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WASHINGTON — Federal immigration authorities are attempting to quickly deport an Arizona woman who has lived in the U.S. for nearly 30 years, in what her lawyers are calling the first test of a federal law holding that longtime immigrants cannot be removed until they’ve had a chance to plead their case before a judge.

Lawyers for Mirta Amarilis Co Tupul filed a lawsuit Saturday night in U.S. district court in Arizona and are seeking an emergency stop to Co Tupul’s imminent deportation to Guatemala while the case plays out in court.

“Only this administration would go this far,” said Co Tupul’s lead attorney, Chris Godshall-Bennet, “because at the core of it is an underlying complete disrespect for the rule of law.”

Godshall-Bennet said the government’s move against Co Tupul is just the latest of many illegal actions being attempted by the Trump administration in its effort to remove as many immigrants as possible. If Co Tupul’s deportation is allowed to proceed, her defenders said, it could have wide implications for millions of other immigrants who have lived in the U.S. for many years and are at risk of deportation.

The lawsuit was filed against Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, U.S. Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi, Acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director Todd Lyons and Phoenix ICE Field Office Director John Cantu. The Department of Homeland Security didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

Federal law since 1996 allows the government to place immigrants in expedited removal proceedings if they have lived in the U.S. for under two years. The Trump administration appears to be using that law beyond its limits.

“They are going to start going around, grabbing people who have been here for decades and throwing them out without immigration court hearings,” said Eric Lee, another of Co Tupul’s attorneys.

Co Tupul’s lawyers don’t deny that she lacks legal status. At issue, they say, is how much due process she should receive.

Co Tupul, 38, entered the U.S. around 1996. She is a single mother of three U.S. citizens, ages 8, 16 and 18, and lives in Phoenix.

She was driving to work at a laundromat on July 22 when an officer wearing a green uniform — believed to be a U.S. Customs and Border Protection agent — pulled her over and quickly asked about her immigration status. When Co Tupul declined to answer, the agent held her while he called ICE, who transported her to the Eloy Detention Center about 65 miles southeast of Phoenix.

Three days later, her attorney Mindy Butler-Christensen called Co Tupul’s deportation officer, who explained that her client had been placed in expedited removal proceedings and would be removed within one to three weeks.

“I asked the Deportation Officer to share with me why she would be placed in Expedited Removal,” Butler-Christensen wrote in a sworn declaration. “He told me that this was a ‘new policy’ that ICE would be implementing with immigrants who have just had ‘their first contact with ICE.’”

He refused to provide documentation of the policy, she said.

Under regular deportation proceedings, immigrants are entitled to plead their case before an immigration judge, with rights to appeal. Because of significant court backlogs, that process can be drawn out for years.

Under expedited removal, the immigration court process is bypassed and immigrants cannot appeal, though they are entitled to an asylum screening.

Initially, the faster process was only applied to immigrants who arrived at ports of entry, such as airports. By the mid-2000s, it had expanded to those who entered illegally by sea or land and were caught by border agents within two weeks of arrival.

Use of expedited removal was expanded again in June 2020, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, to those present in the U.S. for under two years.

In January, the Trump administration announced that the government would now seek expedited deportation for those arrested not just within 100 miles of the border, but to those arrested anywhere in the U.S. The policy still applied only to those in the U.S. for under two years.

In the Federal Register notice announcing the change, then-acting Homeland Security Secretary Benjamine Huffman wrote that it “restores the scope of expedited removal to the fullest extent authorized by Congress.”

“First they expanded the geographical area, and now they seem to be challenging the two years,” said Godshall-Bennet.

Co Tupul’s brother assembled a large collection of documents, including 16 signed affidavits of close friends and family and vaccine records dating back to July 1996, proving that she has lived in the U.S. for decades, that she has no criminal history and that she is an upstanding member of her community.

According to emails reviewed by The Times, Butler-Christensen sent the evidence to Eloy Detention Center staff and to Cantu, the ICE regional field office director, saying that Co Tupul should be placed in regular deportation proceedings immediately.

The response came July 29 in an email from a deportation officer who said “the case was reviewed and she will remain in Expedited Removal proceedings.”

On a call the next day, a supervisory detention and deportation officer asked Butler-Christensen why she was so insistent that Co Tupul be placed in regular proceedings, telling her, “What is the difference?” according to her declaration.

“He told me that during the arrest, she refused to disclose to the officers how long she had lived here,” Butler-Christensen wrote.

She added: “I responded that according to the law, she doesn’t have to share that information, and that I, as her lawyer, had supplied plenty of evidence to [ICE] regarding how long she had resided in Arizona.”

The officer didn’t budge.

Another ICE official confirmed what that officer had suggested — that Co Tupul was being placed in expedited removal proceedings because she had declined to share her immigration status with the officer who arrested her.

“Upon the administrative arrest of your client, she invoked her right to not make a statement,” the official wrote in an email to Butler-Christensen. “Based on this, officers processed her as an Expedited Removal.”

Co Tupul’s eldest son, Ricardo Ruiz, said his mother had prepared him for the possibility of her being detained. She frequently watched the news and was afraid the reported ICE raids would eventually reach her doorstep.

In short calls from the detention center, Ruiz said she told him to look out for his brothers and to stay focused on his own school work as a freshman in college.

Ruiz works at Walmart and split the bills with his mother. Without her help, he said he’s quickly feeling the pressure to keep their family afloat. Ruiz described Co Tupul as a dedicated and hardworking woman who raised her kids to be good citizens who respect the law.

He said it’s unfair that immigration officials aren’t respecting the law themselves.

“I just don’t think she deserves this,” he said. “No one does.”

On Monday, Co Tupul’s youngest sons started their first day of the new school year. For the first time, it was Ruiz dropping them off instead of their mother.

Martin Frizell, the husband of former TV presenter Fiona Phillips, has been sharing heartbreaking updates about her battle with Alzheimer’s

The husband of Fiona Phillips has revealed that the former TV presenter has not cooked in years and has no time for her dressing room of designer clothes as she battles Alzheimer’s.

Martin Frizell said all his wife’s favourite hobbies and interests are now gone – she has not cooked in two years and wears the same T-shirt and trousers every day.

He asked The Telegraph: “What do I do with all these clothes?” And of her previously beloved cookery books, which now lay piled in the basement: “Do I take them to the dump?… She’s never going to open one again.”

But he’s determined not to let her favourite interests – of looking glamorous and eating delicious food – to completely disappear and he regularly helps her to get her hair coloured and nails done.

And he said the best thing his friends could do is to cook for them, leaving something on the doorstep, reports MailOnline.

The ex-GMTV host, 64, was diagnosed with the brain disorder in 2022, aged just 61. It came after she left the former ITV breakfast show in 2008 to care for her father, who suffered from it too, and died in 2012. Her mother also passed away from the disease in 2006.

Martin, 66, left his job as Editor of ITV’s This Morning after 10 years in February to care for Fiona. She has now written a memoir, Remember When: My Life With Alzheimer’s, with the help of her husband and journalist friend Alison Phillips, about her diagnosis.

Ahead of its release on July 17, Martin has now spoken out about some of the most heartbreaking impacts of the disease, which is the most common cause of dementia. There is currently no cure but there are medicines which can somewhat alleviate symptoms.

Martin, who married Fiona in 1997 and shares two children, Nathaniel, 26, and Mackenzie, 23, with her, started by contributing a few paragraphs to his wife’s memoir but ended up generating more than 24,000 words.

He recalled when she was diagnosed and given a leaflet on living with the disease that had a old couple with a Zimmer frame on it. It completely jarred with how young she was, having only just turned 61, Martin said: “She was wearing skinny jeans and high-heeled boots. This was a degenerative disease for old people like the ones on the leaflet,” he said.

The couple first put her symptoms – brain fog, social withdrawal, mood swings, depression and anxiety – down to the menopause.

His wife has always been active – so Martin wondered if her diagnosis could have been caused by stress.

At one point, during her turn on GMTV from 1993 to 2008, she was starting work at 3am, taking part in Strictly Come Dancing, bringing up her young sons, and caring for her parents, who lived far away in Wales.

But he also thought it could be their lifestyle in their younger years – which saw them regularly drink a bottle of wine each every night.

Martin, who has also edited GMTV and Loose Women, now cares for her full-time at their home in London. He revealed she has declined considerably over the last 12 months, needing help with basic tasks like brushing her teeth, developing more confusion, pain, delirium and psychosis and mostly staying inside

Martin appeared on This Morning on Friday, July 11 to tell hosts Alison Hammond, 50, and Dermot O’Leary, 52, about his wife’s progress.

He shared how challenging family life has been since Fiona’s diagnosis three years ago.

He said: “In the book, there’s a picture of her at the end of our road, the most recent picture I took, only a few weeks ago.

“And she’s looking great and she’s smiling and she’s got her coat on. And what you don’t know is she thought I’d kidnapped her. This was us going out.

“Because you get delusions because you get so worked up. She keeps saying, ‘I want to go home’.”

Asked by Alison if she still recognises him, he said: “She does recognise me most of the times. Doesn’t quite know that I’m her husband but she knows who I am.”

This Morning is on ITV1 weekdays at 10am and ITVX

Last Thursday, just days after he had ordered strikes upon Iran, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu stood outside Beersheba’s Soroka Hospital and spoke of his outrage that the building had been hit in an Iranian counterstrike.

“They’re targeting civilians because they’re a criminal regime. They’re the arch-terrorists of the world,” he said of the Iranian government.

Similar accusations were levelled by other Israeli leaders, including the president, Isaac Herzog, and opposition leader Yair Lapid, during the conflict with Iran, which ended with a ceasefire brokered by United States President Donald Trump on Monday.

However, what was missing from these leaders was an acknowledgement that Israel itself has attacked almost every hospital in Gaza, where more than 56,000 people have been killed, or that the Strip’s healthcare system has been pushed to near total collapse.

It was an omission noticeable in much of the Israeli press reporting on the Beersheba hospital attack, with few mentions of the parallels between it and Israel’s own attacks on hospitals in Gaza. Instead, much of the Israeli media has supported these attacks, either seeking to downplay them, or justifying them by regularly claiming that Hamas command centres lie under the hospitals, an accusation Israel has never been able to prove.

Weaponising suffering

According to analysts who spoke to Al Jazeera, a media ecosystem exists in Israel that, with a few exceptions, both amplifies its leaders’ calls for war while simultaneously reinforcing their claims of victimhood, all while shielding the Israeli public from seeing the suffering Israeli forces are inflicting on Gaza and the occupied West Bank.

One Israeli journalist, Haaretz’s media correspondent Ido David Cohen, wrote this month that “reporters and editors at Israel’s major news outlets have admitted more than once, especially in private conversations, that their employers haven’t allowed them to present the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and the suffering of the population there”.

“The Israeli media … sees its job as not to educate, it’s to shape and mould a public that is ready to support war and aggression,” journalist Orly Noy told Al Jazeera from West Jerusalem. “It genuinely sees itself as having a special role in this.”

“I’ve seen [interviews with] people who lived near areas where Iranian missiles had hit,” Noy added. “They were given a lot of space to talk and explain the impact, but as soon as they started to criticise the war, they were shut down, quite rudely.”

Last September, a complaint brought by three Israeli civil society organisations against Channel 14, one of Israel’s most watched television networks, cited 265 quotes from hosts they claimed encouraged war crimes and crimes against humanity, including genocide. Among them, concerning Gaza, were the phrases “it really needs to be total annihilation” and “there are no innocents.”

A few months earlier, in April, the channel was again criticised within the Israeli media, this time for a live counter labelled “the terrorists we eliminated”, which made no distinction between civilians and fighters killed, the media monitoring magazine 7th Eye pointed out.

Analysts and observers described how Israel’s media and politicians have weaponised the horrors of the past suffering of the Jewish people and have moulded it into a narrative of victimhood that can be aimed at any geopolitical opponent that circumstances allow – with Iran looming large among them.

“It isn’t just this war,” Noy, an editor with the Hebrew-language Local Call website, said. “The Israeli media is in the business of justifying every war, of telling people that this war is essential for their very existence. It’s an ecosystem. Whatever the authority is, it is absolutely right. There is no margin for doubt, with no room for criticism from the inside. To see it, you have to be on the outside.”

“The world has allowed Israel to act as some kind of crazy bully to do whatever it wants, whenever it wants,” Noy added. “They can send their troops into Syria and Lebanon, never mind Gaza, with impunity. Israel is fine. Israel is bulletproof. And why wouldn’t they think that? The world allows it, then people are shocked when Iran strikes back.”

The Israeli media largely serves as a tool to manufacture consent for Israel’s actions against the Palestinians and in neighbouring countries, while shielding the Israeli public from the suffering its victims endure.

Exceptions do exist. Israeli titles such as Noy’s Local Call and +972 Magazine often feature coverage highly critical of Israel’s war on Gaza, and have conducted in-depth investigations into Israel’s actions, uncovering scandals that are only reported on months later by the international media. Joint reporting from Local Call and +972 Magazine has revealed that the Israeli military was using an AI system to generate bombing target lists based on predicted civilian casualties. Another report found that the Israeli military had falsely declared entire Gaza neighbourhoods as evacuated, which then led to the bombing of civilian homes in areas that were still inhabited.

A more famous example is the liberal daily Haaretz, which regularly criticises Israel’s actions in Gaza. Haaretz has faced a government boycott over its coverage of the war.

“It’s not new,” Dina Matar, professor of political communication and Arab media at SOAS University of London, said. “Israeli media has long been pushing the idea that they [Israel] are the victims while calling for actions that will allow them to present greater victimhood [such as attacking Iran]. They often use emotive language to describe a strike on an Israeli hospital that they’ll never use to describe an Israeli strike on a hospital in Gaza.”

Take Israeli media coverage of the siege of northern Gaza’s last remaining functioning healthcare facility, the Kamal Adwan Hospital, in December.

While descriptions of the attacks on the hospital from United Nations special rapporteurs spoke of their “horror” at the strikes, those in the Israeli press, in outlets such as Ynet or The Times of Israel, instead focused almost exclusively upon the Israeli military’s claims of the numbers of “terrorists” seized.

Among those seized from the hospital were medical staff, including the director of Kamal Adwan, Dr Hussam Abu Safia, who has since been tortured in an Israeli military prison, his lawyer previously told Al Jazeera.

In contrast, Israeli coverage of the Soroka Hospital attack in Beersheba almost universally framed the hit as a “direct strike” and foregrounded the experience of the evacuated patients and healthcare workers.

In this environment, Matar said, Netanyahu’s representation of Israel as home to a “subjugated people” reinforced a view that Israelis have long been encouraged to hold of themselves, even amid the decades-long occupation of Palestinian land.

“No one questions what Netanyahu is saying because the implications of his speech make sense as part of this larger historical narrative; one that doesn’t allow for any other [narrative], such as the Nakba or the suffering in Gaza,” the academic said.