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Tag: Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)

  • Alligator Alcatraz Is an ‘Extrajudicial Black Site,’ Immigrant Advocates Say as Detainees Disappear

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    Original article by Stephen Prager republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

    U.S. President Donald Trump and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis tour a migrant detention center dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz” in Ochopee, Florida on July 1, 2025.
     (Photo by Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images)

    According to the Miami Herald, over 1,000 detainees in Florida’s immigrant internment camp have effectively “disappeared,” with family and attorneys unable to track their whereabouts.

    Immigrant rights activists in Florida are expressing alarm as they have found themselves “unable to locate” more than 1,000 detainees who have been “administratively disappeared” from the state’s immigrant internment camp known as ”Alligator Alcatraz.”

    Last week, the Miami Herald reported that “the whereabouts of two-thirds of more than 1,800 men detained at Alligator Alcatraz during the month of July could not be determined” after the paper “obtained the names from two detainee rosters.”

    The reporters found that around 800 of the people on the rosters do not appear on Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Online Detainee Locator System, which provides publicly available information about the court status and locations of people who have been jailed by immigration enforcement. Another 450 had no location listed and instead merely instructed users to “Call ICE for details.”

    The Herald also found that the vast majority of the detainees in the system did not have final orders of removal issued against them by immigration judges, which would be required for their deportation. Nevertheless, the detainees’ families and attorneys have been left unable to find them.

    Detainees and other witnesses, including several members of Congress who visited in July, have described the conditions inside Alligator Alcatraz as horrific. The ramshackle tent camp was set up in a matter of days this summer in the Everglades to warehouse thousands of people detained by ICE, often without criminal charges or warrants, and with restricted access to attorneys.

    While people in federal immigration facilities are typically able to be tracked through the system, the state-run Alligator Alcatraz works differently.

    (Video: Democracy Now!)

    Shirsho Dasgupta, one of the reporters who broke the story for the Herald, told Democracy Now! on Thursday that attorneys he’s spoken to often “don’t know who to call” to get in contact with their clients.

    Operations at Alligator Alcatraz were briefly halted in August when a federal district judge ruled against the facility on environmental grounds. But that ruling was stayed by a federal appeals court just two weeks later, allowing operations to resume.

    While the state of Florida runs the facility, it has requested and was promised reimbursement from the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) Shelter and Services Program, which was initially created to provide housing and other services to individuals released from ICE custody who were awaiting immigration court proceedings.

    In a statement on Friday, the Florida Immigrant Coalition (FLIC), which has also attempted to track the detainees, said that the Herald’s report shows what they “have been warning about for months,” that “those detained in this detention camp have effectively been administratively disappeared.”

    FLIC said that the state of Florida has refused to confirm how many detainees are currently in Alligator Alcatraz and that, in addition to those not listed on the ICE locator tool, they have also seen people deported before scheduled bond hearings. The group also said it had “confirmed data showing Florida is lying when claiming those detained at the Everglades camp had final orders of removal.”

    “Since this depraved torture camp funded with state FEMA funds reopened,” said Tessa Petit, FLIC’s executive director, “we have been unable to locate the fathers, brothers, friends, and sons that are caged there without due process in the ICE locator. Hospitalizations for severe medical incidents, which include cardiac incidents and surgeries, go unreported.”

    Thomas Kennedy, a policy analyst at FLIC, said: “What we’re seeing at Alligator Alcatraz is basically a new model of immigration detention, where a state-run facility is operating as an extrajudicial black site, completely outside of the previous models of immigration detention in this country. It’s making what was already a terrible system somehow even worse.”

    Original article by Stephen Prager republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). 

    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.
    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.
    Orcas discuss how Trump was re-elected and him being an insane, xenophobic Fascist.
    Orcas discuss how Trump was re-elected and him being an insane, xenophobic Fascist.

  • New ‘Thought Policing’ Bill May Let Rubio Strip Passports from US Citizens Over Political Speech

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    Original article by Stephen Prager republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

    US Secretary of State Marco Rubio speaks during the American Compass Fifth Anniversary Gala at the National Building Museum in Washington, DC, on June 3, 2025. (Photo by Saul Loeb/AFP)

    “Marco Rubio has claimed the power to designate people terrorist supporters based solely on what they think and say,” said one free speech advocate.

    Free speech advocates are sounding the alarm about a bill in the US House of Representatives that they fear could allow Secretary of State Marco Rubio to strip US citizens of their passports based purely on political speech.

    The bill, introduced by Rep. Brian Mast (R-Fla.), will come up for a hearing on Wednesday. According to The Intercept:

    Mast’s new bill claims to target a narrow set of people. One section grants the secretary of state the power to revoke or refuse to issue passports for people who have been convicted—or merely charged—of material support for terrorism…

    The other section sidesteps the legal process entirely. Rather, the secretary of state would be able to deny passports to people whom they determine “has knowingly aided, assisted, abetted, or otherwise provided material support to an organization the Secretary has designated as a foreign terrorist organization.”

    Rubio has previously boasted of stripping the visas and green cards from several immigrants based purely on their peaceful expression of pro-Palestine views, describing them as “Hamas supporters.”

    These include Columbia protest leader Mahmoud Khalil, who was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) after Rubio voided his green card; and Rumeysa Ozturk, the Tufts student whose visa Rubio revoked after she co-wrote an op-ed calling for her school to divest from Israel.

    Mast—a former soldier for the Israel Defense Forces who once stated that babies were “not innocent Palestinian civilians”—has previously called for “kicking terrorist sympathizers out of our country,” speaking about the Trump administration’s attempts to deport Khalil, who was never convicted or even charged with support for a terrorist group.

    Critics have argued that the bill has little reason to exist other than to allow the Secretary of State to unilaterally strip passports from people without them actually having been convicted of a crime.

    As Kia Hamadanchy, a senior policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union, noted in The Intercept, there is little reason to restrict people convicted of terrorism or material support for terrorism, since—if they were guilty—they’d likely be serving a long prison sentence and incapable of traveling anyway.

    “I can’t imagine that if somebody actually provided material support for terrorism, there would be an instance where it wouldn’t be prosecuted—it just doesn’t make sense,” he said.

    Journalist Zaid Jilani noted on X that “judges can already remove a passport over material support for terrorism, but the difference is you get due process. This bill would essentially make Marco Rubio judge, jury, and executioner.”

    The bill does contain a clause allowing those stripped of their passports to appeal to Rubio. But, as Hamadanchy notes, the decision is up to the secretary alone, “who has already made this determination.” He said that for determining who is liable to have their visa stripped, “There’s no standard set. There’s nothing.”

    As Seth Stern, the director of advocacy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, noted in The Intercept, the language in Mast’s bill is strikingly similar to that found in the so-called “nonprofit killer” provision that Republicans attempted to pass in July’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” Act. That provision, which was ultimately struck from the bill, would have allowed the Treasury Secretary to unilaterally strip nonprofit status from anything he deemed to be a “terrorist-supporting organization.”

    Stern said Mast’s bill would allow for “thought policing at the hands of one individual.”

    “Marco Rubio has claimed the power to designate people terrorist supporters based solely on what they think and say,” he said, “even if what they say doesn’t include a word about a terrorist organization or terrorism.”

    Original article by Stephen Prager republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

    Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
    Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.
    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.
    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.
    Orcas discuss how Trump was re-elected and him being an insane, xenophobic Fascist.
    Orcas discuss how Trump was re-elected and him being an insane, xenophobic Fascist.

    dizzy: There are similarities to what’s happening in UK with showing support for Palestine Action currently being a terrorist offence. Disagreeing with the dominant Neo-Liberal/Capitalist ideology is becoming terrorism.

  • Ventura County activists call for justice for Jaime Alanís, first known casualty of Trump’s ICE raids

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    Original article by Natalia Marques republished from peoples dispatch under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA) license.

    Grassroots immigrant rights activists challenge federal claims about the circumstances of the ICE raid that lead to the farmworker’s death

    Jaime Alanís succumbed to injuries sustained amid an ICE raid at Glass House Farms, where he had labored for over a decade

    On July 10, 2025, while being pursued by ICE agents during a violent raid at Glass House Farms in Camarillo, California, 57‑year‑old farmworker Jaime Alanís fell nearly 30 feet from a greenhouse roof and succumbed to his injuries two days later. 

    A devoted husband, father, and the sole breadwinner for his family, Alanís had labored at the farm for over a decade. On July 12, the worker became the first known casualty of the Trump administration’s intensified ICE raids.

    His death ignited a fierce public outcry. While the Department of Homeland Security maintains he was not actively being chased and climbed the roof on his own accord, his family, as well as immigrant rights activists, contend he was fleeing from the violence of Trump’s ICE agents, who have terrorized immigrant communities across the country.  

    The Department of Homeland Security denies that Alanís was being pursued at all, although this does not explain why the worker ended up climbing 30 feet onto the roof of a greenhouse. DHS also claims that the raid resulted in the rescue of children from “potential exploitation, forced labor, and human trafficking.”

    To some immigrant rights activists, Alanís’ death has become a poignant symbol of the human cost of aggressive immigration enforcement tactics, and the policies that make them possible. 

    On July 9, the US Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins announced that there would be “no amnesty” for undocumented farmworkers, and that the Trump administration is seeking a workforce composed entirely of those from the US. Rollins plans to accomplish this via automation and mobilizing the “34 million able-bodied adults in our Medicaid program.” 

    Trump has recently signed legislation that would create the first-ever federally mandated work requirements for those covered by Medicaid, the US’s public health insurance program. According to a May report by the healthcare policy group KFF, 92% of those on Medicaid under age 65 and not receiving SSI or SSDI benefits and not covered by Medicare, were either working full or part-time, or not working due to caregiving duties, illness or disability, or attending school.

    Peoples Dispatch spoke to Ventura County activist Elaine Yompian, part of the immigrant rights coalition VC Defensa, for more on the fight for justice for Jaime Alanís and the millions of immigrant workers with targets on their backs.

    “We understand that even though this wasn’t an immediate death, his injuries and the danger that he was put in is a direct result of the ICE operation and the brutality in which agents were conducting this raid,” Elaine told Peoples Dispatch. “We’re calling it the first murder that has happened in an ICE operation.”

    Read the full interview here:

    Peoples Dispatch: Can you describe what took place during the raid at Glass House Farms and the surrounding events?

    Elaine Yompian: The same day as the raid, there was a huge protest that broke out in defense of the community. We kind of put out a call for people to immediately show up. 

    That’s been one of the key things that we’ve been doing, mobilizing people to take action wherever ICE is present so that their actions don’t go unnoticed or unchecked.

    We didn’t know how big the raid was when it started. We put out a call for emergency mobilization to that location, and soon we saw that the National Guard was coming in. We kept making calls for people to just show up to declare that we wanted ICE out of the county, and away from our neighbors and family members.

    We were there for over six hours, standing basically in front of the ICE agents, hoping that they wouldn’t pass, hoping that they wouldn’t take more people. Amid the chaos, we have heard of four US citizens that were taken, two of which were our volunteers, and one is a person that we know. 

    All four have been released so far. One of them was our volunteer, she’s a mother, and she was held for over 10 hours. She was beaten up, then taken to the hospital. And when she was taken to the hospital, we called for a protest there, for them to release her, and ICE agents actually tried to enter the hospital and were pushing the hospital staff to try to get in. A lot of the staff held their ground because of HIPAA compliances and everything, and the ICE had no warrants. 

    Eventually ICE agents did get in, apparently someone let them in, and then they took her again and she saw all kinds of really horrible things while in their custody. They tried to intimidate her, but eventually they released her with no charges. 

    The other US citizen that was detained, Jonathan Anthony Caravello, is a labor organizer and a volunteer of ours. He is math and philosophy professor at California State University, Channel Islands, and he was also taken and detained for several days. They released him recently.

    Another US citizen who was detained is a US Army veteran, George Retes, who we met during the first raid that happened in June, and he was also detained and freed yesterday. 

    We stayed back at the site of the raid for a very long time, even after the agents had left, to help those who were hiding with farm workers, to get back to their cars or get back home.

    After the raid, our hotline was getting back to back calls of families who were looking for their loved ones. We had a family search team, trying to find where they were taken, if they were taken, or if they were just missing – whether they had been detained or were still hiding somewhere, and we needed to go find them. We were doing all that work, as well as doing food distribution for families that have been affected.

    With Jaime Alanís’ family in particular, we got in contact pretty quickly because the news reports were saying that he had died during the raid. The family was pretty upset that the media was saying that he had already passed away when he was still on life support. 

    When I spoke to his niece, who was his immediate family member in the US., her goal is to eventually sue the DHS for his murder. 

    PD: How does the violence deployed during the ICE raid in Camarillo compare to tactics used in other Trump-era ICE raids, such as militarization or arrests of noncriminals? How do these raids compare to raids under past administrations?

    EY: Raids have always been a form of human torture. It’s always involved family separation, and the level of trauma and impact that it has on our communities has never really shifted, depending on whether it’s a Democratic president or a Republican president in office. It’s always been something that has caused incredible amounts of pain to the families and to the people being taken. 

    The use of force has also always been brutal. The conditions within detention centers have always been truly horrific. There’s no other word to describe them other than torture.

    Now with Trump, it’s definitely intensified, we’re not going to deny that. 

    PD: DHS is justifying this raid by claiming that children were rescued from potential violations of child labor laws and human trafficking taking place at the farm. What is your response to this justification? 

    EY: It’s a common tactic for the US to claim that they’re doing this for the safety of the community, for the well-being of children. Let’s even say that the farm had conditions that DHS claims. However, these conditions are also caused by systems of injustice. The reason why so many people go into jobs that have these extreme amounts of physical labor for very low pay is a result of capitalist exploitation.

    But the solution for that would never be a one time intervention on one farm in one county in the middle of California. That is not going to solve the larger issue.

    So if the government wants to say we’re doing this because we were trying to protect children from working these conditions, the finger should be pointed right back at the government itself and the capitalist system, because that’s what’s causing these conditions and that’s what’s allowing for this to happen.

    Original article by Natalia Marques republished from peoples dispatch under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA) license.

  • LA Judge Orders ICE to Stop ‘Indiscriminately Rounding Up’ Immigrants Using Racial Profiling

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    Original article by Stephen Prager republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

    Federal agents block people protesting an ICE immigration raid at a nearby licensed cannabis farm on July 10, 2025 near Camarillo, California.
     (Photo: Mario Tama/Getty Images)

    “No matter the color of their skin, what language they speak, or where they work, everyone is guaranteed constitutional rights to protect them from unlawful stops,” said an attorney with the ACLU of Southern California.

    A federal judge in Los Angeles has ordered the Trump administration to stop carrying out indiscriminate immigration raids in the city and its surrounding areas, citing its use of “unconstitutional tactics,” including racial profiling and denying the right to an attorney.

    Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California wrote that there is a “mountain of evidence” that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other federal agents are “indiscriminately rounding up numerous individuals without reasonable suspicion” in violation of the Fourth Amendment during their “roving patrols” in the region.

    She issued two temporary restraining orders against the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). One bars agents from targeting individuals based on race or ethnicity; speaking Spanish or English with an accent; presence in specific locations such as bus stops, car washes, or agricultural sites; or type of employment. The second requires DHS to provide access to attorneys for those who are arrested.

    The case was brought by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and other local legal organizations on behalf of five plaintiffs who said their rights were violated by immigration agents.

    According to the complaint:

    The raids in this district follow a common, systematic pattern. Individuals with brown skin are approached or pulled aside by unidentified federal agents, suddenly and with a show of force, and made to answer questions about who they are and where they are from. If they hesitate, attempt to leave, or do not answer the questions to the satisfaction of the agents, they are detained, sometimes tackled, handcuffed, and/or taken into custody.

    In these interactions, agents typically have no prior information about the individual and no warrant of any kind. If agents make an arrest, contrary to federal law, they do not make any determination of whether a person poses a risk of flight before a warrant can be obtained. Also contrary to federal law, the agents do not identify themselves or explain why the individual is being arrested.

    Two of the plaintiffs were U.S. citizens.

    One of them, a dual U.S. and Mexican citizen, said he was questioned and detained by unidentified officers on three separate occasions while working at a car wash in Orange County. Agents insisted that his passport was fake and repeatedly asked if he was American.

    Another U.S. citizen was told he was arrested because he “looked like an illegal alien.” Agents with military-style rifles and handguns repeatedly asked him, “What hospital were you born at?” When he could not answer the question, an officer grabbed him and shoved him against a metal fence. After he showed the officers his Real ID, he says they took it and never returned it to him.

    “No matter the color of their skin, what language they speak, or where they work, everyone is guaranteed constitutional rights to protect them from unlawful stops,” said Mohammad Tajsar, a senior staff attorney with the ACLU Foundation of Southern California.

    “While it does not take a federal judge to recognize that marauding bands of masked, rifle-toting goons have been violating ordinary people’s rights throughout Southern California, we are hopeful that today’s ruling will be a step toward accountability for the federal government’s flagrant lawlessness that we have all been witnessing,” he added.

    Since early June, Southern California has been the epicenter of the Trump administration’s “mass deportation” push, with thousands of immigrants detained—often by unidentified, masked agents—in sweeping raids that have traumatized Latino communities across the state.

    Despite the administration publicizing the arrests of violent criminals, the vast majority of those arrested have no criminal history. More than 1,500 people have been disappeared, the ACLU said last week, “in order to meet arbitrary arrest quotas set by the Trump administration.”

    “Due process, access to counsel, dignity, and respect were not afforded to our loved ones, our friends, our neighbors as ICE plowed through our community in their obsessive, racially motivated quest for quotas,” said Angelica Salas, executive director at Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights (CHIRLA). “No one is above the law, and today’s decision reaffirms that President Trump and all its immigration enforcement apparatus must follow the Constitution.”

    Original article by Stephen Prager republished from Common Dreams under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0).

    Neo-Fascist Climate Science Denier Donald Trump says Burn, Baby, Burn.
    Neo-Fascist Climate Science Denier Donald Trump says Burn, Baby, Burn.

  • Kristi Noem Guts ICE Oversight as Detainee Deaths Surge

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    https://newrepublic.com/post/197698/kristi-noem-guts-ice-oversight-detainee-deaths-surge

    Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP/Getty Images

    ICE Barbie Kristi Noem is making it harder to hold ICE accountable.

    …

    As DHS carries out a massive reduction in force, the size of its detainment and deportation operation has only grown. Since Trump’s inauguration in January, 60 local, state, and federal prisons—public and private—have been detaining immigrants for DHS and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

    At least 12 people have already died in ICE custody so far this year, the same number that died in all of 2024. Administration officials have brushed off these deaths as business as usual, but Michelle Brané, a former Immigration Detention Ombudsman, told CNN that the death toll “could be much higher.”

    “People’s lives are at risk,” Brané said.

    Katie Shepherd, who previously served as a senior policy advisor at CRCL before she was removed as part of the DHS oversight cuts, said the agency was moving in the wrong direction.

    “As the Trump administration is doubling down on immigration enforcement, and the number of people in custody is rapidly increasing, we should be increasing oversight, not eliminating it,” Shepherd said.

    …

    Article at https://newrepublic.com/post/197698/kristi-noem-guts-ice-oversight-detainee-deaths-surge

    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.
    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.
    Power-mad orange gasbag Donald Trump says Burn, Baby, Burn.
    Power-mad Neo-Fascist orange gasbag Donald Trump says Burn, Baby, Burn.