Latest news with #ImmDef
The Guardian
22-05-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Ice arrests at immigration courts across the US stirring panic: ‘It's terrifying'
Federal authorities have arrested people at US immigration courts from New York to Arizona to Washington state in what appears to be a coordinated operation, as the Trump administration ramps up the president's mass deportation campaign. On Tuesday, agents who identified themselves only as federal officers arrested multiple people at an immigration court in Phoenix, taking people into custody outside the facility, according to immigrant advocates. In Miami on Wednesday, Juan Serrano, a 28-year-old who immigrated from Colombia, went to court for a quick check-in where a judge soon told him he was free to go. When he left the courtroom, federal agents waiting outside cuffed him and placed him in a van with several other immigrants detained that day. Journalists, advocates and attorneys reported seeing Ice agents poised to make arrests this week at immigration courthouses in Los Angeles, Phoenix, New York, Seattle, Chicago and Texas. Arrests near or in the immigration courts, which are part of the US Department of Justice, are typically rare – in part due to concerns that the fear of being detained by Ice officers could discourage people from appearing. 'It's bad policy,' said Lindsay Toczylowski, president of the Immigrant Defenders Law Center (ImmDef). 'By putting immigration officers in the courtrooms, they're discouraging people from following the processes, punishing people for following the rules.' Toczylowski noted several Ice officers both inside and outside an immigration courtroom in Los Angles this week, but said she did not see any arrests made there. She said that immigrants without lawyers are especially vulnerable, as they may not understand the exact information and context they need to provide in order to advance their case for asylum or other pathways to permanent residency in the US. ImmDef and other legal groups are sending attorneys to courtrooms they believe may be targeted by Ice officials, to try to provide basic legal education and aid to people appearing at required appointments. The presence of agents is stirring panic, she said. 'People are being detained and handcuffed in the hallway,' she said. 'Can you imagine what you would be thinking, if you're waiting there with your family and children, about to see a judge? It's terrifying.' The agents' targeting of immigrants at court comes as the Trump administration faces multiple lawsuits and the president attempts to enact the large-scale deportations he promised during his campaign. 'All this is to accelerate detentions and expedite removals,' said Wilfredo Allen, an immigration attorney with decades of experience representing immigrants at the Miami immigration court. The Trump administration has revived a 2019 policy that allows for 'expedited removals' – fast-tracked deportation proceedings for people who have been in the US for less than two years. Immigrants who cannot prove that they have been in the US for longer than two years are subject to having their cases dismissed and being immediately expelled from the country. Under the Biden administration, expedited removals were limited to people apprehended within 100 miles (160km) of the US border, and who had been in the US for less than two weeks. In Phoenix, immigrant advocates gathered outside immigration court to protest the presence of Ice agents. 'We witnessed parents and children being detained and abducted into unmarked vans immediately after attending their scheduled immigration proceedings,' said Monica Sandschafer, the Arizona state director for the advocacy group Mi Familia Vota. 'We demand an immediate stop to these hateful tactics.' Three US immigration officials told the Associated Press on the condition of anonymity that government attorneys were given the order to start dismissing cases when they showed up for work Monday, and were aware that federal agents would then be able to arrest those individuals when they left the courtroom. In the case of Serrano in Miami, the request for dismissal was delivered by a government attorney who spoke without identifying herself on the record, the Associated Press reported. She refused to provide her name to the AP and quickly exited the courtroom. US Immigration and Customs Enforcement said in a statement this week that it was detaining people who are subject to fast-track deportation authority. Advocates and lawyers are advising immigrants with upcoming hearings or court appearances to bring a trusted family member or friend who is a US citizen and ideally, a lawyer, to their appointments. The Associated Press contributed
The Guardian
19-03-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
‘He is innocent': families of deported Venezuelans rebuke Trump claims
Donald Trump's White House has described the Venezuelan migrants deported to a notorious prison in El Salvador as 'heinous monsters' and terrorists who 'rape, maim and murder for sport'. But relatives of Francisco Javier García Casique, a 24-year-old from the city of Maracay, say he was a hairdresser, not a crook. 'He has never been in prison, he is innocent, and he has always supported us with his work as a barber,' his younger brother, Sebastián García Casique, said from their family home in Venezuela. Less than a week ago, the García brothers were preparing to be reunited, with Francisco telling relatives he expected to be deported from a US immigration detention facility to his South American homeland after being arrested by immigration officials on 2 March. The flight was scheduled for last Friday. A family gathering was planned in Maracay. On Sunday those plans were shattered when El Salvador's authoritarian president, Nayib Bukele, published a cinematographic propaganda video on social media showing scores of Venezuelan prisoners being frog-marched off planes and into custody in his country's 'terrorism confinement centre'. 'It's him,' a shell-shocked Sebastián told their mother after spotting his sibling among those shackled men. 'I never in my life thought I would see my brother like that – handcuffed, his head shaved, in a prison for murderers, where they put rapists and kidnappers. It is very painful because he is innocent,' he said of his brother, who travelled to the US in late 2023 chasing a better future. Lindsay Toczylowski, a California-based immigration lawyer, was another person who found herself scouring Bukele's sensationalist video for any sign of her client, another Venezuelan migrant she feared had also been unjustly dispatched to El Salvador after seeking shelter from political persecution in the US. 'I felt sick … absolute shock,' Toczylowski said of the moment she saw those pictures in which detainees are shown being forced to their knees to have their heads shaved by masked security forces with batons and guns. 'It really is such an escalation … and to see it paraded and celebrated by the White House and by Bukele was just an absolutely shocking escalation of human rights abuses against migrants,' said the lawyer who works for the Immigrant Defenders Law Center (ImmDef) group. García and Toczylowski's client – an LGBTQ+ asylum seeker she declined to name out of fears for his safety – appear not to be the only Venezuelans deported to El Salvador despite having no criminal history in their home country or the US. More than 260 people were deported to the Central American country last weekend, 137 of them under 227-year-old wartime powers invoked by Trump called the Alien Enemies Act. In recent days, a succession of Venezuelan families have gone public to demand the release of their loved-ones: young working men whose main 'crimes' appear to have been their nationality and having tattoos that US immigration authorities deemed a sign of affiliation to the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. Experts in South American organized crime reject the idea that tattoos are a meaningful indicator of gang membership in Venezuela. García's tattoos include one – inspired by a verse from the Book of Isaiah and inked onto his skin during a stint living in Peru – that reads: 'God gives His toughest battles to his strongest warriors'. His brother, Sebastián, has the same tattoo. In a video plea posted on social media, Mercedes Yamarte, the mother of another migrant sent to El Salvador, Mervin Yamarte, described her 29-year-old son as 'a good, hardworking boy' who had never been involved in crime. But Yamarte, who entered the US in 2023 and had lived in Dallas, also has tattoos – one with the name of his daughter, another paying tribute to his mum – which were seemingly interpreted as an indication of gang membership by US authorities. 'Everyone close to him knows he has a big heart and NOTHING TO DO WITH TREN DE ARAGUA,' his brother, Francis Varela, wrote on social media. 'My brother went in search of the American dream,' Varela added. 'A dream that has now become a nightmare for us all.' Toczylowski's client also has tattoos which she said immigration enforcement officials used to allege he was a Tren de Aragua member. '[But] they are not gang tattoos and he has no gang membership affiliation at all,' the lawyer insisted. García's shock incarceration in El Salvador ended a six-year quest to build a better life for himself and his family, which the Venezuelan Zoomer documented on Instagram. After leaving his economically shattered country, in 2019, García migrated to Callao, a seaside city near Peru's capital Lima, hoping to make enough money to help his family survive back home. 'I miss you Venezuela,' he posted the following year, between photos and videos that highlighted his love for hairdressing, football and his numerous tattoos. In late 2023 García, like many Venezuelan migrants, decided to relocate to the US to escape the post-pandemic economic crisis in Peru. An Instagram photo shows him posing outside a train station in the Mexican state of Jalisco as he heads to the southern border. The post is accompanied by a song by the Mexican singer Peso Pluma called 'Nueva Vida' (New Life) which captured his aspirations. Two months later, another image shows him cutting hair at a Marvel-themed salon in Longview, Texas named after the Incredible Hulk. 'May it be everything we dreamed of,' García wrote of his fresh start beside an emoji of the Stars and Stripes flag. Last weekend that dream came to an abrupt and unexpected end in Bukele's mega prison near San Salvador. Immigration advocates have voiced outrage at the plight of men such as García and the lack of due process in their cases. 'It's enraging because they clearly don't have any affiliation with Tren de Aragua at all,' said Adam Isacson, a migration expert from the Washington Office on Latin America thinktank. Isacson said that in the past such migrants tended to face detention in a 'miserable [detention] centre here in the United States' or were 'shipped back' home. 'It did not mean that you were sent to some medieval jail of an authoritarian leader in another country. So we're in brand new ground here,' Isacson warned, adding that while it was possible some of those deported to El Salvador were hardened criminals, many appeared to be innocent. Sebastián García Casique insisted that was the case of his older brother who their mother had raised to be an 'honest and good' person. He urged Trump to review his brother's case and free him. 'I believe this is an injustice,' said García, 21. 'Maybe one or two [of the prisoners] have criminal records, and if they did something, punish them for it … But the innocent should be sent to Venezuela … What is he doing in El Salvador if he committed no crime there? … Why don't they say what crimes they are accused of?'
The Guardian
18-03-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Allies of deported Venezuelans accuse White House of waging ‘sickening' campaign against migrants
A lawyer for one of the Venezuelan immigrants sent from the US to a notorious mega prison in El Salvador has accused the Trump administration of waging a 'sickening' campaign of psychological warfare against asylum seekers and migrants. 'In my 15 years of representing people in removal proceedings in the United States, this is the most shocking thing that I've ever seen happen to one of our clients,' said Lindsay Toczylowski, a California-based lawyer for the Immigrant Defenders Law Center (ImmDef) group. ImmDef represents one of the more than 200 Venezuelan citizens who were flown to El Salvador on Saturday as part of Donald Trump's highly controversial immigration crackdown. Some of them subsequently appeared in a cinematic three-minute propaganda video shared by the Central American country's authoritarian president, Nayib Bukele, having their heads shaved or being manhandled by guards. The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, accused the deported detainees – who now face at least a year inside the Salvadoran jail – of being 'heinous monsters' who were part of 'one of the most violent and ruthless terrorist gangs on planet earth' – the Venezuelan crime group Tren de Aragua. Leavitt claimed their 'extraction' and removal to El Salvador meant they would 'no longer be able to pose any threat to the American People'. But Toczylowski rejected that portrayal of her client, calling claims that he was involved in the gang 'completely baseless'. In fact, she said he was an LGBTQ artist who had fled political persecution in an increasingly repressive Venezuela and crossed into the US from the Mexican border city of Tijuana last year. There, he passed a 'credible fear interview' used by asylum officers to determine whether asylum seekers have reasonable grounds to request protection in the US. Colleagues who had spent time with the Venezuelan man in detention described him as 'a very sweet [and] normal guy' with no criminal history. Toczylowski said he appeared to have been wrongly identified as a gang member by immigration enforcement officials as a result of some 'some benign tattoos that are not gang related'. 'We're all in just absolute shock that this has happened,' Toczylowski said. 'We feel like if it could happen to him, who's next? And that's really frightening.' Toczylowski declined to name her client or give further details of his life out of fears for his safety. But the families of other Venezuelans transported from the US to El Salvador have begun speaking out to challenge the Trump administration's portrayal of their loved ones as terrorists and gangsters. Sign up to This Week in Trumpland A deep dive into the policies, controversies and oddities surrounding the Trump administration after newsletter promotion 'My brother doesn't belong to any criminal group, has no criminal history or record in any country and they have unjustly sent him to El Salvador simply because of his tattoos,' the brother of 24-year-old of Francisco Javier García Casique wrote on Instagram. Toczylowski said she believed the decision to send detainees to El Salvador was 'part of the Trump administration's psychological warfare against asylum seekers and migrants'. 'I think it's designed to deter people from seeking protection in the United States. I think it's designed to be part of their effort to end asylum in the United States. And I think that they find due process and people's ability to exercise their constitutional rights inconvenient for their plans. And so they are doing everything they can – whether it means breaking the law or not – to further their political goals here.' 'Unfortunately,' Toczylowski added, 'clients like our client are intended collateral damage in that pursuit.'
Yahoo
19-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Trump administration cuts off legal aid for unaccompanied immigrant children
The Trump administration abruptly cut off legal aid for unaccompanied immigrant children on Tuesday, telling government-funded attorneys across the country they should immediately stop their work. Advocates called the decision shocking and warned that taking away legal aid programs would endanger minors already at risk of child trafficking, an issue that Trump and Republican members of his administration repeatedly highlighted as a concern during the 2024 election. The order to 'stop all work' affects US non-profits that provide legal counsel for about 26,000 unaccompanied minors. Tuesday's sudden 'stop-work' orders from the Department of the Interior were confirmed by multiple organizations, including Immigrant Defenders Law Center (ImmDef), the largest legal service provider to unaccompanied children in southern California, and the Acacia Center for Justice. 'It's abhorrent,' said Yliana Johansen-Méndez, the chief program officer for (ImmDef). She added that advocates had been expecting some efforts to cut back these services, but were not anticipating such an abrupt and complete stop to all services, including for children who are currently in government custody. Related: US immigrants detained at mandatory check-ins and court hearings Among ImmDef's clients are children just a few months oldas well as school-aged, including teenagers. Many are in exceedingly vulnerable situations and have been abused either in their home countries or in the US, or are minors who have been trafficked. For clients who have hearings scheduled for the coming days or weeks, a failure to appear could result in an immediate removal order. Lindsay Toczylowski, ImmDef's president and CEO, said the government-funded legal defense efforts were 'a 20-year-old program meant to safeguard the rights of the most vulnerable among us', and that eliminating legal aid for children 'will only cause more chaos in our immigration courts and violates our commitment to children's safety'. 'This decision flies in the face of ensuring children who have been trafficked or are at risk of trafficking have child-friendly legal representatives protecting their legal rights and interests,' Shaina Aber, the executive director of the Acacia Center for Justice, said in a statement. Despite the stop-work order, which stipulates a complete, immediate and indefinite halt to all legal aid work, ImmDef plans to continue working on behalf of its clients, Johansen-Méndez said. 'We have professional obligations to these clients,' she said. 'We are required by the oaths that we've taken as attorneys by our state bars to not do anything that will prejudice [their cases].' Among the children affected by this stop-work order are those who presented themselves to officials at the border without their parents and were put under the custody of the office of refugee resettlement (ORR). ImmDef and other legal service non-profits have been acting as subcontracts who provide legal services to minors to see if they can qualify for reprieve from deportations while the ORR searches for family members who can take custody of them. 'These kids who are in government custody, and are not in the care of a family member or adults who can step in for them, they would be going into court with nobody to stand at their side and help,' she said. 'And to think that our legal system would be okay with that kind of setup – it's unbelievable.' Some of the clients at risk of imminent removal if they are left without legal aid include children who could be sent back to dangerous or abusive environments in their home countries, she added. The Trump administration previously issued a similar stop-work order for legal aid programs for adults at risk of deportation, but the justice department restored the funding in early February, two days after non-profits sued the government over the funding cuts, the Associated Press reported. In the week after the Trump administration issued the stop-work order for adult legal aid, advocates reported confusion and scaling back of services across the country, and staff from at least one advocacy group said they were escorted out of a Virginia detention facility after attempting to continue their legal aid work without funding.
The Guardian
19-02-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
Trump administration cuts off legal aid for unaccompanied immigrant children
The Trump administration abruptly cut off legal aid for unaccompanied immigrant children on Tuesday, telling government-funded attorneys across the country they should immediately stop their work. Advocates called the decision shocking and warned that taking away legal aid programs would endanger minors already at risk of child trafficking, an issue that Trump and Republican members of his administration repeatedly highlighted as a concern during the 2024 election. The order to 'stop all work' affects US non-profits that provide legal counsel for about 26,000 unaccompanied minors. Tuesday's sudden 'stop-work' orders from the Department of the Interior were confirmed by multiple organizations, including Immigrant Defenders Law Center (ImmDef), the largest legal service provider to unaccompanied children in southern California, and the Acacia Center for Justice. 'It's abhorrent,' said Yliana Johansen-Méndez, the chief program officer for (ImmDef). She added that advocates had been expecting some efforts to cut back these services, but were not anticipating such an abrupt and complete stop to all services, including for children who are currently in government custody. Among ImmDef's clients are children just a few months oldas well as school-aged, including teenagers. Many are in exceedingly vulnerable situations and have been abused either in their home countries or in the US, or are minors who have been trafficked. For clients who have hearings scheduled for the coming days or weeks, a failure to appear could result in an immediate removal order. Lindsay Toczylowski, ImmDef's president and CEO, said the government-funded legal defense efforts were 'a 20-year-old program meant to safeguard the rights of the most vulnerable among us', and that eliminating legal aid for children 'will only cause more chaos in our immigration courts and violates our commitment to children's safety'. 'This decision flies in the face of ensuring children who have been trafficked or are at risk of trafficking have child-friendly legal representatives protecting their legal rights and interests,' Shaina Aber, the executive director of the Acacia Center for Justice, said in a statement. Despite the stop-work order, which stipulates a complete, immediate and indefinite halt to all legal aid work, ImmDef plans to continue working on behalf of its clients, Johansen-Méndez said. 'We have professional obligations to these clients,' she said. 'We are required by the oaths that we've taken as attorneys by our state bars to not do anything that will prejudice [their cases].' Among the children affected by this stop-work order are those who presented themselves to officials at the border without their parents and were put under the custody of the office of refugee resettlement (ORR). ImmDef and other legal service non-profits have been acting as subcontracts who provide legal services to minors to see if they can qualify for reprieve from deportations while the ORR searches for family members who can take custody of them. 'These kids who are in government custody, and are not in the care of a family member or adults who can step in for them, they would be going into court with nobody to stand at their side and help,' she said. 'And to think that our legal system would be okay with that kind of setup – it's unbelievable.' Some of the clients at risk of imminent removal if they are left without legal aid include children who could be sent back to dangerous or abusive environments in their home countries, she added. The Trump administration previously issued a similar stop-work order for legal aid programs for adults at risk of deportation, but the justice department restored the funding in early February, two days after non-profits sued the government over the funding cuts, the Associated Press reported. In the week after the Trump administration issued the stop-work order for adult legal aid, advocates reported confusion and scaling back of services across the country, and staff from at least one advocacy group said they were escorted out of a Virginia detention facility after attempting to continue their legal aid work without funding.
