MIAMI — The Trump administration is reviving a rule that could deny green cards to immigrants who use public benefits that could include food stamps, Medicaid, housing vouchers and others.
The policy, known as “public charge,” appeared on Thursday in the Federal Register and will be formally published on Monday.
The policy was first implemented in February 2020 as one of President Trump’s moves to limit legal immigration during his first administration, but it was reversed after Democratic President Biden came to power.
Its return comes when the Republican administration is implementing a hard-line policy to curb both illegal and legal immigration, and when the cost of healthcare and food is rising.
The federal government “is reaffirming the requirement of self-reliance, protecting public resources and ending policies that encouraged dependency on the backs of hard-working American taxpayers,” U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services said in a post published on its X account.
“Under President Trump, USCIS is restoring the basic principle that immigrants must be able to support themselves,” the post said.
Under the policy, applicants for green cards have to show they wouldn’t be burdens to the country or “public charges.”
The White House visit will be on a day off in the middle of a nine-game East Coast trip.
“I’m sure a lot of guys are going to participate and be there, and this is an individual choice,” Roberts said. “But I do expect a lot of our guys to be there.”
Scheduling conflicts when the Dodgers played the Nationals in Washington on April 3-5 pushed back the trip.
“This took a long time to get both sides together, and, honestly, like I’ve always said, my company line, my personal line is I hope that we get this invitation every year,” Dodgers manager Roberts said. “Because that’s the goal: to win a championship, to get this invitation to the White House. And I’m not a politician, and I’m doing something that teams have done for decades. And so that’s where I stand, really. I’m a baseball coach. That’s what I do.”
Back in 2019, Roberts suggested that he might not accept an invitation to the White House with Trump in office. But he did attend last year when the Dodgers celebrated their 2024 title.
Roberts said the Dodgers found out earlier this week that the White House visit had been scheduled.
“There was a lot of unknown,” Roberts said. “It’s an off day, and then how could we work this out logistically?”
That set off “a lot of phone calls, texts, and communication internally.”
Hernández’s injury rehab has moved along more quickly than Roberts initially expected. He landed on the injury list in late May after playing in just two games following offseason surgery on his left elbow.
“He looks normal,” Roberts said last weekend. “I’m not saying miraculous, but I’m really in disbelief how well he responded, given the injury.”
In 2023, California regulators levied more than $100,000 in fines against the private operator of a federal immigration facility, kicking off a three-year battle over whether detainees who do work at the facilities should be considered employees.
The question went beyond semantics: If considered employees, the detainees would be subject to state worker protection laws.
A legal settlement announced this week now affirms that private immigrant detention facilities are subject to California’s workplace safety and health requirements.
“Every worker deserves a safe and healthy workplace and should be able to report workplace hazards without fear of retaliation,” said Denisse Gómez, spokesperson for the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health or Cal/OSHA.
“Individuals who perform work in these facilities are entitled to workplace safety protections, and this settlement reinforces Cal/OSHA’s commitment to enforcing those protections and safeguarding vulnerable workers,” she added.
Under the settlement between California and the GEO Group, a Florida-based private prison company, the company recently withdrew its legal challenges and agreed to pay more than $100,000 in the fines.
The GEO Group did not respond to requests for comment.
Back in 2023, Cal/OSHA issued $104,510 in fines against the GEO Group. The agency had found six violations of state code by the company after detainees complained about a lack of protective equipment and proper training while cleaning the facility for $1 per day.
Detainees alleged they routinely wiped black mold off shower walls at the facility, saw black dust spew from air vents and used cleaning solutions that lacked instructions during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The biggest fine levied against the GEO Group was for failure to establish and maintain “effective written procedures to reduce employee risk of exposure to aerosol transmissible disease.”
Advocates viewed Cal/OSHA’S recognition of the detainees as workers as a victory that could pave the way for future labor rights fights at other detention centers in the state.
But the GEO Group appealed, arguing that detainees participating in ICE’s voluntary work program make their own schedules and aren’t employees, so hazard exposure couldn’t be “as a result of assigned duties,” as California law states. Plus, the company argued, there wasn’t enough evidence that detainees were exposed to any hazard.
The GEO Group sued, but three days before a California Superior Court hearing in May, the company and Cal/OSHA reached the settlement.
Along with paying the fines, the GEO Group agreed to draft plans for avoiding aerosol transmissions at 12 secure and reentry facilities in California, including five detention centers that hold immigrants.
“GEO ensures detainees are afforded the necessary tools, equipment, and personal protective equipment … to safely and effectively perform any necessary tasks,” the settlement states.
Gómez said the settlement also leaves intact the appeals board’s ruling that civil immigration detainees who participate in work programs can participate in proceedings anonymously, “acknowledging the potential for retaliation when individuals raise workplace safety concerns.”
But the question of whether detainees are employees and deserve certain protections isn’t entirely resolved — at least not for the federal government.
Last month, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement released new standards for detention facilities across the country. The revised guidelines “emphasize that detainee volunteers participating in the voluntary work program are not considered facility and/or government employees” and thus not entitled to labor regulations.
Attorney Mariel Villarreal said the timing of the new detention standards made her question whether the GEO Group had asked ICE to specify in its standards that detainees are not workers in response to its battle with Cal/OSHA.
“To me, it’s a reaction to this very settlement,” she said. Villarreal works for the California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice, which filed the original complaint on behalf of detainees who said they worked in unsafe conditions.
Villarreal pointed to a Washington Post report that GEO Group executives privately asked ICE to specify that detainees are not employees of the facilities where they work. Two top Trump administration officials, border czar Tom Homan and acting ICE director David Venturella, previously worked for the GEO Group.
New versions of ICE detention standards take effect as contracts are established or modified, so this year’s rules won’t immediately apply to every facility.
An ICE spokesperson did not comment about the settlement. The spokesperson, who did not provide their name in an emailed statement Wednesday, said the agency has begun transitioning detention facilities to meet the 2026 standards, “building on its longstanding commitment to safe, secure, and professional detention operations.”
“ICE has consistently implemented many of these best practices independently, reinforcing its role as the leader in detention operations,” the spokesperson added.
The GEO Group and other immigrant detention center operators have faced other legal battles over workers’ rights, including lawsuits in Washington, Colorado and California over the $1-per-day payment.
Villarreal said she’s confident that the Cal/OSHA settlement would continue to hold even if California facilities incorporated the new standards. But she said she believes the statements are an attempt by the GEO Group to “sidestep responsibility” and avoid the possibility of being fined under similar circumstances in other states.
“These statements in the new standards are a way for them to try and preserve profits as much as possible,” she said. “GEO and ICE are so intertwined at this point that they have the same motives.”
MILWAUKEE — Former Wisconsin Judge Hannah Dugan was spared from prison Wednesday for ushering a Mexican defendant out of her courtroom to evade U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. A federal judge fined her $5,000 and cited her otherwise law-abiding life in issuing the sentence.
“I think this is a situation where an otherwise good person, upset by immigration policies in this country, made a bad decision in the moment,” U.S. District Judge Lynn Adelman said.
Dugan, 67, was convicted of felony obstruction in December. Her lawyers argued during her trial that President Trump’s administration sought to “crush” Dugan in an effort to ensure judicial compliance with the ICE strategy of targeting immigrants as they showed up for court hearings.
Dugan resigned the Milwaukee County circuit judgeship she had held for nine years in January amid threats of impeachment from Republican state lawmakers who labeled her an activist judge. In her resignation letter, she said her prosecution threatened “the independence of our judiciary.” Republican U.S. Rep. Tom Tiffany, a fierce Trump loyalist running for Wisconsin governor, urged authorities to “lock her up” in a social media post following her conviction.
Two Marquette University law professors spoke on her behalf, including a former state Supreme Court justice and a Jesuit priest who read a statement describing Dugan as a defender of oppressed people and saying he didn’t believe there was a need for punishment. “Hannah models what it means to be a Christian,” Gregory O’Meara said.
Dugan says she was just trying to do her job
Dugan then rose to address the court, saying she’s tried to do her best as a judge, and that her actions that day in April 2025 were not done maliciously but rather to maintain the “decorum and safety of the courtroom.”
“I have been cast as both a scofflaw and a hero. I am neither. I am a public servant who’s just trying to do my job,” Dugan said, adding that she has had to retire from public life due to threats against her and her family.
A prosecutor then acknowledged that “she has experienced collateral damage because of her conduct,” but said “judges can’t choose to disregard the law.”
Adelman then spoke, saying he doesn’t believe prison is necessary. He noted that Dugan lost her job, now has a felony conviction and experienced threats that forced her to move and stop attending community events.
“This is a few minutes of conduct for someone who has dedicated her life to public service,” the judge said. “It’s a marked deviation from an otherwise law-abiding life.”
He also noted that Dugan’s actions didn’t stop the ICE agents from arresting the defendant outside the courthouse.
Prosecutors pushed for a ‘serious sentence’
While jurors found her guilty of felony obstruction, they acquitted her of concealing an individual to prevent arrest, a misdemeanor.
Prosecutors argued in a sentencing memo filed last week that Dugan violated her oath as a judge and put both law enforcement and the public at risk.
“Judges are entrusted with tremendous discretion, but there is a line they cannot cross,” Executive Assistant U.S. Attorney Richard Frohling wrote. “The defendant crossed that line.”
Dugan’s attorneys argued she has been “punished enough,” including resigning as a judge and facing threats of violence. They argued in her sentencing memo that she should not be sentenced to any jail time besides the part of one day she already spent in federal custody.
Under federal sentencing guidelines, the presentence report calls for 15 to 21 months behind bars. The judge is not bound by those guidelines.
Prosecutors said the average sentence for obstruction cases is 16 months, but they did not recommend a sentence.
“This was a serious offense, and it warrants a correspondingly serious sentence,” Frohling wrote.
Attorney Jason Luczak said after the sentencing that they would still appeal Dugan’s conviction.
Dugan’s case was a first for Wisconsin
Dugan’s case marked the first time that a state judge in Wisconsin went to trial on charges of obstructing immigration agents.
On April 18, 2025, immigration officers went to the Milwaukee County courthouse after learning Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, 31, had reentered the country illegally and was scheduled to appear before Dugan for a hearing in a state battery case.
Dugan confronted agents outside her courtroom and directed them to the chief judge’s office, saying their administrative warrant wasn’t sufficient to arrest Flores-Ruiz.
After the agents left, she led Flores-Ruiz and his attorney out a private jury door. Agents spotted Flores-Ruiz in the corridor, followed him outside and arrested him after a foot chase. A week later, FBI agents arrested Dugan in the courthouse, leading her outside in handcuffs.
Flores-Ruiz was deported in November.
Savage and Bauer write for the Associated Press. Bauer reported from Madison, Wisc. AP contributors include Hannah Fingerhut in Des Moines, Iowa.
WASHINGTON — The Department of Homeland Security bought two of the largest immigrant detention facilities in California for $1.5 billion, according to the private prison company that sold them.
The purchase comes as the department — flush with cash after Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act infused the agency with $170 billion — has moved to scale up its capacity to detain immigrants without relying as heavily on private prison corporations.
In announcement Monday, the Tennessee-based CoreCivic said the sale of the 2,560-bed California City Detention Facility and the 1,994-bed Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego closed on July 2.
The company said it expects net proceeds of about $1.1 billion after income taxes and transaction expenses.
Ryan Gustin, public affairs director for CoreCivic, said such sales are not uncommon and that “the process was marked with rigor and integrity.” He added that the valuations were established through the federal government’s required appraisal process, using independent appraisers, who determined objective fair market value.
The sale doesn’t immediately change anything at the facilities — CoreCivic expects to continue managing them under existing contracts with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to the company and a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
But the terms of those contracts could be modified given the change in ownership, the filing states. The California City facility contract expires in August 2027 and the Otay Mesa facility contract expires in December 2029, with the option to extend for another five years.
“We are pleased with the sales of these two mission-critical facilities for the Company’s government partner, which demonstrates the value of the Company’s underlying real estate portfolio, while reflecting our role as a long-term, flexible solutions provider to government,” CoreCivic CEO Patrick Swindle said in the announcement.
The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
During a quarterly earnings call in May, George Zoley, CEO of the GEO Group, another major private prison corporation, said that the company had been in discussions with ICE “regarding the potential sale of multiple facilities.”
Critics of the purchases of detention facilities say the Trump administration is simply looking to avoid state and local oversight by bringing them under federal ownership. That issue was raised during the GEO Group earnings call when a participant later asked why the federal government wants to own the facilities instead of contracting with third parties.
If the facilities are federally owned, Zoley replied, there are “more protections from unwarranted litigation that infringes upon the activities of the ICE processing centers.”
Zoley said federal ownership would bolster the legal defense of the facilities and the argument that “states can only have very limited involvement.”
“There’s been litigation regarding overseeing medical services, food services, general cleanliness, etc.,” Zoley continued. “It’s really unprecedented and I believe it’s fundamentally unconstitutional. As some blue states are considering more active involvement in oversight of facilities, I think the logical solution to much of that is federal ownership of the facilities.”
California tried to kick private detention operators out of the state, but the 2020 law was overturned in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Since then, state leaders have established oversight mechanisms through laws that allow for monitoring and investigation of detention centers by the California Department of Justice and local health authorities.
Asked to comment about the sale, Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) said his congressional oversight visits to facilities operated by CoreCivic have shown that immigrants who pose no public safety threat are being held in “unacceptable conditions.”
“Whether these facilities are operated by a private contractor or owned by the federal government, my expectations remain the same,” he said. “I will continue demanding transparency, accountability, and humane conditions that respect the dignity and rights of every person in immigration detention.”
Eight ICE detention facilities now operate in California, with a combined capacity to hold nearly 9,000 people.
The California City and Otay Mesa facilities have both been the subject of lawsuits by detainees alleging detainee mistreatment. CoreCivic calls such allegations unfounded and says it complies with all regulations concerning the treatment of detainees.
In its announcement on Monday, CoreCivic said the company is in discussions with ICE about potentially selling additional detention facilities, though it said those talks are in various stages and it’s unclear whether the sales will go through.
WASHINGTON — Over the past year and a half, the Trump administration has turned repeatedly to the Supreme Court for clearance on its sweeping immigration enforcement plans. While the administration lost its bid this week to do away with birthright citizenship by executive order, its strategy has, in large part, been a success.
In a White House news release listing 60 actions the administration has taken as part of its America First agenda to restrict immigration, the first four actions were decisions by the Supreme Court.
After the court ruled in June that President Trump can, without judicial review, end temporary legal protections for hundreds of thousands of immigrants, his administration celebrated the ruling as a “major victory for American sovereignty.”
The list of accomplishments also noted that the high court had granted immigration officers greater leeway to remove green card holders who are accused but not convicted of crimes; allowed the administration to limit how many people can apply for asylum; and gave it the green light to continue deporting immigrants to third-party countries where they have no connection.
The decisions raise significant consequences for immigrants who have made their lives in the U.S., and stand to reshape public views over the country’s historic position as a place of refuge. The administration has not only tried to restrict illegal immigration, it has also targeted people residing in the country legally and stepped up efforts to drive them out.
The court’s term that ended last week is the most robust judicial affirmation of executive power over immigration in the court’s history, said Muzaffar Chishti, a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank. Chishti said the rulings signify that future presidents could continue to change immigration policies at their discretion.
“The biggest impact is that we have now fully understood the power of the presidency, especially in immigration matters,” Chishti said. “Where there is any discretion left to the president or the executive, this Supreme Court has widened the limits of that authority.”
One of Trump’s earliest wins since returning to the White House came last September, when the Supreme Court affirmed that immigration agents can stop anyone they suspect of being in the country illegally on the basis of their perceived race and ethnicity, job or the language they speak.
Afterward, federal officials launched enforcement operations in Chicago, North Carolina and Minneapolis, using increasingly aggressive tactics until two U.S. citizens were shot and killed by immigration agents in January and the administration shifted course.
The Supreme Court’s rulings have landed with particular force in South Florida, which is home to the largest share of Venezuelan immigrants in the country.
The end of Temporary Protected Status — a program intended to protect people in the event of a natural disaster — heightened concerns about deportation to a country that is reeling after twin earthquakes from June 24. More than 100 Venezuelans deported from the U.S. hours before the disaster are among those missing.
Some Florida Republicans called on the administration to renew the legal protections for Venezuelans in the U.S.
“Congress specifically included earthquakes in the TPS statute for moments exactly like this,” said Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar (R-Fla.). “I urge the Administration to redesignate TPS for Venezuelans already in the United States because sending them back after this catastrophe is simply not the right thing to do.”
The White House did not respond to a request seeking comment on whether Trump would authorize humanitarian relief for Venezuelan immigrants.
Immigrants from El Salvador are now holding their breath for an upcoming decision on their TPS designation, which is set to expire Sept. 9.
About 1.3 million people from 17 countries were enrolled in the program when Trump took office last year. The administration has already terminated TPS for many of them, and the Supreme Court’s decision last week, which concerned Haitians and Syrians, clears the way for federal officials to continue.
“The implication of this is that at least most of the claims that have been litigated to challenge this administration’s illegal war on TPS are now foreclosed,” said Ahilan Arulanantham, co-director of the Center for Immigration Law and Policy at UCLA, who presented arguments for the Syria case.
The concern among advocates took on greater urgency after The New York Times and other outlets reported on Thursdaythat immigration officials, seeking to reach a goal of 2,000 arrests per day, had detained more than 10,000 people in less than a week.
Arnulfo De La Cruz, who leads a California union representing thousands of home care workers with temporary protected status, said he is alarmed by the Supreme Court’s many immigration rulings.
“We’re getting into really dangerous territory with, in some ways, the Supreme Court almost legislating the priorities of the administration,” said De La Cruz, who is president of SEIU California and SEIU Local 2015. “That’s the responsibility of Congress.”
In a blow to a centerpiece of the administration’s immigration agenda, the divided Supreme Court upheld birthright citizenship — that, with few exceptions, a person born in U.S. soil is citizen.
Stephen Yale-Loehr, a retired Cornell University immigration law professor, called the ruling one setback among Trump’s largely successful restructuring of how the U.S. treats immigrants. He pointed to a tracker led by a Stanford University law professor that lists more than 700 immigration policy actions by the Trump administration so far.
“Despite this seemingly historic loss, the Trump administration is winning its war on immigrants,” Yale-Loehr said.
And now some Republicans, including Trump, are saying Congress should lead the attack on birthright citizenship.
“You can’t have the kinds of immigration programs other countries have when you can just have a baby here, and now that child is an American citizen,” said Stephen Miller, a Trump aide who is behind much of his immigration agenda.
But Chishti, of the Migration Policy Institute, said in reality, “Congress can’t do anything — it was left powerless by the Supreme Court.”
Other conservatives called on the administration to lean on the considerable authority it already has.
Dale Wilcox, executive director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a hard-line restrictionist group, said the birthright decision “makes it all the more urgent to step up enforcement to the maximum possible extent.”
Democrats, meanwhile, cheered the win while acknowledging that their fight against the administration’s immigration policies continues.
“We cannot rest,” said Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.). “Because this is certainly not the end of Trump’s attacks on our Constitution, our democracy, and the notion of what it means to be American.”
More immigration-related cases are among those in the Supreme Court’s docket starting in October and could offer further expansions of executive power.
One case concerns more than 50,000 petitions filed in federal courts in hopes of obtaining the release of detained immigrants. Those petitions ballooned after the administration began limiting the ability of many immigrants to seek release through bond hearings in immigration court.
The administration is expected to put up a fierce defense.
SEATTLE — James Wilson, one of just six men who signed both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, never could have imagined how grand the country he was founding would become. But he knew how it could get there.
Wilson envisioned a steady stream of foreigners coming to America every year, reinvigorating the energy and vitality the nation needed if it were to survive, much less thrive. Which is why Wilson, who moved to the colonies from Scotland at 22, argued against barriers on immigration that would “deprive the government of the talents, virtue and abilities of such foreigners as might chose to remove to this country.”
What Wilson had in mind, then, is something such as the U.S. national soccer team, which gathered to train Saturday morning, on the country’s 250th birthday.
Six of the 26 players on the team, which will face Belgium in a World Cup elimination game Monday, are foreign-born. Five others were born to immigrant parents and two others have immigrant grandparents or great-grandparents. Nearly half have dual nationality.
U.S. coach Mauricio Pochettino jumps into the arms of his players after their World Cup win over Paraguay at SoFi Stadium on June 12.
(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)
Yet they all play with the U.S. flag stitched over their hearts. What could be more American than that?
“It is special,” U.S. captain Tim Ream said of having the team together on Independence Day. “Obviously, doubly special because it’s during a World Cup and triple special because it’s here in the U.S. “As a group, with all our different backgrounds, it’s a true representation of what America is. It’s a melting pot of, of people, of personalities, of characters.”
And it’s led by a country-music-listening Argentine coach, Mauricio Pochettino, who first learned to throw a baseball last week so he could perform first-pitch duties at a Seattle Mariners’ game. (He threw a strike.)
“That sort of stuff can only happen in America,” said striker Folarin Balogun, who grew up in England with Nigerian parents but plays for the U.S. because he was born in Brooklyn, qualifying for birthright citizenship through the 14th Amendment to the constitution Wilson helped write.
It would be hard for the U.S. soccer team to more closely resemble the architects who founded the country, nor the vision those architects had for their creation.
Eight the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence and eight of the 55 framers of the Constitution were immigrants. That’s about the same percentage of immigrants on this summer’s World Cup roster. Another 20 of the Founding Fathers were the sons of immigrants; again, the same percentage as the national team.
“That is the U.S. experience of taking different people from all over the world, the immigrant experience, and mixing it into something that the world has never seen,” said Adam Sawyer, a co-founder of Relevant Research, a Baltimore firm which provides support to immigration researchers and organizations.
“One in seven Americans was foreign-born. Our soccer team is like one in four. I always think of soccer [as] leading society and it’s pulling us with it,” continued Sawyer, who recently published an analysis of the role global migration has played on World Cup success. “Our sporting teams push us forward towards further integration.”
The signers of the Declaration of Independence never foresaw a World Cup, much less an American World Cup team. But they did see immigration as such a fundamental strength, they used America’s founding document to condemn King George III for endeavoring “to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners.”
Without that naturalization, Christian Pulisic might not be playing for the U.S.; in fact, he might not even be in the U.S. His paternal grandfather Mate immigrated from the former Yugoslavia in search of opportunity and was later naturalized as a U.S. citizen. The paternal ancestors of goalkeeper Matt Turner became naturalized citizens after fleeing to the U.S. to escape religious persecution in Lithuania and midfielder Cristian Roldan’s parents escaped civil wars in El Salvador and Guatemala, then gained permanent residency through President Reagan’s amnesty program.
“This soccer team is reflecting America at its best,” said Faisal Al-Juburi, co-chief executive of RAICES, a Texas-based humanitarian aid and immigration services nonprofit. “Its global roots, its shared purpose, its one jersey.”
Soccer in the U.S. has long been an immigrant sport. In the years after World War II, when soccer was still an amateur and semi-pro game, the best teams in the country had names such as the Philadelphia Ukrainian Nationals, New York German-Hungarian SC and the Los Angeles Danes. Joe Gaetjens, one of the country’s first stars and the man who scored the goal that beat England in the 1950 World Cup, was a Haitian immigrant.
In recent years, however, the national team has begun recruiting dual-nationals from overseas, among them World Cup midfielder Malik Tillman, who was born to a U.S. serviceman in Germany, and Antonee Robinson, who was born in England to a naturalized U.S. citizen father, and Sergiño Dest, a Dutch native whose father is Surinamese American.
“It is definitely a team that embraces their diverse backgrounds, and that’s quite meaningful, especially now,” said Al-Juburi, the son of Iraqi immigrants. “This notion that we are stronger with impenetrable walls that divide us is definitely not reflected in this team. It credits a lot of its success to its immigrant roots.
“And I think that’s incredibly powerful to see that and to see a nation cheering and getting behind that diversity. It is a reminder that we are stronger from that coexistence.”
But Al-Juburi doesn’t see the result as a melting pot, which burns away the unique flavors and characteristics of each ingredient. For him, it’s more a gumbo in which every ingredient changes and improves the mix.
U.S. players huddle seconds before playing Bosnia-Herzegovina during a World Cup knockout round match at Levi’s Stadium on Wednesday.
(Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times)
“You’re looking at lineage from Nigeria, from Guatemala, from El Salvador, from Mexico, from Liberia, Jamaica, Croatia,” he said. “All these disparate ingredients work together so beautifully and in such a balanced way.”
And when that team succeeds, as the U.S. has this summer, it not only underscores the wisdom of the Founding Fathers, but it offers a lesson for today as well.
“This team contains a different picture of inclusion really mattering, just by being exactly who they are,” said Jules Boykoff, a political science professor at the University of Portland (Ore.) and a former U.S. youth international. “They don’t have to say anything. They just have to be who they are and do their best on the pitch.”
On Thursday morning, a small group of advocates gathered outside the United States federal courthouse in San Diego, California.
One of them pointed to a poster of a young man in a US Navy uniform, three golden medals pinned to his chest.
“This is my brother, Benito Miranda Hernandez, US Navy veteran,” said James Smith, the founder of Black Deported Veterans of America.
Smith and the other advocates had organised the demonstration on behalf of Hernandez, who was miles away at that moment, stuck in an immigration detention facility.
Brought from Mexico to the US as a baby, Hernandez had completed three tours of duty with the US military during the Iraq war. His military service was meant to be his path to citizenship.
But now, Hernandez is among the immigrant veterans fighting deportation under US President Donald Trump.
“These men and women were promised that they were going to get their citizenship if they served,” Smith said. “Help this brother come home.”
Trump has pledged to prioritise immigrants with criminal records in his push for mass deportation.
But advocates for US military members argue that veterans are particularly vulnerable, given their over-representation in prisons and jails. The majority have reported suffering from mental health problems after their service.
Hernandez, for instance, said he struggled to reintegrate into civilian life after leaving the military. But on June 14, he had finally completed his years-long sentence for a drug conviction.
As he waited for his mother, Maria Miranda, to pick him up, agents from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detained him.
Only afterwards did Miranda and her other son arrive. They spent hours that day looking for him, not knowing where he had gone.
“He was doing things right,” Miranda told Al Jazeera in Spanish. “He had so many hopes, so many dreams.”
Benito Miranda Hernandez stands outside the reentry programme where he recently worked, before he was detained by immigration officials in June [Anna Oakes/Al Jazeera]
Hernandez has since been transferred to the Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego. He faces deportation, despite having received his green card for permanent residency earlier this year. He previously spoke to Al Jazeera about his experiences for an article published in April.
Hernandez’s detention is part of a trend under the Trump administration.
While the exact number of deported veterans is impossible to pin down – ICE has long failed to collect the veteran status of the people it detains, as is required – several advocates told Al Jazeera that they have been witnessing a rise in the deportations of US veterans during Trump’s second term.
The New York Times reported in March that at least 34 veterans have been placed in deportation proceedings in the last year.
Some cases have received media attention. But advocates say other immigrant veterans have avoided the spotlight, fearing it may have a negative impact on their immigration cases.
“As the ICE raids continue and revamp across the country, there’s going to be people that are veterans that have not become US citizens that unfortunately will end up falling through the cracks,” said Robert Vivar, cofounder of the Tijuana-based Unified US Deported Veterans Resource Center.
Veterans, like other immigrants across the country, have been detained while pursuing the mandatory steps in their immigration process, according to Danitza James, the president of Repatriate our Patriots, an advocacy group.
They are often flagged for having outstanding warrants or criminal convictions that have not been vacated. James said she is in contact with about six veterans who had been detained by ICE in 2026 alone.
“Our government, they don’t place any value in the service that our immigrants have,” James, who is herself a veteran and naturalised citizen, told Al Jazeera. “They honestly see us as disposable.”
Danitza James, a former US military member, has led a push to repatriate deported veterans [Alejandro Cossio/Al Jazeera]
For decades, the US military has recruited immigrants to enlist in its wars abroad to help address staffing shortages.
Recruiters often tell immigrant enlisters that military service offers a shortcut to naturalised citizenship.
In theory, it should. But while deployed, many immigrant soldiers, like Hernandez, have reported delays in the naturalisation process.
By the time Hernandez was called for his citizenship interview in 2006, two years had passed since he finished his last deployment. He had a criminal conviction by that point – and his citizenship case was denied.
The failure to protect immigrant veterans is representative of the government’s larger failures to reckon with its military policies, according to advocates like Smith.
“The United States government is failing to take accountability for what they’ve created,” Smith told Al Jazeera. “You bring us in and strip us of part of our humanity so that we can kill without repercussions.”
“Then, when you get out, there is no process that gets you ready to be in the civilian world.”
Several bills to protect immigrant veterans are currently under consideration in Congress. But recruiters continue to target immigrant communities with the promise of expedited citizenship.
The next steps for Hernandez are not yet clear. At Thursday’s rally, a lawyer with a local immigration nonprofit told Smith and other advocates that the group may be interested in helping with Hernandez’s case.
In the meantime, Hernandez’s mother has been trying to keep his spirits up.
Miranda takes his calls from the ICE detention centre and sees him during the facility’s visiting hours on Saturdays. But the two-hour drive from Anaheim to San Diego is difficult for her health.
“On Saturday, when I saw him, he was very, very depressed,” Miranda told Al Jazeera.
“He said, ‘I don’t want to cause you any more problems. I don’t want to upset you any more, Mom. I’m doing things right. I’m praying for myself,'” Miranda recalled, in tears.
“They clipped the wings of a bird, and all the hopes he had. They threw them in the trash.”
It was a traumatic moment for much of Southern California, as federal immigration agents snatched undocumented workers from car washes, garment factories and Home Depot parking lots.
Angelica Salas, who heads one of Los Angeles’ most influential immigrant rights groups, met regularly last summer with City Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martínez — himself the son of Mexican immigrants — as they formulated a response. The two kept circling back to a singular issue: the lack of political power wielded by noncitizens.
“A lot of this is happening because immigrants don’t have the right to vote,” said Salas, executive director of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights.
Those conversations helped fuel Soto-Martínez’s decision in late April to push for a ballot proposal aimed at giving noncitizens the right to vote in city and school district elections. The proposal quickly gained momentum, with two-thirds of the council voting in mid-June to draft a measure for the Nov. 3 ballot.
Los Angeles City Council member Hugo Soto-Martínez attends a City Council meeting following elections at City Hall June 3.
(Etienne Laurent / For the Times)
But the effort collapsed on Tuesday, with the council reversing course and sending the proposal to a committee for more study. Before the vote, Soto-Martínez acknowledged that he had not performed sufficient outreach, particularly to the city’s Black community leaders.
By then, critics were accusing the council of failing to do its homework, leaving voters to fill in the blanks on such questions as whether undocumented immigrants would be covered by the expanded franchise. Some worried the proposal would endanger the very people it was designed to help, making them a fresh target for the Trump administration.
Even community leaders who have worked on civil rights issues were urging the council to slow down.
Mobilizing Preachers and Communities, a national nonprofit that represents clergy and civil rights advocates, asked for a delay, citing concerns about President Trump. Rev. K.W. Tulloss, the group’s western regional director, said he was also hearing concerns from Black residents and their religious leaders about the potential for weakening Black voting representation.
That, in turn, could reduce the overall number of Black elected officials in Los Angeles, he said.
“That’s a major concern among our community,” Tulloss said. “And we can’t be afraid to have that dialogue.”
In L.A., Black residents make up about 8% of registered voters, according to the Sacramento-based firm Political Data, Inc. That figure has been gradually declining over the past few decades. An influx of noncitizen voters — Latinos, Asians and others — could cause it to shrink even more.
At the end of the year, L.A.’s 15-member City Council will have two Black representatives, down from three, all in South L.A.-based districts. Two Latinos are running in this year’s election to replace Councilmember Curren Price, who is Black and retiring after serving the maximum three terms.
The county’s five-member Board of Supervisors has one Black member. Voters have given the go-ahead to add four more members, which some fear could leave the board with one Black member out of nine.
Tulloss said his organization supports creating a pathway to citizenship for the city’s undocumented immigrants. At the same time, he worried that Soto-Martínez’s proposal could in the short term divide Black and brown residents, who share a common struggle on a wide range of issues.
“At the end of the day, we don’t want any type of deal that will be divisive in the community,” he said.
Soto-Martínez, who represents an Echo Park-to-Hollywood district, said in an interview Wednesday that noncitizen voting was part of his platform when he first ran for City Council in 2022. He said he first thought about the issue seriously a decade ago, when San Francisco voters passed a measure allowing noncitizen parents to cast ballots in school board elections.
Since its formation, the United States has repeatedly redefined the right to vote, broadening it to include women, Black people and other groups, he said.
“To me, it just seemed very natural to expand it,” he said. “It’s part of our history.”
The idea of noncitizen voting has been circulating in L.A. for years. School board member Kelly Gonez persuaded her colleagues to begin exploring it in 2019. But the effort was set aside after the onset of COVID-19, which caused massive disruptions across the Los Angeles Unified School District, said Michael Trujillo, a political strategist for Gonez.
Last summer, as the Trump administration was launching immigration raids across Southern California, the city was convening a 13-member citizens commission to come up with proposals for rewriting the City Charter, L.A.’s governing document.
The commission took up noncitizen voting in March, narrowly rejecting it. Several commissioners said they were worried about unintended consequences, like the Trump administration taking aim at newly registered voters, said Raymond Meza, who served as the commission’s chair.
“I thought those concerns were not fully addressed,” Meza said, “so I actually switched my vote” and opposed the proposal.
A month later, with the deadline for placing items on the Nov. 3 ballot fast approaching, Soto-Martínez introduced a motion calling for a two-step process for expanding voting rights. First, voters would be asked to give the City Council the authority to grant noncitizens the right to vote.
The council would then examine the details surrounding the change before passing an ordinance expanding those voting rights.
Soto-Martínez said his motion was based on a simple idea: Those who live in the city, raise their families there and pay taxes “deserve to have a voice” in local decision-making. He did not offer many specifics, saying those would be worked out at a later date.
Critics, and even some supporters, said Soto-Martínez was making his move at the wrong time. Councilmember Monica Rodriguez, who voted against the proposal in mid-June, voiced fears that the list of noncitizen voters would immediately be seized by federal immigration authorities.
Former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa said he opposes noncitizen voting in city elections. He does favor it for L.A. Unified — but only for parents of children attending those schools.
Villaraigosa, who led the city from 2005-13 and recently ran for governor, argued that this is not the right time to make even that change.
“With Trump ferreting through every record he can find looking for undocumented people, I just think it’s the wrong time,” he said. “I think these people would be exposing themselves to deportation, and the well-intentioned would be exposing them as well.”
Soto-Martínez portrayed such arguments as “fear mongering,” saying undocumented immigrants take risks every day in their quest to create a better future for their families.
Salas, the head of CHIRLA, echoed that idea.
“At end of day, we are already targets,” she said. “This is not going to make it worse. Don’t tell me voting against this was for the protection of immigrants.”
The Trump threat was not the only reason council members hesitated.
Rodriguez, who has expressed some interest in the proposal, said city leaders had not determined how county election officials would issue separate ballots for voters who would be barred from state and national contests. They also had not determined the cost of such a service, she said.
Twenty-two local jurisdictions across the country have approved and implemented noncitizen voting, according to Megan Dias, who is co-author of “Immigrant Voting and the Movement for Inclusion in San Francisco,” a report examining that city’s push to allow immigrants to vote in school board elections.
Dias said that backers of noncitizen voting need to build a broad coalition — grassroots organizations, election officials, lawyers for the city — before taking the proposal to voters.
Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson said he is confident that noncitizen voting will get a much more extensive review in the coming months, and make the ballot in 2028. First, he said, the council will need to provide voters with specifics on how the changes would work.
Harris-Dawson said he heard from people who wanted more time to understand the proposal, to “make sure that it was done in a way that protected Black voting districts in particular.”
During the deliberations on the proposal, it also was not clear whether the change would apply to green card holders, recipients of Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals or other categories of noncitizens.
“When something goes to the ballot, we need the details to be figured out — like how much something is going to cost, exactly how it’s going to work, and what the parameters are,” Harris-Dawson said. “All of that needs to be defined.”
This week’s narrow Supreme Court decision protecting birthright citizenship is rightly being hailed as a triumph for the American experiment.
By some, anyway.
Check out MAGA world and you’ll quickly find Trump surrogates and even elected leaders spouting a kind of extremist anti-immigrant sentiment that once, not so long ago, was considered intolerable in the public sphere.
This has included suggestions that go as far as banning pregnant women from traveling to the United States for fear they might give birth here, and — no joke — one notable commentator writing that demanding female immigrants be sterilized might be a solution.
Trump’s Homeland Security advisor Stephen Miller said after the ruling that children of immigrants might not be “qualified to carry on or capable of executing the inheritance of this country.”
“We have people from all over the world, from Third World nations, nations that on their own would have never invented the wheel, let alone modern technology, let alone medicine, let alone air travel, and they can just come into the country, have a baby at a hospital, paid for it by you and me, and then that baby is automatically a citizen,” Miller said.
Before you tell me that the Supreme Court has spoken and this is a done deal, no matter if there’s more gross Miller mush, let me tell you about Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s written opinion and why it matters. It is, if read in the right light, a warning for what comes next — a fight to rewrite history to serve political aims.
“The odds were long and the stakes were high,” Jackson wrote about the creation of the 14th Amendment in 1866, which has long been understood as granting citizenship to any child born on U.S. soil and which was the focus of this case.
Still, she wrote, despite the unlikeliness of post-Civil War America rising to the challenge of inclusiveness, the amendment was always meant to do just that — because free Black people, recently emancipated but denied citizenship, “fought for the shared humanity of all people.”
An alternative interpretation by MAGA world of this amendment and this history was the center of this case.
To greatly simplify, the 14th Amendment was originally a response to a Supreme Court decision, the Dred Scott case, that said freed Black slaves could not be U.S. citizens. MAGA world was arguing that the authors of the 14th Amendment never intended much more than that — citizenship for ex-slaves and their descendants.
While concurring with the majority of the court, Jackson also wrote her own summary that makes a vital point: Without history that includes the Black experience — as most of the arguments in this case did — we are left bereft of the suffering that has shaped our values and which gives us the empathy required to be a pluralistic society.
Black history — any non-white history, really — is the history of resistance and the road map to recovery from this dark era of hate.
It’s hard to call someone your fellow citizen if you take away their humanity — which is exactly what this case was attempting to do by splitting into factions those who would fight for equality and rewriting history with only the voices that match the current administration’s goals.
It was disappointing that the court, whose individual justices bounced around arguments from a myriad of sources outside of their erstwhile adherence to the ideas of originalism, did not call out that erasure more forcefully, and that it was left to Jackson to do so.
Jackson took that narrow idea that Black people — and the white legislators sympathetic to their cause — had only themselves in mind when crafting the 14th Amendment and attacked it head-on, arguing that if we just look at what Black people were saying at the time, the larger intent of the amendment becomes clear.
“This alternative account pitches Black Americans against immigrants when the advocates who promoted the Fourteenth Amendment did no such thing,” Jackson pointed out of the MAGA version of events. “Freed Blacks fought for the shared humanity of all people.”
That “universalist vision of belonging and citizenship,” she wrote, “eventually won the day.”
The 14th Amendment was largely written by Sen. Lyman Trumbull of Illinois, who took much of the basis of it from the legal arguments of Black intellectuals, including Frederick Douglass, the most influential Black statesman of the era.
Trumbull then argued in Congress that the amendment was meant to be inclusive — even of so-called “gypsies” and Chinese immigrants, who faced extreme racism, especially in California.
One congressman opposed to the measure warned that if it passed, Chinese immigrants would “overrun” California and “will double or treble the population.” At the same time, the Romani would likely continue to “wander in gangs” and “have no homes, pretend to own no land, live nowhere, settle as trespassers where ever they go, and whose sole merit is a universal swindle,” he warned.
Asked if the amendment would grant citizenship to those two controversial groups of immigrants, Jackson points out that Trumbull gave an unapologetic “undoubtedly,” again drawing on the universalist ideas of Douglass and others.
The “child of an Asiatic is just as much a citizen as the child of a European,” Trumbull said (and Jackson quoted, drawing from an amicus brief by Evan Bernick of Northern Illinois University and Jed Sugerman of Boston University).
“There is a serious breakdown in on the court that reflects the breakdown and echo chambers in America,” Sugerman, the professor, told me Wednesday. “When it comes to history and originalism, you have to read more broadly than just the founding fathers that you liked.”
So the history of the 14th Amendment is right there — equality not just for Black Americans but for immigrant Americans — but it required Jackson to write her own opinion to put it on the court record.
Legal scholars aligned with Trump did Olympic-level gymnastics in this case to parse what the authors of the 14th Amendment meant with the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction” — words that MAGA claimed were meant to secretly exclude undocumented immigrants.
Brown instead reminded us that outside of those white-only discussions when the amendment was written, it was the activism of Black people — their demand for colorblind equality — that actually shaped the final words that granted citizenship to all babies born within our borders.
Solidarity — the unbreakable strength of American democracy.
After the ruling, Trump wrote on social media that Congress could write legislation undoing birthright citizenship. Some pundits say that wouldn’t work, but I’m here to say Trump has managed a bunch of stuff that the pundits said wouldn’t work.
But “because of President Trump’s courage and leadership, we are now on the precipice. Yes, we were dealt a setback, but because of his courage alone, we’re on the precipice as a nation of being in a position to end this travesty once and for all, and that’s what we have to fight for.”
Miller and his ilk are seeking to rewrite history to justify their vision of the future of America.
Jackson alone in the court offered us both a warning and a path — a reminder that our history holds indisputable facts despite politics, and we erase them at our own peril.
Immigrants detained at two federal facilities in California have launched a boycott in protest of increasing and, in their view, burdensome prices at the facilities’ commissaries for items including tampons, coffee and soup.
The Times reviewed a grievance letter and spoke with three detainees who are involved in the boycott at the California City Detention Facility, about 80 miles east of Bakersfield, and at the Golden State Annex in McFarland.
More than 300 detainees are estimated to have signed grievance letters sent recently to facility administrators, according to advocates with the California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice.
Both facilities are operated by private prison corporations — the California City facility by Tennessee-based CoreCivic and the Golden State Annex by Florida-based GEO Group.
The Times has reached out to the Department of Homeland Security, GEO Group and CoreCivic for comment.
Detainees are provided certain essentials, such as food and soap, free of charge, but many also purchase items at commissary stores that are of better quality or otherwise unavailable. Detainees said shampoo and other hygiene items sometimes run out for days and that meals are small or exacerbate diabetes and other health issues.
“The three daily meals that CoreCivic provides at California City Detention Facility are the bare minimum to keep a person alive,” they wrote. “Because of this, charging inflated prices on necessities is considered price gouging and profiteering against vulnerable incarcerated population who have no ability to refuse or shop elsewhere.”
The detainees said an 8 oz. jar of Folgers instant coffee costs $18 at the California City facility, a single instant ramen soup is 75 cents and a box of 40 tampons costs nearly $21.
At Walmart, the same Folgers coffee costs $8.97, Maruchan chicken ramen soup is 50 cents and 40 Tampax tampons are $12.19.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detains immigrants for civil purposes. Detention is meant to facilitate removal proceedings but is not meant to be punitive.
Detainees are paid $1 per day under a voluntary work program for cleaning or cooking. Many detainees rely on money from family and friends.
In their grievance letter, the detainees called the markups an unacceptable business practice with no apparent limit. They said they view the situation as an example of captive market exploitation and economic coercion.
The detainees requested a review of commissary pricing by facility leaders, a comparison of prices with prison industry standards, an immediate reduction in prices of essential items and the implementation of reasonable price caps. They also requested an increase in the portions of daily meals, including for meals meeting religious requirements, which they said are particularly small.
In May, the California State Senate passed a bill that would prohibit the excessive markup of products sold at private detention centers, limiting prices to 35% above the vendor cost. Existing California law already limits such markups in state prisons. The bill is now in the Assembly.
Priya Patel, an attorney at the California Collaborative for Immigrant Justice, represents people who have been detained at both facilities. She said that during legal service consultations, commissary pricing frequently comes up.
“The higher the prices get, the higher of an impact the conditions have on people and the more difficult it becomes to fight their cases,” Patel said.
The collaborative is one of the organizations that brought a lawsuit last year alleging inadequate medical care, as well as insufficient clothing, food, water and outdoor recreation time at the California City facility, which can hold more than 2,500 people. The lawsuit remains ongoing; in March, a U.S. district judge in San Francisco appointed an external monitor to ensure the facility provides “constitutionally adequate health care.”
The lawsuit describes multiple commissary-related issues. For example, it says the facility doesn’t provide headphones for tablets, making private phone calls — including privileged calls with attorneys — impossible unless the detainee can afford to purchase headphones from the commissary.
“One detained person has difficulty walking and standing for extended periods of time without shoes that provide arch support,” the complaint says. “He arrived at California City with appropriate shoes to accommodate his mobility disability, which were approved as an accommodation at a prior ICE facility. California City staff confiscated those shoes and instead provided him with plastic, orange sandals.”
“Several weeks after staff confiscated his shoes, he had an appointment with a doctor at California City,” it continues. “The doctor told the him … to buy different shoes from commissary to accommodate his foot condition.”
A contract between CoreCivic and ICE for the California City facility, dated April 1, 2025, says the contractor must provide notice of any price increases and that “any revenues earned in excess of what is required for commissary operations shall be used solely to benefit aliens at the facility.”
Alfredo Parada Calderon, 52, has been detained at the California City facility since September. He said commissary prices were already high before they increased around mid-June.
Parada Calderon said he asked an ICE officer why the prices had increased so much. The officer said he wasn’t aware of the change but that the vendor is Keefe Group, which supplies commissaries at prisons and immigrant detention centers across the country.
Detainees in his dormitory submitted a grievance about commissary prices, Parada Calderon said. The answer was vague.
“They’re blaming it on inflation,” he said.
Parada Calderon said his family sends him about $100 per month to spend on commissary items, which he spends on packets of crackers, coffee, soups, soap, shampoo, deodorant and chips.
“Enough is enough,” he said. “It’s a horrible enough place to be in and you guys are making it even more horrible, not just for me but for my family. The detainees want to be heard and this is the only option we actually have — a peaceful protest.”
Tommaso Bardelli, a researcher at New York University who studies mass incarceration, said the families of most people in prison are working class and may sacrifice their electricity bill or credit card payment to send money to their incarcerated relatives. The money they send no longer pays for small luxuries, he said, because prisons have over the years reduced how much they spend per person on necessities such as food.
Bardelli published a research article in 2022 about inequality within prison commissary stores. Commissary is often now the difference between starving and a semi-normal diet, he said.
In 1913, Antonino Alati left southern Italy to find a better life in a land where many people regarded him as little better than scum.
He joined millions of his fellow countrymen in the United States, where the press vilified Italians as poor, dirty, violent Catholics who had too many babies, refused to assimilate and could never possibly be considered “white.”
Politicians were already working to shut the door on them. A congressional report released two years before Alati’s arrival cited southern Italians as evidence that “the new immigration as a class is far less intelligent than the old.” They came to the U.S., the report asserted, “with the intention of profiting, in a pecuniary way, by the superior advantages of the new world and then returning to the old country.”
Alati wouldn’t let bigotry win. He soon sent for his wife and children, including his infant son Salvatore. Alati turned to Alito, Salvatore became Samuel. A generation later, the family had a Supreme Court justice in Samuel A. Alito Jr. — the second Italian American, after Antonin Scalia, to sit on the highest court in the land.
During his 2005 confirmation hearings, Alito praised his father as an “extraordinary man who came to the United States as a young child and overcame many difficulties” to ensure a better life for him and his sister. By then, Italian Americans were established as an essential part of this country’s fabric, from music to politics to food.
If there’s one constant in this country besides death and taxes, it’s how quickly descendants of immigrants, and sometimes immigrants themselves, forget how loathed their ethnic group was and how they proved the haters wrong. Too many become uncharitable to the policies that helped them and the immigrants who followed.
But Alito’s stance against birthright citizenship goes beyond just forgetting his roots. His 39-page opinion describes the supposed impact of undocumented migrants on the U.S., using words — “overran,” “soared,” “exploded,” “massive,” “a stream,” “huge” — that read like the same invective used against Italians in his grandfather and father’s time.
The justice channels anti-Italian conspiracies of the past by casting doubt on the national allegiances of the U.S.-born children of Mexican, Guatemalan and Salvadoran immigrants — the same patriotism test that Italian Americans faced generations ago when xenophobes questioned their Catholicism. Alito claims without evidence that millions of agricultural workers were able to apply for American citizenship after President Reagan’s 1986 amnesty “at least in part because of fraud” — a charge also leveled against Italians who sought to naturalize back in the day.
And so it goes, each passage a jumbled argument dressed up in judicial interpretations largely rejected by his fellow Catholic Supreme Court justices John Roberts, Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh. Coney Barrett signed on to the majority opinion that Roberts wrote, and Kavanaugh concurred.
Rev. William Barber II speaks during a rally outside the U.S. Supreme Court on April 1 while justices heard oral arguments on birthright citizenship.
(Al Drago / Getty Images)
I know how quickly families forget their own immigrant histories. Yet I look at people like Alito and wonder how they ended up thinking the way they do, because I could never imagine doing the same.
Like Alito’s paisanes, my Mexican family was also demonized for supposedly being insufficiently American and posing a threat to national unity. They also sacrificed their own dreams so their children and grandchildren could achieve theirs.
And just like Alito, some members of my family have forgotten our history and support Trump or favor some of his immigration policies, dismissing new arrivals as criminals or lazy. That’s why I will always side with undocumented people and welcome anyone who gives birth in this country with the hope that their newborn finds a better life.
It seems from his dissent that Alito somewhat agrees with me. He posits that millions of Americans who were born in this country to parents without papers “have a strong moral claim to be able to remain in the land where they grew up.” Congress “can and should address their situation,” he writes.
The justice blasts birth tourism, where women from China and other countries travel to the U.S. to have a baby, then return home, benefiting from our generosity and offering nothing in return.
I agree that’s a mockery of what being an American should be and ruins it for people who want to contribute to building a better nation. But Alito throws out the baby with the bathwater by failing to recognize that Trump’s attempt to erase birthright citizenship via executive order is presidential overreach based on bigotry, not rule of law. He’d rather cut up the Constitution to spite something he doesn’t like. Thank God his side lost, yet it’s sad that Trump’s pathetic attempt to define who can be an American went as far as it did.
Alito concludes by stating that the court’s decision to uphold the 14th Amendment is “a mistake that will seriously affect the country’s future.”
What new immigrants might inflict on this country is the perpetual worry of immigration restrictionists — and yet history keeps proving them wrong. Alito’s family did; so did mine. Only in these United States can the progeny of people once portrayed as parasites and invaders side with those making the same argument about the latest batch of newcomers.
History will see Alito’s vote for what it is: a forsaking of the promise his family once fulfilled, to support the people who never wanted them here in the first place.
For decades, Californians have generally said immigrants, who make up more than a quarter of the state’s population and a third of its labor force, are beneficial to the state and its economy. But budget instability and concerns about rising costs are spilling into a debate over the controversial and expensive policy of allowing low-income immigrants without legal status to receive state-funded health coverage.
Now, Democrat Xavier Becerra and Republican Steve Hilton present a stark choice to voters in the race to be the next governor at a moment when public support for the state’s generous safety net is starting to fray.
Both frame the choice as an economic one.
Becerra, former secretary of Health and Human Services under President Biden, has said it would be “foolish” to exclude the poorest immigrants from routine care and push them into expensive emergency rooms on the taxpayer’s dime. Hilton, a conservative commentator backed by President Trump, has promised to eliminate their coverage and has echoed national Republicans who have skewered California’s expansions to bolster their claims of fraud and abuse in the Medicaid program.
With voters nationwide worried about inflation and the rising cost of living, some Californians might feel less inclined to provide full healthcare coverage to those lacking legal status. What the state does next could have profound implications for its healthcare system and sprawling economy.
Over the past decade, California lawmakers used state dollars to expand Medi-Cal, offering all low-income residents comprehensive coverage regardless of immigration status. But enrollment surpassed initial projections, as did the cost. Medi-Cal coverage of immigrants without legal status costs the state roughly $10 billion a year, according to California’s nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office, more than double the initial estimates.
California lawmakers and Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, who championed the program, have approved major rollbacks of benefits for those residents. They said the state can’t afford ballooning healthcare costs amid massive federal cuts from the GOP tax-and-spending law known as the One Big Beautiful Bill Act; the California Health and Human Services Agency projected up to 3.4 million Medi-Cal enrollees could lose coverage and the state could lose more than $30 billion a year in federal funding under the law, causing major disruptions in the safety net health program.Medi-Cal’s budget for fiscal year 2026-27 is $217 billion, and the program serves more than 14 million Californians.
Meanwhile, many legal U.S. residents and citizens have seen their health premium payments skyrocket this year after Congress let enhanced federal Affordable Care Act subsidies expire at the end of December.
As the state grappled with a deficit last year, a majority of likely voters in California said — for the first time in nearly a decade — they opposed providing health insurance to immigrants without legal status, according to a poll by the Public Policy Institute of California.
“The state faces major challenges, and healthcare is one of the major expenditures,” said Mark Baldassare, the institute’s survey director. “People have become more selective about how they want to see those limited healthcare dollars spent.”
Hilton, running on a platform of affordability and lowering taxes, has seized on the sentiment, casting health coverage for immigrants without legal status as deeply unfair and a direct threat to the state’s ability to help citizens.
“Stop taking money from California taxpayers who can barely afford their healthcare to give free healthcare to citizens of other countries who shouldn’t even be here,” Hilton said in a Facebook video the morning of the June 2 primary.
In campaign stump speeches, Hilton promised to use the savings to lower healthcare costs for other Californians without detailing how. Hilton did not respond to requests from KFF Health News for comment.
“Their messaging is very, very simple: It’s an us vs. them,” said Roger Salazar, a Democratic political consultant who represents a coalition of healthcare advocates who argue providing coverage to people who can’t afford it strengthens the workforce and, as a result, the economy. “It’s just a question of convincing the average voter that it’s much better economically.”
A son of immigrants, Becerra for decades pushed to extend safety net benefits in Congress and has made a similar pitch in his campaign for governor. He did not respond to requests for comment.
“Immigrants, whether documented or not, work hard. They pay taxes, and sometimes they get injured on the job or their children get sick,” Becerra said during a debate last month. “It would be foolish to tell a family that they don’t have access to the pediatrician or the family doc.”
Becerra, who could become California’s first elected Latino governor, objected last year when Newsom and legislative leaders decided to freeze Medi-Cal enrollment for adults without legal status, cut benefits, and impose monthly premiums.
“Stop treating coverage as a budget variable that expands in good years and contracts when revenue dips,” Becerra wrote last month in response to an Orange County Register candidate questionnaire. He has vowed to pursue new, steady revenue to fund basic services, such as by upping taxes on corporations and the wealthiest Californians.
In 2023, California was home to about 2.3 million people without legal status, representing roughly 8% of the state’s labor force, according to the Pew Research Center. And 1 in 5 California children live in a family that includes at least one member without legal status, according to the California Department of Education. Healthcare economists say giving people access to preventive healthcare saves taxpayers money in the long run by keeping the workforce healthy and relieving pressure on an overburdened system.
That, Baldassare said, wasn’t a hard argument to make during the COVID-19 pandemic, when immigrants were celebrated as essential workers and the link between individual well-being and public health was more obvious.
But Medi-Cal costs to cover roughly 1.4 million immigrants have ballooned, according to the latest estimates from the Department of Health Care Services. Because only some lawfully present immigrants are eligible for federal Medicaid benefits, states like California that cover other populations must do so exclusively with state funding.
California’s budget experts have warned that maintaining full Medi-Cal coverage for immigrants without seeking additional revenue would destabilize the state’s long-term fiscal outlook.
In a legislative hearing last year, Republican Assemblymember Carl DeMaio questioned whether California taxpayers would prioritize the expansions, saying he doubted “illegal immigrant healthcare in the general fund would be at the top of their list.”
After lawmakers approved the spending reductions, support for immigrant health coverage dropped, Baldassare said. Now lawmakers and Newsom are negotiating further cuts.
David Hayes-Bautista, who has spent his career studying the economic contributions of Latinos and immigrants, said Californians without legal status have higher labor force participation and tend to work in industries and occupations that don’t offer employer-based health insurance. As a result, many resort to Medi-Cal, saddling the state with the healthcare costs instead of employers.
“California, as a state, has the world’s fourth-largest GDP, which is true thanks to Latinos,” Hayes-Bautista, director of the Center for the Study of Latino Health and Culture at UCLA, said. Without contributions from Latinos, many without legal status, it drops to eighth place, about the size of Italy’s economy, he added.
Immigrant advocates hope to have a more vocal champion in Becerra, the favorite to become governor in a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans nearly 2 to 1.
“He will fight, he will push back, he will do all that he can,” said state Sen. María Elena Durazo, a former labor leader who has championed the immigrant healthcare expansions. “That’s the most we could expect.”
Mai-Duc writes for KFF Health News, anational newsroom that produces in-depth journalism about health issues and is one of the core operating programs at KFF — an independent source of health policy research, polling, and journalism.
The Dodgers’ decision to deny U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents access to Dodger Stadium wasn’t the way the team intended to first address the surge of federal immigration enforcement a year ago.
Pressed by religious, labor and community leaders to take a stand, the Dodgers had prepared a response to Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol raids that triggered widespread protests — only to shelve the announcement as the team went public with their refusal to let federal agents onto stadium grounds. A day later, on June 20, the Dodgers unveiled their plan, centered on $1 million “toward direct financial assistance for families of immigrants impacted by recent events in the region.”
In total, the Dodgers donated $1.1 million, representatives for California Community Foundation and Labor Community Services — the two nonprofits that received the funds — told The Times.
“The Dodgers have been in L.A. for 68 years,” said Joseph Tomás McKellar, executive director of PICO California. “They’re beloved among immigrant communities in a way that no other sports team is. That gives the Dodgers cultural and financial power in the region. We applaud what they did, but they could do even more by exercising leadership.”
PICO California, the state’s largest faith-based organizing network, was behind a petition delivered to the Dodgers, the contents of which were largely addressed by the team’s $1-million commitment. But as the last of the money flowed to immigrant families in need in late August, another petition circulated that demanded Dodgers owner Mark Walter sell his “company’s stake in ICE jails and deportation flights.”
Walter’s massive investment firm, Guggenheim Partners, owned more than a million shares of GEO Group, valued at nearly $12 million. By the end of 2025, Guggenheim’s interest in GEO Group had fallen to around 10,000 shares. And by the end of March of this year, Guggenheim no longer owned any shares of the prison company that also assisted in the deportation of immigrants, according to SEC filings reviewed by The Times.
Walter also faced criticism over the partnership announced last year between Palantir Technologies and TWG Global — of which Walter is chairman and chief executive officer. Palantir provides AI and analytics software to ICE, tools the American Civil Liberties Union said “form the backbone for ICE’s mass deportation regime.”
There are no indicators as to why Guggenheim Partners divested from GEO Group. The Dodgers declined comment. Guggenheim Partners did not respond to The Times’ request for comment. GEO Group referred questions to Guggenheim Partners.
In January, Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, or CHIRLA, filed a federal lawsuit against federal officials over the condition of the Adelanto ICE Processing Center in San Bernardino County, a facility operated by GEO Group. In the complaint, CHIRLA alleged “detained individuals face dangerous conditions and pervasive abuses — disease and illness are rampant, mold grows on the walls, and detained individuals are denied sufficient food, clean drinking water, proper medical care, and disability accommodations.”
Donald Trump’s reelection has been a major driver of profits for GEO Group. GEO Group founder, chairman and chief executive George Zoley said in a May earnings call the company was “awarded new or expanded contracts that represent up to approximately $520 million in new incremental annual revenues, which represents the largest amount of new business we have won in the single year in our company’s history.” Former GEO Group exec David Venturella is the acting director of ICE.
“It’s really good to know [of the Guggenheim divestment],” said Rabbi Susan Goldberg, a longtime immigrants rights activist and founder of Nefesh, a Jewish spiritual community in Echo Park. “We showed up so often at its [regional] headquarters in Culver City that they moved. We don’t know where they are located in the area now.”
The California Community Foundation received $1 million, which worked with Los Angeles city officials to distribute $1,000 in direct relief to 1,000 households impacted by the immigration raids. The money was distributed through cash cards, according to the foundation. The Dodgers’ gift amounts to a quarter of the $4 million the foundation has raised for its Los Angeles Neighbors Support Fund, $3.3 million of which has been “deployed to impacted communities with new investments continuing to roll out,” according to the nonprofit.
The Dodgers also donated $100,000 to Labor Community Services, a partner of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, that provided more than 4,000 families with food assistance with the team’s donation.
“The Dodgers’ generous donation has enabled us to reach and assist more families throughout Los Angeles County with dignity and compassion, providing critical food assistance at a time when it is needed most,” Labor Community Services Executive Director Norma López said in a statement to The Times.
A spokesperson for Labor Community Services said no other pro sports team outside the Dodgers made a similar donation to help impacted immigrant families.
“The Dodgers have a unique responsibility and they are an example of something we want to continue to see, especially as the World Cup and the Olympics come to L.A.,” said Carlos Martin Rodriguez, director of organizing for L.A. Voice, a multifaith coalition that organized several vigils and demonstrations when the raids were at their height. “I hope this wasn’t a singular moment, but the beginning of a movement.”
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is retreating from a plan to use warehouses to hold up to 10,000 people on a single site, jettisoning a key piece of former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s $38-billion plan to rapidly expand detention capacity this year.
The federal government, which was sued by Michigan and a Detroit suburb, informed a judge Monday that a warehouse purchased in Romulus will be sold. Plans also are unraveling in Social Circle, Ga., and the El Paso suburb of Socorro, local officials said.
The three cities are among 11 where the federal government spent a combined $1.074 billion on warehouses.
The New York Times first reported last week that federal immigration officials now plan to get rid of seven of the 11 warehouses — either giving them to other federal agencies or selling them outright.
DHS didn’t confirm the reports but said in a statement that it is “moving swiftly to utilize EXISTING detention space with our state and county partners.”
“Wildly foolhardy” is how Claire Trickler-McNulty, a former ICE official under the Obama, Trump and Biden administrations described the plans to convert the buildings into immigrant detention.
One issue was that Noem’s purchases were largely carried out of public view and angered communities that were caught by surprise. Some only learned about ICE’s ambitions after the agency bought or leased space for detainees.
After Noem was fired, her replacement, Markwayne Mullin, quickly paused the purchase of new warehouses.
Objections came from Republicans and Democrats alike
Some were opposed on moral grounds to ICE’s presence in their neighborhoods, while others questioned whether the facilities would be a drain on local resources, such as sewer and water systems.
Seven federal lawsuits were filed, and regulatory roadblocks created hassles elsewhere.
Meanwhile, questions about how much DHS paid for some warehouses triggered an internal audit. The agency shelled out double what the New Jersey warehouse was valued at in tax records and nearly five times more than the assessed value of the Social Circle warehouse.
Trickler-McNulty, the former ICE official, said ICE does have a few facilities that it owns that it inherited from its predecessor agency, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, but generally ICE has contracted out its detention needs.
“Facilities over 2,000 people just break down. It’s very hard to run a very big facility, to keep it staffed, to keep all of it moving,” she said.
Former head of plumbing business takes over for Noem
Mullin, who took over and expanded his family’s plumbing business before representing Oklahoma in the U.S House and Senate, acknowledged there had been issues at his confirmation hearing.
He noted that most municipalities don’t have the capacity in their infrastructure for waste and water.
Indeed the water issues were such a challenge that a federal lawsuit filed over the Salt Lake City warehouse, the costliest purchased at $145.4 million, said ICE officials told the mayor that they might need to truck water and sewage from the facility as an “interim solution.”
Plans begin to unravel
The New York Times story, which cited internal documents that the newspaper obtained, said the Salt Lake City warehouse is among those that federal immigration officials plans to hand off or sell. Also on the list is the Romulus warehouse, as well as one in New Jersey and two each in Georgia and Pennsylvania.
Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel said it would have been an “abomination” if the 249,000-square-foot Romulus warehouse was transformed into immigrant detention, as was planned when it was purchased for $34.7 million,
“The ICE warehouse proposal was every bit as ill-conceived as it was cruel and unnecessary, and I am relieved that this chapter is coming to a close,” Nessel, a Democrat, said.
Social Circle, Georgia, announced last week in a statement that it has received notification from U.S. Rep. Mike Collins, a Republican, that the Department of Homeland Security is no longer pursuing an ICE detention facility there.
Meanwhile, acting ICE Director David Venturella told officials in the El Paso area during a visit there earlier this month that the agency has changed its plans for three warehouses it purchased in nearby Socorro for $122 million, said Rep. Veronica Escobar, who was present for the visit.
Escobar, a Democrat who represents El Paso, said during a news conference that ICE no longer plans to detain up to 8,500 immigrants in the facilities as originally envisioned, and instead will convert the property into an ICE campus, she said. The site will include an unspecified smaller number of detainees but also ICE offices and training space, she said.
Frustrations persist as communities seek details
However, many of the communities remained frustrated, as they struggled to get information about possible sales.
In Pennsylvania, state and local officials said Tuesday that they hadn’t received any new information from DHS about two warehouses bought earlier this year by the department. Both are being held up by the state’s denial of permits over concerns that drinking water and sewer service are inadequate to handle thousands of inhabitants.
U.S. Rep. Dan Meuser, whose district includes both warehouses, said he met Friday with DHS personnel, but that the agency hadn’t made a decision whether to use them as detention centers or sell them.
In Georgia, the city manager in Oakwood, said Tuesday he is talking to his state congressional delegation, trying to confirm rumors that a warehouse there will be sold. “I have not heard anything yet,” B.R. White said.
Work appears to continue on other warehouses
In Maryland, where a judge extended a stoppage on transforming a sprawling warehouse into a processing facility for immigrants, ICE is currently collecting public comments about the environmental impacts of the facility. And an announcement earlier this month disclosed more details on plans for the facility, including six secure recreation yards.
Patrick Dattilio, the founder of Hagerstown Rapid Response, which formed in opposition to housing ICE detainees in the warehouse, said there has been little communication outside of the lawsuit. But he remains committed to keeping it from opening.
“It’s a big warehouse,” Dattilio said. “It’s not meant for people.”
Hollingsworth, Foley and Santana write for the Associated Press. AP writers Marc Levy and Ed White contributed to this report.
A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit filed by the Trump administration that sought to block what it called L.A.’s “illegal” sanctuary city law.
In a weekend ruling, U.S. District Judge Fernando M. Olguin granted the city’s motion to dismiss the complaint, which alleged that the city ordinance violates the intergovernmental immunity doctrine by regulating and discriminating against the federal government.
Olguin ruled that the government’s allegations were “insufficient to establish that the Ordinance violates the intergovernmental immunity doctrine,” but granted the administration permission to file an amended complaint by July 3.
“The Ordinance does not directly regulate the federal government,” Olguin said in his ruling. “Rather, it ‘controls the actions of [the City’s] own agents and agencies.’”
The White House and the Department of Justice did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Although the administration could refile its complaint, L.A.. City Atty. Hydee Feldstein Soto celebrated the dismissal as a legal victory.
“This order reinforces the well-established principle that local governments have the authority to decide how to use their personnel and resources,” Feldstein Soto said in a statement.
The lawsuit, filed by the Trump administration in California’s Central District federal court last June, said the country is “facing a crisis of illegal immigration” and that its efforts to address it “are hindered by Sanctuary Cities such as the City of Los Angeles, which refuse to cooperate or share information, even when requested, with federal immigration authorities.”
The lawsuit came as immigration agents descended on Southern California, arresting thousands of immigrants and prompting protests across the region.
“The situation became so dire that the Federal Government deployed the California National Guard and United States Marines to quell the chaos,” the lawsuit states. “A direct confrontation with federal immigration authorities was the inevitable outcome of the Sanctuary City law.”
The law was proposed in early 2023, long before Trump’s election, but it was finalized in the wake of his victory in November 2024.
Under the ordinance, city employees and city property may not be used to “investigate, cite, arrest, hold, transfer or detain any person” for the purpose of immigration enforcement. An exception is made for law enforcement investigating serious offenses.
The ordinance bars city employees from seeking out information about an individual’s citizenship or immigration status unless it is needed to provide a city service. They also must treat data or information that can be used to trace a person’s citizenship or immigration status as confidential.
“The goal of this ordinance, and of LAPD’s immigration-related policies … is to encourage victims of and witnesses to crime to feel safe coming forward to seek help from LAPD regardless of their immigration status,” Feldstein Soto said in her statement. “It does not obstruct or impede lawful federal immigration enforcement operations.”
The government in its original filing said that Trump campaigned and won the 2024 presidential election on a platform of deporting “millions of illegal immigrants.” By enacting a sanctuary city ordinance, the City Council sought to “thwart the will of the American people regarding deportations,” the lawsuit states.
“The Supremacy Clause prohibits the City of Los Angeles and its officials from singling out the Federal Government for adverse treatment — as the challenged law and policies do — thereby discriminating against the Federal Government,” the lawsuit says.
Trump’s Department of Justice contends that L.A.’s sanctuary city ordinance goes much further than similar laws in other jurisdictions by “seeking to undermine the Federal Government’s immigration enforcement efforts.”
MADISON, Wis. — A federal judge on Tuesday declined to overturn a Wisconsin judge’s obstruction of justice conviction for helping a man evade immigration officers who showed up at a courtroom looking to detain him.
The case against Hannah Dugan, who resigned from the Milwaukee County Circuit Court following her conviction, was an early test of how the courts would respond to President Trump’s sweeping immigration crackdown.
Trump allies branded Dugan as an activist judge, while her supporters said she was unfairly targeted.
U.S. District Judge Lynn Adelman postponed Dugan’s sentencing June 3 to consider arguments about whether he should overturn her conviction. But in his ruling Tuesday, Adelman said Dugan’s conviction would stand. He did not immediately set a sentencing date.
“The court’s decision is wrong,” Dugan’s legal defense team said in a statement.
Questions about a similar case in Virginia
Dugan’s attorney had argued that her conviction in helping Eduardo Flores-Ruiz leave the courthouse was invalid and should be overturned. He said that was necessary because a federal appeals court in April overturned a key Virginia immigration case that the judge and prosecutors had cited in Dugan’s case.
In the Virginia case, an immigrant who was in the country illegally was detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and later escaped. He was recaptured and indicted on a charge of obstructing a pending immigration proceeding.
The federal appeals court found that the ICE action did not constitute a “pending proceeding,” as is required under the federal obstruction law.
Dugan’s attorneys argue that she should not have been charged because there was no “pending proceeding” against the immigrant in her courtroom being sought by ICE agents, only a warrant filed for his arrest. The filing of a warrant does not constitute a “proceeding” under the law, Dugan’s attorneys argued.
Prosecutors countered that the facts in the Virginia case are different and don’t apply to Dugan’s. They also argued that other cases support Dugan’s conviction.
Adelman said the attempted arrest of Flores-Ruiz did count as a “pending proceeding,” in part because it was a planned and targeted operation rather than an arrest resulting from a random encounter.
“Defendant argues that ICE was acting as a law enforcement agency here,” Adelman wrote. “But this ignores the fact that, unlike, say, the FBI, ICE can issue its own warrants and adjudicate and effectuate a removal, as it did with Flores-Ruiz, without the involvement of a court. This makes a difference.”
Dugan faces 5 years in prison, but will likely get probation
Dugan, 67, faces up to five years in prison after a jury convicted her Dec. 19, 2025, but she is unlikely to be sentenced to time behind bars. Federal sentencing guidelines generally call for probation for defendants like her, who have no criminal history and are convicted of a nonviolent crime.
Dugan resigned from her position as a Milwaukee County circuit judge two weeks after her conviction amid threats of impeachment from Republican state lawmakers. She had been a judge for nine years.
The Trump administration brought the case against Dugan as the president pressed ahead with his sweeping immigration crackdown. Trump’s administration and his allies branded Dugan as an activist judge, while Dugan’s attorneys said she was being unfairly targeted and argued, unsuccessfully, that she was immune from being charged because she was a judge.
Dugan’s case marked the first time that a state judge in Wisconsin went to trial on charges of obstructing immigration agents. She was acquitted of concealing an individual to prevent arrest, which is considered a misdemeanor.
Dugan helped an immigrant wanted by ICE agents
On April 18, 2025, immigration officers went to the Milwaukee County courthouse after learning Flores-Ruiz had reentered the country illegally and was scheduled to appear before Dugan for a hearing in a state battery case.
Dugan confronted agents outside her courtroom and directed them to the chief judge’s office because she told them their administrative warrant wasn’t sufficient grounds to arrest Flores-Ruiz.
After the agents left, she led Flores-Ruiz and his attorney out a private jury door. Agents spotted Flores-Ruiz in the corridor, followed him outside and arrested him after a foot chase. A week later, FBI agents arrested Dugan in the courthouse, leading her outside in handcuffs.
WASHINGTON — A year after the Trump administration kicked off its aggressive immigration enforcement tour with military-style raids across greater Los Angeles, federal officials have veered toward a less flashy but broader strategy: making immigrants’ lives harder so they will leave.
The changes range in scale and scope, from disqualifying immigrants from certain jobs to indefinitely pausing the processing of visa applications. They target those lawfully present as well as the undocumented.
Since President Trump’s second term began, the administration has used executive orders and federal regulations to chip away at services or benefits, such as work permits and small business loans, that immigrants could obtain in the past.
Now, immigrants are finding that freedoms — the ones that once made the U.S. a desirable place to start over — are disappearing. Many are retreating back into the shadows as they fear previously routine tasks, such as traveling across states, filing taxes and seeking medical care.
“The priority is to force people to leave the country or not come, regardless of legal status or really any other criteria,” said David Bier, immigration studies director at the Libertarian think tank the Cato Institute. “They’re taking a sledgehammer to the system.”
Trump won the White House in part on his promise to clamp down on illegal immigration, but recent polling shows support for his agenda has waned, especially after immigration agents shot and killed two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis.
In a statement, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said Trump’s highest priority has always been the deportation of immigrants with criminal records. The Department of Homeland Security said Trump also prioritizes immigration that strengthens the country financially, socially and culturally.
President Trump displays the signed “Secure America Act” during a ceremony in the Oval Office on Wednesday. The act provides $70 billion for immigration enforcement and border-security agencies.
(Aaron Schwartz / CNP, Bloomberg)
The number of arrests by ICE agents has declined. On average, ICE arrested about 1,000 immigrants per day in early March, down from a peak average of just under 1,400 in mid-January, agency data show. And there are fewer detained immigrants — facilities across the country held about 60,000 detainees in April, compared to more than 70,000 in late January.
The downturns prompted some Trump loyalists to say the administration is failing to fulfill his signature promise, which is an assertion the administration rejects.
“ICE is NOT slowing down,” said Homeland Security spokesperson Lauren Bis. “Since Day One, DHS law enforcement has been delivering on President Trump’s promise to the American people to arrest and deport criminal illegal aliens.”
At a border security conference last month, Tom Homan, who leads border policy for the White House, suggested immigration agents would return to more muscular enforcement tactics.
“You ain’t seen s— yet,” he told the audience.
But along with focusing on deportations, the administration is deploying other tactics to deter illegal — and legal —immigration.
ICE agents confront protesters on June 8 as they gather outside the federal immigration center at Delaney Hall in Newark, New Jersey, where ICE is housing detained immigrants.
(Spencer Platt / Getty Images)
Curtailing visas
Last month, the Department of Homeland Security announced that “except in extraordinary circumstances,” immigrants seeking lawful permanent residency must leave the U.S. to complete the process. After a backlash, the administration defended the policy, saying it won’t prevent anyone who qualifies for a green card from getting one.
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency in charge of processing immigration benefits, has upped security screening since Trump took office. The agency says that’s to root out fraud, but critics say all it does is unnecessarily slow down a system that already vets applicants vigorously.
The administration indefinitely banned people from 75 countries from receiving immigrant visas, which allow people to move permanently to the U.S.
In a similar move, the government halted the processing of immigration applications for people from 39 countries and who are already in the U.S. On June 5, a federal judge struck down the policy in a scathing ruling that said the administration “justifies its actions with pretextual concerns of ‘national security’ that mask anti-immigrant sentiments.”
Children of Guatemalan origin, from left, Areimy, Mariela and Enrique, arrive at Miami International Airport on Dec. 4, 2025, as they prepare to leave the United States to reunite with their recently deported parents in Guatemala.
(Chandan Khanna / AFP via Getty Images)
The judge’s ruling may offer relief, but for many immigrants, the effects of the policy are devastating. Armin, a 42-year-old from Iran, said he has racked up more than $15,000 in debt since the pause took effect in December. Armin asked The Times not to fully identify for fear of jeopardizing his immigration case.
The nutritional scientist came to the U.S. in 2019 on a student visa and has a pending green card application under a provision that allows certain highly skilled immigrants to apply for permanent residency without needing an employer to sponsor them.
After receiving his PhD and completing a postdoctoral program, Armin was in between jobs when he received a research grant in November. But with the processing of his work authorization halted, the university that issued the grant said it couldn’t hire him as a research associate. In February, he was turned down for another job.
Armin said he is confused about why the administration won’t differentiate between legal immigrants and those who should be deported.
“I can’t believe it,” he said. “I’m doing research and my research has national interest benefits. You expect support from the government. Unfortunately they don’t differentiate. They don’t care about your resume.”
Bier said the visa policies affect half of all legal immigrants coming from abroad. He published a report in April about how Trump has cut legal immigration far more than illegal immigration, noting that the administration’s policies have led to big drops in visas for international students, high-skilled workers and refugees.
“The legal immigration system is being used as a means to carry out the mass deportation agenda,” he said.
Alessandro Negrete, who lived most of his life in the U.S. undocumented, crosses into Mexico after deciding to leave.
(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)
Encouraging self-deportation
More than 90,000 immigrants have been granted voluntary departure since the start of the Trump administration, according to federal immigration court data through April that was analyzed by TRAC, a data research organization. Voluntary departure avoids official deportation and can leave open the possibility of an immigrant returning to the U.S. legally.
Homan, who declined to be interviewed for this story, has said self-deportations were part of the administration’s immigration plan all along.
“We knew if we surged unlimited ICE resources in the interior, and we do these operations, that that will force those that are here illegally to leave on their own,” he recently told the Washington Examiner.
Halting work permits
In the past, asylum seekers and others with deportation protections have had the ability to seek permits to work legally in the U.S. But work is now an administration target.
One proposed regulation would prevent asylum seekers from working legally in the U.S. Another proposal, published Friday, would further restrict access to work permits for other immigrants.
Under a rule that took effect last month, asylum seekers pay an annual $102 fee within 30 days of receiving a notice from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. If the deadline is missed, their applications will be rejected — with no opportunity to appeal — and they could be placed in deportation proceedings. Those who apply for asylum with the agency have entered the U.S. legally, such as on a visa, and are not undocumented.
Asylum seekers rest at a Tijuana migrant shelter a day after President Trump began his second term in the White House.
(Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times)
Conchita Cruz, co-executive director of the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project, said many asylum applicants have not received notice that the fee is due.
Cruz said she believes the Trump administration is using these changes as an excuse to dismiss people’s asylum claims. While the president has the power to decide whether to offer or rescind humanitarian programs, such as Temporary Protected Status, the right to seek asylum is enshrined in law.
“We’re worried this is a pretext for people to fall out of the asylum system and fall out of the workforce,” she said.
The processing of work permits has already been slowed, leaving many immigrants who still qualify for employment authorization unable to work.
During a House Homeland Security Committee hearing last week, Rep. Lou Correa (D-Santa Ana) asked Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin to help him speed up the work permit renewals for two police officers who were recently fired by agencies in his district because their DACA status expired.
Mullin said he would help but that Congress ultimately must pass a permanent solution for DACA recipients.
“These are police officers on Main Street, sir,” Correa responded.
“Not all of them are,” Mullin said. “I’m not just going to wave a magic wand and fix them all.”
“You have that magic wand — that’s your job,” Correa said.
It wasn’t just Democrats complaining about slow processing. Rep. Gabe Evans (R-Colo.) similarly asked Mullin for help because many of his constituents — “farm workers, youth ministers, nurses, grocery store business managers” — who have lived and worked in the U.S. legally for decades are now having trouble renewing their visas.
Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin, left, and President Trump, center, walk to the motorcade after exiting Air Force One at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, on May 20.
(Kent Nishimura / AFP via Getty Images)
Calls for mass deportations
Mullin, who took the reins in March after Trump fired his predecessor, Kristi Noem, rolled back some of Noem’s policies, including telling agents to stop entering homes without judicial warrants and canceling some contracts she had initiated.
But the changes and the downturn in arrests have drawn criticism from some fervent Trump supporters.
“Trump’s legacy is tied up in this,” said Mike Howell, a former DHS attorney who founded a group called the Mass Deportation Coalition. “It’s going to be hard to tell a younger voter to get excited to show up when one of their top issues is mass deportation and, a year and a half in, it doesn’t appear it’s going full-steam ahead.”
Howell said enforcement at work sites is critical to scaling up arrests and deportations. That more such operations haven’t happened, he said, is a political decision to appease wealthy donors and special interest groups who don’t want to see their workers deported.
The architect of Trump’s immigration agenda is Stephen Miller, a top White House aid who has called for a “moratorium on immigration from third-world countries,” demanded 3,000 arrests per day and said that immigrants and their descendants “recreate the conditions, and the terrors, of their broken homelands.”
Royce Bernstein Murray, a former Homeland Security official who worked on immigration policy under the Biden administration, said the winding down of flashy enforcement surges has given the administration more time to “focus on tearing down the legal immigration system.”
“This is Stephen Miller’s sweet spot,” she said. “He was never in enforcement — he’s a policy guy. This is really an opportunity for him to make good on all he has planned for years.”
While ICE has, in recent months, returned to its more conventional targeted enforcement tactics, Homan has sought to make clear that mass deportations are still a goal.
“For the people out there saying ‘President Trump’s getting weak on mass deportation,’ you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” Homan said at the border expo.
On Monday, Homan told Fox News that he had just reviewed plans for an ICE operation that would surge agents to New York City.
June 5 (UPI) — The Treasury Department on Friday issued an advisory that financial institutions, including banks and casinos, to “be vigilant” against signs of unlawful employment of illegal immigrants.
The Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, called FinCEN, in the advisory calls on the institutions employ methods to detect schemes covering up the employment of people who are not authorized to work in the United States.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in a FinCEN press release that part of the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration includes “securing our financial system.”
“This administration will not allow illegal aliens to abuse financial institutions to steal billions of dollars from hardworking American taxpayers,” Bessent said.
In order for non-immigrants to work in the United States, employers are required to petition with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services for eligibility, before a prospective employee either applies to the State Department for a visa or enters the country through a port of entry, according to USCIS.
FinCEN said in the release that the hiring, concealing and exploiting of workers without visas can give employers advantages over other businesses, depress wages, facilitate identity theft and steal tax revenue from the United States.
The agencies additionally said that the hiring of these workers can also help fund and assist criminal enterprises that include drug trafficking and human trafficking.
The financial institutions are being asked to watch out for red flags of shell companies, identity theft, fraudulently used social security and worker identification numbers, shell companies and a raft of other detectable signs of fraud.
In addition to depository institutions such as banks, credit unions, money services businesses and securities and futures firms, FinCEN has aimed the advisory at casinos, the insurance industry, mortgage companies and brokers, and the precious metals and jewelry industries.
The Treasury Department said that more than $2.5 billion in suspicious activity reported by financial institutions was linked to payroll fraud schemes in 2025 alone, noting one multi-year scheme that cost the United States more than $38 million in tax revenue.
President Donald Trump discusses renovations to the Lincoln Reflecting Pool and makes an announcement on coal in the Oval Office at the White House on Thursday. Photo by Samuel Corum/UPI | License Photo
BOSTON — A federal judge on Friday struck down a Trump administration policy enacted after the shooting of two National Guard members that made it harder for immigrants from dozens of countries to stay and enter the U.S.
In a ruling harshly criticizing the administration, U.S. District Chief Judge John McConnell Jr. said the policy “threw the lives of countless immigrants living in the United States into indeterminate legal limbo,” and he accused the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services of ignoring the law.
“In enacting its latest immigration policies, USCIS: claims statutory and regulatory authority that it does not possess; makes decisions without the reasoned explanations that it must provide; acts without regard for the reliance interests of applicants that it must consider; and justifies its actions with pretextual concerns of ‘national security’ that mask anti-immigrant sentiments that it is forbidden from letting influence its decision-making,” he wrote. “In legal terms that means USCIS’s actions are contrary to law and arbitrary and capricious.”
A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The policies enacted after the National Guard shooting last year meant that immigrants from 39 African, Asian, Latin American and Middle Eastern countries have been “categorically barred” from receiving final decisions on, among other things, their asylum, work permit, green card and citizenship applications.
“This ruling reaffirms a basic principle: the federal government cannot shut down lawful immigration pathways or discriminate against people based on where they come from,” said Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward, which represented the plaintiffs in the case. “These unlawful policies caused enormous harm to families, workers, asylum-seekers, and communities across the country who were left in limbo, unable to work, access protections, or move forward with their lives.”
The policies apply to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which approves applications for immigrants to work and become citizens. The agency, which is within the Homeland Security Department, often grants asylum, but only for those already in the United States when they apply. Immigration judges grant asylum to those who are stopped at the border; the ruling does not affect them, and neither do the policies that sparked the lawsuit.
It is part of an ongoing effort by the administration to tighten U.S. entry standards for travel and immigration, in what critics say unfairly prevents travel for people from a broad range of countries. The administration suggested it would expand the restrictions after the arrest of an Afghan national suspect in the shooting of two National Guard troops over Thanksgiving weekend.
In its motion to dismiss, which the court denied, the government argued that Congress gave the executive branch broad authority over immigration policy, including “the entry of aliens into the United States as well as discretion within the statutory scheme to confer as well as withdraw various discretionary benefits.”
“This case rests on a remarkable premise: that a federal court should prevent an agency from issuing the very policy guidance that provides government personnel with the guardrails necessary to ensure consistent, non-arbitrary, and individualized decisionmaking consistent with federal law,” the government wrote in its brief.
Immigration groups celebrated the ruling.
“This ruling sets a powerful precedent that the administration cannot ignore the law as laid down by Congress and cannot arbitrarily bar immigration benefits on the basis of national origin by fiat,” said Jamal Abdi, president at the National Iranian American Council. “Fortunately, this is still a nation of laws, and those who uphold America’s values have recourse to challenge and push back on such discriminatory, arbitrary policies.”
Shawn VanDiver, a Navy veteran who heads a coalition that supports Afghan resettlement efforts called #AfghanEvac, said the ruling was a “significant victory for the rule of law and for thousands of Afghan allies and other immigrants who followed every requirement asked of them.”
“Just this week in Dallas and Fort Worth, we met people who feared losing jobs because delayed work permit renewals threatened their livelihoods, families who postponed education, travel, and homeownership because they did not know when their cases would be resolved, and future Americans who had expected to become citizens only to see their applications stall without explanation,” VanDiver said.
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected Florida’s long-shot attempt to sue California and Washington state over the issuance of commercial driver licenses to truckers who don’t speak English and are not authorized to be in the United States.
The case stems from a crash in Florida last year that killed three people. The driver, Harjinder Singh, is accused of making an illegal U-turn that caused the accident. Singh, who is from India, was carrying a valid commercial driver’s license from California and had earlier been granted one by Washington state.
Republican-led Florida has accused the Western states, led by Democrats, of openly defying immigration laws and asked the justices to rule that states lack the authority to issue CDLs to people who are not citizens or legal permanent residents.
The Supreme Court typically hears appeals of lower-court decisions, but it sometimes takes on what are known as original lawsuits in which states sue each other in the nation’s highest court.
Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr. dissented from Tuesday’s order, as they often do when the court rejects an original lawsuit, saying that the court has no choice but to hear such cases.
Separately, a federal appeals court has blocked a Trump administration proposal to impose new restrictions that would severely limit which immigrants can get commercial driver’s licenses to drive a semitrailer truck or bus.
WASHINGTON — Last June 16, armed immigration agents broke the locks to forcibly enter an Oxnard auto body shop. Juan Carlos Ramirez, a U.S. citizen, filmed as they arrested his father.
Then the agents pepper-sprayed Ramirez, slammed him onto the hoods of two vehicles, punched his face and kneed him in the side, according to a legal claim he later filed against the federal government.
Local attorney Vanessa Valdez denounced Ramirez’s arrest at an Oxnard City Council meeting the next day. The following month, Valdez found herself in a similar situation when agents raided the cannabis company Glass House Farms.
Despite identifying herself as a legal observer, she said, agents — or possibly National Guard — deployed tear gas and shot her six times with rubber bullets. She ran and then, unable to see, crawled on all fours to escape.
Vanessa Valdez, a Ventura-based attorney, has filed a claim against the federal government, alleging she was hit with tear gas and six rubber bullets during the Glass House Farms raid last July.
(Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
“They were just shooting aimlessly, it seemed like,” she said. “I thought maybe they had fractured a rib because that’s how painful it was. I couldn’t sleep face down for three weeks.”
Ramirez and Valdez are among the dozens of U.S. citizens and immigrants who are seeking financial compensation for damages they say they suffered during President Trump’s immigration dragnet. For Valdez, that includes the cost of hospital visits, lost wages as she recovered, anxiety medication and seeing a therapist.
After reviewing public accounts and legal documents and interviews with more than a dozen lawyers and immigrants, The Times found that claimants from across the country are seeking at least $260 million.
In a statement, Homeland Security spokesperson Lauren Bis wrote that ICE officers are held to the highest professional standard and receive regular training. Bis said that when agents are faced with danger, they use their training to protect themselves and the public.
“The pattern is NOT of law enforcement using force. It’s a pattern of violent agitators attacking our law enforcement,” she wrote.
Asked about Valdez, Bis said law enforcement deployed chemical irritants including pepper balls, but not rubber bullets, after agitators attempted to breach the perimeter at Glass House Farms. She said Ramirez refused officer’s commands and physically attacked them, so they pepper-sprayed him in self-defense.
Lawyers who are experts in tort claims said the bureaucratic process is lengthy and complex, and any damage award would likely be lower than what a claimant is seeking.
Still, seeking redress through the Federal Tort Claims Act is one of the few legal remedies available for those seeking financial compensation for deaths, physical injuries, emotional trauma, unlawful detention or property damage caused by federal employees.
The number of claims is expected to rise.
Federal agents, some wearing street clothes and some wearing uniforms and protective gear, form a defensive line against hundreds of protesters outside the Metropolitan Detention Center in Los Angeles on Jan. 30.
(Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)
In recent months, advocacy organizations have prepared practice advisories for attorneys interested in filing tort claims, and law groups across the country have begun holding training sessions on the process.
“There is no question in my mind that a lot of people — hundreds, thousands — have been harmed significantly and will be legally entitled to large damages payouts, which are going to come from the federal government,” said Jonathan Feinberg, a Philadelphia-based attorney.
Feinberg, who specializes in cases involving excessive use of force by police and abuses of detained immigrants, is president of the board of directors for the National Police Accountability Project, which focuses on law enforcement misconduct.
“We’re going to be talking about Minneapolis in 2030,” he added.
Before they can sue in federal court, individuals must first request a review by the agency that they say is responsible, such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement or Customs and Border Protection. The agency has six months to respond and deny the claim or offer a settlement.
If the agency doesn’t respond or denies a claim, the claimant can then file suit.
Unlike civil rights lawsuits, in which juries decide the verdict, in tort cases, judges make that call. Only the agencies are named as defendants, not individuals.
The Times reviewed the claims of nearly 80 people filed since the start of 2025. The vast majority remain in the review stage. Lawyers anticipate most will not be settled, unleashing a flood of lawsuits starting this summer.
Federal law since 1871 has established that people can sue state and local officials for violating their constitutional rights. But the law left out federal actors.
One hundred years later, the Supreme Court allowed for damages lawsuits against federal officials who violate a person’s civil rights, though decisions in recent years have substantially narrowed that ability.
Democrats in California are pursuing legislation that would make it easier for residents to seek financial damages for constitutional violations committed by federal agents. Similar laws were already enacted in Maryland, Illinois and Connecticut, though the Trump administration has sued to block the latter two.
But there is a different route — tort claims.
Tort cases can be difficult to win, in part because the government can claim a “discretionary function exception,” which shields the agency from liability when the situation involves a policy-driven judgment call.
“So that’s what a lot of plaintiff’s lawyers are really anxious about, that the Trump administration is going to say, ‘Well, we’ve got our own immigration policies. Of course a lot of people disagree with them, but the statute is designed to give us the right to make those policy judgments,’” said Benjamin Zipursky, a Fordham University law professor who studies torts.
“Now, if I were the plaintiff’s lawyer, I would say, ‘Yeah, but shooting somebody in cold blood because you’re just mad about their political views, and they’re not really threatening your life at all — that’s not a policy judgment,’” he said.
The law office of John Burris, an Oakland-based attorney who represented Rodney King after he was severely beaten by Los Angeles police officers in 1991, has taken on damages clients in Minnesota. He said he anticipates filing around 80 tort claims stemming from the immigration enforcement actions there.
A memorial for Renee Good at the location where she was fatally shot in Minneapolis.
(Eric Thayer / Los Angeles Times)
Burris said the experience has given him flashbacks to the period before King’s beating and the subsequent protests over police brutality, when officers felt they could act with impunity.
“There’s 1779798656 a more fundamental understanding that bad stuff does happen,” he said. “Everyday people are not as willing as they once were to just accept a police officer’s perspective.”
Public disapproval over immigration enforcement rose after federal immigration agents in Minneapolis shot and killed two 37-year-old U.S. citizens, Renee Good, a mother of three, and Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse, in separate incidents.
Other deaths took place before the Minnesota operation: 23-year-old Ruben Ray Martinez, who was killed by an ICE agent in Texas who fired repeatedly through the open window of his car; Keith Porter, 43, who was killed in Los Angeles by an off-duty ICE agent after shooting his gun into the air on New Year’s Eve; and Jaime Alanis Garcia, 57, who fell 30 feet from atop a greenhouse while fleeing agents at the Glass House Farms site in Camarillo.
Lawyers for the families of Good, Martinez and Garcia confirmed they are pursuing tort claims. Lawyers for the other families did not respond to requests for comment.
Additional highly publicized cases have also resulted in tort claims: Marimar Martinez, who was shot five times by a Border Patrol agent in Chicago; Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University student and Palestinian rights activist who spent 104 days detained after the administration labeled him a national security threat; Aliya Rahman, a disabled woman on her way to a doctor’s appointment in Minneapolis who blacked out at a detention facility after ICE agents detained her.
New claims appear to be filed weekly. Seventeen men, women and children who were detained in a military-style raid at a Chicago apartment complex filed claims this month seeking about $5 million each.
In many of the cases, Bis said, the claimants impeded or assaulted agents. Pretti’s death remains under investigation, she said.
Willy Wender Aceituno stands in the parking lot where he was arrested last November by ICE agents in Charlotte, N.C.
(Jesse Barber / For The Times)
Willy Wender Aceituno was already a plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit filed by the ACLU of North Carolina challenging the policy allowing warrantless immigration arrests after he was stopped twice in a span of minutes by immigration agents last November. In March, he also submitted a tort claim.
Aceituno is a Honduran-born U.S. citizen who voted for Trump. On the day he was arrested, a group of masked agents checked his identification and left. Aceituno then filmed as a second group surrounded his red truck.
“If you break it, you will pay for it,” he tells them in Spanish seconds before one agent smashes the window with a baton. “Why did you do that, sir?”
Aceituno suffered cuts when agents threw him to the ground, which was covered in shattered glass. They placed him in an SUV with other detainees and drove him around Charlotte, N.C., before releasing him, still bleeding, more than 2 miles from his vehicle.
The moment brought back Aceituno’s childhood memory of watching his father be arrested by the Honduran military and disappeared.
“I remember they broke down the door, entered, put him in handcuffs and threw him to the ground,” he said. “I thought, ‘It’s happening again.’ To see the other Hispanics in the car made it feel like this is racial persecution. This is about skin, not criminality.”
Bis, the Homeland Security spokesperson, said Aceituno acted erratically, escalated the situation and refused to comply with officers’ commands.
Lawyers said many people, especially immigrants, who have viable claims have chosen not to pursue them out of fear of being targeted for deportation. Some were deported before they could sue.
“Even now, our clients wake up some days thinking, ‘What am I doing suing the federal government?’” said Iván Espinoza-Madrigal, executive director of the Massachusetts-based Lawyers for Civil Rights. “You have to have a lot of courage to be able to stand up against an administration that has put a bull’s-eye on you and that has targeted you based on your identity.”
Others have turned to mutual aid or online fundraisers to pay for medical bills or to repair property damage. On the website GoFundMe, donation campaigns describe shattered car windows, broken limbs, head trauma and mounting bills.
Some damage can’t be fully recompensated, Espinoza-Madrigal added.
Members of the Haitian community hold signs in support for the extension of Temporary Protected Status during a rally last month in Miami.
(Carl Juste / Miami Herald / Getty Images)
One of the organization’s clients is Jose Pineda, a Salvadoran man with Temporary Protected Status. A year ago, Pineda was stopped by ICE officers on his way to work in East Boston as a landscaper. They wouldn’t accept his Social Security and work authorization cards as proof enough that he was not deportable, and detained him without explanation, according to his tort claim.
So Pineda spent nearly two days in a holding cell at the ICE Boston Field Office with around 50 other people. He couldn’t sit or sleep and received minimal water and food.
Bis said agents “briefly questioned” Pineda because he matched the description of the subject of an operation, and that he was released after being identified.
When he was released, the claim alleges, his documents were returned but $600 in cash that he was saving to pay rent was not. The incident left him with frequent headaches, anxiety and memory loss, and exacerbated his gastritis. His absence from work resulted in a demotion from lead foreman to an assistant role.
“Whenever I drive, if someone stays behind me for three, four or five minutes, I start to imagine that it’s them again,” he said in an interview.
Pineda’s arrest also caused recurring nightmares that leave him shouting and thrashing around in bed. Out of fear that he could inadvertently harm his wife, they now sleep in separate beds.
