Gibsonia and Cranberry, PA restaurants raided and damaged by masked ICE agents

A local Mexican restaurant chain in Western Pennsylvania is trying to forge ahead a week after a worksite immigration raid left property damage at two of its storefronts and a workforce afraid to show up to their jobs, according to two employees and a witness who spoke with NBC News.

It all started Aug. 7 when immigration authorities showed up at two Emiliano’s Mexican Restaurant & Bar locations in the Pittsburgh area. As many as 16 workers were detained — nine worked at a location in Gibsonia, a suburb north of Pittsburgh, and seven others worked at another location in the nearby township of Cranberry.

In a social media post that same afternoon, which included a video taken by a worker, the business accused agents of storming into its restaurants and leaving “a trail of fear, confusion, and destruction” that included a burned kitchen, torn ceiling tiles, broken doors, a safe cut open by an agent and trashed food. The incident raises questions over the tactics used by authorities at this particular raid.

This week, gas plumbers fixed a stove that was damaged during the raid, according to two people working at the restaurant chain. Staffing was also thin at the locations targeted by immigration authorities as employees who witnessed the raid, including those who are U.S. citizens, remain “in shock,” they added. “No one wants to go back, everyone is scared.”

Both workers who spoke with NBC News requested to not be named to protect their family’s privacy because of an ongoing federal investigation in connection with last week’s events.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Western District of Pennsylvania declined to clarify what the investigation it is leading is about.

As the immigration arrests were happening last week, someone alerted an emergency response immigration hotline run by Casa San Jose, a local nonprofit that advocates for Latino and immigrant communities.

The organization quickly dispatched about 20 volunteers to both locations to act as legal observers, collect testimonies and provide support to the workers and families affected, according to Jaime Martinez, a community defense organizer at Casa San Jose.

At the Gibsonia location, “the raid actually caused a kitchen fire that agents were unable to extinguish at the beginning, which put people in danger,” Martinez told NBC News on Tuesday.

Employees who spoke to Martinez and his volunteers said the stove was on when agents entered the kitchen because workers were cooking food as they prepared to open the restaurant Thursday morning. The restaurant’s manager warned agents that the open burners were on, but witnesses alleged that agents didn’t do anything until a fire sparked, he said.

The detained employees, who had their arms and ankles shackled, were the ones who directed the agents to find the fire extinguisher and instructed them on how to use it after initially failing to operate it, according to employees who spoke to Martinez and his volunteers.

“By the time the fire department got there, the fire had already been put out with a dry chemical extinguisher, but only after this delay,” Martinez said.

A spokesperson with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement told NBC News in an email Thursday that the “damage to the restaurant, including the small fire, was created by the illegal aliens themselves while they were trying to escape or hide from law enforcement officers.”

According to ICE, the agents showed up at the locations in Gibsonia and Cranberry to execute federal search warrants based on information it got alleging that the restaurants were employing undocumented workers, WPXI, NBC’s affiliate in Pittsburgh, reported. The agency added that the 16 people detained lack legal status and are now in ICE custody, undergoing immigration proceedings.

“But in the process of coming in with that warrant, they also terrorized the community, pointed guns at people and destroyed a local business,” Martinez said.

In response to this, the ICE spokesperson told NBC News, “All agents and officers followed established legal procedures while executing the warrants.”

At the Cranberry location, Casa San Jose volunteers interviewed a worker who described seeing officers come into the restaurant, shouting “police” and pointing their long guns at the employees. One female employee who was in the kitchen said an agent “pointed the gun at her head” while telling her to stop cooking, according to Martinez.

While she was not detained after showing proper documentation, “this lady is now going to have to live with the trauma of having law enforcement point a gun at her head while she was at work,” Martinez said.

Martinez and one of the workers who spoke with NBC News said agents lined up all of the cuffed employees and made them kneel while pointing their weapons at them.

“Agents and officers operated within established law enforcement standards in order to ensure the safety of law enforcement officers, the public and the illegal aliens themselves,” the ICE spokesperson said in response to this allegation.

Last week was not the first time immigration authorities attempted to detain employees from Emiliano’s Mexican Restaurant & Bar. The ICE spokesperson confirmed to NBC News that a June incident was part of “an investigation that ultimately led to the execution of the warrants” this month.

Martinez said that on a night in June, he got a call on the hotline, reporting unmarked vehicles surrounding a nearby apartment complex. When the volunteer who was dispatched arrived at the area, she noticed the vehicles were parked with their engines still running, in front and behind the restaurant.

According to Martinez, it looked like federal agents inside the vehicles were waiting for workers to come out of the restaurant as it was closing. The vehicles left once TV crews arrived on the scene, he said.

“There were nine people in that restaurant on lockdown,” Martinez said, adding his group doesn’t know the immigration status of those workers since it doesn’t ask people about that as part of its policy. “But you don’t have to be undocumented to be afraid of getting detained.”

Since launching the hotline in March, Casa San Jose has received more than 650 calls reporting more than 100 immigration detentions in the area and has dispatched volunteers in at least 70 instances, according to Martinez.

In the wake of the raids at Emiliano’s Mexican Restaurant and Bar locations, the community came together and collectively donated more than $133,000. The workers who spoke with NBC News said the business plans to use the funds to cover bond expenses, one month worth of salary for each employee detained and repair damage done to the restaurant.

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SCOTUS Supreme Court Deals New Blow to President Trump on Immigration

The Supreme Court on Friday denied the Trump administration's request to swiftly resume deportations of Venezuelan nationals under the Alien Enemies Act, an 18th-century wartime law, according to Newsweek.

In a 7-2 decision, the justices rejected the emergency appeal filed by administration lawyers seeking to remove Venezuelan men accused of gang affiliations, an allegation the administration says qualifies them for expedited deportation under the rarely used 1798 statute.

President Donald Trump quickly took aim the decision on Truth Social. "THE SUPREME COURT WON'T ALLOW US TO GET CRIMINALS OUT OF OUR COUNTRY!" he posted Friday afternoon.

Newsweek reached out to the U.S. Department of Justice via contact form and the American Civil Liberties Union, which brought the original suit, via email for comment.

Why It Matters

President Donald Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act (AEA) in March, on the basis that the United States is under alien invasion due to immigration. The order was aimed at alleged members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua, allowing for swift removals without court hearings.

The Court had previously paused AEA deportations to El Salvador's high-security CECOT prison in a late-night order last month, temporarily blocking removals from a detention center in North Texas.

Friday's decision, in which conservative Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dissented from the majority, also related to those being held in Texas. Conservative justices John Roberts, Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Coney Barrett, and Neil Gorsuch joined the liberal justices in the unsigned order.

In their decision, the justices sent the case back to an appeals court to decide on the underlying issue of the use of the Alien Enemies Act, while calling out the federal government over the time frame given to plaintiffs to launch legal challenges to their imminent deportations.

"Under these circumstances, notice roughly 24 hours before removal, devoid of information about how to exercise due process rights to contest that removal, surely does not pass muster," the unsigned ruling said.

At least three federal judges have said Trump was improperly using the AEA to speed deportations of people the administration says are Venezuelan gang members.

On Tuesday, a judge in Pennsylvania signed off on the use of the law.

The court-by-court approach to deportations under the AEA flows from another Supreme Court order that removed a case from a judge in Washington, D.C., and ruled that detainees seeking to challenge their deportations must do so where they are held.

Other courts have sought to enforce longer time frames for immigrants to file challenges, with at least two judges calling for 21 days, rather than the current 12-24 hours.

U.S. District Judge Stephanie Haines ordered immigration officials to give people 21 days in her opinion, in which she otherwise said deportations could legally take place under the AEA.

The Supreme Court also clarified on Friday that it was not blocking other ways the government may deport people.

Earlier on Friday, Trump posted on Truth Social, criticizing the court after it heard oral arguments on his attempt to amend birthright citizenship. Justices appeared skeptical of the idea of limiting the scope of the 14th Amendment while also leaning toward limiting lower court powers.

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POTUS has not asked El Salvador to return illegally deported man

 According to The New Republic, President Donald Trump’s lawlessness is getting worse, but the public is now clearly rejecting it. Trump gave a new interview in which he made some striking admissions about the wrongfully deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia that only demonstrate how reprehensible his treatment of this whole saga has become. Meanwhile, new polling shows a large public backlash to Trump’s extra-legal tactics. We don’t think that Trump and Stephen Miller anticipated this public response. We think they thought they had successfully acclimated voters to their lawlessness. The opposite is happening. Yet all signs are that they’ll continue plunging us into this abyss. The New Republic interviewed Chris Newman, who’s one of the lawyers for Abrego Garcia’s family and is general counsel for the National Day Laborer Organizing Network. Here are some excerpts:

Question: President Trump was interviewed recently by Time magazine.  He was asked about Kilmar Abrego Garcia Trump, “Have you asked Bukele to return him?” Trump admitted, "I haven’t," and said his lawyers have not told him he has to. Chris, that’s an astounding admission. Your response?

Newman: Like everything, it’s difficult to interpret. On the one hand, it appears that Trump is softening and indeed backing away from the position of Stephen Miller, who appears to be higher on the organizational chart than his own vice president. On the other hand, it seems to be an admission as well that he’s violating the Supreme Court order because the order clearly said that he was supposed to facilitate the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. And the fact that he hasn’t tried seems to be a dead to rights admission that he is not complying with the order. From a political lens, it appears to reflect what is actually happening, which is public opinion is turning against Trump on this issue, and on immigration broadly. But as a legal matter, again, we continue to inch closer and closer to the proverbial constitutional crisis that people have been afraid of and some would even say—potentially rightly—that we’re already there.

Question: Well, he is currently defying the Supreme Court, which has again ordered him to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return and he’s not doing that. To your point, Chris, the Time magazine interviewers actually did press Donald Trump on the thing you raised. They said, Well, OK, if you haven’t asked Bukele to return him, then aren’t you violating the Supreme Court’s order to facilitate his return? Trump stammered and said something like, Well, the lawyers aren’t telling me I have to do that. They don’t really want to do that at this juncture. That strikes me as pretty damning. Trump is admitting it’s an option, but he’s not taking it.

Newman: Yeah, and it makes you wonder which lawyer, if any, he’s talking to. For example, is he talking to Erez Reuveni, the Department of Justice lawyer who admitted that Abrego Garcia was mistakenly deported and then subsequently fired—seemingly because of that admission? Or is he talking to Pam Bondi? Or in fact, is he just making it entirely up and he hasn’t spoken to any lawyers at all? The fact is that we don’t know. And also the fact is that this is also part of this trick mirror thing where Trump is trying to make it seem like he ultimately is all three branches of government. It doesn’t really matter whether he’s spoken to lawyers or not. His administration must comply with the Supreme Court order.

Question: Right, and he was actually asked during the interview whether generally speaking he thinks he has to comply with the Supreme Court. And of course he said, I greatly respect the justices and so forth. I think that they may be moving toward compliance. I want to flag another moment from the Time interview. Trump was asked why he won’t just bring Abrego Garcia back to the United States and retry him for deportation through lawful channels. Trump answered: “It’s something that, frankly, bringing him back and retrying him wouldn’t bother me.”

But then Trump adds again that his lawyers “don’t want to do that” at this moment. To be clear, Chris, the administration does have the option of bringing him back and recontesting his withholding of removal status or seeking to deport him to a third country. Trump now just said flat out that he’d be OK with this. Well, what the hell are we waiting for then? How is this not a big deal?

Newman: Again, I don’t know. All we’re asking for is for Kilmar Abrego Garcia to get a fair hearing and due process that is entitled to all of us in the U.S. And then the chips can fall where they may. The fact that he’s being deprived of that and they continue to double down is not just something that’s putting Kilmar’s life at risk. It’s putting all of our rights at risk because, again, this is the proverbial test case as to whether or not Donald Trump can suspend core elements of the Constitution whenever he wants. And if he gets away with it on this case—because maybe the political winds are going this way or that way—there’s no question that there will be an erosion of constitutional rights for every single person in the country.

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CREATORS: Let History Guide the Court on Deportation Issue

 Matthew T. Mangino
CREATORS
April 22, 2025

What happens when the government violates an individual's constitutional rights? We may soon find out as the United States Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case involving the federal government's deportation of noncitizens in violation of a court order and without due process of law.

The Supreme Court's response to unconstitutional conduct by law enforcement as it relates to individuals accused of a crime may serve as a guide.

In 1961, the high court created a dramatic remedy that would prevent the prosecution of an accused whose constitutional rights had been violated. The Court established the exclusionary rule, which remains controversial to this day.

In 1957, Cleveland, Ohio police officers went to the home of Dollree Mapp looking for a suspect in a criminal investigation. She refused to let the police in without a warrant.

The police left, and when they returned, they were armed with a phony warrant. Chicanery took the place of real police work. Instead of going to a judge to get a warrant, they drew up their own. After entering Mapp's home, police searched and confiscated obscene material, resulting in Mapp's arrest.

As a result of the police misconduct, the Supreme Court, in Mapp v. Ohio, provided a remedy — the exclusion of illegally obtained evidence from admission in a criminal prosecution — resulting in a dismissal of the charges.

The rationale behind the exclusionary rule was to deter police misconduct. If police intentionally circumvented their obligation to get a search warrant, or deprived an accused of due process, the penalty would be significant — the inability to use any evidence illegally obtained.

Over the last half century, the Supreme Court has whittled away at the exclusionary rule. The court has ruled that the exclusionary rule does not apply if the police obtained no advantage by their unlawful conduct, if a judge improvidently issued a warrant or if a valid warrant was illegally served.

In 2009, the assault on the exclusionary rule continued. The Supreme Court found that evidence confiscated as a result of an arrest that was the product of an expired warrant was not subject to exclusion. The court found that negligence by one police department in failing to remove a warrant did not contaminate evidence obtained by a different police department that was unaware of the invalid arrest warrant.

In 2011, the U.S. Supreme Court further narrowed the exclusionary rule. Police in Alabama arrested Willie Davis. After he was handcuffed and placed in the backseat of a police cruiser, Davis' car was searched. The police found a gun. They were in conformity with the law as it existed at the time the warrantless search of Davis' car was conducted.

Subsequently, the law changed, and Davis sought to have the evidence excluded. The Supreme Court refused to exclude the evidence. Justice Samuel Alito concluded that suppression of evidence as the result of a change in the law, a change that came after a lawful search, "would do nothing to deter police misconduct."

In 2016, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas wrote an opinion in a Utah case ruling that evidence obtained from an unlawful police stop would not be excluded from court because the link between the stop and the evidence's discovery was "attenuated" by the discovery of an outstanding warrant during the stop.

Despite the Supreme Court's diminution of Mapp v. Ohio, history has looked kindly on the Warren Court and the important protections provided by the court to men and women accused of crime.

The current Supreme Court has stepped in to halt deportations to El Salvadore temporarily. The Trump administration faces possible contempt for prior deportations and specifically for the mistaken deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. History will remember what remedy the Supreme Court crafts, if any, for Garcia and the other Venezuelans deported without due process.

Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book The Executioner's Toll, 2010 was released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on Twitter @MatthewTMangino.

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Bunch: 'Kilmar Abrego Garcia is the critical pawn in a game to end American democracy for good'

 Will Bunch writing for the Philadelphia Inquirer:

Kilmar Abrego Garcia is the critical pawn in a game to end American democracy for good.

And the regime knows its window for pulling this off is closing. The polls are showing Trump’s popularity with the American people is plummeting, and support for his immigration policies is also shrinking, after people see their rank cruelty. The conventional wisdom is that the president should pull back, but the conventional wisdom has been wrong ever since Trump descended a golden escalator on June 16, 2015. The White House is instead racing to impose dictatorship before opponents can get organized to stop it.

In this life-and-death moment for our liberty, there are still a lot of key people who aren’t getting it, and not just television bloviators. One centrist Democratic member of Congress insisted anonymously to Axios that Trump’s immoral deportation machine is a political trap, and that Dems “shouldn’t take the bait for one hairdresser,” tacking a homophobic dog whistle onto a lack of concern over human rights.

Fortunately for democracy, the mass of decent everyday American people do get it. It’s why a throng of people gathered outside a federal courthouse in Greenbelt, Md., demanding our government obey the law. It’s why Philadelphia suburbanites driving on U.S. Route 202 in Chester County this week saw their neighbors at an overpass with a giant sign, “Free Abrego Garcia.” It’s why voters at a town hall in deeply conservative rural Iowa confronted GOP Sen. Chuck Grassley and cheered raucously when one asked, “Are you going to bring that guy back from El Salvador?”

They understand the most important fact in America right now: that if Abrego Garcia is not free, then none of us are free. The Trump regime understands this, too, but in a very different way. It sees this everyman Salvadoran laborer as the speed bump on its autobahn toward a strongman regime of unchecked corruption and naked retribution against anyone from powerful universities and law firms to college newspaper op-ed writers who dare oppose them. And they are spinning yet another Big Lie to make sure Abrego Garcia is crushed.

But we have seen, time and time again, that injustice to one simple man can change the arc of history. It was one oppressed Tunisian fruit vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi who launched the massive Arab Spring protests, and it was the captured-on-video 2020 police murder of George Floyd that triggered the largest protest in American history. This time, we need to bend the arc a lot further toward justice, and we need to do so in the name of Abrego Garcia.

There will be yet another opportunity this Saturday, with a new round of Easter weekend protests in all 50 states and beyond — and it’s clear now that everything is on the line. Let the chants of liberation ring loudly from Maine to Hawaii: Free Kilmar Abrego Garcia!

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Supreme Court acts quickly to stop additional deportations by Trump administration

There are sculptures of tortoises scattered around the Supreme Court grounds. They symbolize, the court’s website says, “the slow and steady pace of justice,” writes Adam Liptak of The New York Times.

But the court can move fast when it wants to, busting through protocols and conventions. It did so around 1 a.m. on Saturday, blocking the Trump administration from deporting a group of Venezuelan migrants accused of being gang members under a rarely invoked 18th-century wartime law.

The court’s unsigned, one-paragraph order was extraordinary in many ways. Perhaps most important, it indicated a deep skepticism about whether the administration could be trusted to live up to the key part of an earlier ruling after the government had deported a different group of migrants to a prison in El Salvador.

That unsigned and apparently unanimous ruling, issued April 7, said that detainees were entitled to be notified if the government intended to deport them under the law, “within a reasonable time,” and in a way that would allow the deportees to challenge the move in court before their removal.

There were indications late Friday that the administration was poised to violate both the spirit and letter of that ruling. Lawyers for the detainees said their clients were given notices that they were eligible to be deported under the law, the Alien Enemies Act. The one-page notices were written in English, a language many of them do not speak, the lawyers said. And they provided no realistic opportunity to go to court.

The American Civil Liberties Union, racing against the clock, filed its emergency application to the Supreme Court on Friday evening — Good Friday, as it happened — and urged the court to take immediate action to protect the detainees as part of a proposed class action.

The lawyers told the court that they feared their clients could be deported within hours, saying that some had already been loaded onto buses, presumably to be taken to the airport.

The Supreme Court did act fast. “The government is directed not to remove any member of the putative class of detainees from the United States until further order of this court,” the order said.

In a typical case, the Supreme Court would await a ruling from the relevant appeals court, here the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, and ask for a response from the administration, on a deadline set by the justices.

The justices did neither of those things. Instead, their unsigned opinion said: “The matter is currently pending before the Fifth Circuit. Upon action by the Fifth Circuit, the solicitor general is invited to file a response to the application before this court as soon as possible.”

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Law & Crime:‘Beginning to assert their constitutional authority’: Federal judiciary may be gearing up for a face-off with Trump administration

Matthew T. Mangino
LAW & CRIME NEWS
April 10, 2025

President Donald Trump’s administration apparently believes the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 can be used to address unlawful migration and drug trafficking — but so far, federal courts have pushed back on that notion.

A March 15 executive order issued by President Donald Trump suggested a Venezuelan gang known as Tren de Aragua was behind “an invasion of and predatory incursion into” the United States.

The Alien Enemies Act has only been used three times, during the War of 1812, World War I and World War II, when it was used to justify the mass internment of people of Japanese heritage while the U.S. was at war with Japan.

The United States is not at war with Venezuela. However, based on the government’s interpretation of the Alien Enemies Act, the Trump administration forcibly deported 238 alleged Venezuelan gang members without due process. Included with those summarily deported was Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a man with a work permit, married to an American citizen, and raising an American-born child. Abrego Garcia was sent to El Salvador in spite of a 2019 protection order prohibiting his deportation to El Salvador.

In late March, Chief U.S. District Judge James Boasberg temporarily blocked any deportations under the Alien Enemies Act, writing that the law refers to hostile acts perpetrated by another nation. On appeal, 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals sided with Boasberg.

In the neighboring jurisdiction of the District of Maryland, U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis found that the government had no lawful authority to detain and deport Abrego Garcia. She ordered his return. The Justice Department in a Supreme Court filing stated that Abrego Garcia was removed to El Salvador through an “administrative error,” but the government had no authority to effectuate his return.

Just this week, the Supreme Court lifted Boasberg’s order that had barred the government from removing noncitizens who are designated as members of a Tren de Aragua. By a vote of 5-4, the justices declined to address the challengers’ contention that they are not covered by the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 on which Trump relied in issuing the order. Instead, the high court found, the challengers’ lawsuit must be brought in Texas, where they are being held, rather than in Boasberg’s Washington, D.C., court.

However, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote a brief concurring opinion that “the Court’s disagreement is not over whether the detainees receive judicial review of their transfers — all nine Members of the Court agree that judicial review is available. The only question,” he concluded “is where that judicial review should occur.”

As the Trump administration celebrated its “victory,” judges in Texas and New York said “not so fast.” Judges in both states temporarily barred the government from deporting Venezuelans jailed in parts of those two states while lawyers challenge the Trump administration’s use of Alien Enemies Act of 1798.

The orders were the first to occur following the Supreme Court’s ruling that the administration can resume deportations under the act.

The broader decision was handed down by U.S. District Judge Fernando Rodriguez Jr., appointed by Trump and sitting in the Southern District of Texas. He said that the administration cannot use the Alien Enemies Act to remove any Venezuelans being held at the El Valle Detention Center, in Raymondville, Texas, near the southern border, until at least April 23, giving lawyers for the detainees an opportunity to argue that the Alien Enemies Act is only applicable to enemy nations in times of war.

The Trump administration received further bad news from the U.S. Supreme Court. In what appeared to be a unanimous decision, the high court affirmed on Thursday Xinis’ order requiring “the government to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador” and to be prepared to share what steps it has taken to bring Abrego Garcia home. She set a hearing for Friday, and — when DOJ lawyers asked for more time to evaluate the Supreme Court’s ruling — excoriated the government attorneys.

“[T]he Defendants’ act of sending Abrego Garcia to El Salvador was wholly illegal from the moment it happened, and Defendants have been on notice of the same,” Xinis wrote Friday in response to the government’s request. “Indeed, as the Supreme Court credits, ‘the United States acknowledges that Abrego Garcia was subject to a withholding order forbidding his removal to El Salvador, and that the removal to El Salvador was therefore illegal.’ Second, the Defendants’ suggestion that they need time to meaningfully review a four-page Order that reaffirms this basic principle blinks at reality.”

As the hearing went forward on Friday, Xinis lashed out at the Trump administration after DOJ lawyers said that the government was “not yet prepared to share” information as to what efforts have been made to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s release.

“That means they’ve done nothing,” Xinis said in retort.

The decisions in the deportations cases are coming fast and furious, and with each ruling, courts are beginning to assert their constitutional authority to hold in check an overreaching executive branch.

Matthew T. Mangino is of counsel with Luxenberg, Garbett, Kelly & George P.C. His book “The Executioner’s Toll, 2010” was released by McFarland Publishing. You can reach him at www.mattmangino.com and follow him on Twitter

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Deadline looms on Order to bring back man illegally deported

A federal judge in Maryland ordered the Trump administration to take immediate steps to return a Maryland man who was deported to a Salvadoran mega-prison by mistake, setting up another high-stakes clash between the White House and the courts, reported The New York Times.

"This was an illegal act," U.S. Federal District Judge Paula Xinis told Justice Department lawyers at a federal court hearing in Greenbelt, Maryland about the deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who lived in the U.S. legally and had a work permit. Abrego Garcia was arrested and deported last month — despite having been granted protection by an immigration judge in 2019 that should have prevented him from being deported to El Salvador.

Judge Xinis ordered the government to return Abrego Garcia to the U.S. by 11:59 p.m. on Monday, April 7. She said keeping him in El Salvador constitutes irreparable harm.

"From the moment he was seized, it was unconstitutional," Judge Xinis said during the hearing. "If there isn't a document, a warrant, a statement of probable cause, then there is no basis to have seized him in the first place. That's how I'm looking at it," the judge said.

The Trump administration filed an appeal to the ruling to the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals.

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Targeting noncitizen students for deportation harkens back to McCarthy Era

 Several students and professors lawfully present in the U.S. with visas have been detained and deported for their pro-Palestinian activism and many have filed legal challenges against the Trump administration, reported Truthout. On March 27, Rubio declared that at least 300 foreign students have had their visas revoked.

The administration is apparently targeting noncitizen students for deportation just for “liking or sharing posts that highlighted ‘human rights violations’ in the war in Gaza,” signing “open letters related to the war,” and “call[ing] for ‘Palestinian liberation.’” The Israeli newspaper Haaretz asserted that ICE has “reportedly paused its human trafficking and drug smuggling investigations to have agents monitor social media for posts and likes from pro-Palestinian students.”

Trump’s witch hunt against pro-Palestinian voices harkens back to a dark time in our history.

“This is the McCarthy era all over again,” attorney Van Der Hout told me. “The government tried this 40 years ago against a group of Palestinians I represented in Los Angeles and, after 20 years, the case was thrown out for government misconduct. It was outrageous then, and it’s outrageous now. Mahmoud will be challenging this until his rights to speak out about what is happening in Palestine and anywhere else are vindicated.”

Attorney Sisay told me that, “As long as he remains in ICE custody, away from his pregnant wife and movement community, his ability to speak freely, and the ability of many other students speaking out against the Israeli government’s genocide in Gaza, will continue to be chilled.”

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Heritage Foundation: Get schools to report immigration status and the undocumented will self-deport

In his presidential campaign, Donald Trump has doubled down on bashing migrants crossing the southern border. Trump said migrants are criminals who are “poisoning the blood of our country,” reported The New York Times. The Republican National Convention was full of talk of surging “migrant crime,” even though such a rise does not exist.

The number of Americans who think the immigration level is too high has sharply risen since the last presidential contest in 2020, and as Americans move to the right on the issue, Trump plans to go much further than President Biden’s executive order in June, which closes the border when crossings surge. Trump has said he would build “vast holding facilities” — detention camps — to lock people up as their cases progress; end birthright citizenship, even though the Constitution protects it; and bring back a version of the travel ban from his first term, which barred visitors from several mostly Muslim countries. Another Trump promise, mass deportations, hasn’t been tried since the 1950s; now, polls show majority support for it, including among Latinos.

But there is one anti-immigration proposal on the right that Trump doesn’t talk about publicly. It’s a spin on “self-deportation.” The term — for provoking immigrants to leave of their own volition — has gone out of fashion but the idea continues to lurk. This time, instead of directly pressuring undocumented adults to flee, some immigration opponents are threatening access to school for their children. It’s a nuclear option — requiring the reversal of a Supreme Court ruling that has been a linchpin of educational rights for four decades — that some of Trump’s allies on the right are quietly building support for.

In February, the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing Washington think tank that’s become central to mapping out policy objectives for the next Republican administration, recommended requiring public schools to collect data on immigration status when students enroll. Heritage also said schools should charge tuition for children who are undocumented or who have a parent who lacks legal status.

About 600,000 undocumented children live in the country, and another 4.5 million have a parent who is here illegally. To ensure that parents can send their children to school without fear of immigration agents, the Biden administration declared in 2021 that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement could take no actions of any kind at schools and other locations where young people gather, like universities and day care centers. It’s easy to see why schools are such a sensitive site of immigration enforcement. Barring children from the classroom punishes them for their parents’ decisions and disrupts families’ daily rhythm. Most searingly, perhaps, it undermines the hope of bettering the lives of the next generation — a reason for coming to the United States in the first place.

It has always been difficult to deter people from migrating to the United States, given instability in their home countries and the lure of economic opportunity at American businesses that depend on cheap labor. But there is a grim logic to the strategy of keeping children out of school in the United States — that if you go so far as to take away a right fundamental to the American dream, people will leave.

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Texas seeks to deport immigrants, Lt. Governor likens immigrant influx to 'attack on Pearl Harbor'

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott ordered the National Guard and the state police to begin apprehending migrants who illegally cross the border from Mexico and taking them back to ports of entry, a move that could put the state into direct conflict with the federal government over immigration, reported The New York Times.

Mr. Abbott, in a statement, said the goal was to return “illegal immigrants to the border to stop this criminal enterprise endangering our communities.”

The order, which significantly expanded the potential activity of Guard troops and state police personnel along the border, came amid mounting pressure on Mr. Abbott from conservatives and Republicans to take even more drastic action to address the record number of arrivals from Mexico. Federal agents recorded 240,000 crossings in May, the majority of those in Texas, though recently the daily numbers have gone down slightly, an official said, citing internal data.

This week, Texas officials from counties at or near the border have called on the governor to act, and the lieutenant governor, Dan Patrick, has urged Mr. Abbott to have state law enforcement personnel “put hands on people and send them back,” likening the numbers of migrants arriving in Mexico to the attack on Pearl Harbor during World War II.

Republicans outside Texas have also pushed Mr. Abbott. “Texas should just send them back across the border,” Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida said during a news conference last month.

Immigration has historically been the purview of the federal government, and states have refrained from seeking to enforce federal immigration laws themselves, particularly after a Supreme Court ruling a decade ago knocked down an effort by Arizona to do so.

Mr. Abbott has so far stopped short of what many of his conservative critics have called for: a formal declaration of an “invasion” that, proponents argue, would allow the governor to seize war powers and have state law enforcement personnel not only take migrants back to the border but directly deport them.

Indeed, the first criticisms of his order came not from immigration advocates or civil rights groups but from a former top Department of Homeland Security official under the Trump administration, Ken Cuccinelli, who implied that the governor’s order did not go far enough. Mr. Cuccinelli has been actively calling for Mr. Abbott to make the invasion declaration.

 “The governor does not appear to formally declare an invasion nor direct the National Guard and Department of Public Safety to remove illegals across the border directly to Mexico,” read a joint statement from Mr. Cuccinelli and Russ Vought, the president of the Center for Renewing America, a conservative nonprofit group. “That is critical. Otherwise this is still catch and release.”

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Article Debunks Connection Between Immigration and Crime

A recent article written by Florida International University Professor Ramiro Martinez, Jr. and published in The Criminologist entitled Crime and Immigration further debunks the idea that immigration legislation like that in Arizona will reduce crime.

Professor Martinez writes:

A prominent claim by politicians and anti-immigrant supporters is that SB 1070 is needed to fight immigrant crime given rising levels of violence. There is little if any systematic evidence to support this claim. Violent crime reported to the police and measured in victimization surveys has plummeted across the country since at least 1995 and that decrease is evident in places with large Latino and immigrant populations including the city of Phoenix Arizona (Phoenix Police Department, 2010; for more see Sampson 2008). In a forthcoming Criminology & Public Policy article, Lauritsen and Heimer (2010) report that serious violence victimization rates among White, Black and Latino males are several times lower now than when the National Crime Victimization Survey began in 1973 – trends made all the more remarkable when considered in the context of the dramatic rise in immigration over the past four decades.

The article also examines the premise that the communities on the border of Mexico are more violent than other non-border communities. Actually the opposite is true. Professor Martinez writes:

Some immigration opponents imply that the southwestern border is a dangerous place due to its location and proximity to Mexico. Again, empirical evidence raises doubt that the border is a hyper violent place (Martinez 2010). Consider the state of Texas
which shares the longest stretch of the U.S. border with Mexico. A recent examination of county-level homicide data demonstrates Texas border counties have significantly lower homicide rates than non-border counties and Texas counties with higher levels of immigration concentration had lower levels of homicide. Not only are Latino homicide rates lower in these areas, so are those of non-Latino Whites and Blacks. No compelling support was found for the claim that border areas are more violent due to proximity or immigration (Martinez 2010).

To read full report: http://www.asc41.com/Criminologist/2010/2010_July-Aug_Criminologist.pdf

Federal Prisons Inundated with Foreign Nationals

Monday's blog explored the use of deportation to alleviate prison crowding and budget deficits. The Texas plan was to release nearly 11,400 foreign nationals by turning them over to U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement officials for deportation.

The Courthouse News Service reported that the federal government holds 210,000 people in prison. Roughly 18 percent of the inmates are housed in private prisons run by contractors. The other 172,000 inmates are squeezed into government facilities that only have a listed capacity of 126,000 beds, which means the buildings hold 37-percent more prisoners than their designs allow.

Federal prison director Harley Lappin said the prison population is expected to grow by an additional 7,000 members next year. This represent a 3-percent increase in prisoners, while state prisons realized a half a percent decrease last year.

The increase in federal prisoners can be attributed to a 45-percent increase in the last two years of people booked for immigration crimes. Lappin noted that countries like Vietnam and Cuba refuse to take back their convicted citizens, leaving the United States to hold some foreign nationals indefinitely. More than a quarter of the federal prisoners, about 55,000, are non-citizens.

My Take

Texas is contemplating a shell game with the federal government. Texas proposes pushing its imprisoned foreign nationals off on the federal government that does not have the capacity to manage more prisoners. The move won't save taxpayers any money, it merely pushes the burden off to the federal government. That obligation will be returned to taxpayers in the form of federal taxes.

The parochial nature of Texas' efforts point to a misguided legislature that is more worried about getting re-elected than tackling important issues in a meaningful way. Unfortunately, this is not unique to the Texas legislature. As long as policymakers insist on being "tough on crime" without generating the "dime," state governments will continue to generate absurd policy to deal with difficult situations.

To read more:

http://www.courthousenews.com/2010/03/18/25696.htm