San Diego clergy visit federal immigration court to bear witness during crackdown on migrants
About a dozen religious leaders from the San Diego area visited federal immigration court Friday to serve as witnesses to 'what goes down' as some cases arising from the Trump administration's migration crackdown are heard, an organizer said.
Some migrants have been arrested at the court by federal immigration officers. The Rev. Scott Santarosa, a Jesuit priest who was lead organizer of the group, said the purpose of the visitation 'is more than anything just to provide some sense of presence.'
' People are longing for people of faith to walk with vulnerable migrants,' added Santarosa, the pastor of San Diego's Our Lady of Guadalupe Church. 'Our goal is not trying to prevent arrests — but we can witness it.'
The visit was preceded by a Mass at San Diego's Catholic Cathedral with bishops and other clergy — including Bishop Michael Pham, the top-ranking official in the group and one of the first bishops to be appointed by Pope Leo XIV after his election as pontiff — offering prayers for refugees and migrants on World Refugee Day. Pham himself is a refugee; he came to the United States unaccompanied as a boy from Vietnam.
The idea for the court visit started during a diocese-wide call to plan events for World Refugee Day, in addition to each church holding a Mass to pray for migrants and refugees, Santarosa said.
The priest said he hopes that visiting the court helps migrant communities — both more recent arrivals and those without legal status to be in the country who have lived in the San Diego area for decades.
'They're feeling like people just want them to disappear,' Santarosa said, adding that a woman told him, in Spanish: 'Father, we feel as if we were hunted, as if we were animals.'
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Associated Press religion coverage receives support through the AP's collaboration with The Conversation US, with funding from Lilly Endowment Inc. The AP is solely responsible for this content.
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BBC News
an hour ago
- BBC News
Iran and Israel exchange strikes after Iran rules out nuclear talks while under attack
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The IAEA earlier this month expressed concern that Iran had amassed enough uranium enriched up to 60% purity - a short, technical step away from weapons grade, or 90% - to potentially make nine nuclear bombs. Update: Date: 08:02 BST Title: Iran only ready for diplomatic talks once aggression stops - a recap Content: Iran's foreign minister Abbas Araghchi On Friday, top diplomats from the UK, EU, Germany and France held hours-long talks with their Iranian counterpart, Abbas Araghchi, in Geneva. The Europeans had hoped to make progress on a diplomatic breakthrough at what UK Foreign Secretary David Lammy called a "perilous moment". But the talks didn't yield the outcome they wanted. Araghchi told reporters afterwards Iran was only "ready to consider diplomacy once the aggression is stopped" and Israel is held accountable "for the heinous crimes committed". He added that Iran's nuclear programme was peaceful, and that Iran would continue to "exercise its legitimate right of self-defence". "I make it crystal clear that Iran's defence capabilities are non-negotiable." Update: Date: 07:49 BST Title: Israel says senior Iranian commander killed in strike - reports Content: Israel's Defense Minister Israel Katz said on Saturday the IDF had killed a senior Iranian commander in a strike on an apartment in the city of Qom, local media and Reuters news agency reported. Saeed Izadi was responsible for financing and arming Hamas ahead of its October 7 attacks on Israel, Katz said. "This is a major achievement for Israeli intelligence and the Air Force," Katz said in a statement. "Justice for the murdered and the hostages. Israel's long arm will reach all its enemies." Izadi was a member of Iran's powerful Quds Force, a branch of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) responsible for overseas activities, including supporting Iran's proxies in the region. The IRGC is yet to confirm Izadi's death. Update: Date: 07:36 BST Title: European discussions yield no breakthrough, but Iran ready to keep talking Content: Lyse DoucetChief international correspondent, reporting from Geneva Yesterday, European foreign ministers met with their Iranian counterpart in Geneva. Here are the key takeaways from the discussions: More than three hours of discussions in Geneva yielded no breakthrough. But European ministers emerged convinced that Iran was ready to keep talking, and more willing to put issues on the table which hadn't been there before. They all emphasised that Iran has to resume its talks with the United States. 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Overnight, the Israeli military said it launched a "series of strikes" against missile storage and infrastructure sites in central Iran. Update: Date: 07:02 BST Title: Iran and Israel exchange strikes, as Iran refuses nuclear talks while attacks continue Content: Missiles fired from Iran in retaliation for Israeli attacks are seen in the sky over the Hebron, West Bank Good morning and welcome to our live coverage as Israel and Iran continue to exchange strikes on the ninth day of the ongoing conflict. Israel targets nuclear infrastructure in fresh strikes as Iranian media report an attack on a nuclear site in Ifsahan, in the centre of the country. Israeli Defense Forces say they struck down several drone and missile attacks from Iran overnight. It comes after Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi ruled out nuclear talks while under attack. Speaking to reporters yesterday, Aragchi said Iran is "ready to consider diplomacy once again once the aggression is stopped" and "the aggressor is held accountable for the heinous crimes committed". We'll continue to bring you the latest developments and analysis throughout the day, stay with us.
The Guardian
an hour ago
- The Guardian
America is showing us football in its final dictator form – we can't afford to look away
Should we give it a miss? Is it best to stay away from next summer's Trump-Infantino US World Cup? Depending on your politics the answer may be a resounding no or a bemused shrug. Some will see pure drive-by entertainment. Why would anyone want to boycott a month-long end-of-days Grand Soccer Parade staged by two of the world's most cinematic egomaniacs? But it is a question that has been asked, and will be asked a lot more in the next year. Those who intend to travel will need to answer it by action or omission. Would it be better for dissenting media and discomfited football fans to simply no-platform this event? The picture is at least clearer now. After a week of the new steroid-fed Club World Cup we know what this thing will feel like and who it will benefit. There is no mystery with these events now, no sense of politics lurking coyly out of sight. Under Gianni Infantino Fifa has become a kind of mobile propaganda agency for indulgent regimes, right out in front twirling its pompoms, hitching its leotard, twerking along at the front of the parade like an unholy Uncle Sam. So we had the grisly sight this week of Donald Trump not just borrowing football's light, but wrestling it on to his lap and ruffling its hair, burbling like a random hot-button word generator about women and trans people, while Juventus players gawped in the background. We have the spectacle of both club and international football hijacked as a personal vanity platform for Infantino, the dictator's fluffer, the man who sold the world not once but twice. Infantino's status as a wildly over-promoted administrator has always had an operatic quality. But there is something far more sinister in his political over-reach, out there nodding along at the latest Oval Office freak-off, helping to legitimise each divisive statement, each casual erasure of process. Nobody gave Fifa a mandate to behave like this. Its mission is to promote and regulate. And yet here is it acting as a commercial disruptor in its own sport and as a lickspittle to the powerful, disregarding the human rights fluff and political neutrality enshrined in its 'statutes', offering zero transparency or accountability. To date Infantino's only public interface in the US is a 'fireside chat', AKA approved PR interview, at the Dick's Sporting Goods stage in New York. There he is, up there on the Stage of Dick's, mouthing platitudes to pre-programmed questions, high on his own power supply, the newly acquired Gianni glow-up eyebrows arched in a patina of inauthenticity. They say celebrity is a mask that eats into the face. Take a look at what football can do to you. And so far this tournament has presented the full grotesquery in store. What is the Club World Cup like on the ground? Pretty much the same as it is on the screen given this event is invisible in physical form beyond the stadiums. The key takeaway is confirmation of the weirdly jackboot, cult-like nature of the Infantino-shaped universe. Even the optics are trying to tell you something, all black holes, hard surfaces, gold, power-flash. Why does Fifa have its own vast lighted branding on the pitch like a global super-corporation or a military dictatorship? What is the Club World Cup logo supposed to represent, with its weird angular lines, the void at its heart? An obscure Stalinist plug socket? Darth Vader's space fighter? Not to mention the bizarre obsession with that shapeless and indefinable trophy, present on the big screen in every ground in weird scrolling closeup, one minute a Sauron's eye, the next some kind of finger-snapping torture instrument, with its secret draws full of ectoplasm, a dead crow, the personal effects of Pol Pot. Mainly there is the very openly manipulative nature of the spectacle, football in its final dictator form, with a sense of utter disdain for its captive consumer-subjects. Yes, they will literally put up with anything if we pipe it into their smartphones. So here is beauty, love, colour, connection, the things you're hard-wired to respond to, cattle-prodded into your nervous system for the benefit of assorted interests. Here is football reimagined as a kind of mass online pornography. Fifa even calls its media website Fifahub. With all this in mind some have suggested a World Cup and US boycott is the correct and logical response, not least in two recent articles published in these pages. The organisation Human Rights Watch has carried a warning about the implications of staging the tournament under the Trump regime. Guardian readers and social media voices have asked the same question from all sides of discourse. The hostile versions of this: if you don't like it then just don't come, we don't want you anyway [expletives deleted]. If you were worried about us in Qatar, western imperialist, why are you going to the US? And from the liberal left a concern that to report on sport is also to condone a regime that sends deportation officers to games, imposes travel bans on Fifa members and is edging towards another remote war. And all the while marches football around in a headlock, snapping its underwear elastic, saying thanks, Gianni, for the distracting firework show. This is not a normal situation. So why normalise it? Why give it legitimising light and heat? And yet, one week into the World Cup's rehearsal dinner, the only logical response is: you just have to go. Not only would a boycott serve no practical purpose; it would be counterproductive, an act of compliance for a regime that will happily operate without an opposing voice on the stage. There are two structural reasons for this. And a third that relates to the United States itself, or at least to the idea of the United States, to its possibilities, which are not defined by Trump, by the latest military action, or by Infantino. Most obviously, if you leave the stage you abandon the argument to the other person. Dissent remains a useful commodity. However pointless, ineffective and landlocked the process of pointing out the flaws and contradictions may have become, it is necessary to keep doing so. Qatar 2022 was a dictator show that simply sailed above the criticisms. But someone, however minor, has to make them, to offer at least some kind of counter-view. No-platforming an autocrat's show makes no sense on a basic level. These people would prefer you weren't there in any case. Whereas in reality the people platforming and enabling Trump and Infantino are not journalists trying to give another version of events, but the people who keep voting them into power, friendly dictators, subservient football associations and client media who will be present whatever happens. Fifa and its Saudi-backed broadcast partner Dazn are glossing up an army of in-house influencers and content-wanglers to generate a wall of approving noise. Is it healthy if these are the only voices at the show? Shouting into a void may have little effect. But you still have to shout. Sign up to Football Daily Kick off your evenings with the Guardian's take on the world of football after newsletter promotion Second, football does still have a value that steps outside the normal rules of show and spectacle. This is why it is coveted, courted and used like a weapon. Last week these pages carnied a logical, entirely legitimate wider view, written by two academics from City University New York, which concluded that a boycott was not just an option but 'necessary'. At the same time, the article defined the football World Cup as something that basically has no value, 'spectacles of recreation designed to distract people from their day-to-day lives, cultural and political branding opportunities for their hosts. For authoritarians, they have long been used as a tool to distract from or launder stains of human rights violations and corruption.' Which is definitely true. But it also reads like a vision of sport defined by the most joyless version of AI invented. Under this version of events no World Cup or Olympics would have taken place, because they are essentially worthless, home only to malevolent actors, lacking any notion of colour, human spirt, joy, art, beauty or connection. Who knows, maybe this is accurate now. It is undeniably true that the idea of football as a collective people's game is fairly absurd. Fans of football clubs struggle with this state of cognitive dissonance on a daily basis, the contrast of legacy identity and hard commercial reality. Liverpool are a community club owned by a US hedge fund. Manchester City see themselves as outsiders and underdogs, and are also owned by the Abu Dhabi royal family. Football is the enemy these days. But both sides of this are important, because without that emotional connection, without the act of faith that enables the warm, human part, everything becomes diminished, all our institutions toxic shells. To give up is to abandon sport for ever to the dictators and the sales people, to say, yeah, this just belongs to you now. No-platforming something that still means connection and culture and history. Are we ready for that yet? There will be another version of the present at some point. The final point is about the US, a deeply divided and unhappy place right now, and a much-derided host nation, not least by members of its own populace. What has it been like here? The evidence is that an actual World Cup is going to be very hard to negotiate, spread over vast spaces, with baffling travel times, unreliable infrastructure, and a 24-hour attention industry that is already busy gorging on every other spectacle available to the human race. The US has a reputation for peerless razzmatazz around public events. And while this is undeniably true with cultural spectacles it invented – rock'n'roll, presidential races, galactic shopping malls, enormous food, rural tornadoes, its own continental-scale sports – the US's version of other people's specialities, from cheese to professional football, can seem a little mannered. But the fact remains the actual games have been quite good. There has been a European-flavoured focus on tickets and empty seats. But 25,000 people on a weekday to watch Chelsea in an ill-defined game is decent evidence of willingness to stage this thing and develop the market. The dismay at 3,500 turning up to Mamelodi Sundowns v Ulsan HD in Orlando overlooks the upside, the fact that 3,500 people actually turned up to Mamelodi Sundowns v Ulsan HD in Orlando. Sundowns get 9,000-odd even at home. How many of their South African fans can afford to travel for this? Fifa, which uses its faux-benevolence cleverly, will point out an African team received $2m (£1.7m) for winning that game. Do we want to develop something or not? A wider point is that football here is a game beloved of immigrant populations. There is a different kind of warmth, often among people without a platform or the means to make it to the matches so far. The waiter who adores Cristiano Ronaldo. The taxi driver who wants to talk for 40 minutes about Chelsea's wastefulness with academy players. The cop who loves the Colombian national team and is desperate for his son to see them in the flesh. As for the US itself, it still feels like false equivalence to state that this is now an actual dictatorship, a lost land, a place that doesn't deserve this show because of its flaws and structural violence. This has always been a pretty brutal nation, human life as a constant pressure wave, mainlining heat and light into your veins, but also always taking a bite. The opening week in Miami captured this feeling, football's most hungrily transactional event staged on a sunken green peninsula, a place where the sea seems to be punching holes in the land, but which is still constantly throbbing with life and warmth and beautiful things. There is a nostalgic attachment to the idea of the US for people of a certain age, 20th-century holdovers, brought up on its flaws and imperialism, but also its culture and brilliance. But for the visitor America does seem in a worse state than it did 20 years ago. There is an unhappiness, a more obvious underclass, a sense of neglected parts and surfaces. All the things that were supposed to be good – cars, plenitude, markets, voting, empowerment, civil rights, cultural unity, all the Cokes being good and all the Cokes being the same – seem to have gone bad. But this is also a democracy with an elected leader, albeit one with a lust for executive power and some sinister tendencies. Mainly the US seems to have a massive self-loathing problem. Perhaps you can say it is correct in this, that Trump is enacting actual harms. But Trump is also a symptom of that alienation and perceived decline. He's an algorithm-driven apparition. Say his name enough times and this cartoon will appear. America remains a great, messy, dangerous, flawed idea of a place. What else is the world currently offering? This is in any case where football will now live for the next year, an unquestioning supplicant in the form of its own autocratic leader. The game is not an indestructible product. It can be stretched thin and ruined by greed, is already at war with itself in many key places. It will at some point be necessary to pay the ferryman, even as the US is packed away a year from now and the sails set at Fifa House for all corners of the globe and then Saudi Arabia. However stormy the prospects, it is not quite the moment to abandon this ship for good.
Times
2 hours ago
- Times
Mahmoud Khalil, pro-Palestinian activist, released after 104 days
Mahmoud Khalil, the Palestinian activist detained by the Trump administration over his ties to student protests, has been released from immigration detention after 104 days. The former Columbia University student became a symbol of the president's clampdown on campus demonstrations when he was arrested and threatened with deportation. On Friday a federal judge ruled Khalil, a green card holder married to an American, must be released on bail. He walked free from a detention centre in Louisiana and said he wanted to hug his wife and newborn son. 'Justice prevailed, but it's very long overdue,' Khalil said while wearing a keffiyeh, a black and white headscarf which has become a symbol of solidarity with Palestine. 'This shouldn't have taken three months.' He is expected to travel to New York to reunite with his family. Khalil was detained outside his apartment in New York in March over his ties to the student protests and encampments at Columbia that later spread to colleges across the nation. Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, claimed that he should be deported and that his participation in 'antisemitic protests' posed a national security threat. Khalil and his supporters maintain he is innocent and that he took part in legitimate protests. He missed the birth of his son while detained. District Judge Michael Farbiarz said it would be 'highly, highly unusual' for the government to continue detaining a legal US resident who was not a flight risk and who had not been accused of violence. 'Petitioner is not a flight risk, and the evidence presented is that he is not a danger to the community,' he said. 'Period, full stop.' After leaving detention Khalil condemned the White House's immigration policies. 'The Trump administration are doing their best to dehumanise everyone here,' he said of the immigrants still behind bars. 'Whether you are a US citizen, an immigrant or just a person on this land, doesn't mean that you are less of a human.' Under the terms of his release Khalil had to surrender his passport and cannot travel internationally. He can however travel within the country including to New York and Michigan to visit family, New Jersey and Louisiana for court appearances and Washington to lobby Congress.
