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      Migrants at Ice jail in Miami made to kneel to eat ‘like dogs’, report alleges

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      Migrants at a Miami immigration jail were shackled with their hands tied behind their backs and made to kneel to eat food from styrofoam plates “like dogs”, according to a report published on Monday into conditions at three overcrowded south Florida facilities.The incident at the downtown federal detention center is one of a succession of alleged abuses at Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (Ice) operated jails in the state since January, chronicled by advocacy groups Human Rights Watch, Americans for Immigrant Justice, and Sanctuary of the South from interviews with detainees.Dozens of men had been packed into a holding cell for hours, the report said, and denied lunch until about 7pm. They remained shackled with the food on chairs in front of them.“We had to eat like animals,” one detainee named Pedro said.Degrading treatment by guards is commonplace in all three jails, the groups say. At the Krome North service processing center in west Miami, female detainees were made to use toilets in full view of men being held there, and were denied access to gender-appropriate care, showers, or adequate food.The jail was so far beyond capacity, some transferring detainees reported, that they were held for more than 24 hours in a bus in the parking lot. Men and women were confined together, and unshackled only when they needed to use the single toilet, which quickly became clogged.“The bus became disgusting. It was the type of toilet in which normally people only urinate but because we were on the bus for so long, and we were not permitted to leave it, others defecated in the toilet,” one man said.“Because of this, the whole bus smelled strongly of feces.”When the group was finally admitted into the facility, they said, many spent up to 12 days crammed into a frigid intake room they christened la hierela – the ice box – with no bedding or warm clothing, sleeping instead on the cold concrete floor.There was so little space at Krome, and so many detainees, the report says, that every available room was used to hold new arrivals.“By the time I left, almost all the visitation rooms were full. A few were so full men couldn’t even sit, all had to stand,” Andrea, a female detainee, said.At the third facility, the Broward transitional center in Pompano Beach, where a 44-year-old Haitian woman, Marie Ange Blaise, died in April, detainees said they were routinely denied adequate medical or psychological care.Some suffered delayed treatment for injuries and chronic conditions, and dismissive or hostile responses from staff, the report said.In one alleged incident in April at the downtown Miami jail, staff turned off a surveillance camera and a “disturbance control team” brutalized detainees who were protesting a lack of medical attention to one of their number who was coughing up blood. One detainee suffered a broken finger.All three facilities were severely overcrowded, the former detainees said, a contributory factor in Florida’s decision to quickly build the controversial “Alligator Alcatraz” jail in the Everglades intended to eventually hold up to 5,000 undocumented migrants awaiting deportation.Immigration detention numbers nationally were at an average of 56,400 per day in mid-June, with almost 72% having no criminal history, according to the report.The daily average during the whole of 2024 was 37,500, HRW said.The groups say that the documented abuses reflect inhumane conditions inside federal immigration facilities that have worsened significantly since Trump’s January inauguration and subsequent push to ramp up detentions and deportations.“The anti-immigrant escalation and enforcement tactics under the Trump administration are terrorizing communities and ripping families apart, which is especially cruel in the state of Florida, which thrives because of its immigrant communities,” said Katie Blankenship, immigration attorney and co-founder of Sanctuary of the South.“The rapid, chaotic, and cruel approach to arresting and locking people up is literally deadly and causing a human rights crisis that will plague this state and the entire country for years to come.”The Guardian has contacted Ice for comment. More

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      Ice chief says he will continue to allow agents to wear masks during arrest raids

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      The head of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) said on Sunday that he will continue allowing the controversial practice of his officers wearing masks over their faces during their arrest raids.As Donald Trump has ramped up his unprecedented effort to deport immigrants around the country, Ice officers have become notorious for wearing masks to approach and detain people, often with force. Legal advocates and attorneys general have argued that it poses accountability issues and contributes to a climate of fear.On Sunday, Todd Lyons, the agency’s acting director, was asked on CBS Face the Nation about imposters exploiting the practice by posing as immigration officers. “That’s one of our biggest concerns. And I’ve said it publicly before, I’m not a proponent of the masks,” Lyons said.“However, if that’s a tool that the men and women of Ice to keep themselves and their family safe, then I will allow it.”Lyons has previously defended the practice of mask-wearing, telling Fox News last week that “while I’m not a fan of the masks, I think we could do better, but we need to protect our agents and officers”, claiming concerns about doxxing (the public revealing of personal information such as home addresses), and declaring that assaults of immigration officers have increased by 830%.While data from January 2024 to June 2024 does show 10 reported assaults on Ice officers compared to 79 during the same period last year, those six months have also seen Ice agents descend in record numbers on streets, businesses, farms and public spaces, rounding up and detaining mostly Latino people as part of a massive Trump administration push to rid the US of as many as 1 million immigrants every year.Videos have flooded social media showing Ice agents wearing masks over their faces, detaining people without immediately identifying themselves, refusing to answer questions or explaining why people are being detained, and pushing them into unmarked cars with tinted windows.“I do kind of push back on the criticism that they don’t identify themselves,” Lyons said. “Men and women of Ice, and our DoJ partners, and local law enforcement partners who do help us are identified on their vest.” The only identification many agents wear is body armor marked with the word “police”, despite not being police officers.The interview was described as the first major network sit-down at Ice headquarters in Washington.Lyons also confirmed in the interview that Ice obtained and is using Medicaid data to track down immigrants believed to be in the US unlawfully, despite undocumented people not being eligible to receive Medicaid.White people comprise the largest share of Medicaid recipients, at 39.6%.A June report from the Pew Research Center found that 84.2% of Medicaid recipients are born in the US, 6.6% are naturalized citizens and 9.2% are foreign-born non-citizens authorized to be in the US.As well as the tens of thousands of arrests, there have been several reported cases of masked criminals posing as Ice officers, such as a man in Raleigh, North Carolina accused in January of kidnapping and raping a woman, threatening to deport her if she didn’t comply, or a man in Brooklyn attempting in February to rape a 51-year-old woman. In April 2025, a Florida woman posed as an immigration officer to briefly kidnap her ex-boyfriend’s wife from her job.Ice agents have also been reported to overstate assaults, such as in New York City mayor candidate Brad Lander’s arrest by immigration officers, where Lander was accused of assaulting officers despite charges being dropped later that day.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionCritics say using a mask allows Ice agents to obscure accountability and avoid transparency for their actions.“The use of masks is one among a panoply of legal issues presented by the administration’s recent actions against immigrants and visitors (and some citizens) but a significant one that can – and should – be immediately addressed and remedied,” said the New York City Bar Association in a statement on the practice.A coalition of 21 state attorneys general, including New York’s Letitia James, wrote to Congress last week urging it pass legislation prohibiting “federal immigration agents from wearing masks that conceal their identity and require them to show their identification and agency-identifying insignia”. In California, state legislators last month proposed the No Vigilantes Act, which would require federal agents to provide identification, including their last name and badge or ID number.“We have a Los Angeles Police Department that has to deal with crime in this city every single day – and they’re not masked, and they stay here,” said the mayor of Los Angeles, Karen Bass, in a Sunday interview with ABC News.“I don’t think you have a right to have a mask and snatch people off the street.” More

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      Ice secretly deported Pennsylvania grandfather, 82, after he lost green card

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      An 82-year-old man in Pennsylvania was secretly deported to Guatemala after visiting an immigration office last month to replace his lost green card, according to his family, who have not heard from him since and were initially told he was dead.According to Morning Call, which first reported the story, long-time Allentown resident Luis Leon – who was granted political asylum in the US in 1987 after being tortured under the regime of the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet – lost his wallet containing the physical card that confirmed his legal residency. So he and wife booked an appointment to get it replaced.When he arrived at the office on 20 June, however, he was handcuffed by two Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) officers, who led him away from his wife without explanation, she said. She herself was kept in the building for 10 hours until relatives picked her up.The family said they made efforts to find any information on his whereabouts but learned nothing.Then, sometime after Leon was detained, a woman purporting to be an immigration lawyer called the family, claiming she could help – but did not disclose how she knew about the case, or where Leon was.On 9 July, according to Leon’s granddaughter, the same woman called them again, claiming Leon had died.A week later, however, they discovered from a relative in Chile that Leon was alive after all – but now in a hospital in Guatemala, a country to which he has no connection.According to Morning Call, the relative said Leon had first been sent to an immigration detention center in Minnesota before being deported to Guatemala – despite not appearing on any Ice detention deportation lists.A recent supreme court decision ruled the Trump administration could deport immigrants to other countries beside their country of origin.In his nearly 40 years living in the US, Leon spent his career working in a leather manufacturing plant, and raised a family. He had since retired.His condition at the hospital in Guatemala is unknown. He suffers from diabetes, high blood pressure and a heart condition, according to his family, who said they are planning to fly to Guatemala to see him.An Ice official told the Morning Call it was investigating the matter. More

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      Atlanta journalist fights deportation from Ice jail despite dropped charges: ‘I’m seeing what absolute power can do’

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      Prosecutors dropped the last remaining charges against Atlanta-area journalist Mario Guevara last week after he was arrested while livestreaming a protest in June. But the influential Salvadorian reporter remains penned up in a south Georgia detention center, fending off a deportation case, jail house extortionists and despair, people familiar with his situation told the Guardian.Donald Trump’s administration has been extreme in unprecedented ways to undocumented immigrants. But Guevara’s treatment is a special case. Shuttled between five jail cells in Georgia since his arrest while covering the “No Kings Day” protests, the 20-plus-years veteran journalist’s sin was to document the undocumented and the way Trump’s agents have been hunting them down.Today, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, he’s the only reporter in the United States sleeping in a prison cell for doing his job.View image in fullscreen“For the first time in my life, I’m seeing what absolute power can do,” said Guevara’s attorney, Giovanni Díaz. “Power that doesn’t care about optics. Power that doesn’t care about the damage to human lives to achieve a result I’ve only heard about as some abstract thing that we heard about in the past, usually talking about other governments in the way that they persecute individuals. This is powerful.”Around Atlanta, Guevara has been the person that immigrants call when they see an Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (Ice) raid going down in their neighborhood.Guevara had been working for La Prensa Gráfica, one of El Salvador’s main newspapers, when he was attacked at a protest rally held by the leftwing group Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) in 2003. The former paramilitary organization viewed reporters from his paper as aligned with the rightwing government, and threatened his life. He fled to the United States in 2004, seeking asylum with his wife and daughter, entering legally on a tourist visa.He has been reporting for Spanish-language media in the United States ever since, riding a wave of Latino immigration to the Atlanta suburbs to career success and community accolades. He began reporting on immigration crackdowns under the Obama administration, one of the few reporters to note a tripling of noncriminal immigration arrests in the Atlanta area, as noted in a 2019 New York Times video profile of his work.. He meticulously documented cases and interviewed the families of arrestees. People around Atlanta began to recognize him on the street as the journalist chasing la migra.His work continued through the Trump administration, drawing an audience of millions that followed him from Mundo Hispánico to the startup news operation he founded last year: MGNews or Noticias MG.“It’s a unique niche that was met by Mario’s innovation and entrepreneurialism, if you will,” said Jerry Gonzales, executive director of the Georgia Association of Latino Elected Officials and GALEO Latino Community Development Fund. “He developed a really strong relationship with the community. He developed significant trust with much of that community. And because of that, his eyeballs started increasing.”An immigration court judge denied Guevara’s asylum claim in 2012 and issued a deportation order. Guevara’s lawyers appealed, and the court granted administrative closure of the case. He wasn’t being deported. But he wasn’t given legal residency either. Instead, the government issued him a work permit, his lawyer said. With a shrug, he went back to work.Guevara is arguably the most-watched journalist covering Ice operations in the United States, a story that the English-language media had largely been missing, Gonzales said. And local police were well aware of his work. He has been negotiating with them for access to immigration enforcement scenes for more than a decade.“Mario Guevara is well known – sometimes liked sometimes not – but definitely well known by law enforcement agencies, particularly in DeKalb county and Gwinnett county, and also with federal agents, and particularly immigration agents,” Gonzales said.Gonzales, among others, believes this put a target on his back in the current administration.“It seems like law enforcement coordinated and colluded with the federal agents,” Gonzales said. Gonzales points to the misdemeanor traffic charges laid by the Gwinnett county sheriff’s office shortly after Guevara’s arrest in DeKalb county by the Doraville police department as evidence.“The facts and the timeline indicate that pretty clearly to anybody that’s been following this,” he claimed. “In this regard it’s particularly troubling, given that he is a journalist and his situation. He had no reason to have been targeted for his arrest.”The Department of Homeland Security has not responded to a request for comment about their relationship with local law enforcement. The Gwinnett county sheriff’s office said in a response to a lawmaker’s inquiry that it cooperates with Ice when deemed “mutually beneficial” but has not responded to requests for additional comment.Doraville’s police chief, Chuck Atkinson, has not replied to an email seeking answers and fled from questions about the case at a city hearing. But Doraville’s mayor, Joseph Geierman, denied a connection between Ice and Doraville’s arrest of Guevara.On 14 June, the day of his arrest, in Atlanta’s DeKalb county, Guevara darted around a Doraville police truck. A group of riot cops nearby took note. One shouted “last warning, sir! Get out of the road!”Guevara was helmeted and wearing a black vest over his red shirt with the word “PRESS” in white letters. James Talley, an officer with the Doraville police department, was wearing an olive drab Swat jumpsuit with a helmet and gas mask.A masked demonstrator set off a smoke bomb near the cops. Guevara ran into the street with a stabilized camera in hand to capture the police reaction and the crowd scampering out of the way, as was shown on a police body camera video.Police had issued a dispersal order and were kettling protesters out of Chamblee-Tucker Road. They chased the suspected bomb thrower into the crowd, to no avail. But Guevara was in front of them on a grassy slope.Police from DeKalb county managing the raucous protest had been taking verbal abuse from demonstrators for a while – a sharp contrast from other protests around Atlanta held that day. The protest was winding down. Body camera video from the event suggests Talley was in an arresting mood.“Keep your eye on the guy in the red shirt,” Talley said to another Swat officer from Doraville. “If he gets to the road, lock his ass up.”Talley pulled another police officer aside. “If he gets in the road, he’s gone,” Talley said. “He’s been warned multiple times.”The other officer drew a finger across his chest. “The press?” Yep, Talley replied.The three of them waited about 50ft away as a DeKalb county police officer approached Guevara on the hill, ordering him to get on the sidewalk. Guevara backed away from the officer, his attention focused on the recording, took two steps into the street, and the Doraville police pounced.Guevara pleaded for the police to be reasonable.“I’m with the media, officer!” Guevara said. “Let me finish!”People shouted at the officers “That’s the press!” as they walked him handcuffed to a vehicle. “Why are you all taking him! He didn’t do nothing.”More than one million people were watching Guevara’s livestream when he was arrested.Trump has stepped up his rhetorical attacks on journalists since his inauguration. Last week, he described a reporter asking about warnings and emergency response in the Texas flooding disaster as “an evil person”, an epithet he has turned to with increasing frequency.The Guevara case is a sign of increasing hostility toward a free press, said Katherine Jacobsen, a program coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists. She traced a through line from the Associated Press being barred from government briefings after it refused to accept the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America”, then lawsuits and investigations reopened against media companies, then attacks on journalists covering protests in Los Angeles, then Australian writer Alistair Kitchen’s deportation seemingly in relation to his reporting on student protests.“Next thing you know, we have Mario Guevara, a long time Spanish-language reporter in the Atlanta metro area, who is in Ice detention,” she said. “It’s growing increasingly concerning by the day.”Guevara’s audience views it as more than an attack on press freedom, though. They view it as an attack on themselves.“He’s a test case to push the envelope for legal immigrants that have committed no crime, to trump up charges against them,” GALEO’s Gonzales said. “And the second piece is how to target journalists.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionGuevara’s arrest set off an immigration nightmare akin to the kind he has spent the last decade documenting.His arrest on a Saturday led to a weekend in DeKalb county’s decaying jail and a bond hearing that Monday. A magistrate court judge granted Guevara a no-dollar bond, but by then Ice had become aware of the arrest and placed Guevara on a hold. The jail released him into Ice custody, and held him briefly in a metro Atlanta facility.The next day, Gwinnett county charged Guevara with three misdemeanor traffic offenses, claiming that they were related to Guevara livestreaming a law enforcement operation a month earlier. The charges would be sufficient to keep him in jail and provide Ice an argument for his deportation at a federal bond hearing. The Gwinnett county sheriff’s office said Guevara’s livestreaming “compromised” investigations.Guevara’s attorneys tried to work quickly, Diaz said. “The detained dockets are so backed up, and the immigration detention centers are so overwhelmed that what used to take us two or three days to get a bond hearing now is taking about a week,” he said.Attorneys working for immigration enforcement argued in court that Guevara’s reporting constituted a “threat” to immigration operations.Jacobsen with CPJ was listening to the hearing when the government made that argument.“We felt a sense of alarm,” she said. “Alarm bells were raised by the government’s argument, as well as the judge not necessarily pushing back against the government’s argument that live streaming poses a danger to threaten law enforcement actions.”View image in fullscreenThe immigration judge granted Guevara a $7,500 bond for the immigration case. But Guevara’s family was not allowed to pay it because government attorneys appealed the bond order to the board of immigration appeals. But it took seven days for the court to issue a stay to the government’s appeal. Meanwhile, Ice began playing musical jail cells with Guevara.Over the course of the next three weeks, Ice shuttled Guevara between three different counties around Atlanta and eventually to the massive private prison Ice uses in Folkston, Georgia, 240 miles south-east of Atlanta on the Florida line.“We weren’t surprised that they appealed, because the government’s reserving and in most cases appealing everything, even stuff where they shouldn’t appeal because they’re wasting everybody’s time,” Diaz said. “But we didn’t really know the breadth of what they were trying to do to him.”Earlier this week, Todd Lyons, Ice’s acting director, issued a memo changing its policy on bond hearings, arguing that detainees are not entitled to those hearings before their deportation case is heard in court. Immigration advocates expect to challenge the move in court.But Guevara is not facing a criminal charge. The Gwinnett county solicitor’s office dropped the traffic charges last week, noting that two of them could not be prosecuted because they occurred on private property – the apartment complex – and the third lacked sufficient evidence for a conviction.For now, Ice has mostly kept Guevara in medical wards in jails even though he is healthy, Diaz said. “From the beginning, they’ve been keeping Mario under a special segregation because they’re claiming he’s a public figure. They want to make sure nothing happened to him.”Doraville is a municipality of about 10,800 in DeKalb county with a separate police force, and had been asked to assist managing the protest in the immigrant-heavy Embry Hills neighborhood nearby. Protests have become a regular occurrence in DeKalb county since the Trump administration’s immigration raids began.Doraville’s cops have displayed a more cooperative relationship with immigration law enforcement than many other metro Atlanta departments, and observers have raised questions about whether its police department arrested Guevara to facilitate an Ice detainer.Geierman, the mayor, denied those accusations.“The Doraville police department was not operating under the direction of, or in coordination with, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) during the June 14th protest,” he said in a statement. “To the department’s knowledge, no Ice personnel were present at the event. Doraville officers were on site to support the DeKalb county sheriff’s office as part of a coordinated public safety effort.”Observers have also questioned Guevara’s charges from Gwinnett county – ignoring traffic signs, using a communication device while driving, and reckless driving – that stemmed from an incident that occurred in May, a month before his arrest.“Mario Guevara compromised operational integrity and jeopardized the safety of victims of the case, investigators, and Gwinnett county residents,” the department said in a statement.But Gwinnett’s belated prosecution left his attorneys gobsmacked.“In the narrative that they put out, they say he was livestreaming a police operation, and he was interfering,” Diaz said. “But when they went to a judge to get warrants, the only warrants the magistrate was able to sign for them was for traffic violations. I mean, that’s kind of telling.”“I think the whole thing is suspicious,” he added. “From the beginning, just everything seemed they were really making efforts to make it difficult for him to go free.”Marvin Lim, a Filipino American state representative whose district contains the apartment complex in Gwinnett in Guevara’s citation, has asked the sheriff’s office a detailed set of questions about the department’s relationship with federal immigration enforcement. He has not received an adequate response, he said in an open letter to the sheriff.An array of six advocacy organizations challenged Gwinnett’s sheriff, Keybo Taylor, in a letter Tuesday over Guevara’s arrest and the sheriff’s posture toward immigration enforcement, demanding details about the relationship. GALEO, among them, also issued a separate letter Wednesday calling on Taylor to be transparent about the Guevara arrest.Guevara “was arrested while doing the vital work that journalists in a democracy do”, GALEO’s letter states. “Not only do the circumstances surrounding his incarceration and subsequent immigration detainment stir serious civil rights concerns, but they also build upon an expanding sense of fear and confusion in Georgia’s most diverse county.”“I am being persecuted,” Guevara wrote in a 7 July letter seeking humanitarian intercession from, of all people, Nayib Bukele, El Salvador’s rightwing president.“I am about to complete a month in jail, and I need to get out in order to continue with my life, return to my work, and support my family,” Guevara wrote. “I have lived in the United States for nearly 22 years. I had never been arrested before. In these past three weeks, I have been held in five different jails, and I believe the government is trying to tarnish my record in order to deport me as if I were a criminal.”Guevara’s American-born son turned 21 this year, permitting him to sponsor Guevara’s green card and eventual citizenship. His application is pending, Diaz said. It may not matter.“This is the first time I’ve ever seen a stay filed for someone who has no convictions, has almost no criminal history in 20 years, and only had pending traffic violations,” Diaz said.“It’s clear that everybody’s working really hard to keep him detained.” More

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      US sends migrants to Eswatini after ban lifted on third-country deportations

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      A flight carrying immigrants deported from the US has landed in Eswatini, the homeland security department announced, in a move that follows the supreme court lifting limits on deporting migrants to third countries.In a post online, Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin named five deportees from Vietnam, Jamaica, Laos, Cuba and Yemen and said they were convicted of crimes ranging from child rape to murder.“A safe third country deportation flight to Eswatini in Southern Africa has landed. This flight took individuals so uniquely barbaric that their home countries refused to take them back,” McLaughlin said late on Tuesday.In late June, the US supreme court cleared the way for president Donald Trump’s administration to resume deporting migrants to countries other than their own without offering them a chance to show the harms they could face. The decision handed the government a win in its aggressive pursuit of mass deportations.On 4 July, the US completed deportation of eight other migrants to conflict-plagued South Sudan. The men had been put on a flight in May bound for South Sudan, which was diverted to a base in Djibouti, where they had been held in a converted shipping container.Tom Homan, the US border tsar, said last week he did not know what happened to the eight men deported to South Sudan, saying: “If we removed somebody to Sudan, they could stay there a week and leave, I don’t know.”Earlier this month, a top Trump administration official said in a memo that immigration officials may deport migrants to countries other than their home nations with as little as six hours’ notice.US immigration and customs enforcement (Ice) will generally wait at least 24 hours to deport someone after informing them of their removal to a so-called “third country,” according to a memo dated 9 July from the agency’s acting director, Todd Lyons.Ice could remove them, however, to a so-called “third country” with as little as six hours’ notice “in exigent circumstances,” the memo said, as long as the person was provided the chance to speak with an attorney.The memo stated that migrants could be sent to nations that have pledged not to persecute or torture them “without the need for further procedures.” The new Ice policy suggested the Trump administration could move quickly to send migrants to countries around the world.Human rights advocates have raised due process and other concerns over Trump’s immigration policies that his administration has cast as measures aimed at improving domestic security.Eswatini, the last absolute monarchy in Africa, has been led by King Mswati III since 1986. The 57-year-old ruler has been criticised for his lavish lifestyle and has faced accusations of human rights violations.His country, formerly known as Swaziland, is landlocked by neighbours South Africa and Mozambique.Reuters and Agence France-Presse contributed to this report More

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      Trump administration seeks to end bond hearings for immigrants without legal status

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      The Trump administration is reportedly seeking to bar millions of immigrants who allegedly arrived in the US without legal status from receiving a bond hearing as they try to fight their deportations in court.The new policy would apply during removal proceedings, which can take years, for millions of immigrants who entered the country from Mexico in recent decades, according to a report from the Washington Post, which reviewed documents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice).Such immigrants had previously been allowed to request a bond hearing before an immigration judge, but Todd Lyons, Ice’s acting director, stated in a memo reviewed by the Post that the homeland security and justice departments had “revisited [their] legal position on detention and release authorities”. The departments determined that such immigrants “may not be released from Ice custody”, Lyons reportedly wrote in the memo.That new restriction, which is expected to face legal challenges, was issued on 8 July shortly after the Republican-controlled Congress provided Ice $45bn over the next four years to detain immigrants for civil deportation proceedings.“To be clear, [Ice’s] position here is laughable and is being rejected by immigration judges all over the US, and will soon be dismissed by actual federal court judges in habeas proceedings,” Charles Kuck, an immigration attorney and Emory University law professor, wrote on X in a post that alluded to challenges against one’s detention.In response to the Guardian’s request for comment on the reported new policy, an Ice spokesperson said: “The recent guidance closes a loophole to our nation’s security based on an inaccurate interpretation of the statute. It is aligned with the nation’s longstanding immigration law. All aliens seeking to enter our country in an unlawful manner or for illicit purposes shall be treated equally under the law, while still receiving due process.”The policy change would mark the latest significant departure for Ice, which during Joe Biden’s presidency provided a guide on how immigrants who are detained can post bond.“Judges see a lot of people every day,” the guide stated. “You can make your testimony stand out by speaking sincerely. Think about a story that will show the judge how much your family needs you. Explain to the judge why your detention hurts your family very much.“We hope that this guide provides you with helpful information when preparing for your bond hearing. We wish you the best of luck with your case!”The Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for reducing immigration, defended the new reported policy.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Detention is absolutely the best way to approach this, if you can do it,” Mark Krikorian, executive director for the Center for Immigration Studies, told the Post. “It costs a lot of money, obviously.“You’re pretty much guaranteed to be able to remove the person, if there’s a negative finding, if … [they’re] in detention.”The Trump administration had already worked to limit which immigrants can post bond. Previously, people arrested after they had entered the US and placed in regular removal proceedings were eligible for a bond hearing, according to the National Immigration Project, a non-profit whose attorneys have defended immigrants facing deportation.But in May, the federal Board of Immigration Appeals issued a ruling stating that such people were subject to mandatory detention, meaning that Ice could jail them during removal proceedings and not provide them an opportunity to appear before an immigration judge and get a bond set. More

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      US court blocks Trump administration from revoking Afghans’ protected status

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      A US appeals court has for now blocked the Trump administration from removing the temporary protective status of thousands of Afghans in the United States, court documents showed on Monday.An administrative stay on the termination of temporary protected status for Afghans will remain until 21 July, the US court of appeals for the fourth circuit said in an order granting a request from immigration advocacy organization Casa.The group had filed a lawsuit against the US Department of Homeland Security to challenge the terminations of the temporary protected status for Afghans and Cameroonians announced by the Trump administration in April.Casa had filed for an emergency motion for a stay on Monday, when the protected status for Afghans was scheduled to be terminated. The protected status for Cameroonians is set to end on 4 August, according to the court document.The DHS did not immediately respond to a request for comment. In April when the Trump administration terminated temporary deportation protections for thousands of Afghans and Cameroonians, the department had said conditions in Afghanistan and Cameroon no longer merited the protected status.The Trump administration has until 1159pm ET on Wednesday to respond.The US evacuated more than 82,000 Afghans from Afghanistan after Taliban’s takeover in 2021, including more than 70,000 who entered the US with temporary “parole”, which allowed legal entry for a period of two years. More