Migration

A federal officer in the United States has shot a Venezuelan man in the leg in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Officials say officers had tried to stop a car to arrest the man and opened fire after two people attacked one of them with a “snow shovel and broom handle”.

Protests broke out in the city after the incident.

Wednesday’s shooting comes exactly a week after a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer shot and killed local resident Renee Nicole Good in her car in Minneapolis during an immigration raid.

What happened?

In an X post on Wednesday, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) wrote that at 6:50pm (00:50 GMT on Thursday), federal law enforcement officers were stopping “an illegal alien from Venezuela who was released into the country by [former President] Joe Biden in 2022”.

The DHS added that the man had tried to evade the officers, crashing his car into another parked car and then fleeing on foot. It said one of the officers caught up with the immigrant on foot “when the subject began to resist and violently assault the officer”.

The department’s post said that while the immigrant and the officer were struggling on the ground, two people came out of a nearby apartment and began to strike the officer with a snow shovel and a broomstick. It further said, “The original subject got loose and began striking the officer with a shovel or broom stick.”

“Fearing for his life and safety as he was being ambushed by three individuals, the officer fired a defensive shot to defend his life. The initial subject was hit in the leg,” the DHS wrote.

It added that the immigrant and the two people who had come out of the apartment ran back inside the apartment and barricaded themselves in.

The immigrant and officer who was attacked were taken to hospital, and the other two people who attacked the officer are in custody, DHS wrote.

Who was Renee Nicole Good and what happened to her last week?

On the morning of January 7, Jonathan Ross, an ICE officer, fatally shot Good while she was in her car in Minneapolis.

Local officials said Good, 37, was acting as a legal observer during protests against US President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown.

Legal observers are usually volunteers who attend protests to watch police-demonstrator interactions and record any confrontations or possible legal violations.

Good’s killing sparked outrage and protests in Minnesota and nationwide.

In a joint statement released after she was shot dead, Minneapolis City Council President Elliot Payne and council members wrote: “Renee was a resident of our city who was out caring for her neighbors this morning and her life was taken today at the hands of the federal government. Anyone who kills someone in our city deserves to be arrested, investigated, and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”

After Good was shot, the Republican Trump administration clashed with local authorities, including Democratic Governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey.

Trump and administration officials claimed that Good had deliberately hit the ICE officer with her SUV and he had shot her in self-defence.

US Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem described Good’s actions as “domestic terrorism”.

She said Good had refused to obey orders to get out of her car, “weaponise[d] her vehicle” and “attempted to run” over the officer. Minnesota officials disputed Noem’s account, citing videos showing Good trying to drive away.

Footage from the incident shows Good’s car slowly reversing and then trying to move forwards. As the car moves forwards, an agent is seen walking around in front of it. He opens fire while standing in front of the driver’s side of the SUV.

Speaking about the shooting on Wednesday, Trump told the Reuters news agency: “I don’t get into right or wrong. I know that it was a tough situation to be in. There was very little respect shown to the police, in this case, the ICE officers.”

What have local authorities said about the latest shooting?

Walz wrote in an X post on Wednesday that state investigators have been to the scene of the shooting.

“I know you’re angry. I’m angry. What Donald Trump wants is violence in the streets,” Walz wrote.

“But Minnesota will remain an island of decency, of justice, of community, and of peace. Don’t give him what he wants.”

In a series of posts on X on Wednesday, Frey wrote: “No matter what led up to this incident, the situation we are seeing in our city is not sustainable.”

He added that there are 600 local police officers working in Minneapolis, and the Trump administration has sent in 3,000 federal officers.

“I have seen conduct from ICE that is intolerable. And for anyone taking the bait tonight, stop. It is not helpful. We cannot respond to Donald Trump’s chaos with our own chaos.”

What is ICE doing in Minnesota?

The DHS launched Operation Metro Surge, which includes Minneapolis, in December. The Trump administration said the operation aims to root out and arrest criminals and undocumented immigrants.

The Trump administration escalated its immigration operation in Minneapolis on January 6. In an X post, ICE announced it planned to deploy 2,000 additional agents to the northern Midwestern city.

“A 100% chance of ICE in the Twin Cities – our largest operation to date,” the post said, referring to Minneapolis and the adjacent city of St Paul.

Todd Lyons, the acting director of ICE, told local news media that ICE is “surging to Minneapolis to root out fraud, arrest perpetrators and remove criminal illegal aliens”.

On Monday, the state of Minnesota filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration, arguing that the operation is an unconstitutional “federal invasion”.

The population of Minnesota is more than 5 million people, and according to numbers from the Migration Policy Institute from 2023, the number of undocumented immigrants in the state is 100,000.

Republicans have made disparaging remarks particularly targeting the state’s Somali population.

Noem said on Tuesday that Trump intends to end temporary deportation protections and work permits for some Somali nationals in the US.

“Country conditions in Somalia have improved to the point that it no longer meets the law’s requirement for Temporary Protected Status,” Noem said in a statement. “Further, allowing Somali nationals to remain temporarily in the United States is contrary to our national interests. We are putting Americans first.”

In December, ICE launched a raid in Columbus, Ohio, which also has a large Somali population. In late November, ICE agents were deployed in New Orleans, Louisiana. Similar raids were launched in Charlotte, North Carolina, the same month.

How many Venezuelan immigrants are in the US?

As of 2023, there were about 770,000 Venezuelan immigrants in the United States, making up just under 2 percent of the country’s 47.8 million foreign-born population, according to the Migration Policy Institute.

The institute estimated that in 2023, 486,000 Venezuelan immigrants were not authorised to be in the US, accounting for 4 percent of a total of 13.7 million unauthorised immigrants.

Since 2014, about 7.7 million Venezuelans, comprising 20 percent of the population, have left the country, mostly to seek better opportunities abroad as the economy has faltered and the government has cracked down on the political opposition. While the vast majority have moved to neighbouring countries, some have gone to the US.

On January 3, US forces abducted Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, whom the Trump administration describes as a “narcoterrorist”. He currently faces charges related to weapons and drug trafficking in New York.

During a national address on January 3, Trump stated: “Maduro sent savage and murderous gangs, including the bloodthirsty prison gang, Tren de Aragua, to terrorise American communities nationwide.”

However, several US intelligence agencies have rejected the claim that Trump has repeatedly made that Maduro controls Tren de Aragua. In an April memo, the agencies said Maduro’s government “probably does not” cooperate with the gang or direct it to carry out operations in the US.

The decision is expected to affect about 1,100 people and is likely to face legal challenges.

The administration of United States President Donald Trump will end temporary deportation protections and work permits for some Somali nationals in the US, authorities say.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said on Tuesday that the Trump administration was ending Temporary Protected Status (TPS), which shields migrants from deportation to countries where it is deemed unsafe to return and grants temporary work authorisation, for Somalis living in the US.

“Country conditions in Somalia have improved to the point that it no longer meets the law’s requirement for Temporary Protected Status,” Noem said in a statement. “Further, allowing Somali nationals to remain temporarily in the United States is contrary to our national interests. We are putting Americans first.”

The decision, which is expected to affect about 1,100 people, is likely to face legal challenges.

The Somali community has become a frequent target of the Trump administration. The US president has called Somalis “garbage” and depicted them as criminals.

In recent weeks, the Trump administration has lashed out at Somalis in the US, alleging large-scale public benefit fraud in Minnesota’s Somali community, the largest in the country, with about 80,000 members.

Trump has threatened to strip any naturalised Somali or foreign-born person of their US citizenship if they were convicted of fraud, as he continued his attacks on the Somali community.

“We’re going to revoke the citizenship of any naturalised immigrant from Somalia or anywhere else who is convicted of defrauding our citizens,” Trump said on Tuesday.

The administration has additionally cut off Minnesota’s access to federal childcare assistance and surged immigration enforcement agents to the state, home to a sizeable Somali population, prompting widespread anger and condemnation from local and state officials over aggressive immigration raids.

Heavily-armed agents have broken car windows and detained people, used frequent force against protesters, and asked residents for proof of citizenship, drawing concerns from civil liberties groups.

Tensions rose further after a federal immigration agent last week shot and killed Renee Good, a US citizen and mother of three, who had been acting as a legal monitor of federal immigration activity in Minneapolis.

US president issues latest threat to midwestern state, where protests have continued after ICE agent killed woman.

United States President Donald Trump has said that a “day of reckoning and retribution” is coming to Minnesota, as outrage and protests have continued days after an immigration agent fatally shot a woman in the state’s largest city, Minneapolis.

Trump did not provide further details on the statement, which came at the end of a lengthy screed on the president’s Truth Social account on Tuesday.

The apparent threat represented the latest pledge to come down hard on the midwestern state in the wake of the killing of Renee Nicole Good by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent last week.

The administration on Monday promised to send hundreds more ICE agents to Minneapolis, where federal officer ranks already dwarf local law enforcement, in what city and state leaders have called a dangerous escalation.

“All the patriots of ICE want to do is remove them from your neighborhood and send them back to the prisons and mental institutions from where they came, most in foreign Countries who illegally entered the USA though Sleepy Joe Biden’s HORRIBLE Open Border’s Policy,” Trump said, referring to his predecessor, US President Joe Biden.

“FEAR NOT, GREAT PEOPLE OF MINNESOTA, THE DAY OF RECKONING & RETRIBUTION IS COMING!” he said.

The phrase was quickly quoted by the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees domestic US immigration enforcement, in a post on X.

Later on Tuesday, a federal judge was set to hear arguments in a lawsuit filed by Minnesota’s Attorney General and the cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul, alleging that the surge of immigration agents violates residents’ freedom of speech while trampling on the state’s constitutionally protected authorities.

“People are being racially profiled, harassed, terrorised, and assaulted,” the state’s attorney general said in a statement upon filing the lawsuit.

“Schools have gone into lockdown. Businesses have been forced to close. Minnesota police are spending countless hours dealing with the chaos ICE is causing.”

“This federal invasion of the Twin Cities has to stop, so today I am suing DHS to bring it to an end,” it said.

Ongoing outrage

Daily protests have continued across the state since Good’s killing during an enforcement operation in Minneapolis.

Within moments of the shooting, the Trump administration labelled Good a “domestic terrorist”, while claiming the officer was acting in self-defence after the 37-year-old “weaponised her vehicle”.

Widely circulated video evidence quickly cast doubt on their claims, with many observers saying recordings appeared to show Good attempting to flee the scene in her Honda Pilot SUV when the agent opened fire. Questions have also been raised over the conduct of the agents involved, including a series of actions that appeared to escalate the situation.

Last week, local officials decried the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s (FBI) unorthodox move to block an independent state investigatory body from taking part in a probe of Good’s killing. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said the move – coupled with the Trump administration’s comments – raises questions over the integrity of any conclusions reached.

On Tuesday, the UN Human Rights Council also called for a “prompt, independent and transparent” investigation into the incident.

Prior to Good’s killing, the Trump administration had surged immigration agents to Minnesota as the president increasingly focused on alleged fraud in the large Somali-American community in the state, at times employing racist rhetoric as he sent 2,000 immigration agents to the area.

On Wednesday, the Trump administration announced it was revoking so-called Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Somalia, a special designation that protects individuals from deportation due to unsafe conditions in their home country.

In a statement on X, US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) said the move means Somalis who had been on TPS are required to leave the country by March 27.

US immigration agents have clashed with protesters in Minneapolis days after the fatal shooting of Renee Good by an ICE officer. Meanwhile, Minnesota officials sued the Trump administration to block a planned surge of immigration agents, calling the deployment unlawful.

A new video has emerged showing the final moments of a Minnesota woman’s encounter with an immigration officer before she was killed, as public uproar grows in the United States over the shooting and exclusion of local agencies from the investigation.

A Minnesota prosecutor on Friday called on the public to share with investigators any recordings and evidence connected to the fatal shooting of Renee Nicole Good, 37, who was fatally shot by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent.

A new, 47-second video published online by a Minnesota-based conservative news site, Alpha News, on Friday, and later reposted on social media by the Department of Homeland Security, shows the shooting from the perspective of ICE officer Jonathan Ross, who fired the shots on Wednesday.

With sirens blaring in the background, Ross, 43, approaches and circles Good’s vehicle in the middle of the road while apparently filming on his cellphone. At the same time, Good’s wife was also recording the encounter and can be seen walking around the vehicle and approaching the officer.

A series of exchanges occurred.

“That’s fine, I’m not mad at you,” Good says as the officer passes by her door. She has one hand on the steering wheel and the other outside the open driver’s side window.

“US citizen, former f—ing veteran,” says her wife, standing outside the passenger side of the SUV holding up her phone. “You wanna come at us, you wanna come at us, I say go get yourself some lunch, big boy.”

Other officers approach the driver’s side of the car at about the same time, and one says, “Get out of the car, get out of the f—ing car.”

Ross is now at the front driver’s side of the vehicle. Good reverses briefly, then turns the steering wheel towards the passenger side as she drives ahead, and Ross opens fire. The camera becomes unsteady and points towards the sky, then returns to the street view showing Good’s SUV careening away.

“F—ing b—-,” someone at the scene says.

A crashing sound is heard as Good’s vehicle smashes into others parked on the street.

Minnesota officials slam federal agencies

President Donald Trump’s administration has defended the ICE agent who shot Good in her car, painting her as a “domestic terrorist” and claiming Ross – an Iraq War veteran – was protecting himself and the fellow agents. The White House insisted the video gave weight to the officer’s claim of self-defence – even though the clip does not show the moment the car moved away, or him opening fire.

Local officials in Minnesota have condemned federal agencies for excluding them from the probe, and a local prosecutor said on Friday that federal investigators had taken Good’s car and shell casings from the scene.

“This is not the time to bend the rules. This is a time to follow the law… The fact that Pam Bondi’s Department of Justice and this presidential administration has already come to a conclusion about those facts is deeply concerning,” Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, a Democrat, told a news briefing on Friday.

“We know that they’ve already determined much of the investigation,” he said, adding that the state’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, within its department of public safety, has consistently run such investigations.

“Why not include them in the process?” Frey said.

Good was the fourth person to be killed by ICE agencts since Trump launched his immigration crackdown last year.

Good’s wife, Becca Good, told local media that they had gone to the scene of immigration enforcement activity to “support our neighbours”. “We had whistles. They had guns,” she said.

The Minneapolis killing and a separate shooting in Portland, Oregon, on Thursday by the Border Patrol have set off protests in multiple US cities and denunciations of immigration enforcement tactics by the US government.

Protests in Minneapolis continued on Friday, with hundreds gathered at a federal facility that has become a focal point of anti-ICE demonstrations. Hundreds of weekend protests have been planned across the US over the killing, according to organisers.

Federal agents in the United States have shot and injured two people in the city of Portland, Oregon, a city where the administration of President Donald Trump has led an immigration enforcement crackdown.

The shooting was the second time in less than a day that federal immigration authorities claimed to have fired upon a vehicle in self-defence, following a deadly shooting in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

On Thursday, the Portland Police Department announced they had responded to reports of gunfire on southeast Main Street at about 2:18pm local time (22:18 GMT).

“Officers confirmed that federal agents had been involved in a shooting,” the city said in a statement.

Emergency responders then received a call for assistance from one of the shooting victims, a man, at about 2:24pm (22:24 GMT) near Northeast 146th Avenue and East Burnside in Portland’s Hazelwood neighbourhood.

“Officers responded and found a male and female with apparent gunshot wounds,” the statement said. “Officers applied a tourniquet and summoned emergency medical personnel.”

The two shooting victims were transported to hospital. Their conditions remain unknown, according to the police, who were not involved in the shooting.

The local bureau of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) confirmed the shooting in a now-deleted post on social media, saying that the incident involved Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) agents.

“This remains an active and ongoing investigation led by the FBI,” Portland’s FBI bureau said in the post.

Later, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) offered its own account of what happened, describing the shooting as self-defence during a “targeted vehicle stop”.

In a social media post, DHS said its target was a passenger travelling inside a vehicle, who was affiliated with a “transnational Tren de Aragua prostitution ring and involved in a recent shooting”. The driver, DHS claimed, was a member of Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang.

“When agents identified themselves to the vehicle occupants, the driver weaponized his vehicle and attempted to run over the law enforcement agents,” DHS said in the post.

“Fearing for his life and safety, an agent fired a defensive shot. The driver drove off with the passenger, fleeing the scene.”

Second agent-involved shooting

Details about Thursday’s shooting remain unknown. But the administration of President Donald Trump has faced criticism for misrepresenting incidents where federal agents deployed violence as part of its nationwide immigration crackdown.

The Portland shooting comes one day after an agent with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) shot and killed Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, in her car in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

“Just one day after the horrific violence in Minnesota at the hands of federal agents, our community here in Portland is now grappling with another deeply troubling incident,” Portland Mayor Keith Wilson said in a statement.

“We cannot sit by while constitutional protections erode and bloodshed mounts.”

Good’s death has triggered widespread outrage, as well as criticism that the Trump administration rushed to disseminate a misleading narrative about the Minneapolis shooting.

Video of Good’s shooting showed the 37-year-old stopped in her SUV on a snowy Minneapolis road, appearing to wave other drivers by.

A vehicle carrying ICE officers stopped next to her vehicle, and agents approached her, reaching for the handle of her car door. One approached the front of her vehicle. As her car appeared to turn and manoeuvre away, that agent fired multiple times into the vehicle, killing Good.

In that case, too, Trump administration officials claim the ICE agent acted in self-defence, despite the fact that the vehicle did not seem to make contact with his body.

Trump asserted – without evidence – that Good was a “professional agitator” who “violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer”. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem also accused Good of a “domestic act of terrorism”, despite there being no evidence Good sought to harm the ICE agent.

Democratic officials have accused the Trump administration of spreading false narratives to distract from its own abuses during the immigration crackdown.

Still, officials in Portland repeatedly called for calm in the aftermath of Thursday’s shooting, while acknowledging the parallels between the incidents.

“We are still in the early stages of this incident,” Portland Police Chief Bob Day said in a statement.

“We understand the heightened emotion and tension many are feeling in the wake of the shooting in Minneapolis, but I am asking the community to remain calm as we work to learn more.”

Mayor Wilson, meanwhile, called for federal immigration agents to leave the city, arguing that they had endangered local citizens with their heavy-handed actions.

“Portland is not a ‘training ground’ for militarized agents, and the ‘full force’ threatened by the administration has deadly consequences,” Wilson said.

“As Mayor, I call on ICE to end all operations in Portland until a full investigation can be completed. Federal militarization undermines effective, community‑based public safety, and it runs counter to the values that define our region.”

Oregon Senator Jeff Merkley, meanwhile, expressed “huge concern” over the incident and suggested that responding with anger would only fuel the Trump administration’s fixation with Portland.

“Trump wants to generate riots,” he wrote. “Don’t take the bait.”

Portland under a microscope

Portland has long been a focal point of Trump’s immigration enforcement actions, and the increased federal presence has ignited largely nonviolent protests in response.

Long seen as a Democratic stronghold, Portland was identified in May as one of the “sanctuary jurisdictions” that the Trump administration identified as resisting its immigration crackdown.

The Republican president hinted he could surge federal agents to the area in response.

In September, those threats appeared to materialise when Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform that he would be sending the US military to support immigration operations in the city.

The announcement came five days after Trump declared antifa – the loose-knit antifascist movement – a “domestic terrorist organisation”.

“I am directing Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, to provide all necessary Troops to protect War ravaged Portland, and any of our ICE Facilities under siege from attack by Antifa, and other domestic terrorists,” Trump wrote. “I am also authorizing Full Force, if necessary.”

It was the latest in the string of instances where Trump attempted to send federal troops to largely Democratic urban areas, including Los Angeles and Chicago, Illinois.

Local officials denounced the deployment as a violation of the law and a misuse of executive authority. But the Trump administration doubled down, describing Portland as overrun by criminal behaviour.

“ In Portland, Oregon, antifa thugs have repeatedly attacked our officers and laid siege to federal property in an attempt to violently stop the execution of federal law,” Trump said at an October roundtable.

In response, some protesters in Portland began arriving in inflatable frog costumes, in an effort to cast Trump’s warnings about violent extremists as absurd. The Portland Frog Brigade, as the protesters were called, inspired similar demonstrations nationwide.

State and local leaders fought Trump’s troop deployment in court, and on November 7, US District Judge Karin Immergut permanently blocked the deployment.

The US Supreme Court in December declined the Trump administration’s appeal to allow National Guard troops in areas where lower courts had barred them.

On Thursday, Mayor Wilson called for accountability in the recent shootings, saying he would protect local residents’ civil liberties.

“ICE agents and their Homeland Security leadership must be fully investigated and held responsible for their violence against the American people, in Minnesota, in Portland, and across the nation,” he said.

He repeated the message that Portland residents should not seek retribution in the aftermath of the gunfire.

“Portland does not respond to violence with violence. We respond with clarity, unity, and a commitment to justice. We must stand together to protect Portland,” he said.

United States President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio say they want to free up the flow of Venezuelan oil to benefit Venezuelans after US forces abducted President Nicolas Maduro from Caracas.

“We’re going to rebuild the oil infrastructure, which requires billions of dollars that will be paid for by the oil companies directly,” Trump said at a media briefing at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida hours after Maduro was seized on Saturday. “They will be reimbursed for what they’re doing, but it’s going to be paid, and we’re going to get the oil flowing.”

Then, on Tuesday, the US president said he wanted to use proceeds from the sale of Venezuelan oil “to benefit the people of Venezuela and the United States”. Rubio has echoed Trump in his comments in recent days.

But what has been holding back the flow of Venezuelan oil, preventing the country from attracting investments and driving the country into poverty?

A key reason is one that Trump and Rubio have been silent about: Washington’s own efforts to strangle Venezuela’s oil industry and economy through sanctions, which also have set off a refugee crisis.

What has Trump said about Venezuelan oil?

In a post on his Truth Social platform on Tuesday night, Trump said Venezuela will turn over 30 million to 50 million barrels of sanctioned oil to the US.

Trump wrote: “This Oil will be sold at its Market Price, and that money will be controlled by me, as President of the United States of America, to ensure it is used to benefit the people of Venezuela and the United States!”

Trump added that he had directed his energy secretary, Chris Wright, to execute the plan “immediately”.

“It will be taken by storage ships, and brought directly to unloading docks in the United States,” Trump wrote.

During the news conference on Saturday, Trump said US oil companies would fix Venezuela’s “broken infrastructure” and “start making money for the country”.

Earlier Trump had accused Venezuela in a Truth Social post of “stealing” US oil, land and other assets and using that oil to fund crime, “terrorism” and human trafficking. Top Trump adviser Stephen Miller has made similar claims in recent days.

What does it mean for the US to take Venezuelan oil?

Oil is trading at roughly $56 per barrel.

Based on this price, 30 million barrels of oil would be worth $1.68bn and 50 million barrels of oil would be worth $2.8bn.

“Trump’s statement about oil in Venezuela is beyond an act of war; it is an act of colonisation. That is also illegal based on the UN Charter,” Vijay Prashad, the director of the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research based in Argentina, Brazil, India, and South Africa, told Al Jazeera.

Ilias Bantekas, a professor of transnational law at Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Qatar, told Al Jazeera that the US involvement in Venezuela was “less about Maduro as it is about access to Venezuela’s oil deposits”.

“This [oil] is the number one target. Trump is not content with just allowing US oil firms to get concessions but to ‘run’ the country, which entails absolute and indefinite control over Venezuela’s resources.”

According to the website of the US Energy Information Administration, the US consumed an average of 20.25 million barrels of petroleum per day in 2023.

What has Rubio said about Venezuelan oil?

In an interview on the NBC TV network’s Meet the Press programme that aired on Sunday, Rubio said: “We are at war against drug trafficking organisations. That’s not a war against Venezuela.”

“No more drug trafficking … and no more using the oil industry to enrich all our adversaries around the world and not benefitting the people of Venezuela or, frankly, benefitting the United States and the region,” Rubio said.

Rubio said in the interview that since 2014, about eight million Venezuelans have fled the country, which he attributed to theft and corruption by Maduro and his allies. According to a report by the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees from May, nearly 7.9 million people have indeed left Venezuela.

But he was silent on the US’s own role in creating that crisis.

What are the US sanctions against Venezuela’s oil?

Venezuela nationalised its oil industry in 1976 under then-President Carlos Andres Perez during an oil boom. He established the state-owned Petroleos de Venezuela SA (PDVSA) to control all oil resources.

Venezuela continued to be a major oil exporter to the US for some years, supplying 1.5 million to 2 million barrels per day in the late 1990s and early 2000s.

After President Hugo Chavez took office in 1998, he nationalised all oil assets, seized foreign-owned assets, restructured the PDVSA and prioritised using oil revenue for social programmes in Venezuela.

From 2003 to 2007, Venezuela under Chavez managed to cut its poverty rate in half – from 57 percent to 27.5 percent. Extreme poverty fell even more sharply, by 70 percent.

But exports declined, and government authorities were accused of mismanagement.

The US first imposed sanctions on Venezuela’s oil in retaliation for nationalising US oil assets in 2005.

Under US sanctions, many senior Venezuelan government officials and companies have been barred from accessing any property or financial assets held in the US. They cannot access US bank accounts, sell property or access their money if it passes through the US financial system.

Critically, any US companies or citizens doing business with any sanctioned individual or company will be penalised and risk becoming subject to enforcement actions.

Maduro took over as president in 2013 after Chavez’s death. In 2017, Trump, during his first term in office, imposed more sanctions and tightened them again in 2019. This further restricted sales to the US and access for Venezuelan companies to the global financial system. As a result, oil exports to the US nearly stopped, and Venezuela shifted its trade mainly to China with some sales to India and Cuba.

Last month, the Trump administration imposed yet more sanctions – this time on Maduro family members and Venezuelan tankers carrying sanctioned oil.

Today, the PDVSA controls the petroleum industry in Venezuela, and US involvement in Venezuelan oil drilling is limited. Houston-based Chevron is the only US company that still operates in Venezuela.

How have sanctions hurt Venezuela’s oil flows?

Trump might today be interested in getting Venezuelan oil flowing, but it is US sanctions that blocked that flow in the first place.

Venezuela’s oil reserves are concentrated primarily in the Orinoco Belt, a region in the eastern part of the country stretching across roughly 55,000sq km (21,235sq miles).

While the country is home to the world’s largest proven oil reserves – at an estimated 303 billion barrels – it earns only a fraction of the revenue it once did from exporting crude.

[BELOW: The sentence above promises statistics that will show how much oil exports have dropped, but the next graf doesn’t deliver. We should add that figure]

According to data from the Observatory of Economic Complexity, Venezuela exported $4.05bn of crude oil in 2023. This is far below other major exporters, including Saudi Arabia ($181bn), the US ($125bn) and Russia ($122bn).

How have US sanctions hurt Venezuelans and the country’s oil infrastructure?

The US sanctions on Venezuelan oil prevent US and non-US companies from doing business with the PDVSA. Because the US is a market no one wants to lose, firms, including banks, are wary of taking any steps that could invite Washington’s sanctions.

In effect, that has meant Venezuela’s oil industry has been almost entirely deprived of international financial investment.

The sanctions additionally restrict Venezuela from accessing oilfield equipment, specialised software, drilling services and refinery components from Western companies.

This has resulted in years of underinvestment in the PDVSA’s infrastructure, leading to chronic breakdowns, shutdowns and accidents.

The sanctions have also resulted in broader economic turmoil.

The country’s gross domestic product per capita stood at about $4,200 in 2024, according to World Bank data, down from more than $13,600 in 2010.

From about 2012, the economy went into a sharp decline, driven by domestic economic policies, a slump that was later deepened by US sanctions. The resulting hardships have pushed millions of Venezuelans to leave the country – the same people who Trump and Rubio now argue should benefit from Venezuela’s oil revenues.

Does the US have any claim to Venezuelan oil?

US companies began drilling for oil in Venezuela in the early 1900s.

In 1922, vast petroleum reserves were initially discovered by Royal Dutch Shell in Lake Maracaibo in Zulia state in northwestern Venezuela.

At this point, US companies ramped up their investments in the extraction and development of Venezuelan oil reserves. Companies such as Standard Oil led development under concession agreements, propelling Venezuela to a position as a key global supplier, especially for the US.

Venezuela was a founding member of OPEC, joining at its creation on September 14, 1960. OPEC is a group of major oil-exporting countries that work together to manage supply and influence global oil prices.

But the claims by Trump and Miller that Venezuela somehow “stole” US oil are baseless under international law, experts said.

The principle of permanent sovereignty over natural resources, adopted by the UN General Assembly in a resolution in 1962, is clear that sovereign states have the inherent right to control, use and dispose of their resources for their own development.

In other words, Venezuela alone owns its oil.

Jan. 5 (UPI) — Several South American countries announced new migration controls and border security measures in response to Venezuela’s political crisis following a United States operation that detained Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, and transferred them to New York to face drug-related charges.

While Colombia said it will keep its border crossings with Venezuela open and ruled out closures, Argentina, Peru, Ecuador and Paraguay announced restrictions on the entry of people linked to the Venezuelan government amid regional uncertainty and diplomatic coordination.

Colombian Vice Foreign Minister Mauricio Jaramillo said keeping the border open is strategic given cross-border migration and commercial flows along some 1,370 miles of shared frontier.

“Colombia has no interest in closing the border. It is essential that it remain open,” Jaramillo said, adding that Migration Colombia activated a permanent monitoring plan to oversee the situation without disrupting the regular movement of people and goods.

At the same time, President Gustavo Petro ordered tighter security along the border through the deployment of more than 30,000 public security personnel, including military and police forces, as a preventive measure against possible disturbances to public order.

Argentina, Peru, Ecuador and Paraguay separately announced new migration controls and entry restrictions targeting government officials, military personnel and others linked to the Venezuelan government.

In Ecuador, the Foreign Ministry said it will apply migration restrictions to public officials, members of the armed forces and security services, business figures, and other people associated with the government of Nicolás Maduro, citing national security concerns.

Authorities said asylum and refugee protections will not be misused and must comply with principles and procedures established under national and international law.

In Argentina, National Security Minister Alejandra Monteoliva said the National Migration Directorate will impose limits on the entry of people connected to the Venezuelan government, including officials, members of the armed forces, business figures and sanctioned individuals, to prevent what she described as regime collaborators from using the country as a refuge or protective platform.

“Argentina will not grant protection to collaborators of the Maduro regime,” the ministry said in a statement. President Javier Milei welcomed the fall of the Venezuelan leader and voiced support for a political transition process in Venezuela.

In Peru, the Interior Ministry announced the immediate implementation of migration controls through the National Superintendency of Migration, in coordination with the National Police.

The measures target Venezuelan citizens linked to the Caribbean nation’s government who appear on international sanctions lists, particularly those issued by the United States, to prevent Peru from being used to evade judicial proceedings.

“Notified. Those who oppressed their country for years are not welcome,” interim President Jose Jeri said in a post on social media platform X.

In Paraguay, the National Migration Directorate said it adopted control and restriction measures, with support from state security agencies, to block the entry of people linked to the Venezuelan government or with alleged ties to drug trafficking, narcoterrorism or pending criminal cases.

Authorities said they will evaluate international cooperation mechanisms and database cross-checks to verify individuals’ links to the Venezuelan government.

Gambian authorities say 96 people rescued after boat capsizes along popular West African migration route.

At least seven people have died after a boat carrying more than 200 people capsized along a popular migration route off the Gambian coast, with dozens more believed to be missing, local authorities say.

The boat was reported to have capsized around midnight on Thursday in the vicinity of a village in The Gambia’s North Bank region, the Ministry of Defence said in a statement.

Authorities said seven bodies were recovered, and at least 96 people were rescued, many of whom were seriously wounded.

Alerted by a distress call, the Gambian navy launched a search-and-rescue operation after midnight, involving several naval vessels and a fishing boat that came to assist, according to the statement.

The shipwrecked vessel was later found “grounded into a sandbank”, the Defence Ministry said.

Several of the victims have been identified as not being of Gambian nationality, and the authorities are currently verifying their identity, the statement added.

The Gambia has become a jumping-off point for migrants and asylum seekers seeking to reach Spain’s Canary Islands, a gateway to continental Europe, by boat from West Africa.

According to the European Union, more than 46,000 migrants reached the Canary Islands in 2024.

More than 10,000 people died attempting the journey across the Atlantic, a 58 percent increase over 2023, according to the rights group Caminando Fronteras.

However, irregular migration into the EU along the West African route fell 60 percent during the first 11 months of 2025, according to the Frontex border agency, which credited stronger prevention efforts by departure countries for the drop.

Still, migrants and asylum seekers continue to try to reach Europe on flimsy and often overcrowded vessels.

In May, seven women and girls died when a small boat transporting more than 100 people capsized while approaching the Canary Islands.

Mali and Burkina Faso have announced they are imposing full visa bans on United States citizens in retaliation for US President Donald Trump’s ban on US visas for their citizens this month.

The two West African countries, which are both governed by the military, on Tuesday became the latest African nations to issue “tit-for-tat” visa bans on the US. These follow Trump’s new visa restrictions, which now apply to 39 countries in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and Latin America. The White House said they were imposed on “national security” grounds.

“In accordance with the principle of reciprocity, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation informs the national and international community that, with immediate effect, the Government of the Republic of Mali will apply the same conditions and requirements to US nationals as those imposed on Malian citizens,” the Malian ministry said in a statement.

Burkina Faso’s foreign minister, Karamoko Jean-Marie Traore, in a separate statement similarly cited a reciprocity rule for his country’s visa ban.

Which countries have issued bans on visas for US citizens?

The US directive issued on December 16 expanded full US visa bans to citizens of five nations other than Mali and Burkina Faso: Laos, Niger, Sierra Leone, South Sudan and Syria.

Travellers holding travel documents issued by the Palestinian Authority were also banned from entering the US under the order.

The US cited the countries’ poor screening and vetting capabilities, information-sharing policies, visa overstay rates and refusal to take back their deported nationals for the ban.

Trump’s order also noted countries were additionally assessed based on whether they had a “significant terrorist presence”.

The US ban takes effect on Thursday.

Mali, Burkina Faso and neighbouring Niger have been plagued by violence from armed groups linked to al-Qaeda and ISIL (ISIS) for years. The violence in those countries has displaced millions of civilians.

On Friday, Niger banned entry for US citizens, also citing the US ban on its citizens. The country is also military-led like its neighbours Mali and Burkina Faso. All three formed the Alliance of Sahel States in July 2024 to tackle security problems and improve trade relations.

In its own reciprocal move, Chad stopped issuing visas to US citizens on June 6 with an exception for US officials. Only US citizens who were issued visas before June 9 are now allowed entry into Chad.

The country was on an initial list of 12 nations whose citizens the Trump administration issued a full visa ban on from June 9.

Which countries are affected by the US visa bans?

Citizens of 39 countries are now under full or partial entry restrictions to the US, according to the US-based Council on Foreign Relations think tank.

Those fully banned are:

• Afghanistan
• Burkina Faso
• Chad
• Equatorial Guinea
• Eritrea
• Haiti
• Iran
• Laos
• Libya
• Mali
• Myanmar
• Niger
• Republic of Congo
• Sierra Leone
• Somalia
• South Sudan
• Sudan
• Syria
• Yemen
• Holders of travel documents issued by the Palestinian Authority are also fully banned.

Those partially restricted are:

• Angola
• Antigua and Barbuda
• Benin
• Burundi
• Cuba
• Dominica
• Gabon
• The Gambia
• Ivory Coast
• Malawi
• Mauritania
• Nigeria
• Senegal
• Tanzania
• Togo
• Tonga
• Turkmenistan
• Venezuela
• Zambia
• Zimbabwe

Is Trump specifically targeting African countries with visa bans?

Trump’s approach to Africa regarding visa entries in his second term as US president is similar to that of his first administration when he issued a “Muslim ban”, which included citizens of three African nations – Somalia, Sudan and Libya – as well as Yemen, Syria, Iraq and Iran.

In later updates to the ban, Sudan was removed while Chad was added.

Most countries under US entry restrictions since Trump took office on January 20 are in Africa. Of the 39 affected countries, 26 are African nations.

How have US-Africa trade relations fared under Trump?

Tradewise, the US has shifted away from its preferential African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) trade programme to a tariff-based regime that has also been applied to most other countries around the world under Trump’s tariffs policy.

From 2000, AGOA provided African nations with duty-free access to US markets, bolstering African exports to the US of a wide range of goods, from wine to cars.

AGOA created an estimated 300,000 jobs in African countries and indirectly sustained another 1.2 million jobs, according to the US-based Center for Strategic International Studies.

However, AGOA expired in September after the US Congress failed to renew it. Although the Trump administration said it supported a one-year extension, no steps have been announced to revive the programme.

Instead, African countries now face often steep tariffs as the US sometimes justifies them on political grounds.

South Africa, Africa’s richest country, for example, was slapped with a 30 percent tariff after Trump made debunked allegations of a “genocide” on the country’s white Afrikaner minority. The US government has since prioritised resettling Afrikaners as refugees in the US.

South African President Cyril Ramaphosa met with Trump at the White House in May and explained that crime in the country targets the population at large – not just its white citizens – but was unable to persuade Trump.

Trump’s administration is also prioritising its access to critical rare earth minerals, used to develop high-tech devices, in a bid to remain competitive with China, which mines about 60 percent of the world’s rare earth metals and processes 90 percent of them.

Trump took up a mediator role in the conflict between the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and neighbouring Rwanda this year after the DRC government proposed a minerals deal with the US. The US and United Nations accuse Rwanda of backing a rebellion by the M23 armed group in the eastern DRC.

Trump did not commit to US military intervention in the DRC but successfully secured a peace pact between the two countries on December 4 after applying diplomatic pressure on Rwanda.

Attacks on civilians by M23 have nonetheless continued despite the peace deal.

A clause in the pact granted US firms priority access to both the DRC’s and Rwanda’s mineral reserves, which include cobalt, copper, lithium and gold.

How about aid and security cooperation?

In early 2025, the Trump administration shut down the US Agency for International Development and cut billions of dollars of US foreign aid, affecting many African countries that greatly depended on the world’s largest funder of health and humanitarian aid.

Aid groups have since reported rising hunger in northern Nigeria, Somalia and northeastern Kenya.

Health observers and analysts have also raised the alarm about the risk of undoing work to prevent and contain the spread of HIV in Lesotho and South Africa.

In northern Cameroon, officials have reported a spike in malaria deaths as drug supplies fall. This month, the US unilaterally pledged $400m in health funding to the country over the next five years on the condition that Cameroon raises its own annual health spending from $22m to $450m.

African nations were also most affected when Trump recalled 30 career diplomats appointed by former President Joe Biden from 29 countries last week.

Fifteen of them had been stationed in African nations: Algeria, Burundi, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Gabon, Ivory Coast, Egypt, Madagascar, Mauritius, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, Senegal, Somalia and Uganda.

Meanwhile, the US has continued to intensify strikes against armed groups linked to ISIL and al-Qaeda, similar to those during Trump’s first term as president from 2017 to 2021.

In Somalia, the US launched strikes in September targeting al-Shabab and the ISIL affiliate in Somalia Province, according to the US-based New America Foundation think tank.

The US also targeted ISIL- and al-Qaeda-linked groups in northwestern Nigeria for the first time on Thursday.

While those strikes were carried out in collaboration with the Nigerian government, a war of narratives prevailed between the two countries.

The US claims to be “saving” Nigerian Christians, who it alleges are experiencing a genocide.

Nigerian authorities, on the other hand, deny claims of genocide and say people of all religions have been badly affected by armed groups operating in the country.

Zohran Mamdani was sworn in as New York City’s mayor just after midnight in a historic ceremony at a decommissioned Manhattan subway station.

Making history as the first Muslim to lead the United States’ largest city, Mamdani took his oath with his hand placed on a Quran.

“This is truly the honour and the privilege of a lifetime,” Mamdani said in a brief speech.

The private ceremony, conducted by New York Attorney General Letitia James at the architecturally stunning old City Hall station – one of the city’s original subway stops known for its arched ceilings – marked the official transition of power.

In his inaugural remarks, Mamdani highlighted the venue as a “testament to the importance of public transit to the vitality, the health and the legacy of our city” while announcing Mike Flynn as his new Department of Transportation commissioner.

The mayor concluded his brief address saying, “Thank you all so much, now I will see you later,” before ascending the stairs with a smile.

A more elaborate public inauguration will take place at 1pm (18:00 GMT) at City Hall. A public celebration will follow on Broadway’s “Canyon of Heroes”, famous for hosting ticker-tape parades.

As he steps into one of the US’s most demanding political positions, Mamdani breaks multiple barriers. At 34, he becomes the city’s youngest mayor in generations and the first of Muslim faith, South Asian descent, and African birth.

Trump is seeking to end protected status for South Sudan, claiming country no longer poses danger to those returning.

A federal judge has blocked the administration of President Donald Trump from stripping temporary protections from deportations for South Sudanese citizens living in the United States.

US District Judge Angel Kelley in Boston, Massachusetts, granted an emergency request on Tuesday in a lawsuit filed by several South Sudanese nationals and an immigrant rights group.

The order prevents the temporary protected status (TPS) for South Sudanese citizens from expiring on January 5 as the Trump administration has sought.

The lawsuit, led by the African ‍Communities Together, accuses the US Department of Homeland Security of acting unlawfully in its effort to strip South Sudanese citizens of TPS, a US immigration status granted to citizens of countries experiencing natural disasters, conflict or other extraordinary circumstances that could make return to their homelands dangerous.

The status was initially granted for South Sudan in 2011 when the country officially broke away from Sudan. It has been repeatedly renewed amid repeated bouts of fighting, widespread displacement and regional instability.

​The status allows eligible individuals to work and receive temporary protection from deportation.

The lawsuit further alleged that the Trump administration exposed South Sudan citizens to being deported to a country facing what is widely considered one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, in a notice published on November ‌5, had argued the country no longer met the conditions for TPS.

“With the renewed peace in South Sudan, their demonstrated commitment to ensuring the safe reintegration of returning nationals, and improved diplomatic relations, now is the right time to conclude what was always intended to ‌be a temporary designation,” she said, appearing to refer to a tenuous 2018 peace agreement.

The statement contradicted the findings of a panel of United Nations experts, who wrote in a report to the UN Security Council in November that “while the contours of the conflict may be altered, the resulting human suffering has remained unchanged.”

“Ongoing conflict and aerial bombardments, coupled with flooding and the influx of returnees and refugees from the Sudan, have led to near-record levels of food insecurity, with pockets of famine reported in some of the communities most affected by renewed fighting,” it added.

The Trump administration has increasingly targeted TPS as part of its crackdown on immigration and its mass deportation drive.

It has moved to similarly ‌end TPS for foreign nationals from countries including Syria, Venezuela, Haiti, ⁠Cuba and Nicaragua, prompting several court challenges.

It has also sought to deport individuals to countries in Africa, even if they have no ties there.

The United Kingdom has imposed visa restrictions on the Democratic Republic of the Congo, accusing its government of failing to cooperate with its new policy on the return of undocumented migrants and those who commit criminal offences.

The UK Home Office announced the measures in a statement late on Saturday. It also said that Angola and Namibia have agreed to step up efforts to take back their citizens.

The agreements mark the first major change under sweeping reforms unveiled by Secretary of State for the Home Department Shabana Mahmood last month to make refugee status temporary and speed up the deportation of those who arrive without documents in the UK.

There was no immediate comment from the DRC, Angola or Namibia.

The Home Office said the DRC failed to meet the UK’s requirements for cooperation and has now been stripped of fast-track visa services and preferential treatment for VIPs and decision makers.

Mahmood said the UK could escalate measures to a complete halt of visas for the DRC unless cooperation rapidly improves.

“We expect countries to play by the rules. If one of their citizens has no right to be here, they must take them back,” she said.

“I thank Angola and Namibia and welcome their co-operation. Now is the time for the Democratic Republic of Congo to do the right thing. Take your citizens back or lose the privilege of entering our country.

“This is just the start of the measures I am taking to secure our border and ramp up the removal of those with no right to be here,” she added.

Prime Minister Keir Streamer’s centre-left government unveiled sweeping changes to the UK’s asylum system last month, including drastically cutting protections for refugees and their children, as part of a bid to stem the arrivals of irregular migrants that have fuelled rising anger on the far-right.

More than 39,000 people, many fleeing conflict, have arrived in the UK on small boats this year, more than for the whole of 2024 but lower than the record set in 2022, when the Conservatives were in power.

Mahmood told lawmakers that the reforms, modelled on Denmark’s strict asylum system, would discourage refugees and asylum seekers from crossing the English Channel from France on small boats.

She described the current system as “out of control and unfair”, adding that it was an “uncomfortable truth” that the government must face.

Under the reforms, refugee status will become temporary and will be reviewed every 30 months. Refugees will be forced to return to their home countries once those are deemed safe.

They will also need to wait for 20 years, instead of the current five, before they can apply for permanent residency.

The government has also said it will legislate to make it harder for irregular migrants and foreign criminals to use the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) to stop deportation.

Since July last year, the UK has “removed more than 50,000 people with no right to remain”, a 23 percent increase on the previous period, and instructed diplomats to make returns a top priority, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs Yvette Cooper said.

The policy has been facing criticism, however, with Mark Davies, a former adviser to the Foreign Office, calling it “shameful” and a departure from “Britain’s historic commitment to support refugees”.

Former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn also described the policy as “draconian”, adding that it tries to “appease the most ghastly, racist right-wing forces all across Europe”, while undermining the UN Convention on Human Rights.

Enver Solomon, chief executive of the Refugee Council, urged the government to reconsider, warning the plans “will not deter” crossings, and that refugees who work hard should be able to build “secure, settled lives”.

Official figures cited by the AFP news agency showed that asylum claims in the UK are at a record high, with about 111,000 applications made in the year to June 2025.

But the number of initial positive decisions the UK authorities granted fell from 2023 to 2024.

Most asylum seekers and refugees arrive in the UK legally. Net migration reached a record high of 906,000 in the year to June 2023, before it fell to 431,000 in 2024, partly reflecting the tighter rules.

Last week, Republican Ohio gubernatorial hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy challenged other Republicans over their idea that ancestry or heritage is what makes someone truly American.

“The idea that a ‘heritage American’ is more American than another American is un-American at its core,” Ramaswamy, who was born to Indian immigrant parents, said during Turning Point USA’s annual conference.

Remigration — once a fringe far-right notion advocating the deportation of ethnic minorities — is now gaining traction in United States Republican circles as President Donald Trump’s second term enters the final weeks of its first year.

Earlier this year, reports said that the US State Department was considering creating a department of remigration. A few months later, the Department of Homeland Security posted in favour of remigration online.

But it is not just American far-right figures evoking the idea of remigration; European far-right leaders are also joining in.

Here is a closer look at what remigration means and what its origins are.

What is remigration?

Broadly, remigration refers to when an immigrant voluntarily returns to their country of origin.

However, in the context of far-right movements, remigration is a method of ethnic cleansing.

For white ethnonationalists, remigration is a process through which all non-white people are forcibly removed from traditionally white countries.

What are the origins of remigration?

Ideas of remigration trace back to Nazi Germany in the late 1930s. The Nazis attempted to “remigrate” the Jews in Germany to Madagascar.

But the concept got wind through the work of Renaud Camus, a French novelist who devised the Great Replacement conspiracy theory in his 2011 book, Le Grand Remplacement.

His widely debunked white nationalist theory suggests that elites are replacing white Christians in the West with non-white, primarily Muslim, people through mass migration and demographic changes. Camus calls this “genocide by substitution”.

Far-right nationalists in Europe and beyond have borrowed ideas from this theory.

Heidi Beirich, an expert on the American and European far-right movements, told Al Jazeera that the term remigration is “relatively new” in far-right circles.

Beirich said that the concept was popularised by Martin Sellner.

Sellner, 36, is the leader of Austria’s ultranationalist Identitarian Movement, a far‑right group known for anti-immigration activism and promoting ethnonationalist ideology. Ethnonationalists define the nation primarily by shared ethnicity, ancestry, culture and heritage.

“Remigration advocates the forced removal of non-white people from what Sellner and others with his beliefs view as historically white countries, basically Europe, Canada, the US, Australia and New Zealand,” Beirich explained.

Beirich said remigration in essence, is a “policy solution to the white supremacist ‘Great Replacement’ conspiracy theory”.

Do different groups have different ideas?

There are strands of nationalists beyond ethnonationalism.

Civic nationalists, who also called liberal nationalists or constitutional nationalists, define the nation by shared political values, laws and institutions, regardless of ethnicity. They believe that a person belongs to a country if they hold legal citizenship and are committed to the state’s principles.

While civic nationalists are less enthusiastic about remigration than ethnonationalists, to them, remigration means voluntary return migration. This could mean policies or incentives for immigrants to return to their country of origin if they choose, often for economic, family or cultural reasons.

Why is the idea of remigration becoming mainstream?

Beirich said that Sellner has been pushing this idea with far-right parties in Europe for the past two years.

“The astounding thing is not that a xenophobic political party like AfD in Germany would be open to this, but rather that a white supremacist policy position is now being pushed by the US government.”

The AfD is a far-right party called Alternative for Germany, which is designated an “extremist” organisation in the country.

In May 2025, Axios reported, quoting an unnamed State Department official, that the department is planning to create an “Office of Remigration”.

Then, in an X post on October 14, the Department of Homeland Security wrote “remigrate,” adding a link to its mobile application, which allows US immigrants to self-deport.

Where is the remigration movement picking up?

The idea of remigration has been revived by far-right leaders in Europe as well.

This includes Herbert Kickl, the leader of Austria’s far-right anti-immigration Freedom Party (FPO).

“As People’s Chancellor, I will initiate the remigration of all those who trample on our right to hospitality,” Kickl said in the FPO manifesto ahead of the election in September 2024.

While FPO won most seats in the election, other parties — the conservative People’s Party (OVP), the Social Democrats (SPO) and the liberal NEOS — came together to form a ruling coalition under an early 2025 deal which sidelined the FPO.

Across the border in Germany, Alice Weidel, the leader of the AfD, referred to “remigration” while supporting the closure of the country’s borders to new immigrants at a party conference in January.

In May 2025, a conference called the Remigration Summit was held in Italy. It was attended by far-right activists from across Europe. InfoMigrants, a website which covers migration issues in Europe, estimated that 400 right-wing activists attended the summit.

But Beirich said that remigration, if implemented as a policy, would in effect be an “attempt to create all-white countries through ethnic cleansing”.

The administration of President Donald Trump has announced it will halt the visa lottery programme that allowed the suspect in the Brown University shooting to enter the United States.

The lottery awards approximately 50,000 immigrant visas each year, according to the US government.

But Trump has long opposed the Diversity Immigrant Visa Programme, sometimes known as the DV Programme. On Friday, his Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem revealed that he had directed her to end the lottery immediately.

She also identified the suspect as Portuguese national Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, who received his green card — a certificate for permanent residency — through the lottery in 2017.

“This heinous individual should never have been allowed in our country,” Noem wrote in her social media statement.

“At President Trump’s direction, I am immediately directing USCIS [US Citizenship and Immigration Services] to pause the DV1 program to ensure no more Americans are harmed by this disastrous program.”

Campaign to end visa lottery

Friday’s announcement is not the first time Trump has sought to wind down the diversity visa lottery.

Trump has long sought to narrow the country’s pathways to legal immigration, and he has used crime as a pretext for doing so.

Noem herself pointed out that, in 2017, Trump “fought” to shut down the diversity visa lottery in the wake of an attack in New York City that saw a truck ram into a crowd of people, killing eight.

Speaking at a graduation ceremony for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in December 2017, Trump — then in his first term as president — called on Congress to “end the visa lottery system”.

“They have a lottery. You pick people. Do you think the country is giving us their best people? No,” Trump said.

“What kind of a system is that? They come in by lottery. They give us their worst people.”

The Diversity Immigrant Visa Programme was established in 1990 to ensure applicants from underrepresented countries had access to the US immigration system.

Immigration rights advocates have long argued that pathways to permanent residency are narrow for those who do not already have a spouse, relatives or some other kind of sponsor in the country.

The visa lottery helps to answer that need, by creating an alternative route to residency.

The lottery system selects visa recipients randomly, but critics argue it remains a long-shot avenue to gain US residency, and even successful applicants must still pass a rigorous screening process after the lottery.

While the Diversity Immigrant Visa Programme used to accept 55,000 applicants each year, in 2000 that number was lowered to its current level, according to the American Immigration Council.

A suspect identified

Friday’s decision to immediately suspend the lottery comes as new details emerge about Neves Valente, a physics scholar found dead in a storage unit in New Hampshire after a nationwide manhunt.

The search began on December 13, when gunfire erupted on the campus of Brown University, a prestigious Ivy League school in Providence, Rhode Island.

The school’s fall semester was at its conclusion, and the exam period had begun. Students in the Barus and Holley physics laboratory were taking their end-of-course exams when a suspect, clad in black, entered the building and opened fire, killing two students and injuring nine others.

The physics lab was close to the edge of campus, and the suspect was able to escape on foot undetected.

The manhunt included several false starts, as authorities said they quickly detained a person of interest, only to release the individual without charges.

Then, on November 15, law enforcement officials announced that a plasma physics scholar named Nuno Loureiro had been found dead at his home, after suffering multiple gunshot wounds.

Loureiro was also a Portuguese immigrant, and he served as a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), a highly regarded science institution.

It was not immediately clear that the two shooting incidents were related, and authorities faced pressure to bring the Brown University shooter to justice, as the manhunt dragged on.

But on Thursday night, officials announced they had discovered Neves Valente dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, and that they believed him to be responsible for both attacks.

Neves Valente had previously studied in a PhD programme at Brown, though he did not complete his degree, and he had been Loureiro’s classmate in Portugal.

Visa revocations

The administration of President Trump has a track record of revoking visas and terminating immigration programmes after high-profile attacks.

On November 26, for example, two National Guard members from West Virginia were shot while on patrol in Washington, DC, as part of Trump’s crime crackdown in the capital.

The suspect in that case was identified as Rahmanullah Lakanwal, an Afghan national who had previously worked with allied forces during the US-led war in Afghanistan.

One of the National Guard soldiers, 20-year-old Sarah Beckstrom, ultimately died from her wounds.

Trump responded to the incident by announcing he was halting all visa applications and asylum requests from Afghan nationals, despite outcry from human rights and veterans groups.

The Republican leader also said he would pursue a “permanent pause” on entry for immigrants from “all third-world countries”.

In the aftermath of the shooting, the Trump White House tightened entry for 19 countries it had identified in June as “high risk” and expanded the list of restrictions to include 20 more countries.

Trump has also taken targeted actions to strip individuals of their immigration status following shootings.

After the assassination of conservative commentator Charlie Kirk in September, the Trump administration announced it was yanking visas from six foreign nationals who posted disrespectful comments or memes online about the attack. They hailed from countries ranging from Argentina to Brazil, Germany to Paraguay.

Free-speech advocates said the decision was a clear violation of the First Amendment of the US Constitution, which protects the freedom of expression.

But the Trump administration has repeatedly threatened to boot foreign nationals that do not align with its policy priorities.

“Aliens who take advantage of America’s hospitality while celebrating the assassination of our citizens will be removed,” the US State Department wrote in response.

The suspect in the Kirk shooting is a 22-year-old US citizen named Tyler James Robinson from Utah.

Studies have repeatedly shown that US-born citizens are more likely to commit violent crimes than immigrants.

Washington, DC – For the past two years, weekdays for Susanna have meant thumbing through picture books, organising cubby holes and leading classroom choruses of songs.

But her work as a pre-school teacher came to a screeching halt in October, when she found out her application to renew her work permit had been denied.

Susanna, who uses a pseudonym in this article for fear of reprisals, is one of the nearly 10 percent of teachers in the United States who are immigrants.

But while the US has increasingly looked abroad to fill teacher shortages, some foreign-born teachers say the deportation push under President Donald Trump has threatened their livelihoods — and risks traumatising their students.

Susanna, an asylum applicant who fled violence in Guatemala nearly a decade ago, said that losing her permit meant she had to stop working immediately.

She recalls breaking the news to her students, some of whom are only three years old. Many were too young to understand.

“In one week, I lost everything,” Susanna told Al Jazeera in Spanish. “When I told the kids goodbye, they asked me why, and I told them, ‘I can only tell you goodbye.’ There were kids that hugged me, and it hurt my heart a lot.”

Looking abroad for teachers

Estimates vary as to how many foreign-born teachers currently work in the US. But one 2019 report from George Mason University found that there were 857,200 immigrants among the country’s 8.1 million teachers, in roles ranging from pre-school to university.

For the 2023-2024 school year alone, the US government brought 6,716 full-time teachers to the country on temporary exchange visas to fill openings in pre-kindergarten, primary and secondary school education.

Many hailed from the Philippines, as well as countries like Jamaica, Spain and Colombia.

The uncertainty for immigrants under Trump’s second term, however, has proven disruptive to schools that rely heavily on foreign-born teachers.

That is the case for the pre-school where Susanna worked, CommuniKids, which offers language immersion programmes in Washington, DC.

Cofounder and president Raul Echevarría estimates that immigrants — both citizens and non-citizens working with legal authorisation — comprise about 90 percent of CommuniKids’s staff.

But Echevarría told Al Jazeera that the push to rescind legal pathways to immigration has jeopardised the employment of several faculty members.

Five other teachers at the school have seen their ability to work affected by changes to the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) programme.

All five, Echevarría explained, were originally from Venezuela. But in October, the Trump administration ended TPS status for more than 350,000 Venezuelan citizens, including the teachers at CommuniKids.

Their authorisation to work legally in the US will expire on October 2, 2026, according to the US Citizenship and Immigration Services website.

“These teachers lost their ability to make a living,” Echevarria said, noting that his school requires educators with expertise in languages like Spanish, French and Mandarin.

‘Strong bonds’

For the schools themselves, the losses can be devastating. Every state in the US has reported teacher shortages to the federal government.

But advocates say the high stress and low pay of education make teachers difficult to recruit and keep.

That leads some states to look abroad for education workers. In North Carolina, for example, 1,063 foreign nationals worked full-time as grade-school teachers on temporary J-1 visas during the 2023-2024 school year.

The top destinations for such recruits were all southern states: North Carolina was followed by Florida with 996 teachers on J-1 visas, and Texas with 761.

But Echevarria said some of the biggest impacts of the deportation drive are felt by the students themselves.

“Our students develop strong bonds with their teachers, and all of a sudden, overnight, they lost their teachers,” said Echevarría.

“Their number one superpower”, he added, “is their ability to empathise and to create strong, effective bonds with people from any background”.

But when those bonds are broken, there can be mental health consequences and setbacks for educational achievement, particularly among younger children.

A 2024 study published by the American Educational Research Association found that, when teachers leave midyear, children’s language development takes a measurable hit.

In other words, the loss of a familiar teacher — someone who knows their routines, strengths and fears — can quietly stall a child’s progress. The consequences extend to a child’s sense of self and stability.

Mental health consequences

For parents like Michelle Howell, whose child attends CommuniKids, the loss of teachers has also made the classroom environment feel fragile.

“The teachers there aren’t just teachers for these young kids,” Howell said of CommuniKids. “They’re like extended family.

“They hug them, they hold them, they do the things a parent would do. When those people disappear, it’s not just hard for the kids. It’s hard for everyone.”

Howell, who is Chinese American, said the sudden disappearances reminded her of her own family’s history.

“I used to read about things like this happening in China, the place my family left to find safety,” she said. “It’s very disturbing to know that what we ran from back then is our reality now. People disappear.”

School psychologist Maria C, who asked to remain anonymous to protect her work in the Texas public school system, has noticed the children she works with struggling with instability caused by the deportation push.

The disappearance of a loved one or mentor — say, a favourite teacher — could flood a child’s body with cortisol, the hormone meant to protect them in moments of danger, she explained.

But when that stress becomes chronic, the same hormone starts to hurt more than it helps. It interferes with memory, attention and emotional regulation.

“For some, it looks like anxiety. For others, it’s depression or sudden outbursts,” Maria said. “They’re in fight-or-flight mode all day.”

She added that selective mutism, an anxiety disorder, is on the rise among the children she sees, who range in age from five to 12.

“It used to be rare, maybe one case per school,” she said. “Now I see it constantly. It’s a quiet symptom of fear.”

Preparing for the worst

Back at CommuniKids, Echevarría explained that he and other staff members have put together contingency plans, just in case immigration enforcement arrives at the pre-school.

The aim, he said, is to make both employees and students feel safer coming to class.

“We put those steps in writing because we wanted our staff to know they’re not alone,” he said. “We have attorneys on call. We’re partners with local police. But above all, our job is to protect our children.”

But as an added precaution, teachers are advised to carry their passports or work permits with them.

Even Echevarría, a US citizen born in Virginia, said he carries his passport wherever he goes. The fear of deportation has a way of lingering.

“I’m bilingual and of Hispanic descent,” he said. “Given how things are, I want to be able to prove I’m a citizen if anyone ever questions it.”