Latest news with #detention
Bloomberg
32 minutes ago
- Politics
- Bloomberg
War Crimes Court Delays Bail Decision on Ex-Philippine President
The International Criminal Court delayed its decision on whether to grant former Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte temporary release from detention. In a statement issued Wednesday, the Hague-based court said it would hold off on the decision until Duterte's defense team takes further steps or until the Chamber finds it appropriate to act.
The Guardian
an hour ago
- Politics
- The Guardian
Afghan translator who worked for US military detained by Ice in Connecticut
An Afghan wartime translator granted a US immigration visa after risking his life to help US troops has been detained by masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) agents, in the latest sign that the Trump administration is willing to flout legal agreements and promises to allies in pursuit of its unprecedented immigration crackdown. Identified only as Zia S, the 35-year-old husband and father of five who entered the US in October 2024 with a visa issued by American authorities was arrested and taken away in a van last week after a routine biometrics appointment for his green card in East Hartford, Connecticut, according to his attorney, members of Congress and human-rights advocates. A judge has issued a temporary stay preventing Zia's removal from the United States, but he remains in detention at a facility in Plymouth, Massachusetts. The former wartime interpreter fled Afghanistan with his family after the Taliban takeover in 2021. Zia legally entered the US in October 2024 through JFK airport with humanitarian parole – and an approved special immigrant visa (SIV). This visa is a pathway to permanent residency, or a green card, for certain foreign nationals who have worked for the US government or military in specific capacities, particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan. 'What happened to him is the worst kind of abhorrent violation of basic decency,' said the Democratic senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut on Tuesday. 'He actually worked and risked his life in Afghanistan to uphold the values and rights that are central to democracy.' Zia is the third known Afghan ally who helped US troops to have been seized by Ice since Trump returned to power, amid growing outrage at the administration's actions. Jahana Hayes, a Democratic member of Congress for Connecticut, said she had been contacted by Zia's family because they didn't know where Ice had taken him. 'Our credibility is at stake. We have families who have risked everything not just for themselves, but for their entire family … in the name of standing up for the promises of our American democracy,' Hayes said. In a statement to Reuters, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said the Afghan national entered the US on 8 October 2024, and is under investigation for a 'serious criminal allegation', adding: 'All of his claims will be heard by a judge. Any Afghan who fears persecution is able to request relief.' Zia's attorney Lauren Petersen said she had no idea what the DHS was referring to. 'Zia has done everything right. He's followed the rules. He has no criminal history,' said Petersen, adding that he was approved for humanitarian parole due to a direct threat from Afghanistan's Taliban rulers. 'If he is deported … he faces death.' Sign up to This Week in Trumpland A deep dive into the policies, controversies and oddities surrounding the Trump administration after newsletter promotion More than 70,000 Afghans were granted permission to enter the US under Joe Biden's 'Operation Allies Welcome' initiative, which followed the bungled America exit and subsequent Taliban takeover in 2021. Some, like Zia, have a SIV and pathway to permanent residency, while about 12,000 or so have temporary protected status (TPS) – a type of work visa granted to people already in the US who cannot return to their home countries due to armed conflicts, natural disasters or other extraordinary events. The Trump administration is seeking to terminate TPS status for multiple countries including Venezuela, Haiti and Afghanistan – despite ongoing unstable and dangerous conditions in those countries.
Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
ICE detention is growing in the South. This state was the first.
WINN PARISH, LA – Far from the jazz clubs and nightlife of New Orleans, thousands await their fate inside immigration jails. Louisiana has more dedicated Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention centers than any other state besides Texas – nine total – after it converted nearly half a dozen correctional facilities to immigrant detention. Most are remote, scattered near farms and forests. Among the sites is a unique "staging facility" on a rural airport tarmac for rapid deportations. President Donald Trump is increasingly leaning on Republican-led Southern states to detain and deport millions of immigrants ‒ from "Alligator Alcatraz" in the Florida Everglades to the expansion of a sprawling Georgia immigration facility. Far from the U.S.-Mexico border, Mississippi has the ICE jail with the highest average daily population. But Louisiana was the first non-border state to surge immigration detention capacity, according to the American Civil Liberties Union of Louisiana and Tulane University Law School. The state opened five new facilities to detain immigrants in 2019, during the first Trump administration, and vastly expanded the number of detainees during the Biden administration. Immigrants are sent here from all over the country, far from their families, communities and, often, their lawyers. The Trump administration has confined some of its highest-profile detainees in Louisiana, including now-released Columbia University activist Mahmoud Khalil and Harvard University scientist Kseniia Petrova. The state's largest immigration jail, Winn Correctional Center, is tucked deep into dense pine woods nearly five hours northwest of New Orleans. The site is so remote that, for years, online maps routinely sent visitors the wrong way down a dirt road. A warning sign cautions visitors: "This property is utilized for the training of chase dogs." Other states might follow Louisiana's example as more federal funds flow to ICE detention. Congress recently authorized the Trump administration to spend $45 billion over the next four years to expand immigration jails around the country. That's nearly four times ICE's previous annual detention budget. USA TODAY traveled to four of Louisiana's nine ICE facilities, hoping to see firsthand what life is like for immigrants detained there. But the Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement denied multiple requests for a tour of any of the locations. In an emailed statement, DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said ICE originally expanded its detention capacity in Louisiana "to address the increasing number of individuals apprehended at the border" under the Biden administration. "ICE continues to explore all options to meet its current and future detention requirements while removing detainees as quickly as possible from the U.S.," she said. Nora Ahmed, legal director of the ACLU of Louisiana, described the state as key to Trump's promised mass deportation campaign. "Louisiana really is the epicenter for a lot of what is currently taking place with this administration," Ahmed said. "It's an outcropping of a prison economy that Louisiana has survived on for a long, long time." Deportation hub far from the border Louisiana found its foothold as a deportation hub at the end of Trump's first term, when the administration was looking to expand immigrant detention. The state had reformed its criminal justice system in 2017, with bipartisan support, to reduce sentences for low-level offenders. That had the effect of dramatically decreasing the state's prison population and freeing thousands of incarcerated people – mainly Black men and women. At the time, the Black imprisonment rate was nearly four times the rate of White imprisonment in Louisiana, according to the ACLU. Louisiana eventually rolled back the reforms. But racial justice activists briefly celebrated a win. Then ICE came knocking. The first Trump administration, and later the Biden administration, wanted to detain more illegal border crossers. Louisiana offered advantages: empty prisons, employees already trained in corrections, and access to the Alexandria airport with a detention facility and a history of deportation flights. It also has some of the country's most conservative immigration judges, as well as a federal appeals court that, in immigration cases, often sides with the government, lawyers say. "Louisiana had the infrastructure already there," said Homero López, legal director of New Orleans-based Immigration Services and Legal Advocacy, a nonprofit that provides free representation. "ICE comes in saying, 'Y'all have got the space. We've got the people. We'll pay you double what the state was paying.' That's why the expansion was so fast." Louisiana's rural communities offered advantages for ICE Many Americans know Louisiana by its crown jewel, New Orleans, the state's tourism mecca, where social norms and politics are as liberal as the flow of alcohol on Bourbon Street. But Louisiana is largely wooded, rural, proudly conservative and deeply Christian. County governments are called parishes and the poverty rate is the highest in the nation. "People want jobs and who's to blame them?" said Austin Kocher, a Syracuse University research assistant professor who studies immigration enforcement. "It's fairly easy to promise jobs by setting up a detention facility." Rural Louisiana used to make a living from oil and timber. Logging trucks still rumble down forested two-lane roads, but the decline in natural resources and price unpredictability drove some communities to look for new industries. Prisons and now immigration detention deliver good-paying jobs and economic development to places like Winn, Ouachita and LaSalle parishes. LaSalle was one of the first to see the potential. In 2007, local leaders in the parish seat of Jena – current population 4,155 – wanted to diversify the economy. A sprawling juvenile detention facility north of town sat empty. When GEO Group, the nation's largest private detention contractor, swooped in with an ICE contract in hand, local leaders welcomed the opportunity. "Not having to build an entirely new facility was probably a key factor to them locating here," said Craig Franklin, editor of the weekly Jena Times. Plus, "our advantage to a strong employee pool was likely a factor." In Ouachita Parish, the mayor and council of Richwood ‒ population 3,881 ‒ debated whether to approve an ICE detention contract. Mayor Gerald Brown didn't have a vote, but he supported the conversion to ICE detention, he said. "Richwood Correctional Center is one of our biggest employers," Brown told USA TODAY. "There was a lot of back and forth. We did town halls, and we had meetings." The town stood to gain new income as an intermediary between ICE and the private operator, LaSalle Corrections. When it was a jail, the town earned a $112,000 a year fee. Now that it's an ICE detention center, the town is getting about $412,000 a year. "The financial windfall for the community was something I certainly couldn't turn a blind eye to," Brown said. Remote ICE detention has consequences for the detained The willingness of rural communities to house ICE facilities is part of the draw to Louisiana, researchers who study immigration detention say. Another factor: When ICE tries to open new detention centers near big cities, the agency is often met with resistance from immigrant rights activists and residents with "not in my backyard" arguments. But attorneys say the rural locations have real consequences for the people detained. Data shows that having access to an attorney dramatically improves a detainee's chance of winning release and a chance at staying in the United States. But it's hard for attorneys to get to many of the facilities; Ahmed regularly drives three to seven hours to visit immigrant clients across the state. Baher Azmy, legal director of the New York-based Center of Constitutional Rights, represented Khalil, the Columbia University activist, during his more than three-month detention at the Central Louisiana Processing Center in Jena. He visited twice and said he was struck by its remoteness, the utter lack of space for attorneys to meet their clients and the no-contact family visitation conducted behind plexiglass. Accommodations were made for Khalil to see his wife and newborn baby in a separate room, after a court ordered it. "Getting there was an all-day proposition," Azmy said. "It reminded me of my early trips to Guantanamo," the military jail on the island of Cuba, where he represented clients accused of terrorism in the years after the 9/11 attacks. "The desolation, the difficulty getting there. The visiting conditions were better in Guantanamo than in Jena. As horrible as Guantanamo was, I could hug my client." According to ICE, rules and accommodations at different facilities can depend on their design and capacity, as well as contractual agreements. "Allegations that ICE detention facilities have improper conditions are unequivocally false and designed to demonize ICE law enforcement," McLaughlin said. "ICE follows national detention standards." Exponential expansion of ICE detention The United States has consistently grown its immigration detention through both Republican and Democratic administrations. But the average number of immigrants in detention on any given day has risen rapidly over the past six months, from roughly 40,000 people at the end of the Biden administration in January to more than 58,000 in early July. Under President Joe Biden, ICE moved thousands of migrants who sought asylum at the United States-Mexico border over to Louisiana detention centers, said the ACLU's Ahmed. Now, the centers are filled with people picked up in the country's interior. Nearly half of those in ICE detention in early July had no criminal record or pending charges, according to ICE data. They faced civil immigration violations. When determining whether to send a detainee to Louisiana, ICE considers bed space availability, the detainee's medical and security needs and proximity to transportation, according to an agency statement. The average daily population in Louisiana ICE facilities topped 7,300 in early July. That compares to roughly 2,000 ICE detainees in 2017 at the start of the first Trump administration, according to data collected by TRAC at Syracuse University. Some of that increase is due to a Trump administration decision to withdraw legal status from thousands of immigrants who arrived during the Biden administration and followed the rules then in place. "These are mothers. These are children. These are students. And these are individuals who often had status that was very much legal, that's then been taken away by the administration," Ahmed said. "So what we are seeing is the rendering of documented people to undocumented by the stroke of a pen of the United States government." More: He won asylum and voted for Trump. Now his family may have to leave. Three times this spring and early summer, Will Trim traveled to Richwood Correctional to visit his colleague Petrova, the Harvard scientist from Russia. He said the buildings looked "like warehouses, featureless beige buildings" encircled with razor wire, separated from a low-income neighborhood by a patch of woods. During his visits, few of the people he spoke with in the nearby town of Monroe knew that more than 700 immigrant women were being held locally. According to ICE data, on average, in July, 97% of the women in Richwood Correctional had no criminal record. "If they are being held without charge," he asked, "why is there double-barbed wire? Why is it hidden in the forest?" Lauren Villagran can be reached at lvillagran@ Dinah Pulver and Ignacio Calderon contributed to this report. This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Trump looks to the South to grow ICE detention Solve the daily Crossword
Free Malaysia Today
2 hours ago
- Politics
- Free Malaysia Today
Taliban says detained British couple receiving medical care
Taliban officials have refused to detail the reasons for the couple's arrest. (AP pic) KABUL : An elderly British couple detained for months in Afghanistan are receiving medical care, the Taliban government's top diplomat said today, after UN experts warned they were at risk of dying. Peter and Barbie Reynolds, 80-years-old and 75-years-old, had lived in Afghanistan for 18 years when they were arrested in February along with Chinese-American friend Faye Hall, who has since been released, and an Afghan translator. 'All their human rights are being respected,' Afghan foreign minister Amir Khan Muttaqi told a news conference in the capital Kabul. 'They are being provided with medical care. They are in occasional contact with their families.' Muttaqi said 'efforts are underway to secure their release, but the process is not complete', echoing similar comments by the government in April. Independent United Nations experts warned on Monday of the 'rapid deterioration' of their physical and mental health, stating that they 'risk irreparable harm or even death'. The couple, against whom no charges have been brought, were held 'in a high-security facility for several months, then in underground cells, without daylight, before being transferred last week' to the intelligence services in Kabul, according to the UN. The experts said Peter Reynolds requires heart medication following a stroke in 2023. Since his detention, he has suffered two eye infections and intermittent tremors in his head and left arm. His wife, who is anaemic, is 'weak and fragile' and has reported numbness in her feet, the experts said. The couple, who married in Kabul in 1970, had been running education programmes in Afghanistan and held Afghan passports. Taliban officials have refused to detail the reasons for their arrest but a source familiar with the case told AFP in April that the couple were in possession of several non-Islamic books.
The Guardian
3 hours ago
- Politics
- The Guardian
Videos reveal harsh conditions inside Ice's New York City confinement center
Two videos have surfaced shedding light on what is happening behind closed doors at a New York federal building where people are being confined after being seized by officers on their way out of immigration court on the 12th floor, with the footage offering a rare look inside a controversial and closely guarded space that is part of Donald Trump's anti-immigration crackdown. The filming, shared by the New York Immigration Coalition (NYIC), captures one of several rooms at 26 Federal Plaza in Manhattan, on the building's 10th floor, where accounts have emerged of people being detained in wholly unsuitable conditions with few basic provisions, but there had been no public access to direct evidence. The footage in question shows about two dozen men confined in bare rooms, some lying on the floor wrapped in aluminum emergency blankets while others sit on benches, the City reported on Tuesday. One clip shows two toilets just feet away from where people sleep, separated by a low wall. The video was secretly recorded by a man who had been detained after an immigration court appearance last week, according to the City, which first obtained the footage from the NYIC. The man who filmed the scenes had reportedly managed to have a phone in his possession despite the usual protocol by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) of confiscating personal items at arrest. Reports of people being held for protracted periods in deprived conditions in the Manhattan building have followed weeks of controversy about Ice officers turning up at immigration courts across the country, where they are usually not present, and apprehending people. The footage shows people held in the same building as one of the main immigration courts in New York City. It was sent to state assembly member Catalina Cruz's office. Until now, photos or videos from the 10th floor have not emerged in public. 'The American dream,' the unseen and unnamed detainee says as he films. 'Immigration, 26 Federal Plaza.' In a separate audio message also shared with the City , the same man adds: 'They haven't given us food, they haven't given us medicine. We're cold. There are people who've been here for 10, 15 days inside. We're just waiting.' Concerns about what goes on inside the federal building had been growing. Advocates, attorneys and immigrants themselves have described the 10th floor as overcrowded, with no beds, showers, or adequate access to food or healthcare. 'Ice is kidnapping so many people from New York's immigration courts that they had to create a new detention facility on the 10th floor of 26 Federal Plaza. But instead of sharing the truth with the public, Ice has skirted accountability by consistently lying about what's happening on the 10th floor, and breaking the law by not allowing Congress members to view the conditions,' said Murad Awawdeh, president of the NYIC, in a statement. 'The 10th floor detention facility must be shut down immediately, and regularly inspected to ensure that Ice adheres to federal guidelines as mandated by law,' Awawdeh added. Leaked footage confirms what we've known all along: 26 Federal Plaza is a secret detention site where immigrants are being held in overcrowded, inhumane conditions. @DHSgov has spent months lying to cover it up. We need answers. We demand accountability. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) assistant secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in earlier statements about the facility that 'any claim that there is overcrowding or sub-prime conditions is categorically false'. Ice also maintains that the 10th floor is not used for detention. Officially, the agency describes the space as a processing center, and therefore not subject to congressional inspection rules that apply to detention facilities, where national lawmakers have to be allowed to visit. '26 Federal Plaza is not a detention center. It is a federal building with an Ice law enforcement office inside of it,' said McLaughlin. But data from Ice detention logs analyzed by the City revealed that from September 2023 through late June this year, people were held there in what Ice calls the 'NYC Hold Room' for an average of 29 hours. Some stayed for several days. Sign up to This Week in Trumpland A deep dive into the policies, controversies and oddities surrounding the Trump administration after newsletter promotion The space remains off-limits to both journalists and lawmakers, even though members of Congress are supposed to be allowed to make unannounced visits to detention sites. Several Democrat representatives have been denied entry. Detainees and advocates continue to speak about grim conditions, including sparse food offerings, no showers or clothing changes, and people crammed into a single room with only the floor or hard benches to rest on, according to Gothamist. Meanwhile, Ice has been granted a huge budget boost. Trump's so-called 'big, beautiful bill' dedicates roughly $170bn for immigration and border-related operations – a sum that would make Ice the most heavily funded law enforcement agency in the federal government. This article was amended on 23 July 2025. A previous version showed an image of a different confinement center. The best public interest journalism relies on first-hand accounts from people in the know. If you have something to share on this subject you can contact us confidentially using the following methods. Secure Messaging in the Guardian app The Guardian app has a tool to send tips about stories. Messages are end to end encrypted and concealed within the routine activity that every Guardian mobile app performs. This prevents an observer from knowing that you are communicating with us at all, let alone what is being said. If you don't already have the Guardian app, download it (iOS/Android) and go to the menu. Select 'Secure Messaging'. SecureDrop, instant messengers, email, telephone and post See our guide at for alternative methods and the pros and cons of each.
