Latest news with #AbregoGarcia
San Francisco Chronicle
9 hours ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
California pioneered modern gang surveillance. Trump may be exploiting it
Six years before he was wrongly deported to a foreign prison over unproven gang ties, Kilmar Abrego Garcia got a firsthand lesson in American gang intelligence. In March 2019, Abrego Garcia stood outside a southern Maryland Home Depot chatting with three fellow day laborers when local police arrested them. Abrego Garcia was never charged with a crime or accused of one. But he was placed on a list of 'verified' gang members, something he discovered at an immigration hearing a month later. According to his attorneys, Abrego Garcia left El Salvador as a teen to escape the gangs that threatened to kidnap and ransom him. The evidence that he belonged to one of them came down to who he was with and what he wore. The practice of labeling him originated in California, the first U.S. state to legally define gangs and equate them with terrorist organizations. The Prince George's County Police Department, which arrested Abrego Garcia and handed him to federal immigration authorities, said a confidential informant told them that Abrego Garcia belonged to MS-13, an international gang started by Salvadorans in 1980s Los Angeles that was partial to bull horns as a symbol. That Abrego Garcia was wearing a Chicago Bulls hat and hoodie when he was arrested indicated he 'was a member in good standing,' an arrest report stated. The first Trump administration lost its bid to legally deport Abrego Garcia. The second Trump administration circumvented the legal process. In 2019, an immigration judge determined that Abrego Garcia was more likely to be a victim of gang crime than a purveyor of it, and granted him protection from future deportation. On March 12, three days before President Donald Trump signed an executive order claiming the U.S. was at war with the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, ICE agents arrested Abrego Garcia on his way home from work. The sheet metal worker had his autistic 5-year-old son in the backseat. Over the next four days, Abrego Garcia's attorneys say, he was moved to different locations in different states, questioned about gang affiliations, allowed two phone calls to his wife and flown to El Salvador, where he was frog-marched into a maximum-security prison for terrorists known as CECOT. At least 287 other U.S. migrants have experienced the same fate, though immigration advocates and attorneys suspect there are more. 'Many of these families really had their loved ones disappear,' Michelle Brané, a Biden administration immigration detention ombudsman who now leads the family reunification nonprofit Together & Free, said during a video briefing. 'It's just literally what it looks like to these families.' Numerous federal judges have recoiled at the White House's interpretation of U.S. law, issuing injunctions both preliminary and permanent against its invocation of the arcane Alien Enemies Act of 1798, threatening it with criminal contempt for not complying with orders to return migrants and directing it to do everything it can to bring back Abrego Garcia. Meanwhile, the Trump administration is attempting to deport scores of others for disputed gang affiliations. Attorneys for the detained immigrants say their clients are actually victims or potential victims of the gangs they're accused of belonging to. Some have had relatives killed; others say their sexual orientation would make them targets. While the administration initially chalked up Abrego Garcia's deportation as an ' administrative error,' it has since doubled down on claims that he belongs to MS-13, releasing his 2019 arrest report and offering as ' bombshell ' evidence a 2022 traffic stop in which Abrego Garcia was released with a warning. Attorneys for the banished migrants say Trump's actions are illegal. Civil libertarians say they are also a foreseeable, if extreme, extension of California's decades-long efforts to track criminal street gangs in computerized databases that have been found to be riddled with errors, assumptions and, in some cases, falsified reports. The state has tried to undo much of what it pioneered across the country — including the use of flawed gang intelligence in deportations. But the reforms are falling into a growing loophole, says a Southern California attorney who is trying to close it. Law of the land The grandson of a high-ranking Los Angeles and Newport Beach police official, Garcia-Leys already thought that cops placed too much stock in their own judgment. But it wasn't until the westside native moved to the lower-income, tightly packed Watts neighborhood in southern L.A., to teach at the lowest-performing high schools in the county, that he saw how heavily perception weighed in gang policing. 'In Watts, nobody trusted the police to do the right thing ever,' said Garcia-Leys, now the executive director of the Peace and Justice Law Center in Orange County, where he pursues local and statewide policing reforms. 'And it was just because they mistreated people, their demeanor, and they didn't seem to care if they got the right person.' Garcia-Leys said his students were resigned to their reality. They kept little more than a buck on them for their two-a-day 'pocket checks' — robbed by the gangbangers waiting for them outside of school, searched by the gang officers closer to home. 'It's the exact same sort of intimidation and harassment, and you'd experience it first at the hands of the gang and second at the hands of the police,' Garcia-Leys said. 'They were actually making the problem worse.' Garcia-Leys started his teaching career in 2001, four years after L.A.'s approach to gang policing became the California standard. He left teaching in 2010, after that standard had been adopted nationally. The Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department created the nation's first computerized database of suspected gang members in 1987, a year before California adopted the nation's first law defining street gangs and creating stiff penalties for belonging to them. A decade later, L.A.'s database was the template for CalGang, a statewide intranet system that quickly became the country's most widely used gang database. To be entered into CalGang, individuals have to meet just two criteria on a nine-item checklist. They included: self-identifying as a gang member; being arrested with gang members; associating with gang members; being identified as a gang member by a reliable informant; being identified by an untested informant; frequenting gang areas; displaying gang signs; wearing gang attire; and having gang tattoos. CalGang ballooned into what critics contended was an indiscriminate dragnet of communities of color. In 2010, more than 235,000 people were logged in CalGang as active gang members — 41,000 of them living in L.A. — with up to 200 items of personal information about each individual. A 2015 study in the Journal of Forensic Social Work found that it didn't result in a reduction of gang-related crime in L.A. In Sacramento County, where the sheriff's and police departments managed their own databases, the low threshold and broad criteria resulted in expansive lists of mostly Black and brown boys and men, who could be and were labeled gang members for wearing their high school colors, making or appearing in rap videos, or being fans of the rap-rock duo Insane Clown Posse. One Sacramento man spent more than a decade mistakenly validated as a member of the gang responsible for shooting him. Another Sacramento man had his gang validation extended five years after he was pulled over while wearing a Sacramento Kings hat. A 2016 state audit found widespread problems with CalGang, including a lack of oversight, unjustified and inaccurate entries, and data privacy violations. But the system had already influenced federal immigration authorities. Not only did U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, have 'read-only' access to CalGang between January 2006 and October 2016, it modeled its own gang database, called ICEGangs, after California's, according to a September 2024 paper by UC Irvine criminologists. A third-year law student at UC Irvine in 2016, Garcia-Leys co-authored a paper about the ripple effects of CalGang's unreliable intel on immigration proceedings — used to fast-track deportations, justify detentions and withhold legal status from otherwise eligible Dreamers. Wrongful gang allegations also show up in wrongful convictions. At its July 2024 meeting, the California Victims Compensation Board granted financial restitution to two different men wrongfully convicted of gang-related murders in 2001. One was Ronald Velasquez, who was awarded $1.2 million after losing 8,587 days to a wrongful first-degree murder conviction. Abraham Villalobos was granted $788,000 for a wrongful conviction of second-degree murder with a gang enhancement, for which he spent 5,629 days incarcerated. Before the conviction was overturned in March 2024, Villalobos was deported to Mexico. Opting out of reforms Over the past decade, the California Legislature has attempted to correct the embattled CalGang system by mandating a notification and appeals process for the people entered into it, and shifting oversight from the L.A.-heavy law enforcement representatives on the executive board and advisory committee to the state Department of Justice. Assembly Bill 90 in 2017 prohibited information in shared gang databases from being used for immigration enforcement purposes, under threat of access being suspended or revoked. The reforms have had intended and unintended consequences. The number of accused people in the database has plunged 87% since the end of 2017, when there were almost 104,000 entries. And people are getting auto-purged from the system at higher numbers than they're being added. Still, CalGang entries have a high failure rate. In 2024, the state DOJ audited 675 gangs identified by law enforcement agencies, and found that 154 — more than a fifth — didn't meet its standards for qualifying as a gang. Another 60 audits were still pending. Racial disproportionality remains an ongoing concern. Of the 13,691 people in the database, 69% are Hispanic and 28% are Black. Comparatively, 40% of California's population is Hispanic and 6% is Black. White individuals made up 6.9% of the 13,691 people in CalGang in September 2024 — the same percentage as six years earlier. 'It highlights the bias in the system, that white gangs typically aren't considered gangs,' said Mike German, a former FBI agent and author of 'Policing White Supremacy: The Enemy Within.' 'There's a tendency because of the bias that's inherent in the system to view white crime as the acts of individuals while holding collective blame when they're nonwhite crimes.' The number of law enforcement agencies using CalGang has also plummeted. At the time of the 2016 state audit, 92% of law enforcement agencies said CalGang was the only gang database they used. Today, only 10 of California's roughly 600 law enforcement agencies are active users, according to the California Department of Justice's response to a public records request. Garcia-Leys fears this means that many agencies have instead chosen to operate internal gang databases to avoid state oversight. 'They should not be sharing their databases but we don't know if that's the case,' he said. 'Here's the problem, right? Nobody's using CalGang anymore.' He's circulating a legislative proposal to close what he describes as the 'shared database loophole,' to make sure these ad hoc databases can't be used to fuel Trump's extraordinary renditions. He said it's drawn lawmaker interest but, because of the summer session deadline, could be a couple years away. In response to public records requests, the Fresno County Sheriff's Office, an early CalGang administrator, said it does operate a shared database accessible by state and regional agencies. The San Francisco Police Department, whose notorious 'Chinatown Squad' in the late 1800s was the first 'ethnic crime' police force in the U.S., said it does not track gangs. And the Los Angeles Police Department — which got kicked out of CalGang in 2020 for falsifying records — said it does not document suspected gang members, contract with software vendors to do so or train its police force how to document gang members. Los Angeles police are still training the nation's gang officers, however. The LAPD is well-represented among the leadership of the L.A.-grown California Gang Investigators Association, whose 33rd national conference in Anaheim in August has some two dozen planned classes dedicated to 'the street gang problem.' They include seminars about gang enforcement operations, investigating minors, Black gangs, the Mexican Mafia, Nuestra Familia and one called the 'Tren de Aragua Menace.'
Yahoo
a day ago
- General
- Yahoo
New Details Emerge On Trump Administration's Defiance Of The Courts
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM's Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version. New details about the extent of the Trump administration's stonewalling in the case of the mistakenly deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia were revealed in a court filing Thursday. After six weeks of what was originally supposed to be two weeks of expedited discovery, the government has provided virtually no meaningful discovery responses, Abrego Garcia's lawyers report. Normal discovery disputes would not usually be newsworthy, but this comes in the context of a contempt of court inquiry. The administration's defiance on discovery and the associated gamesmanship cut against its already-dubious claims that it has complied with the order by U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis of Maryland to facilitate Abrego Garcia's return – an order endorsed and echoed by the Supreme Court. Judge Xinis had ordered the discovery into Abrego Garcia's status and what the government had done and planned to do to facilitate his release from imprisonment in his native El Salvador for two reasons: (i) to pressure the Trump administration to abide by her Supreme Court-backed order to facilitate his return; and (ii) to determine whether the administration had violated her order with sufficient bad faith to constitute contempt of court. After the Trump administration late Wednesday asked for an extension of the May 30 deadline by which all discovery is to be completed, Abrego Garcia's lawyers filed a blistering response demonstrating how little discovery the government has produced so far. It was already clear from public filings that the government had offered witnesses for deposition who had little or no personal knowledge of the facts of the case, in contravention of the judge's order. The precise details of that defiance are unclear because many filings remain under seal. The new details show how desultory the government's document production has been, too. As of two weeks ago, the government had only produced 34 actual documents. In the subsequent two weeks it was given in which to produce rolling discovery, it coughed up a total of one additional partial document, according to Abrego Garcia's filing. 'This is far from a good faith effort to comply with court ordered discovery. It is reflective of a pattern of deliberate delay and bad faith refusal to comply with court orders,' Abrego Garcia's lawyers argued in opposing the extension request. 'The patina of promises by Government lawyers to do tomorrow that which they were already obligated to do yesterday has worn thin.' Abrego Garcia's lawyers say the government document production has included what they characterize as 'makeweight,' non-responsive copies of existing filings in the case and of other publicly available materials that aren't new or pertinent. 'Zero documents produced to Plaintiffs to date reflect any efforts made to facilitate Abrego Garcia's release and return to the United States,' they say (emphasis theirs). Judge Xinis wasn't buying it either. 'Assertions of diligence notwithstanding, Defendants have offered no explanation as to why they could not produce any additional documents on a rolling basis, as they had agreed could be accomplished during the May 16, 2025 hearing,' Xinis wrote yesterday when she denied the administration's request to extend the discovery deadline. In addition to the paucity of document production, the government has still not fully responded to the limited set of interrogatories that the judge approved for the expedited discovery, Abrego Garcia's lawyers say. The Trump DOJ lawyers have also engaged in low-rent gamesmanship, Abrego Garcia's lawyers say. While the government told the court that it had attempted to confer with them about the request to extend the deadline, in fact the DOJ lawyers reached out at 11:35 p.m. and filed their request an hour later without waiting for Abrego Garcia's lawyers to respond. 'This is hardly a good faith attempt to obtain Plaintiffs' position,' Xinis observed in a footnote. Petty gamesmanship aside, the constitutional and real-world implications of the Abrego Garcia case remain enormous. The pace of the defiance has slowed since the flurry of activity in mid-March, but the constitutional clash is no less real now that it was then. '[T]he Government has engaged in a pattern of intentional stonewalling and obfuscation—all in service of delaying the inevitable conclusion, which is that it has not done anything to facilitate Abrego Garcia's return,' his lawyers concluded in their latest filing. 'More time will not change this, but it will multiply the prejudice to Abrego Garcia, who remains in unlawful custody in El Salvador.' The big constitutional clashes are happening in anti-immigration cases where the underlying facts are often less important than the Trump administration's conduct in court, which can be hard for laypeople to follow. The action (and often inaction) can devolve into complicated procedural maneuvering and legal arguments, so the challenge in covering these cases is to find ways to breathe life into them because they're so important: In one of the best pieces I've read in a while, Adam Unikowsky unpacks the Alien Enemies Act case out of Texas that the Supreme Court has already weighed in on and which appears to be a likely vehicle for the big decisions it will make on the AEA. Steve Vladeck unravels the third country deportations case out of Massachusetts which didn't seem nearly as urgent as the AEA cases until the Trump administration started its extreme shenanigans. President Trump has gone after the courts, his own judicial appointees, the Federalist Society, and now his Supreme Court whisperer Leonard Leo. NYT: Trump Taps Palantir to Compile Data on Americans Passing through Nashville last night, I caught a freewheeling set of mostly Beatles covers by the bluegrass band Greenwood Rye. Here's a recent sampling (with a different lineup of musicians):
Yahoo
2 days ago
- General
- Yahoo
Trump admin says it's working to return wrongly deported man (not Abrego Garcia)
The Trump administration did something interesting: It signaled it's going to comply with a court order to facilitate a wrongly deported man's return. While highlighting how low the bar is for this administration, the move is notable for standing in contrast to the government's resistance in other cases, including in the ongoing saga of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. This latest case involves a gay Guatemalan man identified in court papers as O.C.G., who, his lawyers said, fled his country to avoid persecution due to his sexual orientation. An immigration judge barred his removal to Guatemala, after which agents sent him to Mexico, even though he had said that he was targeted and raped there. The government represented to the court that O.C.G. was asked whether he was afraid of being sent to Mexico and said no, but when it came time to prove that, the administration told the court that it actually didn't have a witness who could back it up. On Friday, U.S. District Judge Brian Murphy ordered the government to facilitate O.C.G.'s return to the U.S., writing that officials' 'retraction of their prior sworn statement makes inexorable the already-strong conclusion that O.C.G. is likely to succeed in showing that his removal lacked any semblance of due process.' The Biden appointee wrote that O.C.G. is currently in hiding in Guatemala after he was sent back there from Mexico. In a status report Wednesday, the government said that immigration officials made contact with O.C.G.'s lawyers over the weekend and are working to bring him back to the U.S. It should go without saying that it's a good thing for the government to comply with a court order, just as it should go without saying that no congratulations are due for obeying the law, especially when we're talking about the entity tasked with enforcing the law. Still, the government's relatively normal behavior in its latest filing raises the question: Why not return Abrego Garcia (who was illegally deported to El Salvador) or yet another man held in that country (identified in court papers as 'Cristian') whose return another judge ordered the government to facilitate? These other cases are the subject of separate ongoing litigation. There's no good justification for failing to right a wrong in any case. But a key difference between O.C.G.'s situation and the others is that the latter are being detained by a foreign government (to be sure, only after the U.S. sent them there in cooperation with that foreign government). Murphy noted the distinction in his opinion ordering the facilitation of O.C.G.'s return. He wrote, 'The Court notes that 'facilitate' in this context should carry less baggage than in several other notable cases. O.C.G. is not held by any foreign government.' Likewise, O.C.G.'s lawyers wrote in support of their facilitation motion, 'Notably, ordering DHS to facilitate return in this case does not include the alleged complications involved in Abrego Garcia, where the plaintiff remains detained by a foreign government at the behest of the United States.' While it's worth highlighting that Trump administration officials even claim to be working to remedy a wrongful deportation, this latest news seems to stand as more of an aberration than a change in the administration's legal policy. In fact, the administration this week launched an emergency Supreme Court appeal in the broader case that Judge Murphy is overseeing, which involves the issue of removing people to so-called third countries where they aren't from (O.C.G. is a plaintiff in that case). Murphy had intervened in the government's bid to send migrants to war-torn South Sudan, finding that officials sought to carry out the removals without providing sufficient notice and opportunity to challenge them. Seeking to upend Murphy's injunction while those migrants are held at a U.S. military base in Djibouti, the administration wrote to the high court that the judge 'usurp[ed] the Executive's authority over immigration policy' and that his injunction 'disrupts sensitive diplomatic, foreign-policy, and national-security efforts.' The plaintiffs' Supreme Court response is due June 4. Subscribe to the Deadline: Legal Newsletter for expert analysis on the top legal stories of the week, including updates from the Supreme Court and developments in the Trump administration's legal cases. This article was originally published on
Yahoo
3 days ago
- General
- Yahoo
Deported alleged gang member Abrego Garcia 'will never be on American streets again,' DHS says
The Department of Homeland Security doubled down on Wednesday that Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the illegal immigrant and suspected MS-13 gang member deported to his native country of El Salvador, "will never be on American streets again." The agency's remarks came amid criticism from U.S. Rep. Glenn Ivey, D-Md., who tried to visit Garcia on Memorial Day. Ivey initially posted a video on X about the attempted visit, saying that he represents Abrego Garcia, and that the Salvadoran government stonewalled his efforts. Maryland Democrat Ivey Furious Not Given Access To Kilmar Abrego Garcia In El Salvador He urged Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem on Wednesday to present evidence in court that Garcia is an illegal immigrant. Democrats have maintained that Garcia was denied due process when he was deported despite being in the United States for years. "Let us be crystal clear: Kilmar Abrego Garcia will never be on American streets again," a Homeland Security post on X states. "Advocating for an illegal alien, MS-13 gang member, human trafficker and wife beater over ACTUAL Maryland constituents victimized by illegal alien crime is appalling." Since his deportation, several Democrats have attempted to visit Garcia in the El Salvadoran prison where he's being held to conduct wellness checks. Read On The Fox News App Dem Immigration Talking Points Fizzle As Dark Picture Of Abrego Garcia Emerges The Trump administration has pointed to evidence that Abrego Garcia was involved with MS-13 and human trafficking. It has also cited court documents detailing Abrego Garcia's alleged physical abuse of his wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura. Meanwhile, Democrats describe him as a "Maryland man" who was not given his due process in court before being deported. "If there is nothing to hide, cut the crap. Let his lawyer and I check on him," Ivey said in his video message. "I'm the congressman who represents Kilmar and I came all the way down from the United States after we contacted their ambassador, after we made formal requests through our ambassador to the El Salvadoran government, and we came here to visit him today." Fox News Digital has reached out to Ivey's article source: Deported alleged gang member Abrego Garcia 'will never be on American streets again,' DHS says
Yahoo
3 days ago
- General
- Yahoo
Trump administration moves to dismiss lawsuit over Kilmar Abrego Garcia deportation error
GREENBELT, Md. () — The U.S. government filed a motion Tuesday to dismiss lawsuit over his deportation to El Salvador, arguing the Maryland court does not have jurisdiction because he is no longer in the United States. The Maryland husband and father was mistakenly deported in March due to what the Trump administration admitted was an 'administrative error.' Shortly after his removal, a lawsuit was filed on his behalf, claiming the Trump administration violated a years-established immigration judge's order, shielding him from deportation. 'I will not stop fighting until I see my husband alive': Fight continues over wrongly deported man's return to Maryland The suit also claims his removal violated his Fifth Amendment due-process rights and his wife's and child's substantive due-process rights. The U.S. government has since been ordered to facilitate his return, but efforts to release him from an El Salvador prison and return him to the States remain unclear. The latest move in the Maryland courts — more than two months after Abrego Garcia's deportation — the Trump administration moved to dismiss the case entirely, claiming that because he is no longer in the United States, the Maryland District Court lacks 'subject matter jurisdiction,' according to court documents. 'Defendants' point is simple: even if they make every effort to facilitate his return (as they are doing), the success of those efforts depends on the 'choices of [an] independent actor[ ] not before [this] [C]court,'' the administration argued. As of Wednesday, May 28, U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis has not ruled on the government's motion. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
