The US is set to shut down the federal migrant detention centre known as ‘Alligator Alcatraz,’ with detainees expected to be transferred by early June. It comes after allegations of abuse, including migrant disappearances, and restricted medical access.
Published On 27 May 202627 May 2026
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PHOENIX — As Sandra Ramirez watched footage of immigration officers cracking down on migrants over the past year, she knew her 2024 vote for Donald Trump was a mistake.
“There are a lot of people who are being harassed for the color of their skin, and that’s not right,” said Ramirez, who broke from her Democrat-voting family to cast a ballot for Trump.
“I’ll never go Republican again,” she said.
Trump made inroads with Latino voters like Ramirez during the 2024 elections, earning support that helped propel him to a second term in the White House.
As Republicans gear up for midterms this fall and look ahead to presidential elections in 2028, all eyes are on whether they can hold on to that key support or whether the administration’s sweeping immigration crackdown and an economy beset by high prices may drive Latino voters away.
In a sign of looming danger, recent polling from the Pew Research Center shows support for Trump falling fast among that electorate.
Latino voters have historically been largely aligned with the Democratic Party but during the 2024 election, they shifted significantly toward Trump. A majority still supported Democrat Kamala Harris for president, but Trump made big gains: 43% of Latino voters nationally voted for him, compared with 35% in the 2020 presidential election, a change attributed in part to their concerns about the economy.
Trump returned to office pledging to crack down on immigration, a promise that prompted arrest sweeps, often against Latino migrants, in homes, workplaces and schools, among others. According to an AP-NORC poll, more than half of Latino adults report knowing someone impacted by the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration enforcement.
More than a year into Trump’s second term, polling suggests a significant drop in support for the president among Latinos who voted for him in 2024, although a majority still supports him.
According to a Pew Research Center poll conducted in April, support for the president fell among non-Latino voters from 95% to 79% between February of last year and April of 2026. But among Latino voters who cast their ballot for Trump, the drop-off was more dramatic: 66% approved of his job performance in April compared with 93% at the beginning of his second term.
That national drop could prove crucial in a tight election in swing counties like Maricopa, the largest battleground county in the nation, which encompasses Phoenix and its suburbs. A third of Maricopa County residents are Latino, and one in four of them is an immigrant, according to the Latino Data Hub at UCLA.
Arizona, which also saw a slight increase in Latino support for Trump in 2024, has been a flashpoint in the immigration debate for years. Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio conducted high-profile raids in Latino communities and, later, the state saw large influxes of migrants during the Biden administration.
On a warm afternoon in the predominantly Latino neighborhood of south Phoenix, a vendor at a street fair sold shirts imprinted with phrases like “Lowriders Sunday” while car club members polished their Chevrolets. The parking lot of the nearby Catholic church was full of parishioners attending Spanish-language Sunday Mass.
Albert Rodriguez, a Phoenix tattoo artist, said he once supported Trump. But then he saw how the administration was carrying out enforcement operations in Chicago, Minneapolis and Los Angeles.
He said the president promised to go after immigrants who were criminals, but instead Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have been “hitting the paleta man,” referring to ordinary people trying to make a living from selling frozen treats.
“Big time, I regret it,” Rodriguez said of his 2024 vote for Trump.
Phoenix resident Ronnie Martinez, an Army veteran, backs Trump’s effort to stem crossings at the southern border.
“The border is only a hop, skip and a jump to our south. And I don’t want illegal alien criminals coming from Guatemala, Venezuela, Central America,” he said.
He didn’t like some of the images he’d seen of ICE arresting people in front of their children. But he was also sympathetic to ICE officers, who he said were doing the best they could in difficult situations, and he blamed Democratic officials who weren’t cooperating with immigration enforcement. He also cited economic initiatives as a reason for his continued support for the president, including the removal of taxes on tips and overtime.
Guadalupe Alaffa, another Phoenix resident, blamed President Biden’s policies for prompting Trump’s immigration crackdown.
“He left that damn border wide open,” said Alaffa.
The growing influence of Latino voters is one of several factors that have eroded the GOP’s decades-long dominance in Arizona, putting the state at the center of congressional and presidential elections. Both of Arizona’s senators are now Democrats, along with the top three state officials.
Winning back some of the Latinos who shifted to Trump will be crucial to the reelection prospects of Gov. Katie Hobbs, Secretary of State Adrian Fontes and Atty. Gen. Kris Mayes, all Democrats first elected in 2022.
Democrats in Maricopa County have benefited from more than a decade of political organizing among Latinos mobilizing against hard-line immigration enforcement. The Republican-controlled Legislature in 2010 passed a state law known as SB1070, which required police to check the immigration status of anyone they suspected of being in the country illegally.
Around the same time, Arpaio was building a national profile on the right with immigration sweeps in largely Latino neighborhoods.
Some activists see the nationwide crackdown on immigrants as an extension of what Latinos in Arizona endured under Arpaio.
“We were the lab where they implemented a lot of this with Sheriff Joe and now it’s all over the United States,” said Salvador Reza, a longtime activist in Phoenix who advocates for the rights of day laborers.
For more than two decades, Arpaio was repeatedly elected while his department faced accusations of racially profiling Latino drivers and conducting sweeps in Latino neighborhoods and day labor areas. Deputies often stopped residents for traffic violations and turned noncitizens over to ICE, according to rights groups.
In 2013, a federal judge ruled his office had illegally profiled and detained Latinos, and a 2011 Justice Department report found widespread discrimination. After losing reelection in 2016, Arpaio was convicted of criminal contempt for defying court orders. He was later pardoned by Trump.
The GOP is at risk of losing some of the Latinos that Trump won over, said former Republican Gov. Jan Brewer, who signed the controversial 2010 bill. She cited economic concerns as a possible reason for the drop in support.
“With the inflation and the cost of living and the gasoline and the wars, I don’t know if they can afford to be a Trump Republican,” Brewer said.
Earl Wilcox, a longtime activist and restaurant owner in Phoenix, said between affordability issues and immigration enforcement, he believes Latino support for Trump is waning. Wilcox’s restaurant hosted Biden in 2024 when he launched an initiative meant to rally Latino support for the Democratic ticket.
“I don’t think the Republican Party will have the support it did the second time around,” Wilcox said, “and I think it started with the raids.”
Santana writes for the Associated Press. AP writers Jonathan J. Cooper and Amelia Thomson DeVeaux contributed to this report.
DAKAR, Senegal — It’s an existence that Congo’s president has described as “living the Congolese dream.” For the 15 Latin Americans deported to the African nation under the Trump administration’s widely criticized crackdown on migrants, it feels more like a nightmare.
The Associated Press spoke with one, a 29-year old Colombian woman who confirmed what people deported to other African nations have described: A shackled deportation despite a U.S. immigration judge’s protection order. Confinement in a hotel with supervised outings.
And an impossible choice: Return to a home country with the risk of persecution or stay in Congo, a country the Colombian woman had never heard of before she arrived.
“They treat us like we’re children,” she said as their three-month Congolese visas near an end, with no plan in sight.
“What would one do in a completely unknown place, without a place to live and without knowing what to do?” she added, speaking on condition of anonymity for fear of reprisals.
It was not immediately clear what a new U.S. court ruling, saying the U.S. likely broke the law by deporting a fellow Colombian to Congo, will mean for her.
In her interview from the hotel in Congo’s capital, Kinshasa, where she and other deportees are held, the woman gave new details about the central role that a United Nations-affiliated body, the International Organization for Migration, is playing.
She said deportees are allowed to leave the hotel about once a week and only accompanied by IOM staff. When they shop at a supermarket or withdraw money they are quickly ushered back to their vehicle, with IOM staff never out of sight.
“They choose where we go and what we buy,” she said.
At the hotel, she said, IOM staff have organized activities like painting, music and volleyball but many deportees have stopped participating, bored with the routine. She goes for meals and remains in her room otherwise, making late-night calls to her 10-year-old daughter in Colombia and worrying when she will see her again.
Most striking is the role IOM staff are playing in presenting deportees with their possible fates.
They have offered the woman two paths: Return to Colombia, where a U.S. judge has ruled she cannot safely be sent back, while receiving IOM “protection and assistance,” or remain in Congo with no support.
“They are given impossible choices,” said Alma David, the woman’s U.S.-based attorney. “By deporting them to a third country with no opportunity to contest being sent there, the U.S. not only violated their due process rights but our own immigration laws and our obligations under international treaties.”
Congo is one of at least eight African countries that have made deals with the Trump administration to facilitate deportations of third-country nationals, which legal experts say are effectively a legal loophole for the U.S. Most deportees had received legal orders of protection from U.S. judges shielding them against being returned to their home countries, lawyers said.
The AP has interviewed others sent to African nations who were forced to make risky decisions, such as a gay Moroccan asylum-seeker deported to Cameroon, a country where homosexuality is illegal.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security did not respond to questions about the Colombian woman’s case, but it has asserted that third-country deportation agreements “ensure due process under the U.S. Constitution.” The Trump administration says the agreements are needed to “remove criminal illegal aliens” whose country of origin will not take them back.
The details of Congo’s deal with the Trump administration are not clear. Other countries have received millions of dollars to participate.
Earlier this month, Congolese President Félix Tshisekedi called the agreement an “act of goodwill between partners,” with no financial compensation. It comes as Washington has ramped up pressure on neighboring Rwanda over its support for the M23 rebel group that has seized cities in eastern Congo — a dynamic some analysts say may explain Kinshasa’s willingness to take deportees.
“We agreed to do so as a friendly gesture, simply because it was what the Americans wanted,” Tshisekedi said, adding that the migrants are free to leave Congo at any time.
“We understand that psychologically they must be unsettled because, at first, they dreamed of living the American dream, and now they are living the Congolese dream — in a country they probably did not know and may never even have noticed on a map of the world,” Tshisekedi said.
Congolese human rights groups have called it a violation of international refugee law. The Congo-based Institute for Human Rights Research described the situation as “arbitrary detention by proxy for the United States.”
The current U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement policy says if a government has made blanket diplomatic assurances that it won’t persecute people who are deported, no further process is required for deportation, not even giving deportees notice where they are being sent, said David, the attorney.
“When they told me they were going to deport me, I almost fainted,” the Colombian woman said. She was told about Congo the day before the flight.
She said she left Colombia in 2024, following threats from armed groups and abuse by a former partner who worked for the government.
She went to Mexico, where she waited for a border appointment booked with the U.S. government. When she presented herself at an Arizona port of entry in September 2024, immigration officials determined she had a credible fear of persecution, clearing her to apply for asylum, but kept her in ICE detention.
“You spend a year and a half locked up, living the same day over and over again. You see fights, punishments where people are locked in cells for many hours. You lose your privacy even to use the bathroom,” she said.
Some officers made racist remarks. “They made derogatory comments toward us as migrants, shouted at us all the time and sometimes denied basic things like showers as punishment,” she said.
In May 2025, a federal judge granted her protection under the U.N. Convention Against Torture, ruling she could not be safely returned to Colombia, according to court documents seen by the AP.
She filed a habeas corpus petition and won her release in February. She moved to Texas and was required to wear a GPS monitoring device, but at her first check-in appointment with ICE, she was detained again.
“All they told me was that I was under detention, as they had found a third country for me,” she said.
Less than three weeks later, she was put on a plane to Congo. She and the other deportees arrived on April 17 after a nearly 24-hour charter flight during which their hands and feet were restrained.
Now they stay at a hotel near Kinshasa’s airport, in tidy white bungalows. Congo’s government covers the cost, the IOM said. It was not clear whether that would last after the deportees’ visas run out.
The hotel gates are locked according to one of the deportees lawyers. The Colombian woman also said security personnel do not let them leave on their own.
They were told they could apply for asylum, an option no one has chosen. “I don’t feel safe in Congo,” the woman said.
An IOM spokesperson said the organization has provided her with humanitarian assistance based on an assessment of her vulnerability. It includes “protection interventions, referrals, rights safeguarding and promotion of migrants’ overall well-being,” with no details.
The IOM also may offer “assisted voluntary return” — covering documents, flights, transit and temporary housing on arrival — with migrants’ consent.
The IOM said it plays no role in determining who is deported and reserves the right to withdraw its assistance for deportees if “minimum protection standards” aren’t met.
The Colombian woman remains in limbo, anxious. She said the food “has made us very sick,” with stomach ailments ongoing.
Local languages, like French and Lingala, are as foreign as her surroundings.
“The worst part is having to go through all of that without having committed any crime, simply for going to another country to ask for safety and protection.”
Banchereau writes for the Associated Press.
NEW YORK — A federal immigration court in Lower Manhattan has come to represent the Trump administration’s deportation campaign in New York City, with agents carrying out chaotic and sometimes violent arrests in the hallway as migrants leave hearings.
Now the court is serving as a front in a different kind of battle: one of the city’s most closely watched congressional races.
In the Democratic primary between incumbent U.S. Rep. Dan Goldman and former city Comptroller Brad Lander — for a district so solidly blue that the June primary is considered its deciding election — both candidates have made the Trump administration’s treatment of migrants at 26 Federal Plaza a feature of their campaigns, but with decidedly different approaches.
Goldman — an heir to the Levi Strauss denim fortune and former prosecutor who was lead counsel for President Trump’s first impeachment — has approached the topic with a lawyerly bent that leverages the power of his office.
He sued the administration to open immigration detention centers to members of Congress, conducts oversight visits and turned his office across the street into what he’s called a triage center that connects immigrants with advocacy groups and legal services that has, his campaign said, helped more than 30 people get released from federal custody.
After a recent visit, Goldman credited his oversight work as a reason conditions at a holding facility inside the building have improved.
“What you see from our multipronged approach is the way that I push back, which is not performative, but it is substantive,” he told the Associated Press outside 26 Federal Plaza after he toured the detention center that is closed to the public.
Meanwhile, Lander — a progressive city government stalwart who is running with the support of Mayor Zohran Mamdani — has acted as protester and court observer, watching hearings and attempting to accompany immigrants out of the building past masked federal agents.
His efforts have gotten him arrested twice, with the most recent case headed to a trial scheduled to take place just before the primary.
“I would characterize his oversight function as strongly worded letters,” Lander told AP when asked about Goldman’s approach. “And my oversight function is: Show up with hundreds of your neighbors and bear witness and accompany people and demand access and stay until they give it to you or they arrest you.”
Lander’s first arrest happened last year when he linked arms with a person authorities were attempting to detain in the hallway outside the court. Lander was running for mayor at the time, and the arrest gave his campaign a jolt of excitement at a time when Mamdani and former Gov. Andrew Cuomo were considered the front-runners in the race.
A few months later, after losing the mayoral primary but not long before launching his congressional campaign, Lander was arrested again during a large protest at the building and hit with a misdemeanor obstruction charge.
But instead of accepting a deal that would have made the case go away in six months, Lander instead opted to go to trial. He said the case would extract information about the federal government’s immigration enforcement efforts at the building during a tense period that predates Goldman’s oversight visits.
Goldman dismissed Lander’s efforts as performative.
“I don’t understand why someone would reject a dismissal of a case so that he can have a public trial, ostensibly to ask for information that I could provide him whenever he wanted because I have the answers from doing my oversight,” he said.
This week, Lander returned to 26 Federal Plaza to sit in on hearings. But just before entering the building, his team got word that federal agents were lingering outside an immigration hearing at a different federal courtroom in a building across the street. He raced over and eventually found the agents, who were wearing masks and milling around in the court’s waiting room.
“The challenge is trying to figure out who they’re going to arrest,” Lander said, popping out of the hearing, where he sat in a back row and took notes. After a while, the agents walked away from the hearing room, down a hallway and exited the floor. It was not clear why they left.
“Maybe we have different styles,” Lander said of his opponent after the agents departed. He later went back across the street and filmed a campaign video in front of 26 Federal Plaza.
Izaguirre writes for the Associated Press.