immigration judge

NASHVILLE — A federal judge in Tennessee on Monday warned of possible sanctions against top Trump administration officials if they continue to make inflammatory statements about Kilmar Abrego Garcia that could prejudice his coming trial.

U.S. District Judge Waverly Crenshaw filed an order late on Monday instructing local prosecutors in Nashville to provide a copy of his opinion to all Justice Department and Department of Homeland Security employees, including Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.

“Government employees have made extrajudicial statements that are troubling, especially where many of them are exaggerated if not simply inaccurate,” Crenshaw writes.

He lists a number of examples of prohibited statements as outlined in the local rules for the U.S. District Court of Middle Tennessee. They include any statements about the “character, credibility, reputation, or criminal record of a party” and “any opinion as to the accused’s guilt or innocence.”

“DOJ and DHS employees who fail to comply with the requirement to refrain from making any statement that ‘will have a substantial likelihood of materially prejudicing’ this criminal prosecution may be subject to sanctions,” his order reads.

Earlier this year, Abrego Garcia’s mistaken deportation to El Salvador, where he was held in a notoriously brutal prison despite having no criminal record, helped galvanize opposition to President Trump’s immigration crackdown. Facing mounting public pressure and a court order, the Trump administration brought him back to the U.S. in June, but only after issuing an arrest warrant on human smuggling charges in Tennessee. Abrego Garcia has pleaded not guilty to those charges and asked Crenshaw to dismiss them.

Meanwhile, Trump administration officials have waged a relentless public relations campaign against Abrego Garcia, repeatedly referring to him as a member of the MS-13 gang and even implicating him in a murder. Crenshaw’s opinion cites statements from several top officials, including Bondi and Noem, as potentially damaging to Abrego Garcia’s right to a fair trial. He also admonishes Abrego Garcia’s defense attorneys for publicly disclosing details of plea agreement negotiations.

Abrego Garcia has an American wife and child and has lived in Maryland for years, but he immigrated to the U.S. illegally from El Salvador as a teenager. In 2019, an immigration judge granted him protection from being deported back to his home country, finding he had a well-founded fear of violence there from a gang that targeted his family.

Since his return to the U.S. in June, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has announced plans to deport him to a series of African countries, most recently Liberia.

Loller writes for the Associated Press.

WASHINGTON — Late last month, an immigrant seeking asylum in the U.S. came across social media posts urging her to pay a new fee imposed by the Trump administration before Oct. 1, or else risk her case being dismissed.

Paula, a 40-year-old Los Angeles-area immigrant from Mexico, whose full name The Times is withholding because she fears retribution, applied for asylum in 2021 and her case is now on appeal.

But when Paula tried to pay the $100 annual fee, she couldn’t find an option on the immigration court’s website that accepted fees for pending asylum cases. Afraid of deportation — and with just five hours before the payment deadline — she selected the closest approximation she could find, $110 for an appeal filed before July 7.

She knew it was likely incorrect. Still, she felt it was better to pay for something, rather than nothing at all, as a show of good faith. Unable to come up with the money on such short notice, Paula, who works in a warehouse repairing purses, paid the fee with a credit card.

“I hope that money isn’t wasted,” she said.

That remains unclear because of confusion and misinformation surrounding the rollout of a host of new fees or fee increases for a variety of immigration services. The fees are part of the sweeping budget bill President Trump signed into law in July.

Paula was one of thousands of asylum seekers across the country who panicked after seeing messages on social media urging them to pay the new fee before the start of the new fiscal year on Oct. 1.

But government messaging about the fees has sometimes been chaotic and contradictory, immigration attorneys say. Some asylum seekers have received notice about the fees, while others have not. Misinformation surged as immigrants scrambled to figure out whether, and how, to pay.

Advocates worry the confusion serves as a way for immigration officials to dismiss more asylum cases, which would render the applicants deportable.

The fees vary. For those seeking asylum, there is a $100 fee for new applications, as well as a yearly fee of $100 for pending applications. The fee for an initial work permit is $550 and work permit renewals can be as much as $795.

Amy Grenier, associate director of government relations at the American Immigration Lawyers Assn., said that not having a clear way to pay a fee might seem like a small government misstep, but the legal consequences are substantial.

For new asylum applications, she said, some immigration judges set a payment deadline of Sept. 30, even though the Executive Office for Immigration Review only updated the payment portal in the last week of September.

“The lack of coherent guidance and structure to pay the fee only compounded the inefficiency of our immigration courts,” Grenier said. “There are very real consequences for asylum-seekers navigating this completely unnecessary bureaucratic mess.”

Two agencies collect the asylum fees: U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), under the Department of Homeland Security, and the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), under the Department of Justice, which operates immigration courts.

Both agencies initially released different instructions regarding the fees, and only USCIS has provided an avenue for payment.

The departments of Homeland Security and Justice didn’t respond to a request for comment. The White House deferred to USCIS.

USCIS spokesman Matthew J. Tragesser said the asylum fee is being implemented consistent with the law.

“The real losers in this are the unscrupulous and incompetent immigration attorneys who exploit their clients and bog down the system with baseless asylum claims,” he said.

The Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project (ASAP), a national membership organization, sued the Trump administration earlier this month after thousands of members shared their confusion over the new fees, arguing that the federal agencies involved “threaten to deprive asylum seekers of full and fair consideration of their claims.”

The organization also argued the fees shouldn’t apply to people whose cases were pending before Trump signed the budget package into law.

In a U.S. district court filing Monday, Justice Department lawyers defended the fees, saying, “Congress made clear that these new asylum fees were long overdue and necessary to recover the growing costs of adjudicating the millions of pending asylum applications.”

Some of the confusion resulted from contradictory information.

A notice by USCIS in the July 22 Federal Register confused immigrants and legal practitioners alike because of a reference to Sept. 30. Anyone who had applied for asylum as of Oct. 1, 2024, and whose application was still pending by Sept. 30, was instructed to pay a fee. Some thought the notice meant that Sept. 30 was the deadline to pay the yearly asylum fee.

By this month, USCIS clarified on its website that it will “issue personal notices” alerting asylum applicants when their annual fee is due, how to pay it and the consequences for failing to do so.

The agency created a payment portal and began sending out notices Oct. 1, instructing recipients to pay within 30 days.

But many asylum seekers are still waiting to be notified by USCIS, according to ASAP, the advocacy organization. Some have received texts or physical mail telling them to check their USCIS account, while others have resorted to checking their accounts daily.

Meanwhile the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR) didn’t add a mechanism for paying the $100 fee for pending asylum cases — the one Paula hoped to pay — until Thursday.

In its Oct. 3 complaint, lawyers for ASAP wrote: “Troublingly, ASAP has received reports that some immigration judges at EOIR are already requiring applicants to have paid the annual asylum fee, and in at least one case even rejected an asylum application and ordered an asylum seeker removed for non-payment of the annual asylum fee, despite the agency providing no way to pay this fee.”

An immigration lawyer in San Diego, who asked not to be named out of fear of retribution, said an immigration judge denied his client’s asylum petition because the client had not paid the new fee, even though there was no way to pay it.

The judge issued an order, which was shared with The Times, that read, “Despite this mandatory requirement, to date the respondents have not filed proof of payment for the annual asylum fee.”

The lawyer called the decision a due process violation. He said he now plans to appeal to the Board of Immigration Appeals, though another fee increase under Trump’s spending package raised that cost from $110 to $1,010. He is litigating the case pro bono.

Justice Department lawyers said Monday that EOIR had eliminated the initial inconsistency by revising its position to reflect that of USCIS and will soon send out official notices to applicants, giving them 30 days to make the payment.

“There was no unreasonable delay here in EOIR’s implementation,” the filing said. “…The record shows several steps were required to finalize EOIR’s process, including coordination with USCIS. Regardless, Plaintiff’s request is now moot.”

Immigrants like Paula, who is a member of ASAP, recently got some reassurance. In a court declaration, EOIR Director Daren Margolin wrote that for anyone who made anticipatory or advance payments for the annual asylum fee, “those payments will be applied to the alien’s owed fees, as appropriate.”

SEATTLE — Ramón Rodriguez Vazquez was a farmworker for 16 years in southeast Washington state, where he and his wife of 40 years raised four children and 10 grandchildren. The 62-year-old was a part of a tight-knit community and never committed a crime.

On Feb. 5, immigration officers who came to his house looking for someone else took him into custody. He was denied bond, despite letters of support from friends, family, his employer and a physician who said the family needed him.

He was sent to a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center in Tacoma, Wash., where his health rapidly declined in part because he was not always provided with his prescription medication for several medical conditions, including high blood pressure. Then there was the emotional toll of being unable to care for his family or sick granddaughter. Overwhelmed by it all, he finally gave up.

At an appearance with an immigration judge, he asked to leave without a formal deportation mark on his record. The judge granted his request and he moved back to Mexico, alone.

His case is an exemplar of the impact of the Trump administration’s aggressive efforts to deport millions of migrants on an accelerated timetable, casting aside years of procedure and legal process in favor of expedient results.

Similar dramas are playing out at immigration courts across the country, accelerating since early July, when ICE began opposing bond for anyone detained regardless of their circumstances.

“He was the head of the house, everything — the one who took care of everything,” said Gloria Guizar, 58, Rodriguez’s wife. “Being separated from the family has been so hard. Even though our kids are grown, and we’ve got grandkids, everybody misses him.”

Leaving the country was unthinkable before he was held in a jail cell. The deportation process broke him.

‘Self deport or we will deport you’

It is impossible to know how many people left the U.S. voluntarily since President Trump took office in January because many leave without telling authorities. But Trump and his allies are counting on “self-deportation,” the idea that life can be made unbearable enough to make people leave voluntarily.

The Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review, which oversees immigration courts, said judges granted “voluntary departure” in 15,241 cases in the 12-month period that ended Sept. 30, allowing them to leave without a formal deportation mark on their record or bar to re-entry. That compares with 8,663 voluntary departures for the previous fiscal year.

ICE said it carried out 319,980 deportations from Oct. 1, 2024 to Sept. 20. Customs and Border Protection declined to disclose its number and directed the question to the Department of Homeland Security.

Secretary Kristi Noem said in August that 1.6 million people have left the country voluntarily or involuntarily since Trump took office. The department cited a study by the Center for Immigration Studies, a group that advocates for immigration restrictions.

Michelle Mittelstadt, spokesperson for the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, said 1.6 million is an over-inflated number that misuses the Census Bureau data.

The administration is offering $1,000 to people who leave voluntarily using the CBP Home app. For those who don’t, there is a looming threat of being sent to a third country like Eswatini, Rwanda, South Sudan or Uganda,.

Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said the voluntary departures show that the administration’s strategy is working, and is keeping the country safe.

“Ramped-up immigration enforcement targeting the worst of the worst is removing more and more criminal illegal aliens off our streets every day and is sending a clear message to anyone else in this country illegally: Self-deport or we will arrest and deport you,” she said in a statement sent to The Associated Press.

“They treat her like a criminal”

A Colombian woman dropped her asylum claim at a June appearance in a Seattle immigration court, even though she was not in custody.

“Your lawyer says you no longer wish to proceed with your asylum application,” the judge said. “Has anyone offered you money to do this?” he asked. “No, sir,” she replied. Her request was granted.

Her U.S. citizen girlfriend of two years, Arleene Adrono, said she planned to leave the country as well.

“They treat her like a criminal. She’s not a criminal,” Adrono said. “I don’t want to live in a country that does this to people.”

At an immigration court inside the Tacoma detention center, where posters encourage migrants to leave voluntarily or be forcibly deported, a Venezuelan man told Judge Theresa Scala in August that he wanted to leave. The judge granted voluntary departure.

The judge asked another man if he wanted more time to find a lawyer and if he was afraid to return to Mexico. “I want to leave the country,” the man responded.

“The court finds you’ve given up all forms of relief,” Scala said. “You must comply with the government efforts to remove you.”

“His absence has been deeply felt”

Ramón Rodriguez crossed the U.S. border in 2009. His eight siblings who are U.S. citizens lived in California, but he settled Washington state. Grandview, population 11,000, is an agricultural town that grows apples, cherries, wine grapes, asparagus and other fruit and vegetables.

Rodriguez began working for AG Management in 2014. His tax records show he made $13,406 that first year and by 2024, earned $46,599 and paid $4,447 in taxes.

“During his time with us, he has been an essential part of our team, demonstrating dedication, reliability, and a strong work ethic,” his boss wrote in a letter urging a judge to release him from custody. “His skills in harvesting, planting, irrigation, and equipment operation have contributed significantly to our operations, and his absence has been deeply felt.”

His granddaughter suffers from a heart problem, has undergone two surgeries and needs a third. Her mother doesn’t drive so Rodriguez transported the girl to Spokane for care. The child’s pediatrician wrote a letter to the immigration judge encouraging his release, saying without his help, the girl might not get the medical care she needs.

The judge denied his bond request in March. Rodriguez appealed and became the lead plaintiff in a federal lawsuit that sought to allow detained immigrants to request and receive bond.

On September 30, a federal judge ruled that denying bond hearings for migrants is unlawful. But Rodriguez won’t benefit from the ruling. He’s gone now and is unlikely to come back.

Bellisle writes for the Associated Press. AP reporter Cedar Attanasio contributed to this story.