Ever since Donald J. Trump descended from a gold escalator at his eponymous Manhattan tower in 2015, he has sworn that a scorched-earth campaign against “illegal immigrants” would make life safer for Americans and that citizens had nothing to worry about.
Well.
In 2025, Trump’s campaign vow to target “the worst of the worst” was set aside in the name of not just going after all undocumented immigrants and limiting legal migration but even the goal of remigration — the idea that immigrants of any status should return to their home countries. Now, U.S. citizens Keith Porter Jr., shot at a Northridge apartment complex, and Renee Nicole Good, whose shooting sparked large protests in Minneapolis, are dead.
ICE is about to storm American streets and neighborhoods with thousands of new recruits who received just eight weeks of training instead of what used to be five months. The Fourth Amendment bans the government from subjecting Americans from “unreasonable searches and seizures” yet we now have a vice president promising that they’re forthcoming across the country.
“I think … we’re [going] to see those deportation numbers ramp up,” JD Vance told Fox News’ Jesse Watters, “as we get more and more people online working for ICE going from door-to-door.”
He repeated his boast the following day during a news conference while adding that the killing of Good — shot while trying to drive away from an agent who stood in front of her SUV during an immigration enforcement operation — was justified, adding that the 37-year-old mother of three was “brainwashed” and “radicalized in a very, very sad way.”
The beginning of 2026 now shows even those in the United States legally are targets for for the too often Keystone Kops-like, eager beaver, trigger happy federal immigration enforcement force I like to call la migra.
With the Trump administration’s accelerated recruitment drive for immigration officers and rhetorical bloodlust, don’t be surprised if these masked Bizarro Barney Fifes knock on your door or demand to see your papers. In fact, expect it.
The MAGA excuse for those caught up in la migra‘s crackdown — the way to stay out of trouble is by avoiding it — doesn’t work when the trouble comes to you.
That’s why it seems that the deaths of Porter and Good in the last week, coupled with Vance’s authoritarian promise, seems to be waking up Americans into resisting the deportation Leviathan like never before.
A woman is taken into custody by Border Patrol agents after she was accused of using her vehicle to block their vehicles while they were patrolling in a shopping center in December in Niles, Ill.
(Scott Olson / Getty Images)
Anti-ICE protests are happening across the country this weekend. On social media, conservatives and libertarians who largely stayed silent on Trump throughout 2025 are criticizing him over Good’s death and his administration’s insults against her. Trump’s approval rating has slipped since the start of his presidency, even among supporters — and ICE’s out-of-control conduct is becoming a bigger and bigger factor.
A YouGov poll conducted on the day of Good’s killing found 52% of Americans surveyed don’t like how ICE is operating, while the agency’s approval rating has gone from plus-16% to negative 14% in a year. While the poll unsurprisingly splits on partisan lines — Democrats overwhelmingly oppose ICE, Republicans still think they’re Trump’s Hardy Boys — the independents who delivered the 2024 election to Trump oppose ICE’s actions by a healthy majority.
If he’s losing the middle, he’s losing America.
Unless, of course, Trump goes full banana republic dictator and decides his regime isn’t leaving office — no matter what. And honestly, would you be shocked if this administration tried to make its wet dream a reality?
Every movement needs martyrs, and if the deaths of Porter and Good prove to American citizens and permanent residents once and for all that they’re not safe from ICE, then their deaths weren’t in vain. That’s why the Trump administration and its lackeys are straining so hard to slime Good’s name — because they know the public isn’t having its lies.
Their smears don’t have the same effect they used to, thankfully. Just look at what happened recently with Grok, Elon Musk’s AI creation on X.
You have to take what it digitally blurts out with a grain of salt — Grok once started calling itself “MechaHitler” and spewed anti-semitic conspiracies after an update that Musk swore “improved [it] significantly.”
But consider what Grok did when the billionaire Trump enabler “tweeted” of Good: “She tried to run people over.”
When asked whether it “would have authorized lethal forced based solely on this video evidence” even Musk’s creation, even Grok, replied (while noting that “ICE claims differ”):
“Based on descriptions from multiple sources… it shows the vehicle moving slowly backward and forward without clear evidence of attempting to ram officers. Under objective standards like [the Supreme Court decision] Graham v. Connor, which require an imminent threat for deadly force, I would not authorize lethal force solely on this footage.”
I guess even Grok is capable of calling out Trumpworld’s BS when it “sees” what millions of other people across the U.S. have seen with their own eyes.
WASHINGTON — After President Trump ordered strikes that led to the capture of Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, celebrations erupted in Venezuelan communities across the U.S.
But for many of the hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan immigrants facing possible deportation, their relief and joy were cut by the fear about what comes next from an administration that has zeroed in on Venezuelans as a target.
“Many of us asked ourselves, ‘What’s going to happen with us now?’” said A.G., a 39-year-old in Tennessee who asked to be identified by her initials because she lacks legal status. Even so, Maduro’s ouster gave her a lot of hope for her mother country.
Venezuelans began fleeing in droves in 2014 as economic collapse led to widespread food and medicine shortages, as well as political repression. Nearly 8 million Venezuelans are now living outside the country — including 1.2 million in the U.S.
Venezuelans migrants walk toward Bucaramanga, Colombia, in 2019.
(Marcus Yam/Los Angeles Times)
A.G. and her now-18-year-old son arrived at the southern border in 2019. Since then, she said, they have built a good life — they own a transport company with delivery trucks, pay taxes and follow the law.
Maduro’s fall left her with mixed feelings.
“He’s obviously a dictator, many people have died because of him and he refused to give up power, but the reason that they entered Venezuela, for me what President Trump did was illegal,” she said. “Innocent people died because of the bombs. I’m asking God that it all be for good reason.”
Dozens of Venezuelans and others were killed in the U.S. invasion — more than 100, a government official said — including civilians.
The Trump administration is framing its Venezuela operation as an opportunity for Venezuelans like A.G. “Now, they can return to the country they love and rebuild its future,” said U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services spokesman Matthew Tragesser.
Katie Blankenship, a Miami-based attorney with Sanctuary of the South who has represented many Venezuelans facing deportation, sees a less promising future.
“We’re going to see increased targeting of Venezuelans to force them to leave the U.S. into a political and socioeconomic environment that’s likely only more destabilized and subject to more abuse,” she said.
The Venezuelan community in the U.S. swelled, in part, because the Biden administration expanded pathways for them to enter the country.
Volunteer help a Venezuelan immigrant at the storage units from a volunteer-run program that distributes donations to recently arrived Venezuelan immigrants in need, in Miami, Fla., in 2023.
(Eva Marie Uzcategui / Los Angeles Times)
One of those programs allowed more than 117,000 Venezuelans to purchase flights directly to the U.S. and stay for two years if they had a U.S.-based financial sponsor and passed a background check. Other Venezuelans entered legally at land ports of entry after scheduling interviews with border officers.
By the end of the Biden administration, more than 600,000 Venezuelans had protection from deportation under Temporary Protected Status, a program used by both Republican and Democratic administrations for immigrants who cannot return home because of armed conflict, natural disaster or other “extraordinary and temporary conditions.”
On the campaign trail, Trump repeatedly referred to Venezuelan immigrants as criminals, singling them out more than any other nationality — in 64% of speeches, an Axios analysis showed. He has said repeatedly, without evidence that Venezuela emptied its prisons and mental institutions to flood the U.S. with immigrants.
One of Trump’s first acts as president was to designate the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua as a foreign terrorist organization. Within two months, he invoked an 18th century wartime law, the Alien Enemies Act, to deport 252 Venezuelan men accused of being Tren de Aragua members to El Salvador, where they were imprisoned and tortured despite many having no criminal histories in the U.S. or Latin America.
Later, the Trump administration stripped away protections for Venezuelans with financial sponsors and TPS, with Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem calling the latter “contrary to the national interest.”
In a September Federal Register Notice, Noem said that TPS for Venezuelans undercut the administration’s foreign policy objectives because one result of allowing Venezuelans in the U.S. was “relieving pressure on Maduro’s regime to enact domestic reforms and facilitate safe return conditions.” In other words, if Venezuelans returned home, that would pressure the government to enact reforms.
Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, along with U.S. Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi, left, and Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry, right, participates in a news conference near Camp 57 at Angola prison, the Louisiana State Penitentiary and America’s largest maximum-security prison farm, to announce the opening of a new Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility that will house immigrants convicted of crimes in West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana, on Sept. 3, 2025.
(Matthew Hilton / AFP via Getty Images)
The administration has offered contrasting assessments of conditions in Venezuela. Noem wrote that although certain adverse conditions continue, “there are notable improvements in several areas such as the economy, public health, and crime.”
Throughout the year, though, the State Department continued to reissue an “extreme danger” travel advisory for Venezuela, urging Americans to leave the country immediately.
Conditions for Venezuelans in the U.S. grew more complicated after a man from Afghanistan was accused of shooting two National Guard members in November; in response, the administration froze the immigration cases of people from 39 countries, including Venezuela, that the administration considers “high-risk.” That means anyone who applied for asylum, a visa, a green card or any other benefit remains in limbo indefinitely.
After a panel of the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals struck down the Trump administration’s use of the Alien Enemies Act in September, the Justice Department appealed. In a support brief filed in December, the Justice Department cited escalating tensions with Venezuela.
David Smilde, a Tulane University sociologist and expert on Venezuelan politics, said that invading Venezuela could justify renewed use of the Alien Enemies Act.
The law says the president can invoke the Alien Enemies Act not only in times of “declared war,” but also when a foreign government threatens or carries out an “invasion” or “predatory incursion” against the U.S.
“Now it will be difficult, I think, for the court to say, ‘No, you can’t use this,’” Smilde said.
With U.S. officials promising improved conditions in Venezuela and encouraging citizens to return, Smilde said, they could invoke the Alien Enemies Act to quickly deport undocumented immigrants who don’t leave willingly.
“There’s several layers to this,” he said, “and none of it looks very good for Venezuelan immigrants.”
This couple from Venezuela shared their story of why they left their three children back in their home country and spoke of the the experiences of their travel to the United States at the Parkside Community Church in Sacramento on June 16, 2023.
(Jose Luis Villegas / For The Times)
Jose, a 28-year-old Venezuelan living east of Los Angeles, fled Venezuela in 2015 after being imprisoned and beaten for criticizing the government. He lived in Colombia and Peru before illegally crossing the U.S. border in 2022, and now has a pending asylum application. Jose asked to be identified by his middle name out of fear of retaliation by the U.S. government.
The news this week that an ICE agent had shot and killed a woman in Minnesota heightened his anxiety.
“You come here because supposedly this is a country with freedom of expression, and there is more safety, but with this government, now you’re afraid you’ll get killed,” he said. “And that was a U.S. citizen. Imagine what they could do to me?”
People visit a memorial for Renee Nicole Good on Jan. 7 in Minneapolis.
(Scott Olson / Getty Images)
Jose qualifies for a work permit based on his pending asylum, but his application for one is frozen because of the executive order following the National Guard shooting.
The news of Maduro’s arrest was bittersweet, Jose said, because his mother and grandmother didn’t live to witness that day. He said his mother died last year of kidney failure due to lack of medical care, leaving him as the primary breadwinner for his two young sisters who remain in Venezuela with their father, who is disabled.
Still, he said he’s happy with what Trump has done in Venezuela.
“People are saying he’s stealing our petroleum,” he said, “but for 25 years, Cuba, China and Iran have been stealing the petroleum and it didn’t improve our lives.”
Many Venezuelans were encouraged by news that Venezuela would release a “significant number” of political prisoners as a peace gesture.
For Jose, that’s not enough. Venezuela’s government ordered police to search for anyone involved in promoting or supporting the attack by U.S. forces, leading to detentions of journalists and civilians.
“Venezuela remains the same,” he said. “The same disgrace, the same poverty and the same government repression.”
A.G. said she was heartened to hear Noem say Sunday on Fox News that every Venezeulan who had TPS “has the opportunity to apply for refugee status and that evaluation will go forward.” But the administration quickly backtracked and said that was not the case.
Instead, Noem and other administration officials have doubled down on the notion that Venezuelans without permanent lawful status should leave. Noem told Fox News that there are no plans to pause deportation flights despite the political uncertainty in Venezuela.
Tragesser, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services spokesman, said the agency’s posture hasn’t changed.
“USCIS encourages all Venezuelans unlawfully in the U.S. to use the CBP Home app for help with a safe and orderly return to their country,” he said.
There were no stars in the October sky. No moon that 64-year-old Masuma Khan could see from the narrow window of the California City Immigration Processing Center.
“No planes,” she said, recalling her confinement.
Once a prison, the facility in the Mojave Desert, located 67 miles east of Bakersfield, reopened in April to hold people in removal proceedings, including Khan.
It was not the kind of place where she imagined ending up — not after living in the country for 28 years, caring for her daughter and surviving one of California’s deadliest wildfires, the Eaton fire.
Khan was fortunate not to have lost her west Altadena home to the Jan. 7 fire, which destroyed more than 9,000 structures and killed 19 people.
But in the months that followed, Khan faced another threat — deportation.
As fire recovery efforts were underway in Los Angeles, the Trump administration launched immigration raids in the city, hampering recovery efforts and creating more distress for immigrants after the fires.
Khan worried. She was in the process of adjusting her immigration status and was required to check in every year with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
An immigration attorney reassured her that there was no cause for concern: Her husband and daughter were citizens, she had no criminal record, and her case was still under review.
And so, on Oct. 6, Khan drove to downtown Los Angeles for her routine immigration check-in and found herself caught up in Trump’s deportation surge.
Eaton fire survivor Masuma Khan, 64, right, with her daughter Riya Khan and husband Isteak Khan after bring released in December.
(Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times)
Khan was taken into custody by ICE agents and kept in a cold room for almost an entire day. She said agents denied her access to a lawyer and a phone until she signed deportation papers. Khan resisted but later signed.
She was placed in a van with other detainees and driven three hours north to the detention center in California City. She said there was no air conditioning in the van and she became nauseous and started to experience hypertension symptoms.
At the facility she was denied access to medications for high blood pressure, asthma, peripheral arterial disease, general anxiety and hypothyroidism, she said.
Khan, who is also prediabetic, said she struggled to maintain her health at the facility. Her blood pressure spiked and she began to experience stroke-like symptoms. Her legs swelled up and she became weak.
She said the facility was so cold that people often became ill, including staff. She and other women used socks as scarves, sleeves and mittens but were threatened with fines if they continued to misuse the garments.
She said she became sick and her vision got blurry without her prescribed eye drops. Her Halal meals shifted to a medical diet that included pork, which she cannot eat because she is Muslim.
Khan’s experience at the facility was similar to that of other detainees who filed a federal class-action lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security and ICE. They alleged inhumane conditions at the facility that included inadequate food, water and medical care, frigid cells and lack of access to medications and lawyers.
The California City Immigration Processing Center in Kern County, where Masuma Khan was held.
(Patrick T. Fallon/AFP/Getty Images)
In an email response, Tricia McLaughlin, a DHS spokesperson, said any claims about “subprime conditions at ICE detention facilities are false.”
“All detainees are provided with proper meals, certified by dietitians, medical treatment and have the opportunities to communicate with lawyers and family members.”
Khan said she spent most days in her cell crying.
“I missed my family, I missed everything,” she said “I was frustrated.”
She often thought of home: her husband and daughter, her small garden and the birds she fed daily with seeds and oranges from her balcony.
It would be weeks before she could see her family again, before she could gaze at the mountains and hear the symphony of wildlife.
‘Like an inferno’
The Eaton fire had been raging for hours in west Altadena when Khan and her husband were awakened by evacuation alerts on their phones at 3:30 a.m.
Khan got out of bed and from her bedroom window could see flames raging in the mountains.
Khan hadn’t seen anything like it. Four years before she arrived, the Kinneloa fire, sparked by a campfire, erupted in the same mountains. It fed on dry and flammable vegetation and was driven by Santa Ana winds. It was a destructive fire.
But the Eaton fire was different. Hurricane-force winds helped spread the embers and flames deep into the town’s heart — destroying homes, schools and countless structures.
A business and vehicle are a total loss as the Eaton fire rages along Lake Avenue in Altadena on January 8, 2025.
(Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times)
Khan and her husband, Isteak, didn’t have time to grab much before fleeing in their car that evening.
“It was like an inferno,” Isteak Khan, 66, recalled. “You could see the embers flying everywhere. It was very chaotic.”
The couple drove about three miles south to a supermarket in Pasadena. For a month they lived at a hotel until they were allowed to return home.
When they got back the surrounding neighborhoods were in ruins: Trees were charred, cars were stripped down to metal frames and homes were gutted or left in ash.
The couple’s apartment still was standing but had suffered smoke damage and there was no electricity, no safe water to use. The couple depended on water bottles and showered at the homes of relatives.
Khan never thought she would experience such a disaster in the U.S. Then again, she didn’t journey here for her own reasons. She came to save her daughter.
‘Incredibly traumatized’
In August 1997, Khan was living in Bangladesh with her husband and their 9-year-old daughter, Riya. That month Riya had traveled with her grandparents to the U.S. to see relatives when she fell seriously ill. Doctors determined she was suffering from kidney failure and needed ongoing treatment including chemotherapy and peritoneal dialysis.
Khan traveled to the U.S. on a visitor’s visa to be with Riya. For more than a decade her daughter received treatment at the Children’s Hospital in Los Angeles.
Khan became her daughter’s primary caretaker and did not return to Bangladesh as her visa was expiring. Her husband joined her in 1999 after obtaining a visa. He and Riya eventually received green cards and became citizens.
The following year, as Khan looked for legal ways to adjust her immigration status, she met a man at a Bangladeshi grocery store who befriended her and offered to help her obtain a green card, according to court records. Little did Khan know that this man — who spoke her language and was well known in the Bangladeshi community — was a scammer, one of many who prey on South Asians migrating to the U.S.
At the time Khan did not speak, read or write English well, and this man told her he could file an asylum application on her behalf, for a fee amounting to several thousand dollars.
But Khan was unaware this man had filed the application for her using a false name and listed his own address for future correspondence from immigration authorities, according to court documents.
All this came to light when she showed up for an asylum hearing in Anaheim in 1999 and responded to the questions of an asylum officer who noticed the information did not match what was in the application.
The officer denied the application, and later she was unaware of a notice to appear before an immigration court, since it had been sent to the scammer’s address.
Her absence at the hearing prompted an immigration judge to order her to be deported. Khan did not find out about the court’s action until 2015, when her husband petitioned to adjust her status so she could obtain a green card.
After the petition was denied and her case was closed because of the deportation order, Khan hired an immigration attorney who sought to reopen the case. But a judge denied it, and her appeal also was rejected by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.
In February 2020, Khan was detained by ICE but released and required to check in with immigration officials. That year she hired an immigration attorney who submitted paperwork to let her stay in the U.S. The application was pending when ICE took her into custody on Oct. 6.
McLaughlin, the DHS spokesperson, said there was no reason for the government to reconsider her case, since Khan had a final removal order since 1999 and had exhausted all appeals.
“She has no legal right to be in our country,” McLaughlin said. “DHS law enforcement lawfully arrested her on Oct. 6.”
Yet Khan caught a break in early November when a federal judge ordered her released. The judge ruled the government cannot detain Khan without giving her a hearing and explaining why it needs to detain her.
It was a victory for her legal team, made up of a law firm and two nonprofit groups — the South Asian Network and Public Counsel and Hoq Law APC.
Laboni Hoq, a chief attorney on the case, said the goal is to keep Khan out of detention while the team seeks to adjust her status.
“We’re feeling like she has a shot to pursue that process … given her long history in the country and that she is law-abiding and has met all the requirements to deal with her case through the court system and immigration system,” Hoq said.
Khan’s predicament has drawn the attention of numerous Southern California politicians, including U.S. Rep. Judy Chu and U.S. Sen. Adam Schiff. Much of it had to do with Khan’s 38-year-old daughter, Riya, who reached out to the lawmakers and also took to social media to bring her mother’s case to the public’s attention.
Still, it is unclear what will happen next.
As Khan’s legal fight proceeds, she must check in regularly with immigration authorities, as she did in downtown L.A. on Dec. 19, accompanied by Sen. Sasha Renée Pérez (D-Alhambra), who also became aware of her case from Riya’s efforts.
“She’s incredibly traumatized by what’s happened to her,” Pérez said of Khan. “She’s scared to even participate in the community events that we have during the holidays … it’s painful, it makes me angry, it makes me sad and I just wanted to be here with her.”
At their Altadena home one recent evening, the Khans sat in their living room. Riya said the hope was that the case will be reopened so her mother can obtain a green card.
“We’re going to stay together,” Isteak said.
Not far from Masuma, old “welcome home” balloons hovered. As she sat next to her daughter, she could express only two things: “I cannot leave this country. This is my home.”
NASHVILLE, Tenn. — A newly unsealed order in the criminal case against Kilmar Abrego Garcia reveals that high-level Justice Department officials pushed for his indictment, calling it a “top priority,” only after he was mistakenly deported and then ordered returned to the U.S.
Abrego Garcia has pleaded not guilty in federal court in Tennessee to charges of human smuggling. He is seeking to have the case dismissed on the grounds that the prosecution is vindictive — a way for President Trump’s administration to punish him for the embarrassment of his mistaken deportation.
To support that argument, he has asked the government to turn over documents that reveal how the decision was made to prosecute him in 2025 for an incident that occurred in 2022. On Dec. 3, U.S. District Judge Waverly Crenshaw filed an order under seal that compelled the government to provide some documents to Abrego Garcia and his attorneys. That order was unsealed on Tuesday and sheds new light on the case.
Earlier, Crenshaw found that there was “some evidence” that the prosecution of Abrego Garcia could be vindictive. He specifically cited a statement by Deputy Atty. Gen. Todd Blanche on a Fox News program that seemed to suggest that the Department of Justice charged Abrego Garcia because he had won his wrongful deportation case.
Rob McGuire, who was the acting U.S. Atty. for the Middle District of Tennessee until late December, argued that those statements were irrelevant because he alone made the decision to prosecute, and he has no animus against Abrego Garcia.
In the newly unsealed order, Crenshaw writes, “Some of the documents suggest not only that McGuire was not a solitary decision-maker, but he in fact reported to others in DOJ and the decision to prosecute Abrego may have been a joint decision.”
The U.S. attorney’s office for the Middle District of Tennessee released a statement saying, “The emails cited in Judge Crenshaw’s order, specifically Mr. McGuire’s email on May 15, 2025, confirm that the ultimate decision on whether to prosecute was made by career prosecutors based on the facts, evidence, and established DOJ practice. Communications with the Deputy Attorney General’s Office about a high-profile case are both required and routine.”
The email referenced was from McGuire to his staff stating that Blanche “would like Garcia charged sooner rather than later,” according to Crenshaw’s order.
The human smuggling charges stem from a 2022 traffic stop in Tennessee in which Abrego Garcia was pulled over for speeding. There were nine passengers in the car, and state troopers discussed the possibility of human smuggling among themselves. However, he was ultimately allowed to leave with only a warning. The case was turned over to Homeland Security Investigations, but there is no record of any effort to charge him until April 2025, according to court records.
The order does not give a lot of detail on what is in the documents that were turned over to Abrego Garcia, but it shows that Aakash Singh, who works under Blanche in the Office of the Deputy Attorney General, contacted McGuire about Abrego Garcia’s case on April 27, the same day that McGuire received a file on the case from Homeland Security Investigations. That was several days after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Abrego Garcia’s favor on April 10.
On April 30, Singh said in an email to McGuire that the prosecution was a “top priority” for the Deputy Attorney General’s Office, according to the order. Singh and McGuire continued to communicate about the prosecution. On May 18, Singh wrote to McGuire and others to hold the draft indictment until they got “clearance” to file it. “The implication is that ‘clearance’ would come from the Office of the Deputy Attorney General,” Crenshaw writes.
A hearing on the motion to dismiss the case on the basis of vindictive prosecution is scheduled for Jan. 28.
Trump is seeking to end protected status for South Sudan, claiming country no longer poses danger to those returning.
Published On 30 Dec 202530 Dec 2025
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A federal judge has blocked the administration of President Donald Trump from stripping temporary protections from deportations for South Sudanese citizens living in the United States.
US District Judge Angel Kelley in Boston, Massachusetts, granted an emergency request on Tuesday in a lawsuit filed by several South Sudanese nationals and an immigrant rights group.
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The order prevents the temporary protected status (TPS) for South Sudanese citizens from expiring on January 5 as the Trump administration has sought.
The lawsuit, led by the African Communities Together, accuses the US Department of Homeland Security of acting unlawfully in its effort to strip South Sudanese citizens of TPS, a US immigration status granted to citizens of countries experiencing natural disasters, conflict or other extraordinary circumstances that could make return to their homelands dangerous.
The status was initially granted for South Sudan in 2011 when the country officially broke away from Sudan. It has been repeatedly renewed amid repeated bouts of fighting, widespread displacement and regional instability.
The status allows eligible individuals to work and receive temporary protection from deportation.
The lawsuit further alleged that the Trump administration exposed South Sudan citizens to being deported to a country facing what is widely considered one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, in a notice published on November 5, had argued the country no longer met the conditions for TPS.
“With the renewed peace in South Sudan, their demonstrated commitment to ensuring the safe reintegration of returning nationals, and improved diplomatic relations, now is the right time to conclude what was always intended to be a temporary designation,” she said, appearing to refer to a tenuous 2018 peace agreement.
The statement contradicted the findings of a panel of United Nations experts, who wrote in a report to the UN Security Council in November that “while the contours of the conflict may be altered, the resulting human suffering has remained unchanged.”
“Ongoing conflict and aerial bombardments, coupled with flooding and the influx of returnees and refugees from the Sudan, have led to near-record levels of food insecurity, with pockets of famine reported in some of the communities most affected by renewed fighting,” it added.
The Trump administration has increasingly targeted TPS as part of its crackdown on immigration and its mass deportation drive.
It has moved to similarly end TPS for foreign nationals from countries including Syria, Venezuela, Haiti, Cuba and Nicaragua, prompting several court challenges.
It has also sought to deport individuals to countries in Africa, even if they have no ties there.
Dec. 26 (UPI) — A federal judge has blocked the deportation of a British man targeted by President Donald Trump.
Imran Ahmed, founder and CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, was one of five people placed on a visa ban after the government accused him of censorship.
Ahmed filed suit against Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Attorney General Pam Bondi to prevent “the imminent prospect of unconstitutional arrest.”
The suit said the case comes from “the federal government’s latest attempt to abuse the immigration system to punish and punitively detain noncitizens for protected speech and silence viewpoints with which it disagrees.”
Ahmed is a legal permanent resident of the United States, where he lives with his American wife and child. He praised the judge’s decision.
“I will not be bullied away from my life’s work of fighting to keep children safe from social media’s harm and stopping antisemitism online,” Ahmed said.
The speed of the judge’s decision was telling, said his lawyer Roberta Kaplan.
“The federal government can’t deport a green card holder like Imran Ahmed, with a wife and young child who are American, simply because it doesn’t like what he has to say,” the BBC reported she said.
Rubio said in a statement Tuesday that the five had “led organized efforts to coerce American platforms to censor, demonetize and suppress” the views of Americans with whom they disagreed.
“These radical activists and weaponized NGOs have advanced censorship crackdowns by foreign states — in each case targeting American speakers and American companies,” Rubio said. He described the five as “agents of the global censorship-industrial complex.”
The others included in the ban are former European Union technology commissioner Thierry Breton; Anna-Lena von Hodenberg and Josephine Ballon of Berlin-based non-profit HateAid; Clare Melford, co-founder of Global Disinformation Index.
Ahmed told The Guardian that it was another attempt to deflect accountability and transparency.
“This has never been about politics,” he said. “What it has been about is companies that simply do not want to be held accountable and, because of the influence of big money in Washington, are corrupting the system and trying to bend it to their will, and their will is to be unable to be held accountable. There is no other industry that acts with such arrogance, indifference and a lack of humility and sociopathic greed at the expense of people.”
Ahmed said he had not formally received any notification from the government.
“I’m very confident that our first amendment rights will be upheld by the court,” he told The Guardian.
He is expected to be in court Monday, when the protective order will be confirmed.
In 2023, Elon Musk‘s company X sued the CCDH after it reported on a rise in hate speech on the platform since Musk’s takeover. The case was dismissed but X appealed the decision.
Simon Cowell, the judge on the TV series “American Idol” strangles the show’s host Ryan Seacrest during the May 15, 2003 photo op for the 2003 Fox Upfront at New York’s Grand Central Station in New York City. Photo by Ezio Petersen/UPI | License Photo
Dec. 23 (UPI) — A judge in Oregon ruled Tuesday that the Trump administration cannot require states to account for how deportations have affected their populations in order to receive emergency or disaster preparedness funds.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Amy Potter’s ruling came in response to a lawsuit from 11 states challenging new requirements from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which they argued created undue burdens on access to hundreds of millions of dollars that could be used to prepare for floods, storms, acts of terrorism and other potential catastrophes.
The ruling concerned a new FEMA policy that shortened the duration of grants to states from three years to one. The agency argued that the shorter period would allow it to better gauge the effectiveness of how states were using the money.
FEMA also required states to provide updated figures on their populations to reflect the Trump administration’s aggressive deportation efforts. Population counts have traditionally been the responsibility of the U.S. Census Bureau.
A group of 11 states – including Michigan, Oregon, Arizona, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Maryland, Nevada, New Mexico, Wisconsin and Kentucky – sued in response to the new requirements.
They argued that the requirements violated the Administrative Procedures Act and imperiled funding used for outreach programs in Hawaii, the deployment of emergency management personnel in North Carolina during tropical storms and staff to respond to flash floods in Maryland.
“This abrupt change in policy is particularly harmful to local emergency management,” wrote Potter.
In Oregon, affected funds were used to help cover the expenses of local emergency managers across the state, she wrote.
Washington, DC – For the past two years, weekdays for Susanna have meant thumbing through picture books, organising cubby holes and leading classroom choruses of songs.
But her work as a pre-school teacher came to a screeching halt in October, when she found out her application to renew her work permit had been denied.
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Susanna, who uses a pseudonym in this article for fear of reprisals, is one of the nearly 10 percent of teachers in the United States who are immigrants.
But while the US has increasingly looked abroad to fill teacher shortages, some foreign-born teachers say the deportation push under President Donald Trump has threatened their livelihoods — and risks traumatising their students.
Susanna, an asylum applicant who fled violence in Guatemala nearly a decade ago, said that losing her permit meant she had to stop working immediately.
She recalls breaking the news to her students, some of whom are only three years old. Many were too young to understand.
“In one week, I lost everything,” Susanna told Al Jazeera in Spanish. “When I told the kids goodbye, they asked me why, and I told them, ‘I can only tell you goodbye.’ There were kids that hugged me, and it hurt my heart a lot.”
Advocates warn that the sudden departure of teachers could harm the development of young children in school [Mohammed Zain Shafi Khan/Al Jazeera]
Looking abroad for teachers
Estimates vary as to how many foreign-born teachers currently work in the US. But one 2019 report from George Mason University found that there were 857,200 immigrants among the country’s 8.1 million teachers, in roles ranging from pre-school to university.
For the 2023-2024 school year alone, the US government brought 6,716 full-time teachers to the country on temporary exchange visas to fill openings in pre-kindergarten, primary and secondary school education.
Many hailed from the Philippines, as well as countries like Jamaica, Spain and Colombia.
The uncertainty for immigrants under Trump’s second term, however, has proven disruptive to schools that rely heavily on foreign-born teachers.
That is the case for the pre-school where Susanna worked, CommuniKids, which offers language immersion programmes in Washington, DC.
Cofounder and president Raul Echevarría estimates that immigrants — both citizens and non-citizens working with legal authorisation — comprise about 90 percent of CommuniKids’s staff.
But Echevarría told Al Jazeera that the push to rescind legal pathways to immigration has jeopardised the employment of several faculty members.
Five other teachers at the school have seen their ability to work affected by changes to the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) programme.
All five, Echevarría explained, were originally from Venezuela. But in October, the Trump administration ended TPS status for more than 350,000 Venezuelan citizens, including the teachers at CommuniKids.
Their authorisation to work legally in the US will expire on October 2, 2026, according to the US Citizenship and Immigration Services website.
“These teachers lost their ability to make a living,” Echevarria said, noting that his school requires educators with expertise in languages like Spanish, French and Mandarin.
CommuniKids, a language immersion school in Washington, DC, helps young children develop skills in French, Mandarin and Spanish [Mohammed Zain Shafi Khan/Al Jazeera]
‘Strong bonds’
For the schools themselves, the losses can be devastating. Every state in the US has reported teacher shortages to the federal government.
But advocates say the high stress and low pay of education make teachers difficult to recruit and keep.
That leads some states to look abroad for education workers. In North Carolina, for example, 1,063 foreign nationals worked full-time as grade-school teachers on temporary J-1 visas during the 2023-2024 school year.
The top destinations for such recruits were all southern states: North Carolina was followed by Florida with 996 teachers on J-1 visas, and Texas with 761.
But Echevarria said some of the biggest impacts of the deportation drive are felt by the students themselves.
“Our students develop strong bonds with their teachers, and all of a sudden, overnight, they lost their teachers,” said Echevarría.
“Their number one superpower”, he added, “is their ability to empathise and to create strong, effective bonds with people from any background”.
But when those bonds are broken, there can be mental health consequences and setbacks for educational achievement, particularly among younger children.
A 2024 study published by the American Educational Research Association found that, when teachers leave midyear, children’s language development takes a measurable hit.
In other words, the loss of a familiar teacher — someone who knows their routines, strengths and fears — can quietly stall a child’s progress. The consequences extend to a child’s sense of self and stability.
Mental health consequences
For parents like Michelle Howell, whose child attends CommuniKids, the loss of teachers has also made the classroom environment feel fragile.
“The teachers there aren’t just teachers for these young kids,” Howell said of CommuniKids. “They’re like extended family.
“They hug them, they hold them, they do the things a parent would do. When those people disappear, it’s not just hard for the kids. It’s hard for everyone.”
Howell, who is Chinese American, said the sudden disappearances reminded her of her own family’s history.
“I used to read about things like this happening in China, the place my family left to find safety,” she said. “It’s very disturbing to know that what we ran from back then is our reality now. People disappear.”
School psychologist Maria C, who asked to remain anonymous to protect her work in the Texas public school system, has noticed the children she works with struggling with instability caused by the deportation push.
The disappearance of a loved one or mentor — say, a favourite teacher — could flood a child’s body with cortisol, the hormone meant to protect them in moments of danger, she explained.
But when that stress becomes chronic, the same hormone starts to hurt more than it helps. It interferes with memory, attention and emotional regulation.
“For some, it looks like anxiety. For others, it’s depression or sudden outbursts,” Maria said. “They’re in fight-or-flight mode all day.”
She added that selective mutism, an anxiety disorder, is on the rise among the children she sees, who range in age from five to 12.
“It used to be rare, maybe one case per school,” she said. “Now I see it constantly. It’s a quiet symptom of fear.”
Preparing for the worst
Back at CommuniKids, Echevarría explained that he and other staff members have put together contingency plans, just in case immigration enforcement arrives at the pre-school.
The aim, he said, is to make both employees and students feel safer coming to class.
“We put those steps in writing because we wanted our staff to know they’re not alone,” he said. “We have attorneys on call. We’re partners with local police. But above all, our job is to protect our children.”
But as an added precaution, teachers are advised to carry their passports or work permits with them.
Even Echevarría, a US citizen born in Virginia, said he carries his passport wherever he goes. The fear of deportation has a way of lingering.
“I’m bilingual and of Hispanic descent,” he said. “Given how things are, I want to be able to prove I’m a citizen if anyone ever questions it.”
Commentary: Citizens are finally getting it: No one’s safe from Trump’s deportation ambitions
Ever since Donald J. Trump descended from a gold escalator at his eponymous Manhattan tower in 2015, he has sworn that a scorched-earth campaign against “illegal immigrants” would make life safer for Americans and that citizens had nothing to worry about.
Well.
In 2025, Trump’s campaign vow to target “the worst of the worst” was set aside in the name of not just going after all undocumented immigrants and limiting legal migration but even the goal of remigration — the idea that immigrants of any status should return to their home countries. Now, U.S. citizens Keith Porter Jr., shot at a Northridge apartment complex, and Renee Nicole Good, whose shooting sparked large protests in Minneapolis, are dead.
ICE is about to storm American streets and neighborhoods with thousands of new recruits who received just eight weeks of training instead of what used to be five months. The Fourth Amendment bans the government from subjecting Americans from “unreasonable searches and seizures” yet we now have a vice president promising that they’re forthcoming across the country.
“I think … we’re [going] to see those deportation numbers ramp up,” JD Vance told Fox News’ Jesse Watters, “as we get more and more people online working for ICE going from door-to-door.”
He repeated his boast the following day during a news conference while adding that the killing of Good — shot while trying to drive away from an agent who stood in front of her SUV during an immigration enforcement operation — was justified, adding that the 37-year-old mother of three was “brainwashed” and “radicalized in a very, very sad way.”
The beginning of 2026 now shows even those in the United States legally are targets for for the too often Keystone Kops-like, eager beaver, trigger happy federal immigration enforcement force I like to call la migra.
This isn’t anything new, of course. Since June, when ICE, Border Patrol and their sister agencies used Los Angeles as a testing ground for what they have inflicted on the rest of the country, the government has treated citizens who dare oppose mass-scale deportations — veterans, Democrats or Republicans, old and young, Latino and not — as an enemy of the “homeland.” Citizens have had their front doors blown out, been hit with pepper balls for praying outside government facilities, been wrongfully charged with assaulting agents, and have seen their identification papers dismissed as fake and thus grounds for detainment.
With the Trump administration’s accelerated recruitment drive for immigration officers and rhetorical bloodlust, don’t be surprised if these masked Bizarro Barney Fifes knock on your door or demand to see your papers. In fact, expect it.
The MAGA excuse for those caught up in la migra‘s crackdown — the way to stay out of trouble is by avoiding it — doesn’t work when the trouble comes to you.
That’s why it seems that the deaths of Porter and Good in the last week, coupled with Vance’s authoritarian promise, seems to be waking up Americans into resisting the deportation Leviathan like never before.
A woman is taken into custody by Border Patrol agents after she was accused of using her vehicle to block their vehicles while they were patrolling in a shopping center in December in Niles, Ill.
(Scott Olson / Getty Images)
Anti-ICE protests are happening across the country this weekend. On social media, conservatives and libertarians who largely stayed silent on Trump throughout 2025 are criticizing him over Good’s death and his administration’s insults against her. Trump’s approval rating has slipped since the start of his presidency, even among supporters — and ICE’s out-of-control conduct is becoming a bigger and bigger factor.
A YouGov poll conducted on the day of Good’s killing found 52% of Americans surveyed don’t like how ICE is operating, while the agency’s approval rating has gone from plus-16% to negative 14% in a year. While the poll unsurprisingly splits on partisan lines — Democrats overwhelmingly oppose ICE, Republicans still think they’re Trump’s Hardy Boys — the independents who delivered the 2024 election to Trump oppose ICE’s actions by a healthy majority.
If he’s losing the middle, he’s losing America.
Unless, of course, Trump goes full banana republic dictator and decides his regime isn’t leaving office — no matter what. And honestly, would you be shocked if this administration tried to make its wet dream a reality?
Every movement needs martyrs, and if the deaths of Porter and Good prove to American citizens and permanent residents once and for all that they’re not safe from ICE, then their deaths weren’t in vain. That’s why the Trump administration and its lackeys are straining so hard to slime Good’s name — because they know the public isn’t having its lies.
Their smears don’t have the same effect they used to, thankfully. Just look at what happened recently with Grok, Elon Musk’s AI creation on X.
You have to take what it digitally blurts out with a grain of salt — Grok once started calling itself “MechaHitler” and spewed anti-semitic conspiracies after an update that Musk swore “improved [it] significantly.”
But consider what Grok did when the billionaire Trump enabler “tweeted” of Good: “She tried to run people over.”
When asked whether it “would have authorized lethal forced based solely on this video evidence” even Musk’s creation, even Grok, replied (while noting that “ICE claims differ”):
“Based on descriptions from multiple sources… it shows the vehicle moving slowly backward and forward without clear evidence of attempting to ram officers. Under objective standards like [the Supreme Court decision] Graham v. Connor, which require an imminent threat for deadly force, I would not authorize lethal force solely on this footage.”
I guess even Grok is capable of calling out Trumpworld’s BS when it “sees” what millions of other people across the U.S. have seen with their own eyes.
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While celebrating Maduro’s capture, Venezuelan immigrants worry about deportation
WASHINGTON — After President Trump ordered strikes that led to the capture of Venezuela’s president, Nicolás Maduro, celebrations erupted in Venezuelan communities across the U.S.
But for many of the hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan immigrants facing possible deportation, their relief and joy were cut by the fear about what comes next from an administration that has zeroed in on Venezuelans as a target.
“Many of us asked ourselves, ‘What’s going to happen with us now?’” said A.G., a 39-year-old in Tennessee who asked to be identified by her initials because she lacks legal status. Even so, Maduro’s ouster gave her a lot of hope for her mother country.
Venezuelans began fleeing in droves in 2014 as economic collapse led to widespread food and medicine shortages, as well as political repression. Nearly 8 million Venezuelans are now living outside the country — including 1.2 million in the U.S.
Venezuelans migrants walk toward Bucaramanga, Colombia, in 2019.
(Marcus Yam/Los Angeles Times)
A.G. and her now-18-year-old son arrived at the southern border in 2019. Since then, she said, they have built a good life — they own a transport company with delivery trucks, pay taxes and follow the law.
Maduro’s fall left her with mixed feelings.
“He’s obviously a dictator, many people have died because of him and he refused to give up power, but the reason that they entered Venezuela, for me what President Trump did was illegal,” she said. “Innocent people died because of the bombs. I’m asking God that it all be for good reason.”
Dozens of Venezuelans and others were killed in the U.S. invasion — more than 100, a government official said — including civilians.
The Trump administration is framing its Venezuela operation as an opportunity for Venezuelans like A.G. “Now, they can return to the country they love and rebuild its future,” said U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services spokesman Matthew Tragesser.
Katie Blankenship, a Miami-based attorney with Sanctuary of the South who has represented many Venezuelans facing deportation, sees a less promising future.
“We’re going to see increased targeting of Venezuelans to force them to leave the U.S. into a political and socioeconomic environment that’s likely only more destabilized and subject to more abuse,” she said.
The Venezuelan community in the U.S. swelled, in part, because the Biden administration expanded pathways for them to enter the country.
Volunteer help a Venezuelan immigrant at the storage units from a volunteer-run program that distributes donations to recently arrived Venezuelan immigrants in need, in Miami, Fla., in 2023.
(Eva Marie Uzcategui / Los Angeles Times)
One of those programs allowed more than 117,000 Venezuelans to purchase flights directly to the U.S. and stay for two years if they had a U.S.-based financial sponsor and passed a background check. Other Venezuelans entered legally at land ports of entry after scheduling interviews with border officers.
By the end of the Biden administration, more than 600,000 Venezuelans had protection from deportation under Temporary Protected Status, a program used by both Republican and Democratic administrations for immigrants who cannot return home because of armed conflict, natural disaster or other “extraordinary and temporary conditions.”
On the campaign trail, Trump repeatedly referred to Venezuelan immigrants as criminals, singling them out more than any other nationality — in 64% of speeches, an Axios analysis showed. He has said repeatedly, without evidence that Venezuela emptied its prisons and mental institutions to flood the U.S. with immigrants.
One of Trump’s first acts as president was to designate the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua as a foreign terrorist organization. Within two months, he invoked an 18th century wartime law, the Alien Enemies Act, to deport 252 Venezuelan men accused of being Tren de Aragua members to El Salvador, where they were imprisoned and tortured despite many having no criminal histories in the U.S. or Latin America.
Later, the Trump administration stripped away protections for Venezuelans with financial sponsors and TPS, with Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem calling the latter “contrary to the national interest.”
In a September Federal Register Notice, Noem said that TPS for Venezuelans undercut the administration’s foreign policy objectives because one result of allowing Venezuelans in the U.S. was “relieving pressure on Maduro’s regime to enact domestic reforms and facilitate safe return conditions.” In other words, if Venezuelans returned home, that would pressure the government to enact reforms.
Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, along with U.S. Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi, left, and Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry, right, participates in a news conference near Camp 57 at Angola prison, the Louisiana State Penitentiary and America’s largest maximum-security prison farm, to announce the opening of a new Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) facility that will house immigrants convicted of crimes in West Feliciana Parish, Louisiana, on Sept. 3, 2025.
(Matthew Hilton / AFP via Getty Images)
The administration has offered contrasting assessments of conditions in Venezuela. Noem wrote that although certain adverse conditions continue, “there are notable improvements in several areas such as the economy, public health, and crime.”
Throughout the year, though, the State Department continued to reissue an “extreme danger” travel advisory for Venezuela, urging Americans to leave the country immediately.
Conditions for Venezuelans in the U.S. grew more complicated after a man from Afghanistan was accused of shooting two National Guard members in November; in response, the administration froze the immigration cases of people from 39 countries, including Venezuela, that the administration considers “high-risk.” That means anyone who applied for asylum, a visa, a green card or any other benefit remains in limbo indefinitely.
After a panel of the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals struck down the Trump administration’s use of the Alien Enemies Act in September, the Justice Department appealed. In a support brief filed in December, the Justice Department cited escalating tensions with Venezuela.
David Smilde, a Tulane University sociologist and expert on Venezuelan politics, said that invading Venezuela could justify renewed use of the Alien Enemies Act.
The law says the president can invoke the Alien Enemies Act not only in times of “declared war,” but also when a foreign government threatens or carries out an “invasion” or “predatory incursion” against the U.S.
“Now it will be difficult, I think, for the court to say, ‘No, you can’t use this,’” Smilde said.
With U.S. officials promising improved conditions in Venezuela and encouraging citizens to return, Smilde said, they could invoke the Alien Enemies Act to quickly deport undocumented immigrants who don’t leave willingly.
“There’s several layers to this,” he said, “and none of it looks very good for Venezuelan immigrants.”
This couple from Venezuela shared their story of why they left their three children back in their home country and spoke of the the experiences of their travel to the United States at the Parkside Community Church in Sacramento on June 16, 2023.
(Jose Luis Villegas / For The Times)
Jose, a 28-year-old Venezuelan living east of Los Angeles, fled Venezuela in 2015 after being imprisoned and beaten for criticizing the government. He lived in Colombia and Peru before illegally crossing the U.S. border in 2022, and now has a pending asylum application. Jose asked to be identified by his middle name out of fear of retaliation by the U.S. government.
The news this week that an ICE agent had shot and killed a woman in Minnesota heightened his anxiety.
“You come here because supposedly this is a country with freedom of expression, and there is more safety, but with this government, now you’re afraid you’ll get killed,” he said. “And that was a U.S. citizen. Imagine what they could do to me?”
People visit a memorial for Renee Nicole Good on Jan. 7 in Minneapolis.
(Scott Olson / Getty Images)
Jose qualifies for a work permit based on his pending asylum, but his application for one is frozen because of the executive order following the National Guard shooting.
The news of Maduro’s arrest was bittersweet, Jose said, because his mother and grandmother didn’t live to witness that day. He said his mother died last year of kidney failure due to lack of medical care, leaving him as the primary breadwinner for his two young sisters who remain in Venezuela with their father, who is disabled.
Still, he said he’s happy with what Trump has done in Venezuela.
“People are saying he’s stealing our petroleum,” he said, “but for 25 years, Cuba, China and Iran have been stealing the petroleum and it didn’t improve our lives.”
Many Venezuelans were encouraged by news that Venezuela would release a “significant number” of political prisoners as a peace gesture.
For Jose, that’s not enough. Venezuela’s government ordered police to search for anyone involved in promoting or supporting the attack by U.S. forces, leading to detentions of journalists and civilians.
“Venezuela remains the same,” he said. “The same disgrace, the same poverty and the same government repression.”
A.G. said she was heartened to hear Noem say Sunday on Fox News that every Venezeulan who had TPS “has the opportunity to apply for refugee status and that evaluation will go forward.” But the administration quickly backtracked and said that was not the case.
Instead, Noem and other administration officials have doubled down on the notion that Venezuelans without permanent lawful status should leave. Noem told Fox News that there are no plans to pause deportation flights despite the political uncertainty in Venezuela.
Tragesser, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services spokesman, said the agency’s posture hasn’t changed.
“USCIS encourages all Venezuelans unlawfully in the U.S. to use the CBP Home app for help with a safe and orderly return to their country,” he said.
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Immigrant who survived Altadena’s Eaton fire now faces deportation
There were no stars in the October sky. No moon that 64-year-old Masuma Khan could see from the narrow window of the California City Immigration Processing Center.
“No planes,” she said, recalling her confinement.
Once a prison, the facility in the Mojave Desert, located 67 miles east of Bakersfield, reopened in April to hold people in removal proceedings, including Khan.
It was not the kind of place where she imagined ending up — not after living in the country for 28 years, caring for her daughter and surviving one of California’s deadliest wildfires, the Eaton fire.
Khan was fortunate not to have lost her west Altadena home to the Jan. 7 fire, which destroyed more than 9,000 structures and killed 19 people.
But in the months that followed, Khan faced another threat — deportation.
As fire recovery efforts were underway in Los Angeles, the Trump administration launched immigration raids in the city, hampering recovery efforts and creating more distress for immigrants after the fires.
Although Trump said the mass deportations would target criminals, news reports and court filings show the roundups ensnared immigrants with no criminal history, green card applicants, even American citizens.
Khan worried. She was in the process of adjusting her immigration status and was required to check in every year with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
An immigration attorney reassured her that there was no cause for concern: Her husband and daughter were citizens, she had no criminal record, and her case was still under review.
And so, on Oct. 6, Khan drove to downtown Los Angeles for her routine immigration check-in and found herself caught up in Trump’s deportation surge.
Eaton fire survivor Masuma Khan, 64, right, with her daughter Riya Khan and husband Isteak Khan after bring released in December.
(Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times)
Khan was taken into custody by ICE agents and kept in a cold room for almost an entire day. She said agents denied her access to a lawyer and a phone until she signed deportation papers. Khan resisted but later signed.
She was placed in a van with other detainees and driven three hours north to the detention center in California City. She said there was no air conditioning in the van and she became nauseous and started to experience hypertension symptoms.
At the facility she was denied access to medications for high blood pressure, asthma, peripheral arterial disease, general anxiety and hypothyroidism, she said.
Khan, who is also prediabetic, said she struggled to maintain her health at the facility. Her blood pressure spiked and she began to experience stroke-like symptoms. Her legs swelled up and she became weak.
She said the facility was so cold that people often became ill, including staff. She and other women used socks as scarves, sleeves and mittens but were threatened with fines if they continued to misuse the garments.
She said she became sick and her vision got blurry without her prescribed eye drops. Her Halal meals shifted to a medical diet that included pork, which she cannot eat because she is Muslim.
Khan’s experience at the facility was similar to that of other detainees who filed a federal class-action lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security and ICE. They alleged inhumane conditions at the facility that included inadequate food, water and medical care, frigid cells and lack of access to medications and lawyers.
The California City Immigration Processing Center in Kern County, where Masuma Khan was held.
(Patrick T. Fallon/AFP/Getty Images)
In an email response, Tricia McLaughlin, a DHS spokesperson, said any claims about “subprime conditions at ICE detention facilities are false.”
“All detainees are provided with proper meals, certified by dietitians, medical treatment and have the opportunities to communicate with lawyers and family members.”
Khan said she spent most days in her cell crying.
“I missed my family, I missed everything,” she said “I was frustrated.”
She often thought of home: her husband and daughter, her small garden and the birds she fed daily with seeds and oranges from her balcony.
It would be weeks before she could see her family again, before she could gaze at the mountains and hear the symphony of wildlife.
‘Like an inferno’
The Eaton fire had been raging for hours in west Altadena when Khan and her husband were awakened by evacuation alerts on their phones at 3:30 a.m.
Khan got out of bed and from her bedroom window could see flames raging in the mountains.
Khan hadn’t seen anything like it. Four years before she arrived, the Kinneloa fire, sparked by a campfire, erupted in the same mountains. It fed on dry and flammable vegetation and was driven by Santa Ana winds. It was a destructive fire.
But the Eaton fire was different. Hurricane-force winds helped spread the embers and flames deep into the town’s heart — destroying homes, schools and countless structures.
A business and vehicle are a total loss as the Eaton fire rages along Lake Avenue in Altadena on January 8, 2025.
(Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times)
Khan and her husband, Isteak, didn’t have time to grab much before fleeing in their car that evening.
“It was like an inferno,” Isteak Khan, 66, recalled. “You could see the embers flying everywhere. It was very chaotic.”
The couple drove about three miles south to a supermarket in Pasadena. For a month they lived at a hotel until they were allowed to return home.
When they got back the surrounding neighborhoods were in ruins: Trees were charred, cars were stripped down to metal frames and homes were gutted or left in ash.
The couple’s apartment still was standing but had suffered smoke damage and there was no electricity, no safe water to use. The couple depended on water bottles and showered at the homes of relatives.
Khan never thought she would experience such a disaster in the U.S. Then again, she didn’t journey here for her own reasons. She came to save her daughter.
‘Incredibly traumatized’
In August 1997, Khan was living in Bangladesh with her husband and their 9-year-old daughter, Riya. That month Riya had traveled with her grandparents to the U.S. to see relatives when she fell seriously ill. Doctors determined she was suffering from kidney failure and needed ongoing treatment including chemotherapy and peritoneal dialysis.
Khan traveled to the U.S. on a visitor’s visa to be with Riya. For more than a decade her daughter received treatment at the Children’s Hospital in Los Angeles.
Khan became her daughter’s primary caretaker and did not return to Bangladesh as her visa was expiring. Her husband joined her in 1999 after obtaining a visa. He and Riya eventually received green cards and became citizens.
The following year, as Khan looked for legal ways to adjust her immigration status, she met a man at a Bangladeshi grocery store who befriended her and offered to help her obtain a green card, according to court records. Little did Khan know that this man — who spoke her language and was well known in the Bangladeshi community — was a scammer, one of many who prey on South Asians migrating to the U.S.
At the time Khan did not speak, read or write English well, and this man told her he could file an asylum application on her behalf, for a fee amounting to several thousand dollars.
But Khan was unaware this man had filed the application for her using a false name and listed his own address for future correspondence from immigration authorities, according to court documents.
All this came to light when she showed up for an asylum hearing in Anaheim in 1999 and responded to the questions of an asylum officer who noticed the information did not match what was in the application.
The officer denied the application, and later she was unaware of a notice to appear before an immigration court, since it had been sent to the scammer’s address.
Her absence at the hearing prompted an immigration judge to order her to be deported. Khan did not find out about the court’s action until 2015, when her husband petitioned to adjust her status so she could obtain a green card.
After the petition was denied and her case was closed because of the deportation order, Khan hired an immigration attorney who sought to reopen the case. But a judge denied it, and her appeal also was rejected by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.
In February 2020, Khan was detained by ICE but released and required to check in with immigration officials. That year she hired an immigration attorney who submitted paperwork to let her stay in the U.S. The application was pending when ICE took her into custody on Oct. 6.
McLaughlin, the DHS spokesperson, said there was no reason for the government to reconsider her case, since Khan had a final removal order since 1999 and had exhausted all appeals.
“She has no legal right to be in our country,” McLaughlin said. “DHS law enforcement lawfully arrested her on Oct. 6.”
Yet Khan caught a break in early November when a federal judge ordered her released. The judge ruled the government cannot detain Khan without giving her a hearing and explaining why it needs to detain her.
It was a victory for her legal team, made up of a law firm and two nonprofit groups — the South Asian Network and Public Counsel and Hoq Law APC.
Laboni Hoq, a chief attorney on the case, said the goal is to keep Khan out of detention while the team seeks to adjust her status.
“We’re feeling like she has a shot to pursue that process … given her long history in the country and that she is law-abiding and has met all the requirements to deal with her case through the court system and immigration system,” Hoq said.
Khan’s predicament has drawn the attention of numerous Southern California politicians, including U.S. Rep. Judy Chu and U.S. Sen. Adam Schiff. Much of it had to do with Khan’s 38-year-old daughter, Riya, who reached out to the lawmakers and also took to social media to bring her mother’s case to the public’s attention.
Still, it is unclear what will happen next.
As Khan’s legal fight proceeds, she must check in regularly with immigration authorities, as she did in downtown L.A. on Dec. 19, accompanied by Sen. Sasha Renée Pérez (D-Alhambra), who also became aware of her case from Riya’s efforts.
“She’s incredibly traumatized by what’s happened to her,” Pérez said of Khan. “She’s scared to even participate in the community events that we have during the holidays … it’s painful, it makes me angry, it makes me sad and I just wanted to be here with her.”
At their Altadena home one recent evening, the Khans sat in their living room. Riya said the hope was that the case will be reopened so her mother can obtain a green card.
“We’re going to stay together,” Isteak said.
Not far from Masuma, old “welcome home” balloons hovered. As she sat next to her daughter, she could express only two things: “I cannot leave this country. This is my home.”
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Justice Dept. pushed to prosecute Kilmar Abrego Garcia only after mistaken deportation, judge’s order says
NASHVILLE, Tenn. — A newly unsealed order in the criminal case against Kilmar Abrego Garcia reveals that high-level Justice Department officials pushed for his indictment, calling it a “top priority,” only after he was mistakenly deported and then ordered returned to the U.S.
Abrego Garcia has pleaded not guilty in federal court in Tennessee to charges of human smuggling. He is seeking to have the case dismissed on the grounds that the prosecution is vindictive — a way for President Trump’s administration to punish him for the embarrassment of his mistaken deportation.
To support that argument, he has asked the government to turn over documents that reveal how the decision was made to prosecute him in 2025 for an incident that occurred in 2022. On Dec. 3, U.S. District Judge Waverly Crenshaw filed an order under seal that compelled the government to provide some documents to Abrego Garcia and his attorneys. That order was unsealed on Tuesday and sheds new light on the case.
Earlier, Crenshaw found that there was “some evidence” that the prosecution of Abrego Garcia could be vindictive. He specifically cited a statement by Deputy Atty. Gen. Todd Blanche on a Fox News program that seemed to suggest that the Department of Justice charged Abrego Garcia because he had won his wrongful deportation case.
Rob McGuire, who was the acting U.S. Atty. for the Middle District of Tennessee until late December, argued that those statements were irrelevant because he alone made the decision to prosecute, and he has no animus against Abrego Garcia.
In the newly unsealed order, Crenshaw writes, “Some of the documents suggest not only that McGuire was not a solitary decision-maker, but he in fact reported to others in DOJ and the decision to prosecute Abrego may have been a joint decision.”
The U.S. attorney’s office for the Middle District of Tennessee released a statement saying, “The emails cited in Judge Crenshaw’s order, specifically Mr. McGuire’s email on May 15, 2025, confirm that the ultimate decision on whether to prosecute was made by career prosecutors based on the facts, evidence, and established DOJ practice. Communications with the Deputy Attorney General’s Office about a high-profile case are both required and routine.”
The email referenced was from McGuire to his staff stating that Blanche “would like Garcia charged sooner rather than later,” according to Crenshaw’s order.
The human smuggling charges stem from a 2022 traffic stop in Tennessee in which Abrego Garcia was pulled over for speeding. There were nine passengers in the car, and state troopers discussed the possibility of human smuggling among themselves. However, he was ultimately allowed to leave with only a warning. The case was turned over to Homeland Security Investigations, but there is no record of any effort to charge him until April 2025, according to court records.
The order does not give a lot of detail on what is in the documents that were turned over to Abrego Garcia, but it shows that Aakash Singh, who works under Blanche in the Office of the Deputy Attorney General, contacted McGuire about Abrego Garcia’s case on April 27, the same day that McGuire received a file on the case from Homeland Security Investigations. That was several days after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Abrego Garcia’s favor on April 10.
On April 30, Singh said in an email to McGuire that the prosecution was a “top priority” for the Deputy Attorney General’s Office, according to the order. Singh and McGuire continued to communicate about the prosecution. On May 18, Singh wrote to McGuire and others to hold the draft indictment until they got “clearance” to file it. “The implication is that ‘clearance’ would come from the Office of the Deputy Attorney General,” Crenshaw writes.
A hearing on the motion to dismiss the case on the basis of vindictive prosecution is scheduled for Jan. 28.
Loller writes for the Associated Press.
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Judge blocks Trump effort to strip South Sudan deportation protections | Donald Trump News
Trump is seeking to end protected status for South Sudan, claiming country no longer poses danger to those returning.
Published On 30 Dec 202530 Dec 2025
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A federal judge has blocked the administration of President Donald Trump from stripping temporary protections from deportations for South Sudanese citizens living in the United States.
US District Judge Angel Kelley in Boston, Massachusetts, granted an emergency request on Tuesday in a lawsuit filed by several South Sudanese nationals and an immigrant rights group.
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The order prevents the temporary protected status (TPS) for South Sudanese citizens from expiring on January 5 as the Trump administration has sought.
The lawsuit, led by the African Communities Together, accuses the US Department of Homeland Security of acting unlawfully in its effort to strip South Sudanese citizens of TPS, a US immigration status granted to citizens of countries experiencing natural disasters, conflict or other extraordinary circumstances that could make return to their homelands dangerous.
The status was initially granted for South Sudan in 2011 when the country officially broke away from Sudan. It has been repeatedly renewed amid repeated bouts of fighting, widespread displacement and regional instability.
The status allows eligible individuals to work and receive temporary protection from deportation.
The lawsuit further alleged that the Trump administration exposed South Sudan citizens to being deported to a country facing what is widely considered one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, in a notice published on November 5, had argued the country no longer met the conditions for TPS.
“With the renewed peace in South Sudan, their demonstrated commitment to ensuring the safe reintegration of returning nationals, and improved diplomatic relations, now is the right time to conclude what was always intended to be a temporary designation,” she said, appearing to refer to a tenuous 2018 peace agreement.
The statement contradicted the findings of a panel of United Nations experts, who wrote in a report to the UN Security Council in November that “while the contours of the conflict may be altered, the resulting human suffering has remained unchanged.”
“Ongoing conflict and aerial bombardments, coupled with flooding and the influx of returnees and refugees from the Sudan, have led to near-record levels of food insecurity, with pockets of famine reported in some of the communities most affected by renewed fighting,” it added.
The Trump administration has increasingly targeted TPS as part of its crackdown on immigration and its mass deportation drive.
It has moved to similarly end TPS for foreign nationals from countries including Syria, Venezuela, Haiti, Cuba and Nicaragua, prompting several court challenges.
It has also sought to deport individuals to countries in Africa, even if they have no ties there.
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Judge blocks deportation of British man Trump accused of ‘censorship’
Dec. 26 (UPI) — A federal judge has blocked the deportation of a British man targeted by President Donald Trump.
Imran Ahmed, founder and CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, was one of five people placed on a visa ban after the government accused him of censorship.
Ahmed filed suit against Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Attorney General Pam Bondi to prevent “the imminent prospect of unconstitutional arrest.”
The suit said the case comes from “the federal government’s latest attempt to abuse the immigration system to punish and punitively detain noncitizens for protected speech and silence viewpoints with which it disagrees.”
Ahmed is a legal permanent resident of the United States, where he lives with his American wife and child. He praised the judge’s decision.
“I will not be bullied away from my life’s work of fighting to keep children safe from social media’s harm and stopping antisemitism online,” Ahmed said.
The speed of the judge’s decision was telling, said his lawyer Roberta Kaplan.
“The federal government can’t deport a green card holder like Imran Ahmed, with a wife and young child who are American, simply because it doesn’t like what he has to say,” the BBC reported she said.
Rubio said in a statement Tuesday that the five had “led organized efforts to coerce American platforms to censor, demonetize and suppress” the views of Americans with whom they disagreed.
“These radical activists and weaponized NGOs have advanced censorship crackdowns by foreign states — in each case targeting American speakers and American companies,” Rubio said. He described the five as “agents of the global censorship-industrial complex.”
The others included in the ban are former European Union technology commissioner Thierry Breton; Anna-Lena von Hodenberg and Josephine Ballon of Berlin-based non-profit HateAid; Clare Melford, co-founder of Global Disinformation Index.
Ahmed told The Guardian that it was another attempt to deflect accountability and transparency.
“This has never been about politics,” he said. “What it has been about is companies that simply do not want to be held accountable and, because of the influence of big money in Washington, are corrupting the system and trying to bend it to their will, and their will is to be unable to be held accountable. There is no other industry that acts with such arrogance, indifference and a lack of humility and sociopathic greed at the expense of people.”
Ahmed said he had not formally received any notification from the government.
“I’m very confident that our first amendment rights will be upheld by the court,” he told The Guardian.
He is expected to be in court Monday, when the protective order will be confirmed.
In 2023, Elon Musk‘s company X sued the CCDH after it reported on a rise in hate speech on the platform since Musk’s takeover. The case was dismissed but X appealed the decision.
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Judge halts FEMA rule tying disaster funds to deportation data
Dec. 23 (UPI) — A judge in Oregon ruled Tuesday that the Trump administration cannot require states to account for how deportations have affected their populations in order to receive emergency or disaster preparedness funds.
U.S. Magistrate Judge Amy Potter’s ruling came in response to a lawsuit from 11 states challenging new requirements from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which they argued created undue burdens on access to hundreds of millions of dollars that could be used to prepare for floods, storms, acts of terrorism and other potential catastrophes.
The ruling is a setback for President Donald Trump as he has sought to remake the federal agency that is central to responding to disasters after earlier calling for it to be dissolved.
The ruling concerned a new FEMA policy that shortened the duration of grants to states from three years to one. The agency argued that the shorter period would allow it to better gauge the effectiveness of how states were using the money.
FEMA also required states to provide updated figures on their populations to reflect the Trump administration’s aggressive deportation efforts. Population counts have traditionally been the responsibility of the U.S. Census Bureau.
A group of 11 states – including Michigan, Oregon, Arizona, Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Maryland, Nevada, New Mexico, Wisconsin and Kentucky – sued in response to the new requirements.
They argued that the requirements violated the Administrative Procedures Act and imperiled funding used for outreach programs in Hawaii, the deployment of emergency management personnel in North Carolina during tropical storms and staff to respond to flash floods in Maryland.
“This abrupt change in policy is particularly harmful to local emergency management,” wrote Potter.
In Oregon, affected funds were used to help cover the expenses of local emergency managers across the state, she wrote.
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Faced with Trump’s deportation push, US teachers fear leaving the classroom | Donald Trump News
Washington, DC – For the past two years, weekdays for Susanna have meant thumbing through picture books, organising cubby holes and leading classroom choruses of songs.
But her work as a pre-school teacher came to a screeching halt in October, when she found out her application to renew her work permit had been denied.
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Susanna, who uses a pseudonym in this article for fear of reprisals, is one of the nearly 10 percent of teachers in the United States who are immigrants.
But while the US has increasingly looked abroad to fill teacher shortages, some foreign-born teachers say the deportation push under President Donald Trump has threatened their livelihoods — and risks traumatising their students.
Susanna, an asylum applicant who fled violence in Guatemala nearly a decade ago, said that losing her permit meant she had to stop working immediately.
She recalls breaking the news to her students, some of whom are only three years old. Many were too young to understand.
“In one week, I lost everything,” Susanna told Al Jazeera in Spanish. “When I told the kids goodbye, they asked me why, and I told them, ‘I can only tell you goodbye.’ There were kids that hugged me, and it hurt my heart a lot.”
Looking abroad for teachers
Estimates vary as to how many foreign-born teachers currently work in the US. But one 2019 report from George Mason University found that there were 857,200 immigrants among the country’s 8.1 million teachers, in roles ranging from pre-school to university.
For the 2023-2024 school year alone, the US government brought 6,716 full-time teachers to the country on temporary exchange visas to fill openings in pre-kindergarten, primary and secondary school education.
Many hailed from the Philippines, as well as countries like Jamaica, Spain and Colombia.
The uncertainty for immigrants under Trump’s second term, however, has proven disruptive to schools that rely heavily on foreign-born teachers.
That is the case for the pre-school where Susanna worked, CommuniKids, which offers language immersion programmes in Washington, DC.
Cofounder and president Raul Echevarría estimates that immigrants — both citizens and non-citizens working with legal authorisation — comprise about 90 percent of CommuniKids’s staff.
But Echevarría told Al Jazeera that the push to rescind legal pathways to immigration has jeopardised the employment of several faculty members.
Five other teachers at the school have seen their ability to work affected by changes to the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) programme.
All five, Echevarría explained, were originally from Venezuela. But in October, the Trump administration ended TPS status for more than 350,000 Venezuelan citizens, including the teachers at CommuniKids.
Their authorisation to work legally in the US will expire on October 2, 2026, according to the US Citizenship and Immigration Services website.
“These teachers lost their ability to make a living,” Echevarria said, noting that his school requires educators with expertise in languages like Spanish, French and Mandarin.
‘Strong bonds’
For the schools themselves, the losses can be devastating. Every state in the US has reported teacher shortages to the federal government.
But advocates say the high stress and low pay of education make teachers difficult to recruit and keep.
That leads some states to look abroad for education workers. In North Carolina, for example, 1,063 foreign nationals worked full-time as grade-school teachers on temporary J-1 visas during the 2023-2024 school year.
The top destinations for such recruits were all southern states: North Carolina was followed by Florida with 996 teachers on J-1 visas, and Texas with 761.
But Echevarria said some of the biggest impacts of the deportation drive are felt by the students themselves.
“Our students develop strong bonds with their teachers, and all of a sudden, overnight, they lost their teachers,” said Echevarría.
“Their number one superpower”, he added, “is their ability to empathise and to create strong, effective bonds with people from any background”.
But when those bonds are broken, there can be mental health consequences and setbacks for educational achievement, particularly among younger children.
A 2024 study published by the American Educational Research Association found that, when teachers leave midyear, children’s language development takes a measurable hit.
In other words, the loss of a familiar teacher — someone who knows their routines, strengths and fears — can quietly stall a child’s progress. The consequences extend to a child’s sense of self and stability.
Mental health consequences
For parents like Michelle Howell, whose child attends CommuniKids, the loss of teachers has also made the classroom environment feel fragile.
“The teachers there aren’t just teachers for these young kids,” Howell said of CommuniKids. “They’re like extended family.
“They hug them, they hold them, they do the things a parent would do. When those people disappear, it’s not just hard for the kids. It’s hard for everyone.”
Howell, who is Chinese American, said the sudden disappearances reminded her of her own family’s history.
“I used to read about things like this happening in China, the place my family left to find safety,” she said. “It’s very disturbing to know that what we ran from back then is our reality now. People disappear.”
School psychologist Maria C, who asked to remain anonymous to protect her work in the Texas public school system, has noticed the children she works with struggling with instability caused by the deportation push.
The disappearance of a loved one or mentor — say, a favourite teacher — could flood a child’s body with cortisol, the hormone meant to protect them in moments of danger, she explained.
But when that stress becomes chronic, the same hormone starts to hurt more than it helps. It interferes with memory, attention and emotional regulation.
“For some, it looks like anxiety. For others, it’s depression or sudden outbursts,” Maria said. “They’re in fight-or-flight mode all day.”
She added that selective mutism, an anxiety disorder, is on the rise among the children she sees, who range in age from five to 12.
“It used to be rare, maybe one case per school,” she said. “Now I see it constantly. It’s a quiet symptom of fear.”
Preparing for the worst
Back at CommuniKids, Echevarría explained that he and other staff members have put together contingency plans, just in case immigration enforcement arrives at the pre-school.
The aim, he said, is to make both employees and students feel safer coming to class.
“We put those steps in writing because we wanted our staff to know they’re not alone,” he said. “We have attorneys on call. We’re partners with local police. But above all, our job is to protect our children.”
But as an added precaution, teachers are advised to carry their passports or work permits with them.
Even Echevarría, a US citizen born in Virginia, said he carries his passport wherever he goes. The fear of deportation has a way of lingering.
“I’m bilingual and of Hispanic descent,” he said. “Given how things are, I want to be able to prove I’m a citizen if anyone ever questions it.”
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