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'Have mercy': Families plead as migrants arrested at routine DHS check-ins

'Have mercy': Families plead as migrants arrested at routine DHS check-ins

Yahoo2 days ago

Outside a nondescript building in downtown Manhattan, Ambar was pleading to God and immigration authorities that her husband Jaen would not walk out the doors of the Elk Street facility in handcuffs.
"It's the only thing I ask of God and them, to have mercy for his family. I don't have anyone else. I'm alone with my daughter, I don't want to be separated from him," Ambar told ABC News with tears welling up as her daughter Aranza kept herself distracted on an iPad.
But her prayers were not answered. That afternoon, Jaen and two other men were brought outside by masked agents in plainclothes and quickly ushered into unmarked vehicles, with Ambar wailing and making a last plea. Aranza, 12, tried to push past the agents to prevent them from leading him toward the vehicles, tears streaming down her face.
ABC News observed the emotional moments as an uncontrollably distraught Ambar threw herself on the ground pleading for her husband to be released.
The masked individuals did not respond to multiple questions asked by ABC News regarding what agency they belonged to, why they were covering their faces, and which authority was being invoked to detain the men. But Jaen's lawyer, Margaret Cargioli, says his detention follows a growing pattern of migrants being detained during check-ins with the Department of Homeland Security and being quickly deported under expedited removal.
DHS did not immediately respond to ABC News' request for comment.
In 2023, ABC News did a sit-down interview with the Colombian-Venezuelan family about their tearful reunion after being separated at the border by U.S. authorities in Texas. Jaen, Ambar and Aranza made the dangerous journey from Colombia hoping to seek asylum in the U.S.
"[It was] traumatic," Jaen said during the interview. "It was a risky decision. We knew we had someone to take care of, our daughter. As a family, we felt we didn't have another option."
MORE: In a new tactic, ICE is arresting migrants at immigration courts, attorneys say
Once they reached the border the family said they were separated and were placed in different types of removal proceedings. Ambar and her daughter said they were eventually released and placed on a bus to Los Angeles, funded by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott's Operation Lone Star.
Jaen was issued a removal order under the expedited removal process, but Cargioli and other attorneys with Immigrant Defenders Law Center were able to successfully challenge the separation and he was released on humanitarian parole for one year.
Cargioli says Jaen has petitioned for asylum, a renewal of parole and a stay of removal but all are pending.
Jaen was scheduled for a check-in on June 16 as part of the Intensive Supervision Appearance Program (ISAP) — an alternative to the detention program run by ICE -- but was unexpectedly told to come in on June 3 or 4, Ambar told ABC News.
That raised major red flags for his legal team, who has been monitoring increasing incidents of the Trump administration detaining migrants in the interior of the country and placing them on "expedited removal." The process allows the government to remove migrants in a streamlined manner without requiring them, in some cases, to go before a judge.
Under the Biden administration, the process applied to migrants who had entered the U.S. within 14 days and within 100 miles of the border. Under the Trump administration, it has been expanded to apply to migrants anywhere in the interior who have arrived within two years.
Jaen and his family entered the United States on June 4, 2023, exactly two years before his latest detention, leading Cargioli to fear he's being placed in expedited removal. Despite asking the ISAP officers where he was going to be detained, and if it was through expedited removal, the attorney says she has not received an answer.
Jaen spoke with Ambar on the phone after his detention and said he did not know where he was, but that he was being held at a facility close to where he was detained, Ambar said.
MORE: Families separated by Trump's 'zero-tolerance' policy at risk due to lapse in legal services, ACLU argues
Ambar and Aranza have an asylum hearing scheduled for June 2028. Cargioli believes Jaen would be with his family if they had not been separated at the border.
"If he had not been separated from his family at that stage and put into expedited removal, he would have his case in immigration in New York, in immigration court with her, with both of them," she told ABC News.
ISAP check-ins are carried out through a government contractor called BI Incorporated, according to DHS reports. Jaen has been regularly checking in at the Elk Street office since his initial detention, Ambar said.
Families with loved ones checking in stand outside the facility hoping they will not be detained. On Wednesday, ABC News saw one woman cry with joy when a relative and her baby walked out with no handcuffs in sight. Another woman was shocked to see her mom being quickly led into one of the vehicles waiting outside the building.
"Mom what happened, what is this," the woman asked. The masked agents did not respond to her repeated questions about why her mom was being detained.
"I don't understand," the woman yelled. "She didn't do anything. She has a work card."
"Who do we speak to…what is going on," she asked as the agents closed the car door and drove off with her mother.

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People Are "Disappearing" Since Trump Took Office. Here's What That Means.
People Are "Disappearing" Since Trump Took Office. Here's What That Means.

Yahoo

timean hour ago

  • Yahoo

People Are "Disappearing" Since Trump Took Office. Here's What That Means.

Last month, Frizgeralth de Jesús Cornejo Pulgar, an asylum-seeker from Venezuela, was scheduled for a routine hearing in immigration court. But as Mother Jones reports, he never made it because he'd been whisked off without due process to El Salvador's Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) along with 230 Venezuelan immigrants. Since President Donald Trump began to carry out what he claimed would be the 'largest deportation' campaign in U.S. history earlier this year, there have been a number of cases where immigrants like Cornejo Pulgar have just 'disappeared.' In January, Ricardo Prada Vásquez, a Venezuelan man working a delivery job and picking up food at a McDonald's in Detroit, Michigan, was deported and 'disappeared' to El Salvador after taking a wrong turn into Canada. 'Ricardo's story by itself is incredibly tragic — and we don't know how many Ricardos there are,' Ben Levey, a staff attorney with the National Immigrant Justice Center who tried to locate Prada Vásquez, told The New York Times. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials ultimately confirmed to him that he had been deported but did not divulge his destination. After the abductions, families of men like Prada Vásquez search, but the names of their loved ones disappear from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's online detainee locator. Could what's happening to immigrants under Trump be classified as 'enforced disappearances'? We spoke with academics and researchers who study how rogue states 'disappear' people. First, what does it mean to 'disappear' a person? According to the United Nations, an 'enforced disappearance' occurs when agents of the state (or groups acting with its authorization and support) arrest, detain, abduct or in any other way deprive a person of their liberty. The state then refuses to disclose the fate or whereabouts of the person concerned. If you're wondering whether this is legal or illegal, it's actually neither. 'The inherent consequence of an enforced disappearance is that the person is placed outside the protection of the law, in a sort of legal limbo,' said Gabriella Citroni, an adjunct professor of international human rights law at the university of Milano-Bicocca in Milan, Italy, and a chair-rapporteur of UN expert group on enforced or involuntary disappearances. Unlike other crimes under international law, such as torture, enforced disappearances were not prohibited by a universal legally binding instrument before a UN Convention came into effect in 2010. Disappeared people frequently include political opponents, protesters, human rights defenders and community leaders, students and members of minorities, Citroni said. Related: "We Don't Import Food": 31 Americans Who Are Just So, So Confused About Tariffs And US Trade 'Typically, enforced disappearances are used to suppress freedom of expression or religion, or legitimate civil strife demanding democracy, as well as against persons involved in the defense of the land, natural resources, and the environment, and to fight organized crime or counter terrorism,' she said. Enforced disappearance functions as a tool of terror in two ways, said Oscar Lopez, a journalist based in Mexico City working on a book about the origins of forced disappearance during Mexico's 'Dirty War.' 'First, the victim is deprived of due process and often subjected to torture as well as the psychological hell of not knowing what's going to happen to them and possibly fearing for their life,' he told HuffPost. Secondly, enforced disappearance forces families and communities into a state of painful uncertainty, Lopez said. 'They don't know whether their relative is alive or dead and toggle between desperate hope and unbearable despair.' When disappearances occur frequently enough, they can leave entire communities in a state of terror, unsure of who might be taken next, Lopez said. What has happened to disappeared people in the past? What happens to people involuntarily disappeared depends 'very much on the context' in which they are taken, Lopez said. But generally speaking, if the person is kept alive, they're held in state custody for an indeterminate amount of time without the ability to communicate with their family or legal counsel ― aka they're 'held incommunicado.' If the person is killed, their bodies are often disposed of in such a way that it becomes almost impossible for them to be found. 'This can mean burying them in unmarked graves, cremating their remains, or, as happened in Latin America, throwing their corpses out to sea,' he said. Where have enforced disappearances happened before? Related: AOC's Viral Response About A Potential Presidential Run Has Everyone Watching, And I'm Honestly Living For It Lopez pointed to a few examples: In Argentina, during the military dictatorship between 1976 and 1983, an estimated 30,000 people were disappeared. In nearby Chile, more than 1,000 people went missing under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, while in Guatemala, some 45,000 people were forcibly disappeared during the country's civil war, which lasted from 1960 to 1996. In North Korea, instances of enforced disappearances and abductions date back to 1950. 'There are more recent instances of enforced disappearance, too,' he said. 'In Syria, for example, it's estimated that 136,000 people were disappeared under the Assad dictatorship.' But enforced disappearances aren't always carried out directly by state agents. said Adam Isacson, who leads border and migration work at the Washington Office on Latin America. Hundreds of thousands of people have been disappeared each by irregular groups in Colombia and Mexico, operating with the tacit permission or even assistance of government officials. 'Sometimes, as with the anti-communist paramilitaries in Colombia and death squads in 1980s El Salvador, the officials colluded with the groups out of some ideological alliance,' he said. 'Sometimes, as with corrupt Mexican cops who assist organized crime, they do it because they profit from it.' Could what's happening in the U.S. now with immigrants be considered 'enforced disappearances'? In spite of existing court orders and legal challenges, the Trump administration continues its deportation policy in El Salvador, in partnership with the county's President Nayib Bukele. Venezuelan migrants have been targeted in particular for deportation, many on unproven allegations of gang affiliation. That said, Trump has also repeatedly said he's 'all for' looking for ways to detain U.S. citizens in foreign jails. Should we be calling what's happening now 'forced disappearances'? A report released by the UN in April suggests yes. The incommunicado detentions appeared to involve 'enforced disappearances, contrary to international law,' the report said. 'Many detainees were unaware of their destination, their families were not informed of their detention or removal, and the U.S. and Salvadoran authorities have not published the names or legal status of the detainees,' the UN experts wrote. 'Those imprisoned in El Salvador have been denied the right to communicate with and be visited by their family members.' Isacson agrees that we should be calling a spade a spade here. 'The only difference between that and what was done in 1970s Chile or Argentina is that loved ones have more reason to believe that their relatives are still alive and haven't been killed,' he said. But even that certainty is not complete, he said: 'Can you say with 100% confidence that Andry Hernandez ― the gay Venezuelan stylist that disappeared two months ago ― is still alive right now? He probably is, but you absolutely cannot guarantee that, and no one will confirm it.' The raids and deportations have certainly struck fear into American communities ― another classic characteristic of enforced disappearances. The Trump administration has openly said that its goal is to try to make life so difficult for immigrants that they 'self-deport.' Fear of being sent to a notorious El Salvador prison, where inmates never see the light of day, plays into that goal, said Rod Abouharb, an associate professor of international relations who researches forced disappearances at the University College London. 'These raids send out a chilling effect on those individuals who may be undocumented and even those who are legally in the United States: that they may be caught up in one of these raids, disappear into the prison system, and deported to a third country they may have no connection with,' he told HuffPost. What can regular citizens do in response to enforced disappearances? The best thing Americans can do to object to efforts like this is to draw as much attention as possible to individual cases, Lopez said. 'Whether that's by holding protests, creating online petitions or posting on social media, ensuring that a person who the government has tried to disappear remains visible and in the public discourse can be a powerful way to draw national attention to their plight and the plight of others like them.' he said. Isacson thinks it's important to encourage senate and congressional Democrats who've stood up and made headlines, like Sen. Chris Van Hollen (Md.). Back in April, Van Hollen pushed for a face-to-face meeting with Kilmar Abrego Garcia ― a Salvadoran native living in Maryland who was deported in March to El Salvador despite a 2019 court order barring his deportation to that country due to fear of persecution. 'Democrats will actually help themselves politically if they keep making a lot of righteous noise about this,' he said. Americans should write to Republican moderates who seem quietly uncomfortable about forced disappearances and might be persuaded to action, Isacson said. 'All of us to stay vocal about this,' he said. 'Keep protesting, keep writing about it and keep calling your legislators.'This article originally appeared on HuffPost. Also in In the News: People Can't Believe This "Disgusting" Donald Trump Jr. Post About Joe Biden's Cancer Diagnosis Is Real Also in In the News: Republicans Are Calling Tim Walz "Tampon Tim," And The Backlash From Women Is Too Good Not To Share Also in In the News: JD Vance Shared The Most Bizarre Tweet Of Him Serving "Food" As Donald Trump's Housewife

Democrats itching for fight over immigration
Democrats itching for fight over immigration

The Hill

timean hour ago

  • The Hill

Democrats itching for fight over immigration

Democrats are diving forcefully into the immigration fight, dismissing concerns about political backlash to confront President Trump directly on a polarizing issue that ranks among the president's strongest suits in the eyes of voters. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) is leading the charge. Not only has he waged an animated defense of Rep. LaMonica McIver (D-N.J.), who is facing federal charges following a recent scuffle with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents outside a migrant detention center in New Jersey, but he's also demanding that the masked ICE officers involved in the fracas — and Trump's broader mass deportation campaign — be publicly identified. 'Every single ICE agent who is engaged in this aggressive overreach and are trying to hide their identities from the American people will be unsuccessful in doing that,' Jeffries told reporters in the Capitol. 'This is America,' he added. 'This is not the Soviet Union. We're not behind the Iron Curtain. This is not the 1930s. And every single one of them, no matter what it takes, no matter how long it takes, will of course be identified.' The call drew immediate howls from officials with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and other Republicans, who have long-accused Democrats of siding with people in the country illegally over the rule of law — a major theme of Trump's successful campaign last year. Many of the GOP critics are accusing Democrats of putting the safety of federal law enforcement officers in jeopardy. 'We take threats to law enforcement very seriously. As the state leading the nation in immigration enforcement, FL will not sit idly by and allow agents from DHS/ICE and/or state and local agencies to be targeted,' Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) posted on X, linking to Jeffries's comments. DeSantis said he's instructed Florida law enforcers to be on the lookout for any 'doxxing' campaigns aimed at law enforcers, and to respond quickly. 'Sabotaging the work of those in the immigration enforcement arena will not stand!' he wrote. Capitol Hill Republicans are piling on. Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) this week introduced legislation designed to shield federal law enforcers from doxxing. Violators could face five years in prison. The pushback has done little to dissuade Jeffries, who on Thursday doubled down on his identification push, wondering why those involved in Trump's mass deportation campaign should enjoy privileges of anonymity that others in law enforcement don't. 'It seems to me that the officials at the Department of Homeland Security, including ICE, should be held to the same standards as every other part of law enforcement in terms of transparency,' he said. The strategy has its risks. Trump has built his political brand around an 'America First' message that helped propel him into the White House in 2016 and again in 2024. His 'big, beautiful bill' working its way through Congress includes, as a central feature, an immigration crackdown that helped usher the bill through the House last month. And while Trump's approval rating is underwater across almost every major issue, including the economy, recent polls indicate that his approach to immigration is the sole exception, winning more supporters than detractors. Still, the Democrats' aggressive pushback against Trump's policies is a clear sign that they're not shying away from the immigration issue, regardless of the potential pitfalls. And the de-masking of ICE agents is just one front of a much broader fight they're taking up this year. In recent weeks, Democrats have also rallied behind immigrants deported without due process, including a Maryland resident who was mistakenly sent to El Salvador. They've staged public protests outside migrant detention centers, like the one in Newark that led to McIver's arrest. And top Democrats are up in arms after DHS agents stormed into the district office of Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) and handcuffed a staffer with accusations that aides were 'harboring' immigration 'rioters.' Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), the senior Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, characterized the latter incident as 'intolerable.' 'I'm relieved this situation was resolved, but DHS's actions — first, in attempting to enter the office without a warrant or consent, and then proceeding to handcuff and detain a terrified young congressional staffer without cause — were the stuff of police in a banana republic or a gangster state,' Raskin said in an email. 'This outrageous behavior reflects an alarming disregard for the law and a shocking disrespect for the people's House and the lawmaking branch of government,' he continued. 'DHS does not have the authority to barge into congressional offices with vague demands and arrest or intimidate legislative staffers. We will not tolerate such lawlessness.' Raskin and Nadler are pressing Republicans on the Judiciary Committee, led by Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), to stage hearings on the unusual incident. The most recent battleline of the partisan immigration war arrived this week, when Trump announced a travel ban affecting 12 countries. The makeup of the targets — largely African or Middle Eastern countries with mostly non-white populations — were not overlooked by Democrats, some of whom accused the president of using official policy to promote bigotry. 'Make no mistake: Trump's latest travel ban will NOT make America safer,' Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) wrote on X. 'We cannot continue to allow the Trump administration to write bigotry and hatred into U.S. immigration policy.' Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) delivered a similar warning. 'From his first Muslim Ban, Trump's travel bans have always betrayed … the ideals and values that inspired America's Founders,' Beyer posted on X. 'Trump's use of prejudice and bigotry to bar people from entering the U.S. does not make us safer, it just divides us and weakens our global leadership.'

Trump Era Disappearances: What You Need To Know
Trump Era Disappearances: What You Need To Know

Buzz Feed

time2 hours ago

  • Buzz Feed

Trump Era Disappearances: What You Need To Know

Last month, Frizgeralth de Jesús Cornejo Pulgar, an asylum-seeker from Venezuela, was scheduled for a routine hearing in immigration court. But as Mother Jones reports, he never made it because he'd been whisked off without due process to El Salvador's Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) along with 230 Venezuelan immigrants. Since President Donald Trump began to carry out what he claimed would be the 'largest deportation' campaign in U.S. history earlier this year, there have been a number of cases where immigrants like Cornejo Pulgar have just 'disappeared.' In January, Ricardo Prada Vásquez, a Venezuelan man working a delivery job and picking up food at a McDonald's in Detroit, Michigan, was deported and 'disappeared' to El Salvador after taking a wrong turn into Canada. 'Ricardo's story by itself is incredibly tragic — and we don't know how many Ricardos there are,' Ben Levey, a staff attorney with the National Immigrant Justice Center who tried to locate Prada Vásquez, told The New York Times. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials ultimately confirmed to him that he had been deported but did not divulge his destination. After the abductions, families of men like Prada Vásquez search, but the names of their loved ones disappear from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's online detainee locator. Could what's happening to immigrants under Trump be classified as 'enforced disappearances'? We spoke with academics and researchers who study how rogue states 'disappear' people. According to the United Nations, an 'enforced disappearance' occurs when agents of the state (or groups acting with its authorization and support) arrest, detain, abduct or in any other way deprive a person of their liberty. The state then refuses to disclose the fate or whereabouts of the person concerned. If you're wondering whether this is legal or illegal, it's actually neither. 'The inherent consequence of an enforced disappearance is that the person is placed outside the protection of the law, in a sort of legal limbo,' said Gabriella Citroni, an adjunct professor of international human rights law at the university of Milano-Bicocca in Milan, Italy, and a chair-rapporteur of UN expert group on enforced or involuntary disappearances. Unlike other crimes under international law, such as torture, enforced disappearances were not prohibited by a universal legally binding instrument before a UN Convention came into effect in 2010. Disappeared people frequently include political opponents, protesters, human rights defenders and community leaders, students and members of minorities, Citroni said. 'Typically, enforced disappearances are used to suppress freedom of expression or religion, or legitimate civil strife demanding democracy, as well as against persons involved in the defense of the land, natural resources, and the environment, and to fight organized crime or counter terrorism,' she said. Enforced disappearance functions as a tool of terror in two ways, said Oscar Lopez, a journalist based in Mexico City working on a book about the origins of forced disappearance during Mexico's 'Dirty War.' 'First, the victim is deprived of due process and often subjected to torture as well as the psychological hell of not knowing what's going to happen to them and possibly fearing for their life,' he told HuffPost. Secondly, enforced disappearance forces families and communities into a state of painful uncertainty, Lopez said. 'They don't know whether their relative is alive or dead and toggle between desperate hope and unbearable despair.' When disappearances occur frequently enough, they can leave entire communities in a state of terror, unsure of who might be taken next, Lopez said. What happens to people involuntarily disappeared depends 'very much on the context' in which they are taken, Lopez said. But generally speaking, if the person is kept alive, they're held in state custody for an indeterminate amount of time without the ability to communicate with their family or legal counsel ― aka they're 'held incommunicado.' If the person is killed, their bodies are often disposed of in such a way that it becomes almost impossible for them to be found. 'This can mean burying them in unmarked graves, cremating their remains, or, as happened in Latin America, throwing their corpses out to sea,' he said. Lopez pointed to a few examples: In Argentina, during the military dictatorship between 1976 and 1983, an estimated 30,000 people were disappeared. In nearby Chile, more than 1,000 people went missing under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, while in Guatemala, some 45,000 people were forcibly disappeared during the country's civil war, which lasted from 1960 to 1996. In North Korea, instances of enforced disappearances and abductions date back to 1950. 'There are more recent instances of enforced disappearance, too,' he said. 'In Syria, for example, it's estimated that 136,000 people were disappeared under the Assad dictatorship.' But enforced disappearances aren't always carried out directly by state agents. said Adam Isacson, who leads border and migration work at the Washington Office on Latin America. Hundreds of thousands of people have been disappeared each by irregular groups in Colombia and Mexico, operating with the tacit permission or even assistance of government officials. 'Sometimes, as with the anti-communist paramilitaries in Colombia and death squads in 1980s El Salvador, the officials colluded with the groups out of some ideological alliance,' he said. 'Sometimes, as with corrupt Mexican cops who assist organized crime, they do it because they profit from it.' In spite of existing court orders and legal challenges, the Trump administration continues its deportation policy in El Salvador, in partnership with the county's President Nayib Bukele. Venezuelan migrants have been targeted in particular for deportation, many on unproven allegations of gang affiliation. That said, Trump has also repeatedly said he's 'all for' looking for ways to detain U.S. citizens in foreign jails. Should we be calling what's happening now 'forced disappearances'? A report released by the UN in April suggests yes. The incommunicado detentions appeared to involve 'enforced disappearances, contrary to international law,' the report said. 'Many detainees were unaware of their destination, their families were not informed of their detention or removal, and the U.S. and Salvadoran authorities have not published the names or legal status of the detainees,' the UN experts wrote. 'Those imprisoned in El Salvador have been denied the right to communicate with and be visited by their family members.' Isacson agrees that we should be calling a spade a spade here. 'The only difference between that and what was done in 1970s Chile or Argentina is that loved ones have more reason to believe that their relatives are still alive and haven't been killed,' he said. But even that certainty is not complete, he said: 'Can you say with 100% confidence that Andry Hernandez ― the gay Venezuelan stylist that disappeared two months ago ― is still alive right now? He probably is, but you absolutely cannot guarantee that, and no one will confirm it. ' The raids and deportations have certainly struck fear into American communities ― another classic characteristic of enforced disappearances. The Trump administration has openly said that its goal is to try to make life so difficult for immigrants that they 'self-deport.' Fear of being sent to a notorious El Salvador prison, where inmates never see the light of day, plays into that goal, said Rod Abouharb, an associate professor of international relations who researches forced disappearances at the University College London. 'These raids send out a chilling effect on those individuals who may be undocumented and even those who are legally in the United States: that they may be caught up in one of these raids, disappear into the prison system, and deported to a third country they may have no connection with,' he told HuffPost. What can regular citizens do in response to enforced disappearances? Pacific Press / Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images The best thing Americans can do to object to efforts like this is to draw as much attention as possible to individual cases, Lopez said. 'Whether that's by holding protests, creating online petitions or posting on social media, ensuring that a person who the government has tried to disappear remains visible and in the public discourse can be a powerful way to draw national attention to their plight and the plight of others like them.' he said. Isacson thinks it's important to encourage senate and congressional Democrats who've stood up and made headlines, like Sen. Chris Van Hollen (Md.). Back in April, Van Hollen pushed for a face-to-face meeting with Kilmar Abrego Garcia ― a Salvadoran native living in Maryland who was deported in March to El Salvador despite a 2019 court order barring his deportation to that country due to fear of persecution. 'Democrats will actually help themselves politically if they keep making a lot of righteous noise about this,' he said. Americans should write to Republican moderates who seem quietly uncomfortable about forced disappearances and might be persuaded to action, Isacson said. 'All of us to stay vocal about this,' he said. 'Keep protesting, keep writing about it and keep calling your legislators.' HuffPost.

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