2a·2o·spread 0.30·16 hr agoimmigration·via Salon16 hr agoCon artists posing as ICE agents use WhatsApp, fake court hearings to bilk vulnerable people out of their savings Published May 2, 2026 6:00AM (EDT) In this handout photo provided by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the New York City Fugitive Operations Team conducted targeted enforcement operations resulting in the arrest of a Dominican national on January 28, 2025 in New York City. (Photo by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement/Getty Images) This article originally appeared on ProPublica. As an asylum-seeker living in the U.S., Jasmir Urbina worried as she watched violence break out amid the military-style immigration sweeps across the country. Then she read about legal residents being arrested at immigration court and wondered when federal agents would set their sights on her city. Urbina had fled Nicaragua in 2022 and legally resided with her husband, a fellow asylum-seeker, in New Orleans while reporting to immigration agents for check-ins as she awaited her day in court. Finally, the date was approaching, in late November 2025. Days later, the Trump administration would flood the region with federal officers in “Operation Swamp Sweep.” Urbina, 35, began searching for a Spanish speaker who could help her, and said she stumbled on a Facebook
1a·1o·spread 0.00·16 hr agoimmigration·via Fox News16 hr agoNEWYou can now listen to Fox News articles! Immigration and Customs Enforcement wants police in North Carolina to turn over an illegal immigrant from Romania who has been convicted of child sex crimes and faces deportation after a phony asylum case and early prison release.Rebeca Fratila-Ilies is facing possible deportation after ICE said she was convicted of two counts of carnal knowledge of a child and statutory rape for abusing a middle-school boy.She was serving a 10-year sentence inside a Staunton, Virginia prison up until her early release, ICE said.FOLLOW US ON X ICE wants police in North Carolina to turn over Rebeca Fratila. (ICE)Fratila-Ilies was arrested in North Carolina on March 12, 2025, for a probation violation, according to ICE, and the Guilford County Sheriff’s Office notified ICE Charlotte that it had her in custody."ICE lodged an immigration detainer against Fratila-Ilies with Guilford County April 17, asking them not to release this child predator back into the community," ICE Director Todd M. Lyons said in a statement. "Fratila-Ilies is a lawful permanent resident, but she’s been convicted of sex crimes against a child, which means she’s amenable to removal. She’s currently in removal proceedings and ICE is standing by
1a·1o·spread 0.00·2 hr agoimmigration·via Christian Science Monitor2 hr agoFor immigrants, naturalization ceremonies represent the culmination of their yearslong effort to earn citizenship. In front of a federal judge, permanent residents raise their right hands, repeat the Oath of Allegiance to their new country, and usually wave a small American flag with pride once the judge confirms their citizenship.On Dec. 4, inside Boston’s Faneuil Hall – a historic site where revolutionaries like Samuel Adams fostered the idea of American freedom – one such event took a turn. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officers denied entry to several people who showed up for their naturalization ceremony, according to Project Citizenship, a nonprofit providing legal support for those seeking citizenship. Each of these individuals was from one of 19 countries the Trump administration identified as high-security risks under a Dec. 2 Department of Homeland Security memo, which mandated the immediate pausing and review of immigration applications from those countries, including Haiti, Afghanistan, and Venezuela.What happened at the Boston ceremony is part of a tightening of the naturalization process throughout the country. In late November, New York state Attorney General Letitia James wrote a letter to USCIS questioning its decision to cancel ceremonies in several counties in her state; USCIS said the
1a·1o·spread 0.00·16 hr agoimmigration·via The Conversation16 hr agoThe phrase “concentration camp” is freighted with dark historical meaning. Most people hear it and instinctively think of concentration camps used by the Nazis to exterminate Jews and other minority populations during the Holocaust. But the use and name of concentration camps originated far earlier. In the late 1800s, Spanish military officials used concentration camps – reconcentrados – during their 1896–97 Cuban campaign to isolate civilians from rebels, resulting in widespread death and disease. We are scholars whose research into international relations and conflict includes studying historical and modern uses of these systems of camps as a form of repression. In recent peer-reviewed research, we identified four characteristics that define what qualifies as a concentration camp system: targeting groups of civilians for imprisonment; enclosed spaces where the state controls who enters and exits; departure from standard detention practices; and abuse and neglect. We then created a dataset detailing 150 systems of camps used globally since 1896 that fit this criteria. This includes the U.S. internment of more than 125,000 Japanese immigrants and Japanese American citizens during World War II, the Argentine military junta’s use of camps in their mid-1970s campaign to reorganize society, and Vladimir Putin’s use of so-called filtration
1a·1o·spread 0.00·15 hr agoimmigration·via The Marshall Project15 hr agoThis is The Marshall Project’s Closing Argument newsletter, a weekly deep dive into a key criminal justice issue. Want this delivered to your inbox? Sign up for future newsletters. Ursula Gomez paid her dues to the state of California, spending over two decades in prison, where she immersed herself in rehabilitation programs and went to college. Her sentence came to an end in July 2024. But instead of letting her go home, the prison system turned her over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. For 11 months, Gomez was transferred to multiple detention centers, where she said her mental health deteriorated. By then, President Donald Trump was in office and deporting people to countries they hadn’t come from like El Salvador and South Sudan. With that threat hanging over her head, she agreed to be removed to Mexico, the country she and her family left when she was 5. Gomez was deported later that year. “I have no ties to Mexico,” she said over a video call in March. “It’s extremely difficult because I’m alone.” Gomez became trapped in what’s known as the prison-to-ICE pipeline, a practice critics call “double punishment.” When ICE identifies a person in a prison system or
1a·1o·spread 0.00·17 hr agoimmigration·via The Guardian17 hr agoUS Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has awarded a contract to a private security company that has faced accusations of “torture” and “enforced disappearance” to assist in tracking down undocumented immigrant children who arrived in the US alone, a contracting document shows.ICE has stepped up its work so much in pursuing these minors in the US that it has contracted out some of its mission to a third party to put “boots on the ground” and locate immigrant children previously released from US government custody.The agency characterizes the work of tracing immigrant children who reached the US without authorization and were released into communities while they go through immigration court proceedings as “safety and wellness checks”. ICE says it wants to confirm the children’s location, school enrollment and overall wellness, including checking for signs of abuse or trafficking, according to the contracting document.But an internal ICE document reviewed by the Guardian last year shows ICE actually runs the operations with the aim of deporting the children or pursuing criminal cases against them – or their adult sponsors sheltering them legally in the US. A critic at the time called ICE’s efforts “backdoor family separation”.“Accusations that ICE is ‘targeting’ and arresting
2a·2o·spread 0.30·15 hr agoimmigration·via ABC News15 hr agoDays after the Supreme Court heard arguments challenging the Trump administration's termination of Temporary Protected Status for migrants from Haiti and Syria, a federal judge in New York on Friday blocked the administration from ending TPS for those from Yemen.It was the latest in a series of rulings forestalling the administration's attempts to eliminate TPS protections, which grant recipients the ability to temporarily live in the U.S. in order to escape unsafe conditions in their home country.Yemen's Temporary Protected Status had been due to expire at midnight May 4. Instead, the judge sided with 16 plaintiffs who have lived and worked in the United States, some for decades, who are among the nearly 3,000 Yemeni nationals who hold such status.Fourteen of the plaintiffs are current TPS holders, while two are first-time TPS applicants.U.S. District Judge Dale Ho decided the Department of Homeland Security, under then-Secretary Kristi Noem, terminated Temporary Protected Status for Yemen "in clear disregard" of the procedure Congress established."This Court does not write on a blank slate," the judge wrote. "Defendants have terminated TPS for more than half a dozen countries in the last six months, under circumstances nearly indistinguishable from those here. And every district court that
1a·1o·spread 0.00·16 hr agoimmigration·via KFF Health News16 hr agoHundreds of foreign doctors about to complete training in the U.S. will have to leave the country if the federal government doesn’t rapidly process their visa waiver applications, which have been languishing since the fall and winter, immigration attorneys say. The waiver program, run by the Department of Health and Human Services, allows physicians who aren’t U.S. citizens to stay in the country while transitioning from the visa they used during their training to temporary worker status. In exchange, the doctors agree to work in underserved areas for at least three years. “It will be the patients that suffer the most because in about three months, there’s going to be hundreds of places that are not going to have a physician that should have,” said a psychiatrist caught in the delay. The doctor — whom KFF Health News agreed not to identify because they fear government reprisal — was among hundreds who applied this year for a J-1 visa waiver through the HHS Exchange Visitor Program. If they receive one, the psychiatrist — who attended medical school in their home country in Europe before coming to the U.S. for their residency and fellowship — would work with vulnerable and disadvantaged
