California national guard troops keep watch, as protests against immigration sweeps continue, in Los Angeles, California, on Monday. Photograph: Daniel Cole/Reuters
As many demand the release of loved ones, Trump’s ‘border czar’ admits some were arrested without criminal records
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The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said that 118 immigrants were arrested this week, and released the names of some of those in its custody, alleging criminal violations. But the administration’s border czar, Tom Homan, also admitted that the agency was arresting people without criminal records.
The raids at workplaces – pushed by Homan and by White House deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller – come amid a broader push to speed up arrests and deportations. Homan said the LA area is likely to see more enforcement this week, even as thousands of national guard deployed to the city prepared to quell protests against the raids.
Lawyers from the Immigrant Defenders Law Center (ImmDef), found that immigrants apprehended in LA were initially detained in the basement of a federal immigration building. “As attorneys, we are disgusted by DHS’s blatant betrayal of basic human dignity as we witness hundreds of people held in deplorable conditions without food, water, or beds for 12-plus hours,” said Lindsay Toczylowski, president of ImmDef. “This is an urgent moment for our country to wake up to the terror Ice is inflicting on communities and take action.”
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) held a rally in downtown Los Angeles demanding the “humane treatment and access to lawyers for all detainees”.
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The workplace raids were especially brazen, lawyers said, after a federal judge in April issued a preliminary injunction forbidding warrantless immigration stops. The injunction applied to a wide swath of California, and came after CBP conducted similar raids in California’s agricultural Kern county in January.
“You can’t just racially and ethnically profile people and arrest them and ask questions later,” said Reyes Savalza, noting that many of those arrested had no criminal history and could apply for various forms of immigration relief if they were allowed to contact attorneys.
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Two kindergarten students are seen in their classroom at John Mack Elementary School in Los Angeles on January 6, 2025 in Los Angeles. (Photo: Brian van der Brug/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
The Homeland Security officials falsely told the school principals they had permission from the children’s guardians to speak to them.
The superintendent of Los Angeles public schools, Alberto M. Carvalho, confirmed Thursday that plainclothes federal immigration agents lied to school officials this week in order to gain access to two elementary schools to question several children—which the schools refuses to grant.
Carvalho told reporters that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agents told the principals of Lillian Street Elementary School and Russell Elementary School that they had permission from the four children’s caretakers to question them—a claim that “was confirmed to be a falsehood,”CBS News reported.
The Biden administration barred immigration agents from trying to conduct enforcement operations in “sensitive” areas like schools and places of worship, but President Donald Trump reversed that policy after taking office, with former acting Homeland Security Secretary Benjamine Huffman saying, “Criminals will no longer be able to hide in America’s schools and churches to avoid arrest.”
The five children DHS sought to question on Monday ranged from first to sixth graders.
“My very first question starts there, what interest should a Homeland Security agent have in a first grader?” Carvalho told CBS News. “No federal agency has the authority, short of a judicial warrant, that means the equivalent of a criminal subpoena to enter our schools.”
Kate Cagle of Spectrum News 1 SoCal reported that the agents wore plain clothes and that children came to the U.S. as unaccompanied minors and are in the care of legal guardians.
“My very first question starts there, what interest should a Homeland Security agent have in a first grader?”
Schools are not required to allow immigration agents onto their campuses without being presented with a warrant. In February, Denver’s public school district sued the Trump administration over its policy allowing DHS to attempt raids in schools, saying it had led to decreased attendance as families fear potential enforcement actions in their children’s classrooms.
“I am proud of these principals, I am proud of our workforce, I am proud of the clerical staff in the front office, for they did exactly what we trained them to do,” said Carvalho. “We declared back in August and September and October that at Los Angeles Unified [School District] we have protocols in place and training in place to prepare our workforce in… protection of our students.”
The Los Angeles schools were targeted days after a school principal in the small town of Sackets Harbor, New York, joined the community in demanding the safe return of three children and their mother after they were arrested and detained in a Texas facility by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents.
“As the principal of these students, I need to speak plainly,” wrote Jaime Cook in a letter that went viral. “Our three students who were taken by ICE were doing everything right… They are not criminals. They have no ties to any criminal activity. They are loved by their classmates… We are in shock—and it is that shared shock that has unified our community in the call for our students’ release.”
A rally over the weekend drew more than 1,000 people in the town of just 1,351—part of New York’s most reliably Republican congressional district, according to the Cook Partisan Voting Index, and the part-time home of Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar.
The children were released along with their mother on Monday after the weekend rally, and were back in school on Wednesday.
Former and current President Donald Trump gesture to the crowd before his speech at the California Republican Party Convention Friday, Sept. 29, 2023, in Anaheim, Calif. (AP Photo/Jae C. Hong)Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
Pro-Palestinian protesters rally in support of Mahmoud Khalil outside of the Thurgood Marshall Courthouse, where a hearing is underway regarding Khalil’s arrest, in New York City on March 12, 2025. (Photo: Charly Triballeau/AFP via Getty Images)
If the White House can punish anybody who engages in speech it dislikes, nobody will be free to criticize the government—and corporate criminals will be free to run amok.
Earlier this March, agents from the Department of Homeland Security, or DHS, arrested Mahmoud Khalil at his Columbia University-owned apartment building in New York City. Khalil, a lawful permanent resident of the United States, was then promptly disappeared by federal agents, who refused to tell Khalil’s wife (a U.S. citizen) why he was being detained or where he was being held. He has since been found by his attorneys and partner in a private Louisiana detention facility notorious for abuse. His deportation was successfully, though only temporarily, halted by a federal judge.
An initial hearing in Khalil’s case was subsequently heard—without him present—in New York City. There, the Department of Justice defended the kidnapping, and backed the White House’s claimed rationale: the Trump administration doesn’t approve of Khalil’s speech, and therefore it has the right to forgo due process, revoke his green card without judicial order, and deport him.
Khalil is a prominent pro-Palestinian leader at Columbia University. He was one of students’ lead negotiators during the anti-genocide encampments that formed on its campus in 2024. It is this right to speech, enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, and affirmed over and over and over again, that President Donald Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio are endeavoring to unilaterally, and with no constraints, gut.
Trump and his allies seemingly hope to manufacture a future in which any public critic of the administration or its friends can be defined, and prosecuted, as a “terrorist” for whom basic civil liberties can be summarily suspended.
Donald Fuhrump says that Amerikkka doesn’t bother with crimes or charges anymore, not being 100% Amerikkkan and opposing his real estate intentions is enough. [dizzy: Original article modified by the inclusion of this image and caption.]
To this end, the federal government has made no case that Khalil has committed a crime. Instead, the Trump administration has continuously boasted that Khalil is being targeted with the full force of the state for engaging in speech it doesn’t like; speech that is unambiguously guaranteed by the First Amendment, and that the White House now seeks to classify as “terrorism.”
Should Trump and Rubio succeed, as The Intercept aptly summarized, it will symbolize the death of free speech for American citizens and green-card holders alike.
Of course, it isn’t just Khalil—though if the government succeeds in his case it will be a chilling bellwether for the state of speech and protest in the Trump years and beyond. Even just in the weeks since kidnapping Khalil, it’s been reported that DHS officers have arrested another student protester at Columbia, stripped a different Columbia student of their visa status, denied a French scientist entry to the United States reportedly because of their expressed political disagreement with the administration, disappeared dozens of New Mexico residents, and more.
Of course, this playbook isn’t new, and Republicans have long sought to gut protected speech, and protected protest in particular. Indeed, dozens of Stop Cop City protesters and organizers are still navigating an abusive investigation and prosecution regime in Georgia that functionallyseeks to render public displays of political dissent as violent conspiracy and “domestic terrorism,” including speech activities as mundane as handing out pamphlets.
As baseless and unconstitutional as those prosecutions were and still are, it’s this principle that is being pushed to new and even-more horrifying depths, as Trump and his allies seemingly hope to manufacture a future in which any public critic of the administration or its friends can be defined, and prosecuted, as a “terrorist” for whom basic civil liberties can be summarily suspended.
Indeed, Donald Trump, while turning the White House into a car dealership earlier this month, told reporters that people protesting Elon Musk’s hostile takeover of the U.S. federal government at Tesla storefronts, or protesting “any company,” should be labeled domestic terrorists, and that was something he “will do.”
Should the political persecution of Khalil succeed, it will foster a new era of the militarized American police state that greenlights the arbitrary and capricious abduction of organizers, dissidents, and critics of the Trump administration and the corporations it serves.
It should not need to be said, but to say it anyway: If foundational constitutional rights can be unilaterally suspended by the government, with no trial or even formal documentation of so-called wrongdoing, then those rights do not actually exist for anyone.
Who stands to benefit from such a bleak future? Advocates for authoritarianism for one, and corporations for another.
While the executive branch targets protesters’ rights to speech on White House orders, Trump’s own corporate allies and donors are pursuing adjacent tactics to divest normal people of the right to criticize the corporate hegemons ruining our lives.
Greenpeace, for example, just lost the trial brought against it by Energy Transfer, which seeks to functionally sue the group out of existence in the U.S. for criticizing the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL). That notorious project, controlled by Energy Transfer, is well-known for its environmental racism and for deploying extreme force against environmental advocates, Indigenous communities, and others who opposed it.
Greenpeace is set to appeal the verdict, but if Energy Transfer should ultimately succeed, it would not just spell the end of Greenpeace’s U.S. operations, but will also usher in a new era in which corporate money can not just silence, but wholly eradicate, organizations that are critical of corporate polluters, labor abusers, price-gougers, and more. Such a future would place a price tag on First Amendment protections, with only the most well-resourced entities in the country seemingly eligible to enjoy it, and everyone else left vulnerable to their whims and machinations.
The political kidnapping of Mahmoud Khalil is an egregious attempt to undo 233 years of American constitutional law, and—regardless of what Trump or others claim—threatens to end the right to free speech, and democracy, as we know it. Should the political persecution of Khalil succeed, it will foster a new era of the militarized American police state that greenlights the arbitrary and capricious abduction of organizers, dissidents, and critics of the Trump administration and the corporations it serves. That, to be clear, would wholly cement the United States’ descent into full-fledged fascism.
Crucially, though, even if they fail to make Khalil the defining, and chilling, example of a new epoch of American political prisoners, Donald Trump and his allies in and outside of government have made it clear: They want to eliminate the First Amendment, and will do whatever it takes to do so.
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Mahmoud Khalil was pictured speaking to the press during a briefing organized by pro-Palestinian protesters at Columbia University on June 1, 2024. (Photo: Selcuk Acar/Anadolu via Getty Images)
“Arresting and threatening to deport students because of their participation in political protest is the kind of action one ordinarily associates with the world’s most repressive regimes.”
Civil rights organizations, legal experts, and lawmakers were among the chorus voicing alarm Sunday and into Monday over the dire implications of the Trump administration’s brazen arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian rights organizer who helped lead Columbia University student protests against Israel’s assault on Gaza.
“The Trump administration’s outrageous detention of Mahmoud is designed to instill terror in students speaking out for Palestinian freedom and immigrant communities,” said Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), which has helped organize nationwide demonstrations against Israel’s catastrophic war on the Palestinian enclave.
“This is the fascist playbook,” the group added. “We all must fiercely reject it, and universities must start protecting its students.”
Khalil, a permanent U.S. resident with a green card, was arrested on Saturday by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents who stormed his university-owned apartment in Manhattan. Khalil’s attorney told The Associated Press that the ICE agents also threatened to arrest his pregnant wife, an American citizen.
As of Monday morning, Khalil—an Algerian citizen of Palestinian origin—was being held in an ICE facility in Louisiana, and the Trump administration is moving to revoke his green card.
While the State Department CAN revoke *visas* with very little legal process involved, stripping someone of a green card is done by DHS (not the State Department) and requires filing formal charges alleging a violation of immigration law and a removal hearing in front of an immigration judge.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which oversees ICE, said Sunday that Khalil’s arrest was carried out “in support of President Trump’s executive orders prohibiting antisemitism.”
But JVP and other advocacy groups warned that the administration’s purported crackdown on antisemitism is a pretext for a dangerous assault on civil liberties, including those of Palestinian rights advocates.
“We are not fooled by the Trump administration’s claims that this blatantly unconstitutional and authoritarian attack is somehow in the name of Jewish safety,” said JVP. “Deporting anti-war students who are trying to end genocide and silencing political speech endangers all of us. We will not be divided.”
“The unlawful detention of Mr. Khalil reeks of McCarthyism. It’s clear that the Trump administration is selectively punishing Mr. Khalil for expressing views that aren’t MAGA-approved.”
Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, said in a statement that “arresting and threatening to deport students because of their participation in political protest is the kind of action one ordinarily associates with the world’s most repressive regimes.”
“It’s genuinely shocking that this appears to be what’s going on right here,” Jaffer added. “Universities must recognize that these actions pose an existential threat to academic life itself. They must make clear, through action, that they will not sit on the sidelines as the Trump administration terrorizes students and faculty alike and runs roughshod over individual rights and the rule of law.”
Khalil’s arrest came days after Trump threatened to imprison students engaged in what he described as “illegal protests.” AP reported that “Khalil’s arrest is the first publicly known deportation effort under Trump’s promised crackdown on students who joined protests against the war in Gaza that swept college campuses last spring.”
Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said in a statement Sunday that “the Trump administration’s detention of Mahmoud Khalil—a green card holder studying in this country legally—is targeted, retaliatory, and an extreme attack on his First Amendment rights.”
“The unlawful detention of Mr. Khalil reeks of McCarthyism. It’s clear that the Trump administration is selectively punishing Mr. Khalil for expressing views that aren’t MAGA-approved—which is a frightening escalation of Trump’s crackdown on pro-Palestine speech, and an aggressive abuse of immigration law,” Lieberman added. “Ripping a student from their home, challenging their immigration status, and detaining them solely based on political viewpoint will chill student speech and advocacy across campus. Political speech should never be a basis of punishment, or lead to deportation.”
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