ICE's culture of secrecy has nothing to do with safety
But when Kim attempted to re-enter the country, immigration officials blocked him at San Francisco International Airport, taking him into custody. He got no explanation and no access to his attorney, Eric Lee, who said his client slept in a chair for seven days. The agency recently confirmed in a statement to the Washington Post that 'This alien is in ICE custody pending removal proceedings,' according to the Tribune News Service.
An accused shoplifter would have more rights than have been afforded Kim, who is researching a vaccine for Lyme disease as he pursues a PhD at Texas A&M University. A toxic combination of secrecy, arrogance and an unsettling recklessness is pervading a newly emboldened Immigration and Customs Enforcement as it pursues President Donald Trump's goal of mass deportation at any cost.
Agents' identities are secret; they appear in public wearing black ski masks and street clothes while conducting raids and roundups. Their cars are unmarked. Courtroom arrests have become commonplace.
Once in the system, detainees' locations can be difficult to determine, leaving family and friends frantic. Those who dare to ask for a warrant or identification may find themselves charged with obstructing or even assaulting an officer, as happened to hospital staffers in Oxnard, California. The cruelty — and the fear it creates — has become an essential part of ICE operations.
In his first term, Trump laid the groundwork for greater secrecy and less public accountability with a 2020 memo that designated ICE a security/sensitive agency, on par with the Federal Bureau of Investigation or Secret Service. Months earlier he had done the same for Customs and Border Protection.
The change ensured that names and personal information of not just agents, but all employees, would be kept secret and not subject to public information requests.
In his second term, ICE has become resistant to congressional oversight. Democrats who question agency officials get flippant or downright curt answers. Lawmakers who attempt oversight by visiting detention centres have found themselves turned away.
Newark, New Jersey, Mayor Ras Baraka was arrested for attempting to enter such a facility in his own city.
At a Los Angeles news conference, US Senator Alex Padilla of California was forcibly removed and later taken to the ground and handcuffed because he approached Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem with a question.
She claimed not to have known him, even though he is the ranking member on the Senate's judiciary subcommittee on immigration and border safety. None of this is normal, nor should it be.
I spoke to Steven Thal, a respected Minnesota immigration lawyer with 42 years of experience, for perspective on how much ICE's practices have changed.
'We're in uncharted waters,' he told me. 'I haven't seen anything like this — to this extent — in all the time I've practised.'
'I get calls every day from people — even citizens — who are afraid to travel. Calls about denaturalization,' he said. 'Agents with masks or uniforms? No proper identification? That never used to happen. How would you even know you're not being kidnapped? There is a roughness now that comes straight from the top and has infiltrated through the agency.'
Meanwhile, a backlog in hearings has gone from bad to epic. Thal has one asylum case that's been pending for seven years, another for 10. He says the backlog now stands at 3.4 million cases, according to the Transitional Regional Access Clearinghouse, a national database for immigration.
And little wonder: between Trump administration firings, retirements and transfers, a reported 106 immigration judges have left since January; there are about 600 left in the US today. The backup has contributed to massive overcrowding in detention centres. In June, a record 59,000 immigrants were being held in centres across the country. According to a CBS report, that put the system at over 140% capacity. Nearly half of those being detained had no criminal record. Fewer than 30% had criminal convictions.
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Gulf Today
a day ago
- Gulf Today
Teachers, retirees, activists stand up to immigration raids
Steve Lopez, Tribune News Service "Thank you so much for showing up this morning," Sharon Nicholls said into a megaphone at 8 a.m. Wednesday outside a Home Depot in Pasadena. As of Friday afternoon, no federal agents had raided the store on East Walnut Street. But the citizen brigade that stands watch outside and patrols the parking lot in search of ICE agents has not let down its guard—especially not after raids at three other Home Depots in recent days despite federal court rulings limiting sweeps. About two dozen people gathered near the tent that serves as headquarters of the East Pasadena Community Defense Center. Another dozen or so would be arriving over the next half hour, some carrying signs. "Silence is Violence" "Migrants Don't Party With Epstein" Cynthia Lunine, 70, carried a large sign that read "Break His Dark Spell" and included a sinister image of President Donald Trump. She said she was new to political activism, but added: "You can't not be an activist. If you're an American, it's the only option. The immigration issue is absolutely inhumane, it's un-Christian, and it's intolerable." There are local supporters, for sure, of Trump's immigration crackdown. Activists told me there aren't many days in which they don't field shouted profanities or pro-Trump cheers from Home Depot shoppers. But the administration's blather about a focus on violent offenders led to huge demonstrations in greater Los Angeles beginning in June, and the cause continues to draw people into the streets. Dayena Campbell, 35, is a volunteer at Community Defense Corner operations in other parts of Pasadena, a movement that followed high-profile raids and was covered in the Colorado Boulevard newspaper and, later, in the New York Times. A fulltime student who works in sales, Campbell was also cruising the parking lot at the Home Depot on the east side of Pasadena in search of federal agents. She thought this Home Depot needed its own Community Defense Corner, so she started one about a month ago. She and her cohort have more than once spotted agents in the area and alerted day laborers. About half have scattered, she said, and half have held firm despite the risk. When I asked what motivated Campbell, she said: "Inhumane, illegal kidnappings. Lack of due process. Actions taken without anyone being held accountable. Seeing people's lives ripped apart. Seeing families being destroyed in the blink of an eye." Anywhere from a handful to a dozen volunteers show up daily to hand out literature, patrol the parking lot and check in on day labourers, sometimes bringing them food. Once a week, Nicholls helps organize a rally that includes a march through the parking lot and into the store, where the protesters present a letter asking Home Depot management to "say no to ICE in their parking lot and in their store." Nicholls is an LAUSD teacher-librarian, and when she asks for support each week, working and retired teachers answer the call. "I'm yelling my lungs out," said retired teacher Mary Rose O'Leary, who joined in the chants of "ICE out of Home Depot" and "No hate, no fear, immigrants are welcome here." "Immigrants are what make this city what it is ... and the path to legal immigration is closed to everybody who doesn't have what, $5 million or something?" O'Leary said, adding that she was motivated by "the Christian ideal of welcoming the stranger." Retired teacher Dan Murphy speaks Spanish and regularly checks in with day labourers. "One guy said to me, 'We're just here to work.' Some of the guys were like, 'We're not criminals ... we're just here ... to make money and get by,'" Murphy said. He called the raids a flexing of "the violent arm of what autocracy can bring," and he resents Trump's focus on Southern California. "I take it personally. I'm white, but these are my people. California is my people. And it bothers me what might happen in this country if people don't stand firm ... I just said, 'I gotta do something.' I'm doing this now so I don't hate myself later." Nicholls told me she was an activist many years ago, and then turned her focus to work and raising a family. But the combination of wildfires, the cleanup and rebuilding, and the raids, brought her out of activism retirement. "The first people to come out after the firefighters — the second-responders — were day laborers cleaning the streets," Nicholls said. "You'd see them in orange shirts all over the city, cleaning up." The East Pasadena Home Depot is "an important store," because it's a supply center for the rebuilding of Altadena, "and we're going out there to show our love and solidarity for our neighbors," Nicholls said. To strike the fear of deportation in the hearts of workers, she said, is "inhumane, and to me, it's morally wrong." Nicholls had a quick response when I asked what she thinks of those who say illegal is illegal, so what's left to discuss? "That blocks the complexity of the conversation," she said, and doesn't take into account the hunger and violence that drive migration. Her husband, she said, left El Salvador 35 years ago during a war funded in part by the US. They have family members with legal status and some who are undocumented and afraid to leave their homes, Nicholls said. I mentioned that I had written about Pasadena Mayor Victor Gordo, who was undocumented as a child, and has kept his passport handy since the raids began. In that column, I quoted Gordo's friend, immigrant-rights leader Pablo Alvarado, director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network. "Full disclosure," Nicholls said, "(Alvarado) is my husband." It was news to me. When the raids began, Nicholls said, she told her husband, "I have the summer off, sweetie, but I want to help, and I'm going to call my friends." On Wednesday, after Nicholls welcomed demonstrators, Alvarado showed up for a pep talk. "I have lived in this country since 1990 ... and I love it as much as I love the small village where I came from in El Salvador," Alvarado said. "Some people may say that we are going into fascism, into authoritarianism, and I would say that we are already there." He offered details of a raid that morning at a Home Depot in Westlake and said the question is not whether the Pasadena store will be raided, but when. This country readily accepts the labor of immigrants but it does not respect their humanity, Alvarado said. "When humble people are attacked," he said, "we are here to bear witness." Nicholls led demonstrators through the parking lot and into the store, where she read aloud the letter asking Home Depot to take a stand against raids. Outside, where it was hot and steamy by mid-morning, several sun-blasted day laborers said they appreciated the support. But they were still fearful, and desperate for work. Jorge, just shy of 70, practically begged me to take his phone number. Whatever work I might have, he said, please call.
Gulf Today
a day ago
- Gulf Today
The coming arms race on gerrymandering
'I just want to find 11,780 votes,' President Donald Trump told Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger during a recorded phone call two months after Trump lost the 2020 presidential election. Trump's goal was to retroactively inflate his Georgia vote total in order win a state he'd lost and tip the Electoral College his way — to cheat his way to reelection, in other words, according to the Tribune News Service. Raffensperger, to his eternal credit, refused that corrupt directive from a president of his own party. If only Republican state lawmakers in Texas, Missouri and other red states today had that kind principled dedication to the rules and norms of democracy. But alas. Trump is currently engaged in a similar vote-cheating scheme but on a much larger scale: In an effort to hold onto the GOP's slim congressional majority through next year's midterm elections, Trump is pressing Republican-led states across the country to redraw congressional district lines that were just decided after the 2020 census. And unlike Raffensperger, key Republicans from Austin to Jefferson City and beyond are responding not with principled refusal but with: Yes, sir. Trump isn't even pretending this is anything other than a calculated power grab. Because Trump easily won Texas last year, he told an interviewer this week, 'We are entitled to five more (congressional) seats' from that state. That's not how it works, of course, but whatever. Democratic governors of California, Illinois and other blue states are now contemplating responding by redrawing their own district lines to give Democrats more seats from their states next year. This is what a redistricting arms race looks like — and it promises to sow even more chaos into America's electoral politics than Trump already has. The chaos is most evident in Texas, which is on the verge of redrawing its districts on direct orders from Trump. Legislative Democrats responded by fleeing the state to prevent a vote. Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker has welcomed them to hunker down in his blue state like refugees from some third-world dictatorship. Texas Republicans are threatening them with expulsion or even arrest. Here in Missouri, Trump's call for corrupt redistricting was initially rejected by top Republicans as an invalid scrambling of the normal process. This page even lauded them for their adherence to principle— prematurely, as it turns out. Missouri Republicans who initially expressed reservations about the idea are now suggesting it's possible, even likely, that Republican Gov. Mike Kehoe will call a special session to do Trump's bidding. Kehoe hasn't yet committed to that, but he hasn't ruled it out, either. Where (or where?) are the Brad Raffenspergers in today's GOP? Ironically, there's at least one of them in Congress right now: Rep. Kevin Kiley, R-Calif., has introduced a bill to ban mid-decade redistricting across the country. His motives aren't purely principle, as it was clearly prompted by fears that California Gov. Gavin Newsom would carry out his threat to counter Texas' redistricting shenanigans in kind, potentially unseating California Republicans such as Kiley himself. Still, the legislation (which faces low odds of passage) would at least put the brakes on this runaway redistricting train. Is what Texas is doing and Missouri is contemplating even legal? Clearly it shouldn't be. One person, one vote is a bedrock principle of our democracy. Gerrymandering generally erodes that principle — and gerrymandering that's this blatant in its timing and stated motivation erodes it blatantly. But the US Supreme Court in a 2019 case (Rucho v. Common Cause) effectively punted on the issue, allowing that gerrymandering might be illegal but ruling that federal courts had no jurisdiction to decide the matter. But that doesn't prevent Congress from imposing controls over the process like the one Rep. Kiley envisions, keeping redistricting as the once-per-decade process it's always been. Better still would be reforms of the kind Common Cause and others have long envisioned (and that California, for one, has already enacted) taking redistricting out of the hands of politicians entirely and leaving it to independent entities using hard cold demographic data instead of partisan gamesmanship.
Gulf Today
3 days ago
- Gulf Today
DOJ's push to collect your data is a fishing expedition
With his approval rating sinking lower and lower, and facing the prospect of losing control of the House to Democrats, President Donald Trump is engaged in an unprecedented attempt to manipulate the midterm elections. Not only has he demanded that Texas redraw its congressional districts, he's now got Attorney General Pam Bondi and the Department of Justice embarking on another insidious strategy: Building a dossier of private information on every voter that Trump can use for political advantage. Over the past several weeks, the DOJ Civil Rights Division has sent letters to more than a dozen states demanding they hand over their voter lists, including sensitive private information — such as driver's license and Social Security numbers linked to names, home addresses and, in many cases, dates of birth. The DOJ is telling state election officials that it needs the data to check their compliance with the National Voter Registration Act and the Help America Vote Act — presumably to hunt for illegal voting — and it reportedly intends to contact all 50 states. But while federal law gives the Justice Department the ability to require states to put procedures in place to comply with those laws and remove ineligible voters from voter rolls, it doesn't give the federal government authority over election administration — and that includes reviewing and maintaining the rolls themselves, said David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research. 'We're seeing an unprecedented effort to seize power that is not granted under the Constitution, to realign the balance of power between the executive branch and the judiciary and, especially, the states,' he said. There's another reason the DOJ may want the data. NPR reported recently that the administration is building a searchable national citizenship data system to be used by state and local election officials to root out noncitizen voting — something election experts say is an inconsequential problem. A report released last week from Becker's organisation concluded that in states that have investigated the issue, incidents of noncitizen voting are minuscule and random. By all indications, the DOJ data call is a massive fishing expedition. 'They are just looking for any kind of indication of wrongdoing or error that they can point to, to further fuel the federal government's intrusion into election administration,' said Jonathan Diaz, director of voting advocacy and partnerships at the Campaign Legal Center, a nonpartisan organisation that advocates for government accountability. Yet Michael Whatley, the Republican National Committee Chair, obliquely defended the effort as about 'election integrity' and trying to ensure 'safe and secure elections in key states.' That's obfuscation. It sounds to me — and to the election experts I've talked with from both parties — that this exercise isn't really about election integrity, but about laying the groundwork for a political strategy for the midterm elections. That strategy could take many frightening forms, the experts told me. Trump could suggest that states can't be trusted and use that to justify a state of emergency that allows him to seize control of state voting operations or suspend voting in certain states. (Never in American history have we suspended federal elections, Becker says — and that includes during wars, pandemics and natural disasters.) Or Trump could distort the voter data he collects and use it to continue to spread false claims and conspiracy theories about the security of US elections. One result of these conspiracies, as we've learned, is that many Americans distrust any election where their candidate loses. Even just collecting the data may scare some people into staying away from the polls. There are many people who might decide not to vote if they think federal access to their personal data could be used to intimidate them. What's especially troubling is that the DOJ's action could undermine the decentralised elections system 'that makes our elections so resilient and so resistant to things like foreign interference,' Diaz told me. The Constitution intentionally gives election administration exclusively to the states because 'the founders were very skeptical of a sort of all-powerful executive — having just thrown off the shackles of a king.' For states to comply with these letters, they would have to violate a federal law that prohibits the sharing of driver's license numbers and, in many cases, also violate their state constitutions. According to a list assembled by the National Conference of State Legislatures, many states have stricter privacy protections for their voter files than the federal government does. Another troubling development is that while states have developed strict protocols for protecting this information, the DOJ hasn't said how it will keep the data safe from hackers and cybersecurity breaches. The agency has an obligation to protect individuals, including elected officials, judges, domestic violence victims and others whose personal information is under a protective order or exempt from public disclosure and it owes the public an explanation for how it's going to handle the data if it gets it. Trump tried to intimidate states like this in his first term, when he created a special commission that told states to turn over their voter files so the federal government could audit them. Election officials forcefully pushed back. Members later admitted the group was set up to validate Trump's voter fraud claims. The commission was disbanded. This time, that resistance may be quieter, but election officials in both red and blue states appear to be defying the DOJ request and turning over only the parts of their voter files that are already public. In a letter to the DOJ, New Hampshire's Republican Secretary of State David Scanlan pointed to a state law that says the voter database 'shall be private and confidential' and not subject to any records requests. And Utah's Republican Lieutenant Governor Deidre Henderson told the Salt Lake City Tribune on Thursday that the state turned over its public voter list to federal officials, but 'if they want protected data, there's a process for government entities to request it for lawful purposes.' Then there's Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, a Democrat, who said this week that her state law doesn't allow her to release the data and suggested Trump's DOJ 'go jump in the Gulf of Maine.' If Bondi has a good reason to force states to turn over the voter data, she should state the reason and ask Congress to change federal law to do it. Until then, every American should be concerned about the president trying to exercise power that he doesn't have so he can invade your privacy because you decided to vote.
