Category Archives: US immigration

US supreme court allows Trump to strip temporary status from Venezuelans

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Justices’ order puts on hold lower-court ruing that found officials had wrongly ended temporary protected status

The US supreme court on Friday allowed Donald Trump’s administration to strip legal protections from more than 300,000 Venezuelan migrants.

The justices issued an emergency order, which will last as long as the court case continues, putting on hold a lower-court ruling by US district judge Edward Chen in San Francisco that found the president’s administration had wrongly ended temporary protected status (TPS) for the Venezuelans. The three liberal justices dissented.

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Journalist Mario Guevara deported to El Salvador after 100 days in Ice custody

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Removal comes after Emmy-winning Salvadorian reporter was arrested while covering ‘No Kings Day’ protest

Journalist Mario Guevara’s imprisonment by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (Ice) ended with deportation to El Salvador on Friday, his family announced on social media.

Guevara has been a media mainstay in the Atlanta area for about 20 years, after fleeing El Salvador to escape leftwing militias in 2004. Though he has a work permit and two of his children are American citizens, he has operated under the “administrative closure” of deportation orders for much of that time.

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Judge denies Kilmar Ábrego García’s bid for asylum in the US

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Ábrego, who was deported to El Salvador in March before being returned to the US, has 30 days to appeal ruling

An immigration judge in Baltimore has denied Kilmar Ábrego García’s bid for asylum on Thursday, but he has 30 days to appeal.

Ábrego’s case has drawn national attention since the 30-year-old was wrongfully deported by the Trump administration to El Salvador in March. The Salvadorian national has an American wife and children and has lived in Maryland for years, but he originally immigrated to the US without proper documentation as a teenager.

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US citizen sues after twice being detained by immigration agents

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US-born Leo Garcia Venegas says ‘I just want to work in peace’ after agents in Alabama said his ID card was fake

An Alabama construction worker and US citizen who says he was detained twice by immigration agents within just a few weeks has filed a lawsuit in federal court demanding an end to Trump administration workplace raids targeting industries with large immigrant workforces.

The class-action lawsuit, filed on Tuesday by Leo Garcia Venegas, a concrete worker, demands an end to what the firm calls “unconstitutional and illegal immigration enforcement tactics”.

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‘It’s hard to know what day it is’: families tell of grim Ice detention in Texas

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Anxiety high as parents and children tell of lack of clean water, inadequate medical care and poor food in ‘prison-like’ conditions

At the South Texas Family Residential Center, guards allegedly refer to detained immigrant families as “inmates”, spouses aren’t allowed to hold hands, and children don’t know where they can kick around a ball without getting in trouble, according to a stark court filing.

Yet those are minor indignities compared with accounts given to outside monitors of a lack of clean drinking water, sleep, healthy food, privacy, hygiene supplies and appropriate healthcare. Alongside government admissions of what attorneys called “prolonged unexplained detention” at the facility in the remote town of Dilley, Texas anxiety levels for detainees are high.

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Trump fires US attorney who told border agents to follow law on immigration raids

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New York Times reports Michele Beckwith’s firing came after she reminded Border Patrol to comply with courts

Donald Trump fired a top federal prosecutor in Sacramento just hours after she warned immigration agents they could not indiscriminately detain people in her district, according to documents reviewed by the New York Times.

Michele Beckwith, who became the acting US attorney in Sacramento in January, received an email at 4.31pm on 15 July notifying her that the president had ordered her termination.

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Ice detains superintendent of Iowa’s largest school district

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Fellow educators express shock at detention of ‘beacon of light’ Ian Roberts as DHS claims he had ‘no work authorization’

The superintendent of Iowa’s largest school district was detained by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents on Friday, prompting shock among fellow educators.

Ian Roberts, the superintendent of Des Moines public schools (DMPS), was apprehended on Friday morning, according to the district’s board chair. Roberts appears to be held at the Pottawattamie county jail, about two hours west of Des Moines, according to the Ice online detainee database. The database lists Roberts’s country of birth as Guyana.

This article was amended on 26 September 2025. An earlier version said Ian Roberts was born in Brooklyn, based on past interviews. However, a 2023 statement from the district says he was “born to immigrant parents from Guyana, and spent most of his formative years in Brooklyn”.

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Texas Ice facility shooting: Republicans blame ‘radical left’ as Democrats focus on victims and gun control

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Democrats say Trump allies are using incident for ‘political points’ against the left despite the victims being detainees

A deadly shooting at a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) field office in Dallas has been met with markedly different reactions from the political right and left.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) confirmed shortly after the news broke that detainees were the victims of the sniper attack on the facility and that no federal agents had been injured. The president and his allies, however, were quick to frame the shooting as an attack on Ice and place blame on the “radical left”.

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Ice targeted me for organizing, says farm worker who left US for Mexico

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Alfredo Juarez Zeferino spent a harrowing few months in Ice jail – and, under threat of deportation, chose to leave

Alfredo “Lelo” Juarez Zeferino spends much of his days outdoors, harvesting bananas and hiking vast, bramble-laden trails. But for more than a quarter of 2025, he barely saw the sun. After being arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) in March, the farm-worker activist was placed in a detention center in Washington state, where he remained until he agreed to voluntarily leave the US.

“I probably would say five times, in the three months and a half I was in there, they offered me to go outside,” he explained on a Zoom call from his family farm in Guerrero, Mexico, where he has been for over a month.

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California becomes first state to ban face coverings for most law enforcement

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Local and federal agents, including immigration officials, may not wear masks while conducting official business

California will be the first state to ban most law enforcement, including federal immigration agents, from covering their faces while conducting official business under a bill signed by the state’s governor, Gavin Newsom, on Saturday.

The ban is California’s direct response to a recent series of immigration raids in Los Angeles where federal agents wore masks while making mass arrests. The raids prompted protests and led Donald Trump to deploy national guard troops and marines to the city.

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Trump again asks supreme court to end protections for Venezuelans in US

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Justice department urges court to overturn ruling that Kristi Noem lacked authority to end TPS program

The Trump administration asked the US supreme court on Friday to intervene for the second time in a case involving its bid to end deportation protections the former president, Joe Biden, granted to hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans in the United States.

The justice department filed an emergency application asking the justices to lift a federal judge’s ruling that the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, lacked the authority to end the protections for Venezuelans under the temporary protected status, or TPS, program.

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Judges rule against Trump administration on deporting Guatemalan children and Venezuelans

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Double defeat protects Venezuelans with temporary protected status and Guatemalan minors

The Trump administration has been handed a double defeat by judges in immigration cases, barring the executive branch from deporting a group of Guatemalan children and from slashing protections for many Venezuelans in the US.

A federal judge on Thursday ordered the administration to refrain from deporting Guatemalan unaccompanied immigrant children with active immigration cases while a legal challenge plays out.

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US judge orders Mahmoud Khalil deported citing ‘misrepresented facts’ on green card form

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Lawyers say pro-Palestinian activist remains protected from immigration enforcement while separate federal court case proceeds

An immigration judge in the US state of Louisiana has ordered the deportation of pro-Palestinian protest leader Mahmoud Khalil to Algeria or Syria, ruling that he failed to disclose information on his green card application, according to court documents filed on Wednesday.

Khalil’s lawyers said they intended to appeal against the deportation order, and that a federal district court’s separate orders remain in effect prohibiting the government from immediately deporting or detaining him as his federal court case proceeds. The lawyers submitted a letter to the federal court in New Jersey overseeing his civil rights case and said he will challenge the decision.

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US border agent who led immigration crackdown in LA arrives in Chicago

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Gregory Bovino announces arrival as local immigration advocates say they have noticed an uptick in Ice operations

The border patrol agent who spearheaded the immigration crackdown that sparked widespread protests in Los Angeles announced in a social media post Tuesday that he has arrived in Chicago.

“Well, Chicago, we’ve arrived!” Gregory Bovino said in a post on X that included footage of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) vehicles and agents under Chicago street signs and views of downtown. “Operation At Large is here to continue the mission we started in Los Angeles.”

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US right capitalizes on fatal stabbing of Ukrainian refugee in North Carolina

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Far right points to lax criminal justice system and racist narratives, not mental health system failures as experts say

The random and unprovoked killing of a young woman in North Carolina several weeks ago has become a viral video, a political football, and a powerful rightwing talking point – even as the horror and anger her death has provoked obscures what experts say is a vital story about the failures of the American mental health system.

The alleged perpetrator, Decarlos Brown Jr, 34, has a long history of problems with the law and mental health issues. He had been arrested 14 times and served a five-year stint for armed robbery. Brown had also come to believe that there was something alien and malevolent inside him – a “man-made material”, he told people, possibly a computer chip implanted by the government that was fighting him for control of his body.

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Chicago suburb warns residents that federal agents may be about to arrive

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Evanston urges residents to report sightings of federal agents as Trump has threatened immigration crackdown

A Chicago suburb has warned its residents that federal immigration agents may be present in the coming days as Donald Trump continues to threaten an immigration enforcement crackdown and national guard deployment in the nation’s third largest city.

The city of Evanston issued a statement urging its residents to report sightings of federal agents, after local officials said they were informed over the weekend about the likelihood of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) activity.

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Supreme court lifts restrictions on Los Angeles immigration raids in win for Trump

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Conservative majority lifts restraining order from judge who found’roving patrols’ were conducting indiscriminate arrests

The US supreme court on Monday cleared the way for federal agents to conduct sweeping immigration operations in Los Angeles, the latest victory for Donald Trump’s administration at the high court.

The conservative majority lifted a restraining order from a judge who found that “roving patrols” were conducting indiscriminate arrests in LA. The order had barred agents from stopping people solely based on their race, language, job or location.

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300 South Koreans detained at Hyundai plant in US to be released, says Seoul

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Footage of raid by US immigration officials showed detained workers in handcuffs and with chains around their ankles

South Korea announced on Sunday that the roughly 300 of its nationals detained during an immigration raid in Georgia would be released and flown home, as the sudden detention of workers appeared to strain the longstanding diplomatic and economic relationship between the two nations.

Nearly 500 workers, among them at least 300 South Koreans and at least 23 Mexicans, were arrested at the Hyundai-LG battery plant in the city of Ellabell on Thursday.

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Trump administration begins new Ice operation in Massachusetts

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A Department of Homeland Security official confirmed the action in a statement, blaming mayor’s sanctuary policies

The Trump administration has targeted Massachusetts as its next location to begin arresting and deporting immigrants, a Department of Homeland Security official confirmed to NBC News on Saturday.

DHS and its US Immigration and Customs Enforcement arm are calling the operation Patriot 2.0, modifying the name of a May deportation surge that led to the arrest of 1,500 people in the state, according to the reports.

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Judge blocks ending of legal protections for 1m Venezuelans and Haitians in US

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Homeland security had tried to end temporary protected status granted by the Biden administration

A federal judge on Friday ruled against the Trump administration from ending temporary legal protections that have granted more than 1 million people from Haiti and Venezuela the right to live and work in the United States.

The ruling by US district judge Edward Chen of San Francisco for the plaintiffs means that 600,000 Venezuelans whose temporary protections expired in April or whose protections were about to expire on 10 September have status to stay and work in the United States.

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