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      Trump’s DC takeover harkens back to a dark incident 33 years ago – when crime was far worse

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      Donald Trump’s takeover of Washington DC’s police department and decision to deploy the national guard was sparked by the assault of a former Doge staffer who nicknamed himself “Big Balls”. Thirty-three years ago, a fatal attack on a congressional staffer also provoked an effort by the federal government to impose law and order on the nation’s capital – but in that case, it came from Capitol Hill.On Monday, Trump said he was taking “a historic action to rescue our nation’s capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam, and squalor and worse. This is liberation day in DC and we’re going to take our capital back.”In 1992, it was the death of 25-year-old Tom Barnes, a staffer for Senator Richard Shelby, a Democrat of Alabama, that prompted the senator to introduce legislation to legalize the death penalty in the district. Shelby, a conservative Democrat who would become a Republican two years later, acknowledged that many DC community leaders had historically been opposed to the death penalty, but argued that the tide had changed – using similar dystopian language as Trump.“The terror that comes with living in a war zone has prompted many residents to reconsider the appropriateness, ethically and legally, of a death penalty,” Shelby wrote in a March 1992 Washington Post op-ed. “… People are using guns to settle arguments about clothes and girlfriends. They are ‘smoking’ others because they feel like it. They will even ‘bust a cap in you’ if they don’t like the way you look at them.”In announcing the police takeover on Monday, Trump cited the attack on Edward Coristine, whom he said was “savagely beaten by a band of roaming thugs” and was “left dripping in blood”. He also referenced the June slaying of Eric Tarpinian-Jachym, an intern for the Republican representative Ron Estes, of Kansas, who was killed by crossfire in a drive-by shooting. Last week, his mother, Tamara Tarpinian-Jachym, told ABC News that she supported Trump’s idea of a federal takeover, which he had threatened in a social media post.There was one key difference between then and now: Trump is painting an exaggerated picture of crime in DC, where violent crime is at a 30-year low. But back in January 1992, Washington really was a crime-plagued city. It was coming off a year that saw 482 murders in 1991, earning it the ignoble title of the murder capital of the US. By contrast, there were 187 homicides last year and the city is on pace for a lower number this year.According to the book Dream City: Race, Power, and the Decline of Washington DC by Harry Jaffe and Tom Sherwood, Barnes, the Shelby staffer, left his home on a Saturday night in January 1992 to go to the corner store to get coffee grounds for the next morning. A group of teenagers approached him and demanded his money or they’d “put a cap” in him. “Leave me alone,” Barnes replied, and turned up the street. One of them shot him in the head, landing him in a coma. He died four days later, marking the 22nd homicide of the new year.A Capitol Outrage, ran the headline on a Tuscaloosa News editorial two days later. “Beset by drug-related violence,” the newspaper declared, “Washington has become a national disgrace, an American embarrassment.”“Tom’s death was the catalyst for my involvement in trying to find solutions to the violent crime that plagues our city,” said Shelby, who had known Barnes since he was a toddler.His bill to impose the death penalty on DC failed, but he did get Congress to vote to force the city to hold a referendum on that fall’s ballot asking Washingtonians to authorize capital punishment. “The criminal justice system is out of control in this city and Congress is not going to turn its back on this issue,” Shelby said. Even some home-rule champions on the Hill voted with Shelby, such as Leon Panetta, a Democratic representative from California.“I really think the District of Columbia ought to handle its own affairs,” said Panetta, who would go on to serve as chief of staff to Bill Clinton, CIA director and defense secretary. “But crime continues to be a very serious problem in the district. Part of it is the urban crisis that is part of every city’s social and economic problems. But I don’t get the sense that the district has a strong commitment to confront this issue.”The DC council had repealed the death penalty in 1981, but the last execution in Washington took place in 1957, years before the city won home rule in 1973.This week, Washington leaders bristled at Trump’s takeover of the police. Eleanor Holmes Norton, a non-voting delegate representing DC in the House of Representatives, called it “an historic assault on DC home rule”, while the mayor, Muriel E Bowser, described it as “unsettling and unprecedented”.There was a similarly visceral reaction to Shelby’s death penalty referendum.“There is something approaching rage among the voters of the district about their disempowerment, about Congress forcing this on us,” said Norton, who was in her first term in Congress at the time. “When you mandate a death penalty vote, you engage that issue directly.”Leading up to the referendum, dozens of ministers denounced it at Sunday sermons, the Washington Post reported.On 3 November 1992 – the same day Democrat Bill Clinton won his first presidential election – Washingtonians rejected the death penalty referendum by a 2-1 margin.“Today the voters sent a powerful message to every member of the US Congress that we are citizens of this country,” the then mayor, Sharon Pratt Kelly, said after the vote, while Norton said the vote showed the city “will not tolerate this interference from the outside”.But the climate of fear around crime had won some support for capital punishment.“In neighborhoods across the city, among rich and poor, black and white, some residents have argued that violence has become so random and brutal that convicted killers should be punished with the ultimate act of retribution, regardless of whether it serves as a deterrent,” the Post reported. But others cited concerns that it would be used unfairly against Black defendants, or didn’t like Congress interfering in the city’s affairs, in their votes against it.Even the city council chair, John Wilson, who supported the death penalty, urged a no vote as a signifier of DC’s independence. (Today, the city hall is named for him.)“It’s not that they didn’t favor the death penalty,” Jaffe and Sherwood wrote of DC voters. “Many black Washingtonians are quite conservative, law-and-order advocates … They just resented a white senator from Alabama telling them that they needed a death penalty to make their streets safe.”Today, there is definitely some resentment at a white president from New York who says he wants to clean up the city streets. And Bowser is using it as a way to rally support for the long-held goal of DC statehood.“My message to residents is this: we know that access to our democracy is tenuous,” she said at a news conference after Trump’s takeover. “That is why you have heard me and many, many Washingtonians before me advocate for full statehood for the District of Columbia. We are American citizens. Our families go to war. We pay taxes, and we uphold the responsibilities of citizenship.”

      Frederic J Frommer, a writer and sports and politics historian, has written for the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Atlantic, History.com and other national publications More

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      Texas Senate passes Republican-drawn gerrymandered map as House Democrats continue to deny quorum – live updates

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      The Texas Sentate has passed a GOP-drawn congressional map, that would give Republicans five more House seats ahead of the 2026 midterms.The map passed 19-2 along party lines. Nine Senate Democrats left the floor in solidarity with their House colleagues – who broke quorum again earlier today in protest of the map. The legislation can’t advance without the absent Democrats in the lower chamber.Speaker Dustin Burrows said today that the House will adjourn until Friday 15 August, at which point the legislature will attempt to reach quorum one more time. If this fails they will move to end this month’s first special session days early, and Texas governor Greg Abbott will immediately call a second.“I’ll call special after special until the Texas first agenda is passed,” Abbott said in a post on X.The Trump administration sanctioned an armed group accused of illegally trading minerals in eastern Congo, as Washington seeks to lead peace efforts in the region while securing US access to its mineral resources.A senior US government official told the AP that the state and treasury departments are targeting the Codeco armed group, which controlled the key coltan mining site of Rubaya from 2022 until early 2024.“During this period, Codeco generated revenue by overseeing mining operations, collecting illegal fees and taxes for miners and engaging in mineral smuggling. It also imposed forced labor and executed civilians in mining areas under its control,” the official said.The sanctions also target the Congolese mining company CDMC, accused of selling minerals sourced and smuggled from mines near Rubaya, as well as two Hong Kong exporters, East Rise and Star Dragon, that purchased minerals from the area.Mexico has transferred a group of imprisoned cartel members to the United States, amid growing pressure from the Trump administration to dismantle the country’s powerful drug organizations, the Wall Street Journal reported.The group, sent on Tuesday, was roughly the same size as the 29 prisoners transferred in February.WSJ reports:
      The group sent Tuesday included members of top criminal organizations facing drug charges in the US who are being sent to locations including Washington Dulles International Airport in Virginia, San Diego and New York, one of the people said.
      Terry Cole, the Drug Enforcement Administration chief overseeing the federal takeover of DC police, said in an interview that, starting tonight, federal agents will be “embedded with the Metropolitan police department”.“You will see federal agents working hand in hand on patrol with the Metropolitan Police Department, you will also see an increase of activity, patrol activity in certain sectors to go after the violent criminal offenders that are the drivers of this crime,” Cole said in an interview with Fox News.Earlier today, Texas Senate Democrats staged a walkout in protest of the chamber’s proposed congressional redistricting map, which was moving forward to the Texas House.Despite the senators’ absence, the Republican-controlled Senate approved the map in a 19-2 vote. But it cannot win final approval while the quorum is broken. Texas House Democrats have been out of state for weeks to block Republican lawmakers from conducting business.Senate Democrats are challenging governor Greg Abbott’s decision to prioritize redistricting over urgent flood relief for the state’s affected communities.“This special session is about one thing: flood relief,” said Texas state senator Roland Gutierrez. “Greg Abbott tried to sneak in a rigged mid-decade redistricting beneath voters’ noses. Let’s be clear, the governor can provide this relief anytime he wants. But Abbott is holding it hostage so that he has an excuse to do Trump’s bidding.”“Texas has a long tradition of independence. But when Donald Trump tells Greg Abbott to roll over and fetch him five seats, he does it like a good lapdog,” Gutierrez added. “This governor has failed to uphold Texas values, defend the people of Texas, or make the lives of its citizens better in any meaningful way.”Democratic senators Judith Zaffirini and Chuy Hinojosa did not participate in today’s walkout and stayed in the chamber, according to the Dallas Morning News.Democratic representative Adam Smith, of the state of Washington, said it is “pretty clear” President Trump “wants his own domestic police force” after the president seized control of DC’s Metropolitan police department.“Look, this president is trampling on basic freedoms of the American people to a degree we, I don’t think we’ve ever seen,” Smith said on CNN. “You see that with what the ICE agents are doing, in terms of picking people up off the streets with no evidence, no due process, locking people up.”“This is happening all across the country,” Smith added. “Look, it’s pretty clear the president wants his own domestic police force, and step by step, he’s trying to create it, and we should be deeply alarmed by that, regardless of how you feel about crime in Washington DC, or any other city.”

      National guard troops began to arrive at their headquarters in Washington DC on Tuesday, after Donald Trump announced yesterday that he was deploying them to the nation’s capital and putting city police under federal control, even though the violent crime rate is at a 30-year low. Leading Democrats have called the move a “distraction” from the president’s economic agenda and the plague of the Epstein files.

      Earlier, the DC mayor Muriel Bowser met with attorney general Pam Bondi, after saying that her office intends to comply with federal law enforcement, as Bondi will now oversee the DC police for the next 30 days. On social media, Bondi described the meeting as “productive”, saying the pair agreed there is “nothing more important” than keeping residents and tourists “safe from deadly crime”.

      Meanwhile in the White House briefing room today, press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the president’s DC police takeover was “just the beginning”, saying that the massive surge in law enforcement resulted in 23 arrests yesterday. She added that if individuals living in homeless encampments refuse to accept places in shelters or addiction facilities they would be subject to fines or jail time. Leavitt added that the administration is still considering moving the homeless population out of the city.

      Beyond Washington, the press secretary characterised Friday’s upcoming meeting between Trump and Vladimir Putin as a “listening exercise” for the president, confirming that Volodymyr Zelenskyy would not be in attendance, but the president has hopes for a trilateral meeting in the future.

      For his part, Zelenskyy said today that Ukraine could not agree to a Russian proposal to give up more of his country’s territory in exchange for a ceasefire, because Moscow would use it as a springboard to start a future war. Speaking to journalists a day before a virtual meeting with US and European leaders, Zelenskyy said he believed Putin wanted to dominate his country because he “does not want a sovereign Ukraine”.

      Closer to home, the Texas Sentate approved a GOP-drawn congressional map, that would give Republicans five more House seats ahead of the 2026 midterms. But since House Democrats continue to break quorum, the legislation isn’t going anywhere. Speaker Dustin Burrows said today that the House will adjourn until Friday 15 August, at which point the legislature will attempt to reach quorum one more time. If this fails they will move to end this month’s first special session days early, and Texas governor Greg Abbott will immediately call a second.

      When it comes to the economy, the latest inflation data released today showed that the Consumer Price Index held steady at 2.7 percent. “Core” inflation – which leaves out volatile goods like food and energy to track how prices are increasing – rose by 0.3 percent. This marks a 3.1 percent increase over the course of a year – and the highest level in five months.

      In response, Donald Trump wasted no time calling out Jerome Powell on social media, continuing his long-running campaign against the chair of the Federal Reserve. “The damage he has done by always being Too Late is incalculable,” the president wrote. He also said that he was considering allowing a lawsuit – focused on Powell’s renovation of the fed’s headquarters– to proceed.
      The New York Times is reporting that investigators have uncovered evidence that Russia is “at least in part” responsible for a recent hack of the computer system of the federal court system.According to the Times’s sources, this breach includes highly sensitive records that could contain information with names and details of people charged with national security crimes.The Times also reports that it’s not immediately clear what specific Russian entity might be responsible for the hack.Just a quick post here to sum up the latest analysis from the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), which breaks down the financial impact of Donald Trump’s domestic policy bill that became law last month.The topline: the CBO estimates that the poorest 10% of Americans can expect to lose around $1200 per year due to the restrictions and cut backs in the legislation – namely when it comes to Medicaid and Snap benefits. By contrast, the richest 10% of Americans can expect to gain around $13,600 each year, due to the extension of the president’s 2017 tax cuts.In response to Congressional Democratic leadership’s request for analysis on the distribution of the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, a letter from the CBO’s director noted that while, on average, American households can expect to see an increase in resources, this will not be evenly distributed.He writes:
      Resources will decrease for households toward the bottom of the income distribution, whereas resources will increase for households in the middle and toward the top of the income distribution.
      The Trump administration is evidently extending its control of cultural representation at the Smithsonian, the world’s largest museum and research complex.In a letter obtained by the Wall Street Journal, the White House told the Smithsonian that it plans a wide review of exhibitions, materials and operations ahead of the US’s 250th anniversary celebrations in 2026.The letter to Lonnie Bunch, the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, from Trump administration officials said the White House wants the museums’ program to reflect “unity, progress, and enduring values that define the American story” in keeping with an executive order issued in March that ordered the elimination of “improper, divisive or anti-American ideology” from the Smithsonian and its museums.Donald Trump’s order from March, titled Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History, said the president “aims to ensure that the Smithsonian is an institution that sparks children’s imagination, celebrates American history and ingenuity, serves as a symbol to the world of American greatness, and makes America proud”.But Monday’s letter to the institution, according to the Journal, places the institution under curatorial scrutiny ranging from public-facing exhibition text and online content to internal curatorial processes, exhibition planning, the use of collections and artist grants.Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said Ukraine could not agree to a Russian proposal to give up more of his country’s territory in exchange for a ceasefire because Moscow would use what it gained as a springboard to start a future war.The Ukrainian president said he did not believe that Donald Trump supported Russia’s demands, and he expressed hope the US leader would act as an honest mediator when he meets Vladimir Putin in Alaska on Friday.He added there was no sign that Russia was preparing to implement a ceasefire, as reports emerged that small sabotage groups had pierced Ukrainian defences in the eastern Donbas, advancing about six miles in three days. Zelenskyy also warned that Russia was planning new offensives on three parts of the frontline.Speaking to journalists in the run-up to the Trump-Putin summit, and a day before a virtual meeting with US and European leaders, Zelenskyy said he believed Putin wanted to dominate his country because he “does not want a sovereign Ukraine”.Read more on the lead-up to both meetings hereThe Texas Sentate has passed a GOP-drawn congressional map, that would give Republicans five more House seats ahead of the 2026 midterms.The map passed 19-2 along party lines. Nine Senate Democrats left the floor in solidarity with their House colleagues – who broke quorum again earlier today in protest of the map. The legislation can’t advance without the absent Democrats in the lower chamber.Speaker Dustin Burrows said today that the House will adjourn until Friday 15 August, at which point the legislature will attempt to reach quorum one more time. If this fails they will move to end this month’s first special session days early, and Texas governor Greg Abbott will immediately call a second.“I’ll call special after special until the Texas first agenda is passed,” Abbott said in a post on X.The White House heralded today’s Consumer Price Index report as an clear picture of inflation remaining stable.But another notable exchange in the press briefing was a reporter’s question about why the public should trust the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ inflation data report, given the administration undermining the jobs data released earlier this month. This led to the firing of former commissioner Erika McEntarfer, and yesterday’s announcement that the president is nominating EJ Antoni, chief economist at the conservative Heritage Foundation, to replace her. Antoni is a longtime critic of the BLS.“The jobs data has had massive revisions,” Leavitt said, referring to the routine practice of issuing revisions to provide a more accurate picture of data. “We want to ensure that all of the data, the inflation data, the jobs data, any data point that is coming out of the BLS, is trustworthy and is accurate”.When asked in today’s press briefing, the White House offered little clarity on administration’s view of Benjamin Netanyahu’s Gaza City takeover.
      This is, of course, an incredibly complex and complicated situation. The administration has made our goal clear. We want to see this conflict end. We want to see the hostages released…the President and his national security team has given extensive effort and time in doing that. More

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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      Videos reveal harsh conditions inside Ice’s New York City confinement center

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      Two videos have surfaced shedding light on what is happening behind closed doors at a New York federal building where people are being confined after being seized by officers on their way out of immigration court on the 12th floor, with the footage offering a rare look inside a controversial and closely guarded space that is part of Donald Trump’s anti-immigration crackdown.The filming, shared by the New York Immigration Coalition (NYIC), captures one of several rooms at 26 Federal Plaza in Manhattan, on the building’s 10th floor, where accounts have emerged of people being detained in wholly unsuitable conditions with few basic provisions, but there had been no public access to direct evidence.The footage in question shows about two dozen men confined in bare rooms, some lying on the floor wrapped in aluminum emergency blankets while others sit on benches, the City reported on Tuesday.One clip shows two toilets just feet away from where people sleep, separated by a low wall. The video was secretly recorded by a man who had been detained after an immigration court appearance last week, according to the City, which first obtained the footage from the NYIC.The man who filmed the scenes had reportedly managed to have a phone in his possession despite the usual protocol by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) of confiscating personal items at arrest. Reports of people being held for protracted periods in deprived conditions in the Manhattan building have followed weeks of controversy about Ice officers turning up at immigration courts across the country, where they are usually not present, and apprehending people. The footage shows people held in the same building as one of the main immigration courts in New York City. It was sent to state assembly member Catalina Cruz’s office. Until now, photos or videos from the 10th floor have not emerged in public.“The American dream,” the unseen and unnamed detainee says as he films. “Immigration, 26 Federal Plaza.”In a separate audio message also shared with the City , the same man adds: “They haven’t given us food, they haven’t given us medicine. We’re cold. There are people who’ve been here for 10, 15 days inside. We’re just waiting.”Concerns about what goes on inside the federal building had been growing. Advocates, attorneys and immigrants themselves have described the 10th floor as overcrowded, with no beds, showers, or adequate access to food or healthcare.“Ice is kidnapping so many people from New York’s immigration courts that they had to create a new detention facility on the 10th floor of 26 Federal Plaza. But instead of sharing the truth with the public, Ice has skirted accountability by consistently lying about what’s happening on the 10th floor, and breaking the law by not allowing Congress members to view the conditions,” said Murad Awawdeh, president of the NYIC, in a statement.“The 10th floor detention facility must be shut down immediately, and regularly inspected to ensure that Ice adheres to federal guidelines as mandated by law,” Awawdeh added.The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) assistant secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in earlier statements about the facility that “any claim that there is overcrowding or sub-prime conditions is categorically false”.Ice also maintains that the 10th floor is not used for detention. Officially, the agency describes the space as a processing center, and therefore not subject to congressional inspection rules that apply to detention facilities, where national lawmakers have to be allowed to visit. “26 Federal Plaza is not a detention center. It is a federal building with an Ice law enforcement office inside of it,” said McLaughlin.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBut data from Ice detention logs analyzed by the City revealed that from September 2023 through late June this year, people were held there in what Ice calls the “NYC Hold Room” for an average of 29 hours. Some stayed for several days.The space remains off-limits to both journalists and lawmakers, even though members of Congress are supposed to be allowed to make unannounced visits to detention sites. Several Democrat representatives have been denied entry.Detainees and advocates continue to speak about grim conditions, including sparse food offerings, no showers or clothing changes, and people crammed into a single room with only the floor or hard benches to rest on, according to Gothamist.Meanwhile, Ice has been granted a huge budget boost. Trump’s so-called “big, beautiful bill” dedicates roughly $170bn for immigration and border-related operations – a sum that would make Ice the most heavily funded law enforcement agency in the federal government. More