave her son with another parent or guardian, her lawyers said. Though her boyfriend was already in the US and had offered to act as a legal sponsor, he wasn’t the boy’s biological father and it was unclear that he could fulfill the government’s steep requirements to take custody of him.New policies the Trump administration enacted in January require that anyone seeking to take custody of unaccompanied minors in government-run shelters or foster care must provide proof of their income source, show a US identification and in many cases take a DNA test.A federal lawsuit on behalf of several migrant youths and the legal aid groups representing them alleges that these new requirements have disqualified many parents, siblings and other family members from taking custody of children who have been classified as “unaccompanied minors”.“We’re seeing separation being used as a punitive measure,” said Al-Juburi. “A punitive measure for not acquiescing, for demanding access to legal counsel, and for staking claim to her and her son’s rights to apply for asylum.”As the Trump administration attempts to make good on the president’s campaign promise to enact mass deportations and expel 1 million people each year, legal aid groups and immigration experts say that it appears to be using the threat of separation as one of many aggressive strategies to speed up the removal of migrants from the country.View image in fullscreenIn Texas, which is home to Ice’s sole detention facility currently designated specifically for family units, Raíces has served approximately 250 families this year to date, according to Al-Juburi. Of these families, about 10% have endured some kind of separation while in Ice custody.“This pattern is deeply troubling,” said Elora Mukherjee, a lawyer and the director of Columbia Law School’s Immigrants’ Rights Clinic, who has been advocating on behalf of several clients threatened with separation.Among Mukherjee’s clients are a two-year-old and a seven-year-old. “An Ice officer has threatened to separate each of these children from each other and from their mother and their father, detain them in separate facilities, and put them on four different deportation flights,” she said. “This is unnecessarily cruel.”Many of the migrant families threatened with separations have already made long, dangerous journeys to the US.For Muhammad, a 24-year-old father of four, the journey out of Afghanistan included stopovers in Pakistan, Brazil (where his seven-year-old stepdaughter was kidnapped for ransom) and Mexico (where he had to pay a smuggler to help his family make their way across the US’s southern border).Muhammad’s wife had worked in human rights prior to the US military’s withdrawal from Afghanistan in the summer of 2021. Once the Taliban took power, she began receiving death threats. Her father – a military general under the prior government – was killed, as was Muhammad’s uncle. The couple knew that they and their children had to leave.They first fled to Pakistan, then got a temporary visa to Brazil. But after Muhammad’s seven-year-old stepdaughter was kidnapped and held for ransom there, he and his wife knew they couldn’t stay.Finally – in February 2025, about a month after Trump was sworn in as president – they arrived at the US-Mexico border. By then, the Trump administration had shut down nearly all avenues to apply for asylum at the southern border, so Muhammad and his wife felt they had no choice but to pay a smuggler to bring them into the US, where they turned themselves over to immigration authorities.“We have traveled far in search of safety,” said Muhammad, in a sworn declaration in his immigration case that was shared with his permission by his lawyers at Raíces. “I believe that the US is the safest place to raise my family and provide them with all that they deserve and need.”But he hasn’t been able to hold them in nearly six months. His one-year-old, who was born in Brazil, has been growing up rapidly without him.Initially, immigration officials detained the family together, at a CBP facility and then at a family detention center in Karnes, Texas. Then, on 31 March, Muhammad was told he would be escorted to the medical center for an evaluation. It was odd, because he hadn’t made an appointment or asked to see a doctor.“I asked for a moment to say goodbye to my family, but the officer told me I would see them the following day, and not to worry,” Muhammad said. He was handcuffed and placed in a dark room. The next day, he said he was moved to a different detention center in Pearsall, Texas, and then another facility in Conroe, Texas.View image in fullscreenHis wife and children were released from detention and allowed to reunite with Muhammad’s brother-in-law, who was acting as the family’s sponsor, in Utah.Muhammad’s lawyers said Ice informed them that the agency had deemed him a “national security risk”, and that the agency did not need to provide any further details about why he had been separated from his family. The agency also repeatedly restricted him from speaking with lawyers, without explaining why.Former officials and attorneys told the Guardian that Ice is increasingly using national security concerns as a catchall excuse for not providing clear information about why certain individuals are being detained, or denied access to their families and legal counsel.As the weeks wore on, Muhammad consented to be deported to Brazil. He was hesitant – shaken by the episode when his daughter was kidnapped – but it felt like a safer choice than Afghanistan. But Brazil wouldn’t accept him.So he kept asking to speak to his lawyers, and kept asking to apply for asylum in the US.“I feel like I am alone and nothing of my future is within my control,” he said, after two months of detention.His lawyers, meanwhile, were scrambling to schedule a meeting with him. They submitted multiple Freedom of Information Act requests to multiple immigration agencies, seeking to review Muhammad’s case files. Ice maintained that because it had deemed Muhammad a security risk, it did not have to comply with a court-ordered policy to make sure that parents and children who are separated by Ice are allowed regular calls and visits.Finally, after nearly five months in detention, Ice referred Muhammad to the US Immigration and Customs Agency (USCIS) for an interview to determine his eligibility for asylum. Muhammed said officials there told him they were doing so in order to “cover their asses” – so they could check off the box and finally deport him back to Afghanistan.“I miss the days that I would take [my children] out for ice-cream and walk through the park,” he said. “I also miss playing with them before bedtime to make sure that they would sleep well.”Prolonged separations, including those lasting longer than five or six months, could cause a child welfare crisis, experts said.In the aftermath of the family separation crisis during the first Trump administration, pediatricians, psychiatrists and other experts decried the deep psychological scars that the policy would leave on children.A 2021 study found that the impacts of the separations persisted for weeks or months after families were reunited. “The longer the separation lasts, the more harmful it can be,” said Brané, the former DHS official, who led a taskforce charged with finding and reuniting separated migrant families and is now the executive director of the advocacy group Together and Free.During 2018’s period of zero tolerance for migrant families, images of bawling children being ripped away from their parents at the southern border and forced into overcrowded makeshift shelters quickly began to raise public outrage and alarm. But now, Brané said, few asylum seekers are appearing at the southern border – and most of the separations seem to be occurring out of public view.“But the intent is the same, and the impact is the same,” she said. “And I don’t know that they’re tracking this any better than they were before.”Years after Trump ended the zero-tolerance policy, hundreds of children remained separated from their parents – though advocacy groups said it is impossible to know exactly how many, due to a lack of government records or tracking.In some cases, parents were deported while their children remained in foster care. In other cases, when very young children were taken from their parents and spent years in foster care, parents have made the difficult decision to allow their children to remain in the US without them, rather than risk relocating and re-traumatizing them.Amid a new wave of separations this year, attorneys have said the government in several cases has not complied with a 2019 court settlement – known as the “Ms L Settlement” – designed to prevent a second family separation crisis.“It appears that families are not always receiving the notifications that they’re supposed to receive,” Brané said. “The government hasn’t been following certain norms and procedures.”In the three cases reviewed in detail by the Guardian, parents had no idea where their children were being taken. Often, the parents didn’t know where they were themselves, either, and said that they were frequently denied access to calls with their lawyers. According to attorneys at Raíces and other legal aid groups, this has also been the case for other clients.“The reality is that these are scenarios where there are no grounds for [separation], you know, based upon that settlement agreement,” said Al-Juburi. “And it’s much harder to keep families together when they are separated like this and for such extensive periods of time.”Even after separating families, Al-Juburi noted, Ice has been moving parents around from one detention center to another, without advance notice to their lawyers or other family members – setting attorneys on a “wild goose chase” to find out where their clients have been moved.After LW was separated from her child and moved from a detention center in Texas to another in New Jersey, attorneys at Raíces had to wait three weeks to schedule a phone call to consult on her case. On the day of her scheduled call, she was moved again without explanation or notice to El Paso, Texas, into the custody of CBP, and then two days later back to Ice custody in New Mexico.View image in fullscreenIce has told people in its custody, including LW, that they will be reunited with their children if and when they accept deportation, Al-Juburi noted. “But that should be taken with a grain of salt.” As the government increasingly moves immigrants around the country, often in chaotic and irregular ways, there’s a risk that families will be lost in the shuffle.For some parents, the separations – and the subsequent confusion – were too much to bear. SP and her husband agreed to sign deportation papers after more than two months apart from their son.The family had fled Mongolia in April this year, their lawyers said. After SP and her husband had attempted to expose public corruption and money-laundering allegations, they said their 11-year-old son was sexually harassed and physically abused at school – under the watch of administrators the parents believed were allied with Mongolia’s government.The family arrived in Chicago on tourist visas, and were stopped straight away by immigration agents. Almost immediately, they were sent to an Ice facility for families in Texas – where they each struggled with the mental and physical toll of detention.At one point, SP’s husband attempted suicide. At another, her son developed a persistent rash. Neither received sufficient care, her lawyers said.A month later, Ice flew the family to New York – from where they were meant to be deported to Mongolia. But SP and her husband resisted – saying they would be in danger if they returned.View image in fullscreenThat’s when the government threatened to take their son away, according to a sworn declaration from SP in the family’s immigration case. A week later, it did just that. The family was called into a meeting, and they said no Mongolian interpreter was provided – so the 11-year-old was forced to translate for his parents.“My child told me that Ice officers informed him they were going to take him ‘to a place in San Antonio’,” said SP in a sworn declaration in the family’s immigration case. “Neither my husband nor I understood why our child was being taken from us.”The officers had whisked him away without explaining why or where he was being sent. They had left behind his inhaler. SP and her husband were shackled at their hands and feet and taken to another detention center, and separated from each other – again, without explanation – and only allowed to see each other once every three weeks.“I am devastated by this situation,” SP told her lawyers a few days later. “I still do not understand … Ice officers have not explained anything to me.”Her son turned 12 while he was staying with a foster family. Ice ignored repeated notifications by SP’s lawyers that the agency was violating a court settlement regarding family separations.In the end, the agency said it would deport each family member back separately – and SP’s lawyers fought to ensure that, at least, the family could board the same plane out of the country.Her lawyers have not been able to confirm that the family is still safe, back in Mongolia.The Guardian has used first names or initials, rather than full names, in this article to protect people in Ice or CBP custody or who have been deported back to their countries of origin.ContributorsAdditional reporting: Will Craft
Illustrations: Angelica Alzona
Photo research: Gail Fletcher
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