raids

The rebel fighters who abandoned Falam in Myanmar in April said they gave up the strategic border town near India only after running out of bullets.

The fighters had endured a six-month assault by Myanmar’s military, including more than 2,500 air strikes and a ground assault by roughly 1,000 troops. The fall of the town, which had been under opposition control for a year, marked a strategic victory for the military: Falam is home to the only airport in Chin State and commands a trade route to the Indian border.

Within weeks, three more towns in Chin had fallen, and by late May, the military was claiming control of the entire northern part of the state.

“Falam taught us an important lesson,” said Salai William Chin, a member of the rebel Chin Brotherhood. “Capturing a town and holding it are two very different challenges,” he said, noting that maintaining  control required manpower, logistics, administration, as well as “the ability to withstand repeated attacks, especially from the air”.

But he promised to keep fighting.

“I would not measure success only by whether we permanently hold every town,” he told Al Jazeera. “Where the military has a significant advantage, especially through airpower, mobile warfare may sometimes be more effective. The important thing is to preserve our forces, protect civilians and maintain our ability to continue the struggle.”

‘War of attrition’

The retreat is part of a broader reversal. Myanmar’s opposition – a loose coalition of militias and ethnic armed organisations fighting the military that seized power in a 2021 coup – has been weakened. Their gains in 2023 and 2024, when coordinated offensives stripped the military of dozens of towns, have given way to a steady withdrawal from the urban centres the rebels had captured.

Analysts say the shift has been driven by several factors: a mass conscription drive that has refilled the military’s ranks with tens of thousands of troops, a devastating air campaign that has killed hundreds of civilians, and backing from China, which has brokered ceasefires between the military and some powerful ethnic armed groups while helping choke off weapons supplies to others.

But the military is unlikely to score “existential or politically decisive wins” against the opposition, wrote Su Mon, an analyst at the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data (ACLED) project. She warned in a recent briefing note that the country “faces a protracted war of attrition” and a mounting humanitarian crisis in the coming months.

The war, which began in the wake of a military coup in February 2021, is now in its fifth year. It began following a brutal crackdown on unarmed protesters, with young people taking up arms and forming militias known as the People’s Defence Forces (PDF). They were aided by powerful armed ethnic organisations who control Myanmar’s borderlands, some of which have fought for autonomy since the country’s founding in 1948.

According to ACLED, deaths in the conflict have now surpassed 100,000, while the United Nations says 3.9 million people have been displaced and an estimated one in three people requires humanitarian assistance.

Earlier this year, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, who led the 2021 power grab, presided over tightly controlled elections, with major opposition parties barred from participating and voting impossible, or boycotted, across much of the country. He was sworn in as president in April, completing his passage from commander-in-chief to head of a nominally civilian government in Naypyidaw.

Min Aung Hlaing now says his government wants peace talks with armed opponents, including in Chin.

But the fighting continues.

Capture of strategic towns

The military has opened new operations this year in Chin, Kachin, Kayin and Rakhine States, and according to ISP-Myanmar, an independent think tank, it has now retaken 22 of the 101 towns it lost after the coup. That amounts to 9 percent of the lost territory, but the areas are strategically located and include key trade corridors linking border areas to central Myanmar, where the military’s main bases are located.

Their capture has disrupted the “economic and logistical capacity of many resistance groups”, according to Su Mon at ACLED. And “while the military has yet to fully restore its own regime administration in these areas”, she wrote, “the victories have effectively hindered resistance coordination”, and are pushing the opposition groups “away from large-scale coordinated offensives to defensive guerrilla warfare”.

The Myanmar military has lauded the battlefield wins.

Speaking in Bangkok this month, Min Aung Hlaing said Myanmar was “on the path of democracy and heading towards a better future”, while state media has run photographs of what it described as triumphant troops returning from operations around the country.

Anthony Davis, a Bangkok-based security analyst, said a mass conscription drive and Chinese support have proven pivotal for the military.

Close to 150,000 troops have been added to its combat ranks since 2024 through conscription, he said, with many of the conscripts barely trained, but numerous enough to grind forward. Pressure from China has pulled two powerful opposition forces, the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army and the Ta’ang National Liberation Army, out of the fight, freeing the military to redeploy troops elsewhere. Beijing also pressed the United Wa State Army, one of Myanmar’s strongest ethnic armed groups, to stop selling weapons to opposition groups, contributing to ammunition shortages nationwide.

“Unchallenged airpower has from the beginning of the war provided the [military] with a crucial advantage,” Davis added, both in resupplying troops and in carrying out attacks against opposition forces. At the same time, “the rapid proliferation of drone technology in both surveillance and strike roles, along with improved battlefield coordination between different combat arms, have both boosted [the military’s] capability”, he said.

Air campaign

The toll on civilians has been severe.

The Myanmar Internet Project counted 520 air strikes from April through June, hitting 87 townships and killing at least 314 civilians, including 41 children. Chin State was hit hardest, with 122 strikes, followed by Sagaing with 101, and Rakhine with 98.

Phil Robertson, the director of Asia Human Rights and Labour Advocates organisation, said that “the inability of the resistance to counter the military’s air superiority” had weakened drive among opposition forces.

“Air attacks demoralise PDFs and other resistance troops, and scatter civilians who have supported the rebels,” he told Al Jazeera.

Still, the anti-military forces insist that the war is not lost.

Thinzar Shunlei Yi, an activist living in exile, said opposition networks are still training organisers and building support. “Even in the face of mass murder, in the face of massive violations, we have that courage and integrity that we resist, and we reject,” she said. “Myanmar people keep up that spirit, and we will keep on going.”

In Chin, Salai William Chin remained resolute.

“We do have further plans, but it is still too early to speak publicly about them,” he said. “I would not say that airpower has permanently decided the battlefield. It remains a serious challenge, but warfare continues to evolve, and resistance forces also continue to learn and adapt.”

Aug. 25 (UPI) — Colombian President Abelardo De la Espriella ordered police and immigration authorities to begin to identify and deport migrants without legal status, starting in Barranquilla, the president’s office said.

De la Espriella issued the order during a security council meeting in the Caribbean city, where he announced measures to combat homicide, extortion, drug trafficking and other crimes, according to an official statement.

“The order to Migration is clear: coordinated operations with the police must begin in Barranquilla to find illegal immigrants,” De la Espriella said.

The president said authorities would first target foreign nationals committing crimes and then those who have not regularized their immigration status in Colombia.

“This is a presidential order that must begin to be carried out this week,” he said. “I will not accept illegal immigrants, regardless of where they come from, who are committing crimes in Colombia. They will leave, and we will deport them.”

De la Espriella said the measure was a political and administrative decision by his government. However, the announcement did not include a decree, an enforcement protocol or a deportation target.

The government also has not explained whether the order changes existing legal standards or seeks to intensify enforcement already carried out by Colombia’s immigration authority.

Deportations and expulsions were already part of Colombia’s immigration policy. Between August 2022 and June, Migration Colombia documented 3,389 deportations and 2,576 expulsions — a total of 5,965 people.

The leading reasons for deportation during that period were remaining in the country without legal status, with 1,380 cases, and entering or leaving the country illegally, with 1,315, according to Migration Colombia.

Other cases involved fraudulent documents, false statements, unauthorized activities, court orders and threats to national security or public order. The immigration authority said deportations and expulsions require individual administrative proceedings.

The decision fulfills a campaign promise. In June, when he was still a candidate, De la Espriella said foreign nationals who entered Colombia legally would receive guarantees, while those who violated immigration rules would be returned to their home countries, El Colombiano reported.

Colombia is home to more than 2.8 million Venezuelans, the country’s largest foreign population. Migration Colombia had registered 2,831,561 Venezuelan nationals intending to settle in Colombia as of Aug. 31, 2025, according to an official report.

The Association of Venezuelans in Barranquilla called on authorities to respect due process and the right to a defense during the new operations.

“Anyone who commits a crime must answer to the justice system, regardless of whether they are Colombian, Venezuelan or any other nationality,” the organization said. However, it warned that “irregular immigration status is not synonymous with criminality,” according to Caracol Radio.

Seven Palestinians, including two children, have been detained by Israeli forces in overnight and predawn raids across the West Bank, according to Palestinian local sources.

Israeli settlers separately assaulted a Palestinian man and his wife on their own farmland on Saturday.

The couple was attacked in the al-Zarqa area of Beitillu, northwest of Ramallah, when a group of settlers stormed the farm where they were working, leaving both with injuries and bruising that required hospital treatment.

The latest settler attacks and raids by Israeli forces are a single day’s snapshot of activity now unfolding “in every direction” across the occupied West Bank, said Al Jazeera’s Nour Odeh, reporting from Ramallah.

Odeh said Israeli military jeeps were roaming constantly through Ramallah on Saturday, as soldiers used tear gas inside a supermarket in the city. This level of everyday disruption, she said, has become difficult to separate from the settlement expansion driving it.

Settlers have erected another illegal outpost this week, Odeh added, the 12th such construction in the past seven days alone.

The military raids that produced Saturday’s detentions spanned three governorates at once. In Tubas, forces searched a family home in the town of Tammun and detained a 16-year-old; in Nablus, four Palestinians were picked up in predawn raids on the villages of Urif, Einabus and Burqa; and in Bethlehem, a second 16-year-old was detained in Wadi Fukin, with another man held at the Container Checkpoint.

In the nearby town of Asira ash Shamaliya, troops went further still, storming dozens of homes overnight and converting one house into a makeshift field interrogation centre, security sources told Palestinian news agency Wafa.

Further south, in Khashem al-Daraj near Hebron, Israeli forces chased down and detained 11 workers, beating them in the process, according to local activist Osama Makhamreh.

Israeli settlers, meanwhile, were active on parallel fronts.

In Surif, near Hebron, residents from the Bat Ayin outpost set fire to one car, damaged another, and sprayed racist graffiti on a house, the town’s mayor, Hazem Ghneimat, said.

Later on Saturday, three young Palestinian men were assaulted with pepper spray on the road between al-Mughayyir and Abu Falah, northeast of Ramallah, after settlers rammed their vehicle with an all-terrain vehicle – an attack that village council head Amin Abu Aliya said has become almost a daily occurrence along that stretch of road.

In Beit Jala, near Bethlehem, Israeli authorities forced three residents to demolish their own homes rather than face the fines and costs of a state-led demolition, which, Palestinians say, is a practice used routinely to sidestep Israel’s near-total refusal to grant them building permits.

Saturday’s events fit a pattern that rights monitors have been documenting for months. Palestinian sources recorded more than 11,000 attacks by Israeli forces and settlers across the West Bank in the first half of this year alone, with Hebron, Ramallah and Nablus the worst affected.

The figures echo recent United Nations warnings – including from UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who has said settler violence and forced displacement are accelerating alongside plans to expand and legalise outposts, all of which the UN maintains have no legal validity under international law.

British Prime Minister Andy Burnham added his own criticism on Saturday, calling the scale of the humanitarian crisis in Palestine “unacceptable” and saying his government was weighing further measures on Israeli settlements, including possible restrictions on arms exports.

Iraqi security forces arrested several politicians, lawmakers and senior officials in dawn raids across Baghdad as part of a sweeping anti-corruption campaign ordered by Iraq’s new prime minister, Ali al-Zaidi. Elite Counter Terrorism Service units carried out operations in the Green Zone.

Bethlehem, occupied West Bank – In the narrow alleyways of the Dheisheh refugee camp, three children debate which of their encounters with the Israeli military is worth telling, and who gets to tell it.

Yanal, 14, wins the opening round on language skills alone. He speaks three languages: Arabic, English and Spanish, and insists on telling his story in English.

“Life in the camp is complex,” he says, because, as he explains, there is nowhere to run away to when the army comes.

Yanal keeps returning to one memory: a football match, soldiers entering the field, and there being no way out.

Mustafa Abu Aliyah, 13, counters with a raid that he ran into as he was on his way to his grandfather’s house. The Israeli army fired live rounds and tear gas, he says. “We were in the middle of the fire.”

He can’t remember his first encounter with soldiers, “but I definitely saw them when I was little, because they are always coming here”.

His sister Diyar, 12, was mid-piano lesson the last time the army came through.

“Whenever the army comes, there will be tear gas,” she says. “People will be beaten. There’s usually someone injured or killed.”

She compares it to life elsewhere. “I see children in other countries, in other worlds, living in safety, but we can’t even leave our front door without suffering.”

The raids happen so often that the children often can’t remember the dates of specific incidents. But what they do remember is the fear they experienced and the aggression displayed by the Israeli soldiers.

In the first nine months of 2025 alone, Israeli forces carried out nearly 7,500 raids across the occupied West Bank, or about 27 a day, and a 37 percent increase compared with the same period in 2024.

‘Essence of childhood destroyed’

The children in the Dheisheh refugee camp reflect a wider pattern of childhood experiences under Israeli occupation, set out in a report the UN’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory released on Tuesday.

It examines Israel’s treatment of Palestinian children in Gaza and the occupied West Bank since October 2023.

Titled, “The essence of childhood has been destroyed”, it found that Israeli forces have killed at least 20,179 Palestinian children and wounded more than 44,000 across the occupied territory, most of them in Gaza – where it said that the deliberate targeting of children constituted part of the genocide in the Palestinian territory.

The report also documents a pattern of killings, mass arrests, torture, sexual violence and attacks on schools and hospitals.

In the West Bank, it records a sharp rise in settler violence against children and killings by Israeli forces, among them a two-year-old girl shot dead in January 2025. Children, the report notes, are held in Israeli detention, with no lawyer and no word sent to their parents, a separation it says can amount to enforced disappearance. Schools, too, are targets: 85 across the West Bank are under demolition or stop-work orders, and others have been closed or attacked by soldiers and settlers.

Beyond the casualty count

The UN commission argues that Israel has created conditions in which Palestinians live in a constant state of “diffused, ambient terror, that does not require constant bombing to remain effective”.

“We are talking about repeated shocks, about continuous events that never end,” says Lemis Farraj, a psychologist and the project coordinator at Shorouq in Dheisheh, emphasising that a child’s physical and mental health cannot be separated from each other.

The report calls this continuous traumatic stress, distinct from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), because there is no single event to recover from. The danger does not just come from experiencing one raid, but from the fear that comes with waiting for the expected raids that will likely come in the future.

Diyar explains that when the army enters her neighbourhood, she has to stay home and wait, no matter what her plans were. “Our life stops,” she says.

Her brother, Mustafa, says that the repetition has worn the fear flat.

“When I see the army, I [am] used to it and I stop being afraid.”

Farraj sees the same in the young children she treats: a startle at an ordinary sound, certainty that a raid has begun, and regression – skills already learned suddenly lost again.

Five-year-old Khour Hammad, who lives a few alleys away from the older children, has experienced the same raids.

She explains that both of her parents are in prison. Israeli forces arrested her father in July 2023 and her mother last March, according to the family.

Khour remembers the night the army came for her mother. Half-asleep, she heard a man’s voice and thought her father had finally come home. She climbed out of bed expecting him. Instead, she found soldiers inside the house.

The soldiers tried to question Khour. She says that she “felt like I was going to throw up”.

Handed an old family photo, she brightens at once, pointing out her mother, Islam Amarna, and her father, Osama Hammad, and rattling off memories in bursts.

Generational trauma

While Palestinian children in Gaza and the West Bank face different lived experiences, the UN finds the same cause behind the harm: a military occupation described as a “long-term mechanism of domination, subjugation and oppression”.

Farraj adds that children are affected not only by their own experiences of trauma, but also by what is passed down from parents and grandparents.

“The first generation of the Nakba lived in shock and passed it on to their children,” she says, referring to the ethnic cleansing of at least 750,000 Palestinians following the formation of the state of Israel in 1948.

The report similarly notes that Palestinian refugees, now in their fifth generation, have internalised a sense of “dispossession from the Nakba” alongside present-day experiences of occupation.

In the West Bank, roughly one in four Palestinians are refugees; in Gaza, it is about 70 percent.

Israeli violence and forcible displacement have been carried through generations of Palestinians, compounding as the cycle repeats. Farraj says trauma recovery depends on stability: family support, schooling, safe spaces and a predictable routine, all of which remain precarious under Israel’s occupation.

For Khour, that stability begins with her parents.

“I want the whole world to listen and see my picture,” Khour says, “and get my mom and dad out of prison.”

The Dodgers’ decision to deny U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents access to Dodger Stadium wasn’t the way the team intended to first address the surge of federal immigration enforcement a year ago.

Pressed by religious, labor and community leaders to take a stand, the Dodgers had prepared a response to Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol raids that triggered widespread protests — only to shelve the announcement as the team went public with their refusal to let federal agents onto stadium grounds. A day later, on June 20, the Dodgers unveiled their plan, centered on $1 million “toward direct financial assistance for families of immigrants impacted by recent events in the region.”

In total, the Dodgers donated $1.1 million, representatives for California Community Foundation and Labor Community Services — the two nonprofits that received the funds — told The Times.

“The Dodgers have been in L.A. for 68 years,” said Joseph Tomás McKellar, executive director of PICO California. “They’re beloved among immigrant communities in a way that no other sports team is. That gives the Dodgers cultural and financial power in the region. We applaud what they did, but they could do even more by exercising leadership.”

PICO California, the state’s largest faith-based organizing network, was behind a petition delivered to the Dodgers, the contents of which were largely addressed by the team’s $1-million commitment. But as the last of the money flowed to immigrant families in need in late August, another petition circulated that demanded Dodgers owner Mark Walter sell his “company’s stake in ICE jails and deportation flights.”

Walter’s massive investment firm, Guggenheim Partners, owned more than a million shares of GEO Group, valued at nearly $12 million. By the end of 2025, Guggenheim’s interest in GEO Group had fallen to around 10,000 shares. And by the end of March of this year, Guggenheim no longer owned any shares of the prison company that also assisted in the deportation of immigrants, according to SEC filings reviewed by The Times.

Walter also faced criticism over the partnership announced last year between Palantir Technologies and TWG Global — of which Walter is chairman and chief executive officer. Palantir provides AI and analytics software to ICE, tools the American Civil Liberties Union said “form the backbone for ICE’s mass deportation regime.”

There are no indicators as to why Guggenheim Partners divested from GEO Group. The Dodgers declined comment. Guggenheim Partners did not respond to The Times’ request for comment. GEO Group referred questions to Guggenheim Partners.

In January, Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights, or CHIRLA, filed a federal lawsuit against federal officials over the condition of the Adelanto ICE Processing Center in San Bernardino County, a facility operated by GEO Group. In the complaint, CHIRLA alleged “detained individuals face dangerous conditions and pervasive abuses — disease and illness are rampant, mold grows on the walls, and detained individuals are denied sufficient food, clean drinking water, proper medical care, and disability accommodations.”

Donald Trump’s reelection has been a major driver of profits for GEO Group. GEO Group founder, chairman and chief executive George Zoley said in a May earnings call the company was “awarded new or expanded contracts that represent up to approximately $520 million in new incremental annual revenues, which represents the largest amount of new business we have won in the single year in our company’s history.” Former GEO Group exec David Venturella is the acting director of ICE.

“It’s really good to know [of the Guggenheim divestment],” said Rabbi Susan Goldberg, a longtime immigrants rights activist and founder of Nefesh, a Jewish spiritual community in Echo Park. “We showed up so often at its [regional] headquarters in Culver City that they moved. We don’t know where they are located in the area now.”

The California Community Foundation received $1 million, which worked with Los Angeles city officials to distribute $1,000 in direct relief to 1,000 households impacted by the immigration raids. The money was distributed through cash cards, according to the foundation. The Dodgers’ gift amounts to a quarter of the $4 million the foundation has raised for its Los Angeles Neighbors Support Fund, $3.3 million of which has been “deployed to impacted communities with new investments continuing to roll out,” according to the nonprofit.

The Dodgers also donated $100,000 to Labor Community Services, a partner of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, that provided more than 4,000 families with food assistance with the team’s donation.

“The Dodgers’ generous donation has enabled us to reach and assist more families throughout Los Angeles County with dignity and compassion, providing critical food assistance at a time when it is needed most,” Labor Community Services Executive Director Norma López said in a statement to The Times.

A spokesperson for Labor Community Services said no other pro sports team outside the Dodgers made a similar donation to help impacted immigrant families.

“The Dodgers have a unique responsibility and they are an example of something we want to continue to see, especially as the World Cup and the Olympics come to L.A.,” said Carlos Martin Rodriguez, director of organizing for L.A. Voice, a multifaith coalition that organized several vigils and demonstrations when the raids were at their height. “I hope this wasn’t a singular moment, but the beginning of a movement.”

WASHINGTON — A year after the Trump administration kicked off its aggressive immigration enforcement tour with military-style raids across greater Los Angeles, federal officials have veered toward a less flashy but broader strategy: making immigrants’ lives harder so they will leave.

The changes range in scale and scope, from disqualifying immigrants from certain jobs to indefinitely pausing the processing of visa applications. They target those lawfully present as well as the undocumented.

Since President Trump’s second term began, the administration has used executive orders and federal regulations to chip away at services or benefits, such as work permits and small business loans, that immigrants could obtain in the past.

Now, immigrants are finding that freedoms — the ones that once made the U.S. a desirable place to start over — are disappearing. Many are retreating back into the shadows as they fear previously routine tasks, such as traveling across states, filing taxes and seeking medical care.

“The priority is to force people to leave the country or not come, regardless of legal status or really any other criteria,” said David Bier, immigration studies director at the Libertarian think tank the Cato Institute. “They’re taking a sledgehammer to the system.”

Trump won the White House in part on his promise to clamp down on illegal immigration, but recent polling shows support for his agenda has waned, especially after immigration agents shot and killed two U.S. citizens in Minneapolis.

In a statement, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said Trump’s highest priority has always been the deportation of immigrants with criminal records. The Department of Homeland Security said Trump also prioritizes immigration that strengthens the country financially, socially and culturally.

President Trump displays the signed “Secure America Act” during a ceremony in the Oval Office on Wednesday. The act provides $70 billion for immigration enforcement and border-security agencies.

(Aaron Schwartz / CNP, Bloomberg)

The number of arrests by ICE agents has declined. On average, ICE arrested about 1,000 immigrants per day in early March, down from a peak average of just under 1,400 in mid-January, agency data show. And there are fewer detained immigrants — facilities across the country held about 60,000 detainees in April, compared to more than 70,000 in late January.

The downturns prompted some Trump loyalists to say the administration is failing to fulfill his signature promise, which is an assertion the administration rejects.

“ICE is NOT slowing down,” said Homeland Security spokesperson Lauren Bis. “Since Day One, DHS law enforcement has been delivering on President Trump’s promise to the American people to arrest and deport criminal illegal aliens.”

At a border security conference last month, Tom Homan, who leads border policy for the White House, suggested immigration agents would return to more muscular enforcement tactics.

“You ain’t seen s— yet,” he told the audience.

But along with focusing on deportations, the administration is deploying other tactics to deter illegal — and legal —immigration.

ICE agents confront protesters on June 8 as they gather outside the federal immigration center at Delaney Hall in Newark, New Jersey, where ICE is housing detained immigrants.

(Spencer Platt / Getty Images)

Curtailing visas

Last month, the Department of Homeland Security announced that “except in extraordinary circumstances,” immigrants seeking lawful permanent residency must leave the U.S. to complete the process. After a backlash, the administration defended the policy, saying it won’t prevent anyone who qualifies for a green card from getting one.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency in charge of processing immigration benefits, has upped security screening since Trump took office. The agency says that’s to root out fraud, but critics say all it does is unnecessarily slow down a system that already vets applicants vigorously.

The administration indefinitely banned people from 75 countries from receiving immigrant visas, which allow people to move permanently to the U.S.

In a similar move, the government halted the processing of immigration applications for people from 39 countries and who are already in the U.S. On June 5, a federal judge struck down the policy in a scathing ruling that said the administration “justifies its actions with pretextual concerns of ‘national security’ that mask anti-immigrant sentiments.”

Children of Guatemalan origin, from left, Areimy, Mariela and Enrique, arrive at Miami International Airport on Dec. 4, 2025, as they prepare to leave the United States to reunite with their recently deported parents in Guatemala.

(Chandan Khanna / AFP via Getty Images)

The judge’s ruling may offer relief, but for many immigrants, the effects of the policy are devastating. Armin, a 42-year-old from Iran, said he has racked up more than $15,000 in debt since the pause took effect in December. Armin asked The Times not to fully identify for fear of jeopardizing his immigration case.

The nutritional scientist came to the U.S. in 2019 on a student visa and has a pending green card application under a provision that allows certain highly skilled immigrants to apply for permanent residency without needing an employer to sponsor them.

After receiving his PhD and completing a postdoctoral program, Armin was in between jobs when he received a research grant in November. But with the processing of his work authorization halted, the university that issued the grant said it couldn’t hire him as a research associate. In February, he was turned down for another job.

Armin said he is confused about why the administration won’t differentiate between legal immigrants and those who should be deported.

“I can’t believe it,” he said. “I’m doing research and my research has national interest benefits. You expect support from the government. Unfortunately they don’t differentiate. They don’t care about your resume.”

Bier said the visa policies affect half of all legal immigrants coming from abroad. He published a report in April about how Trump has cut legal immigration far more than illegal immigration, noting that the administration’s policies have led to big drops in visas for international students, high-skilled workers and refugees.

“The legal immigration system is being used as a means to carry out the mass deportation agenda,” he said.

Alessandro Negrete, who lived most of his life in the U.S. undocumented, crosses into Mexico after deciding to leave.

(Robert Gauthier / Los Angeles Times)

Encouraging self-deportation

More than 90,000 immigrants have been granted voluntary departure since the start of the Trump administration, according to federal immigration court data through April that was analyzed by TRAC, a data research organization. Voluntary departure avoids official deportation and can leave open the possibility of an immigrant returning to the U.S. legally.

Homan, who declined to be interviewed for this story, has said self-deportations were part of the administration’s immigration plan all along.

“We knew if we surged unlimited ICE resources in the interior, and we do these operations, that that will force those that are here illegally to leave on their own,” he recently told the Washington Examiner.

Halting work permits

In the past, asylum seekers and others with deportation protections have had the ability to seek permits to work legally in the U.S. But work is now an administration target.

One proposed regulation would prevent asylum seekers from working legally in the U.S. Another proposal, published Friday, would further restrict access to work permits for other immigrants.

Under a rule that took effect last month, asylum seekers pay an annual $102 fee within 30 days of receiving a notice from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. If the deadline is missed, their applications will be rejected — with no opportunity to appeal — and they could be placed in deportation proceedings. Those who apply for asylum with the agency have entered the U.S. legally, such as on a visa, and are not undocumented.

Asylum seekers rest at a Tijuana migrant shelter a day after President Trump began his second term in the White House.

(Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times)

Conchita Cruz, co-executive director of the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project, said many asylum applicants have not received notice that the fee is due.

Cruz said she believes the Trump administration is using these changes as an excuse to dismiss people’s asylum claims. While the president has the power to decide whether to offer or rescind humanitarian programs, such as Temporary Protected Status, the right to seek asylum is enshrined in law.

“We’re worried this is a pretext for people to fall out of the asylum system and fall out of the workforce,” she said.

The processing of work permits has already been slowed, leaving many immigrants who still qualify for employment authorization unable to work.

During a House Homeland Security Committee hearing last week, Rep. Lou Correa (D-Santa Ana) asked Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin to help him speed up the work permit renewals for two police officers who were recently fired by agencies in his district because their DACA status expired.

Mullin said he would help but that Congress ultimately must pass a permanent solution for DACA recipients.

“These are police officers on Main Street, sir,” Correa responded.

“Not all of them are,” Mullin said. “I’m not just going to wave a magic wand and fix them all.”

“You have that magic wand — that’s your job,” Correa said.

It wasn’t just Democrats complaining about slow processing. Rep. Gabe Evans (R-Colo.) similarly asked Mullin for help because many of his constituents — “farm workers, youth ministers, nurses, grocery store business managers” — who have lived and worked in the U.S. legally for decades are now having trouble renewing their visas.

Secretary of Homeland Security Markwayne Mullin, left, and President Trump, center, walk to the motorcade after exiting Air Force One at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, on May 20.

(Kent Nishimura / AFP via Getty Images)

Calls for mass deportations

Mullin, who took the reins in March after Trump fired his predecessor, Kristi Noem, rolled back some of Noem’s policies, including telling agents to stop entering homes without judicial warrants and canceling some contracts she had initiated.

But the changes and the downturn in arrests have drawn criticism from some fervent Trump supporters.

“Trump’s legacy is tied up in this,” said Mike Howell, a former DHS attorney who founded a group called the Mass Deportation Coalition. “It’s going to be hard to tell a younger voter to get excited to show up when one of their top issues is mass deportation and, a year and a half in, it doesn’t appear it’s going full-steam ahead.”

Howell said enforcement at work sites is critical to scaling up arrests and deportations. That more such operations haven’t happened, he said, is a political decision to appease wealthy donors and special interest groups who don’t want to see their workers deported.

The architect of Trump’s immigration agenda is Stephen Miller, a top White House aid who has called for a “moratorium on immigration from third-world countries,” demanded 3,000 arrests per day and said that immigrants and their descendants “recreate the conditions, and the terrors, of their broken homelands.”

Royce Bernstein Murray, a former Homeland Security official who worked on immigration policy under the Biden administration, said the winding down of flashy enforcement surges has given the administration more time to “focus on tearing down the legal immigration system.”

“This is Stephen Miller’s sweet spot,” she said. “He was never in enforcement — he’s a policy guy. This is really an opportunity for him to make good on all he has planned for years.”

While ICE has, in recent months, returned to its more conventional targeted enforcement tactics, Homan has sought to make clear that mass deportations are still a goal.

“For the people out there saying ‘President Trump’s getting weak on mass deportation,’ you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” Homan said at the border expo.

On Monday, Homan told Fox News that he had just reviewed plans for an ICE operation that would surge agents to New York City.