Protesters outside the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland in Greenbelt rally on April 4, 2025, in support of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, calling for him to be returned to the U.S. (Ariana Figueroa/States Newsroom).
GREENBELT, Maryland — A top U.S. immigration official testifying in federal court Thursday did not give details of the Trump administration’s plans to deport Kilmar Abrego Garcia if he is released from pre-trial detention next week in Tennessee.
Thomas Giles, the assistant director for enforcement and removal operations at Immigration and Customs Enforcement, was noncommittal about how the agency would handle Abrego Garcia if he is released from jail in Tennessee where he awaits trial on federal charges, saying officials could not consider the question until he’s in ICE custody.
“There’s been no decision made as he’s not in ICE custody,” Giles said.
Department of Justice attorneys have said they would seek Abrego Garcia’s removal again, because he has a final order of removal, but have not detailed the process for that deportation, raising concerns of a lack of due process in the closely watched case that were not answered by Giles’ testimony Thursday.
Giles appeared after U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis ordered the Trump administration on Monday to produce a witness to detail the plan for Abrego Garcia’s removal.
The government is likely to pursue either a revocation of the deportation protections the El Salvador national and longtime Maryland resident has had since 2019 that bar deportation to his home country, or removal to a country other than El Salvador.
Giles said that ICE placed a detainer on Abrego Garcia last month, meaning the agency requested the U.S. Marshals to notify ICE when he will be released so immigration officials can detain him. Abrego Garcia could be released July 16 after a pretrial hearing that day in Tennessee.
The Trump administration returned Abrego Garcia to the U.S. last month to face federal charges of human smuggling that stemmed from a 2019 traffic stop. Abrego Garcia has denied the charges.
Abrego Garcia’s attorneys said in court Thursday that they found out Abrego Garcia was brought back to the U.S. through media reports and they were given no information by the Trump administration.
DOJ attorneys said that Abrego Garcia will be removed from the U.S. before his trial in Tennessee is complete.
Restraining order considered
Attorneys for Abrego Garcia said Thursday they are concerned he will again be removed without due process or the ability to challenge his removal to another country if he fears he will experience harm or persecution.
Earlier in the week, they pressed for Xinis to have Abrego Garcia brought back to Maryland, rather than remain in Tennessee.
Xinis is still mulling that request from Abrego Garcia’s attorneys. This week, she also denied the Department of Justice’s move to dismiss the case as moot, because Abrego Garcia had been returned to the U.S.
Xinis said Thursday she is considering issuing a temporary restraining order if Abrego Garcia is released on pre-trial detention. The order would last for 48 business hours and bar immigration officials from removing Abrego Garcia to a detention center outside of Tennessee or from the U.S.
She also called for a hearing on Friday at 9 a.m. ET on the temporary restraining order.
Vague answers
Sascha Rand, an attorney representing Abrego Garcia in the immigration case in Maryland, grilled Giles on how familiar he was with Abrego Garcia’s case.
Giles said that he had not directly overseen Abrego Garcia’s case and had about four hours to prepare for Thursday’s hearing.
Rand asked Giles which country Abrego Garcia would be removed to if not El Salvador.
Giles said that if Abrego Garcia is removed to a third country, it would take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks to determine which country.
Giles said that Mexico is one country that accepts nationals from other countries – including El Salvador – and has diplomatic assurance that an individual removed won’t face harm.
He added that South Sudan is also a country that the Trump administration has deemed acceptable to send deportees to.
In a ruling last month, the Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to move forward with removing eight men from different nationalities to South Sudan, which recently experienced a civil war. The U.S. State Department advises against traveling to the country.
Xinis asked Giles if Mexico, “at a minimum,” would be a country Abrego Garcia could be removed to.
Giles said that was possible.
Rand asked if South Sudan was a possibility.
Giles said that “we have removed people to South Sudan.”
Rand then asked Giles multiple times which path the Trump administration was considering for Abrego Garica, either deportation to a third country, or trying to remove the 2019 bar on removal to El Salvador.
“Do you have any actual knowledge of which one of these tracks Mr. Abrego Garcia might be put on next Wednesday?” Rand asked.
Giles said because Abrego Garcia is not in ICE custody, a discussion on the options for his removal is not happening. He said those determinations will be made once Abrego Garcia is in ICE detention.
Giles added that it’s also unclear where Abrego Garcia will be held in ICE detention, as it’s based on available bed space, meaning Abrego Garcia could be transferred anywhere in the U.S.
Yessenia Ruano’s home in Milwaukee is in a state of limbo. Some of the family’s belongings have been sold. Some were gifted, out of necessity, to friends and family, including plants Ruano offered to her coworkers. The most essential — clothing, her daughters’ American birth certificates — were packed into suitcases.
Ruano’s husband, Miguel, is now contending with the rest: two cars in their driveway waiting to be sold, travel documents for their dog, boxes with additional household items he promised to pack up and ship before he, too, departs for El Salvador in a few weeks.
In May, The 19th wrote about Ruano’s fight to remain in the country despite a pending order of deportation. Ruano, a teacher’s aide at a local public school and the mother of twin daughters who are U.S. citizens, argued that her deep roots in her community and her pending application for a visa should at the very least buy her more time.
Ruano was among the millions of immigrants living in the United States who lack permanent authorization. They now face the Trump administration’s intensifying efforts to drive up the number of immigrants deported or otherwise removed from the country. That includes many immigrants who, like Ruano, have been in the country for a decade or longer, who have no criminal record, and whose ties to the country include young children — some of them U.S. citizens — and also careers and community.
Before her first check-in with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) following Trump’s inauguration, Ruano decided to make her struggle public, summoning the help of her local community to avoid deportation. A petition in her support gathered 2,800 signatures within its first 24 hours, and a fundraiser for the family had raised close to $16,000 as of the week of July 1, with the average donation hovering under $60.
The Trump administration’s message has been that the focus of its efforts is on people who have committed crimes and pose a threat to public safety. In order to reach their ambitious deportation goals, immigration officials have also targeted immigrants who are among the easiest to locate and remove: people like Ruano, who regularly attend check-ins with ICE.
Ten-year-old twin sisters Paola and Eli pack their suitcases in their bedroom on June 3, 2025, in Milwaukee. (Jamie Kelter Davis for The 19th)
As of last month, Ruano had attended 19 in-person check-ins with ICE over her 14 years in the United States, in addition to logging dozens of virtual check-ins and, for a time, submitting to 24-hour monitoring.
Ruano appeared for her last check-in at the end of May, holding a much-awaited “receipt number” from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services agency showing that her visa application for victims of human trafficking was being processed. Before Trump, such an application would have likely paused deportation proceedings. Instead, Ruano was told she was expected to depart the country within days and given instructions for how to confirm she had arrived in El Salvador through ICE’s monitoring app. Failure to do so could lead to her immediate detention.
Ruano and her daughters, Eli and Paola, 10, boarded a United Airlines flight scheduled to leave Milwaukee’s Mitchell International Airport on June 17 at 11:35 a.m. local time. The girls’ first time on an airplane was with a one-way ticket out of their first and only home.
Ruano, who by the time of her departure had captured the attention of many people in Milwaukee and elsewhere in the country, spoke to news cameras and a group of supporters in the hall of the airport. She pleaded for a fix to the nation’s immigration system for herself and millions of immigrants in a similar situation.
“For the good of the United States, given this ongoing chaos, our political parties need to have serious conversations about our immigration system — and stop treating it like political soccer,” Ruano said.
As Ruano started to speak, she was interrupted by an automated message from the mayor that rang over the intercom, reminding travelers that in Milwaukee, “there’s so many opportunities to live, work and have fun.”
Ruano continued, thanking her school community and her broader community in Milwaukee for their support.
“To my immigrant community, I want to say that we cannot live in fear. We need to keep working for our children’s futures. … Our love and our togetherness is what will get us through.”
Ruano exchanged hugs with many of the people gathered: relatives, colleagues, supporters. Then, she joined her daughters to go through airport security.
Eli hugs a family member at Milwaukee Mitchell International Airport before leaving for El Salvador on June 17, 2025, in Milwaukee. (Jamie Kelter Davis for The 19th)
Hours before their scheduled flight, Ruano said that the girls were experiencing a convoluted mix of emotions. They vacillated between afraid and sad, and somewhat excited, “as if they were going on vacation.” Ruano chalked it up to their age and the fact that the flight coincided with the end of the school year and the start of summer.
At the terminal, Ruano sat between her two daughters, chatting and sending messages to loved ones until it was time to board.
The family’s departure bore a hole in the community they had built in Milwaukee.
Miguel embraces his 10-year-old twin daughters before they leave with their mother to El Salvador on June 17, 2025, in Milwaukee. (Jamie Kelter Davis for The 19th)
With most of their relatives in El Salvador, Miguel, Yessenia and their twin girls came to lean on his sister and her family, who in turn, leaned on them. They would trade rides to school, handiwork around their homes when something broke and child care — all of the normal beats of extended families.
“We were there for each other for anything the other needed, a tool, a favor,” Miguel said. “It was just the two of us.”
Days before Ruano and the girls boarded their flight, the family got together for what was supposed to be a 10th birthday celebration for the twins. It was the last occasion they got to mark together, and with Ruano’s departure imminent, the focus shifted in part to goodbyes.
Miguel said he and his sister will continue to lean on each other during his final days in the United States. Her close circle of support will be permanently altered once he leaves.
Arriving home from the airport without his family to an empty house, Miguel said, was one of the hardest moments of his life.
“It’s an ugly feeling. I’ve never been alone without them,” Miguel said.
A mug sits on a shelf with a photo of Yessenia Ruano, her husband and their daughters at their civil ceremony on April 3, 2025, in Milwaukee. (Jamie Kelter Davis for The 19th)
Before he joins them later in the summer, Miguel is packing up boxes to ship to El Salvador. Each box costs $450 to ship. Some boxes hold his tools. Others hold extra clothes and shoes for his daughters, along with some of their toys and trinkets. Miguel is packing pots, pans and other kitchen items for Ruano, “so she can feel like she has her things, like she’s home.”
The first box to be packed and ready is covered in a criss-cross of duct tape. “One of three boxes holding 14 years of dreams and hard work,” Miguel said. “Sometimes I think this was all just a nice dream that now we have to wake up from, but it’s not fair, not for my girls.”
Sarah Weintraub, a special education teacher at ALBA School, poses for a portrait outside the school on June 27, 2025, in Milwaukee. (Jamie Kelter Davis for The 19th)
The heart of Ruano’s support was her school community at ALBA School, a bilingual public school in Milwaukee known in Spanish as Academia de Lenguaje y Bellas Artes. Sarah Weintraub, a middle school teacher at ALBA, said she became invested in Ruano’s plight, and in the lead-up to Ruano’s February appointment with ICE, began rallying community support from organizations like the local teachers’ union.
Weintraub and Ruano had worked together over the years and connected over the looming threats and challenges facing immigrants in the United States. Weintraub said she has loved ones in a similar situation. Weintraub’s daughter also attends ALBA and bonded with Ruano even though she was never her student.
Weintraub described ALBA as “a very tight-knit school.” Ruano’s absence will be sorely felt.
“Many of us have our own kids at the school. I have my kids there. Her kids are there. So, much of the staff is just very close in general,” Weintraub said. “My daughter loves her so much and has never been in any of her classes, just knows her from the school and the cafeteria.”
Weintraub said Ruano’s absence is a significant loss for the school as a workplace.
“Right now, it’s summer break, so we’re not in our usual routine. But I know already, just thinking about going back and her not being there will be — her absence will be very felt.”
Ruano, she said, was the type of colleague who “jumps in right away” when there’s a need, and “you don’t just find the energy every day.” The school district, like the rest of the country, is struggling with a shortage of teachers — especially bilingual educators. “I don’t even know if her position will be filled right away,” Weintraub said.
The playground outside of ALBA School is seen on June 27, 2025, in Milwaukee. (Jamie Kelter Davis for The 19th)
Voces de la Frontera, an immigrant advocacy group, worked closely with Ruano and her colleagues at ALBA to elevate Ruano’s story as they worked to avert her deportation. Through events, news releases and outreach to elected officials, her story reached many people who didn’t know her, but saw themselves in her situation.
For Milwaukee’s immigrant community, Ruano’s departure brought home the reality of life under the new administration, said Christine Neumann-Ortiz, co-founder and executive director of Voces de la Frontera. “It definitely highlights that we’re in a new time,” she said, adding that there’s a “cruelty” and “senselessness” to the way the administration is handling immigration enforcement.
Christine Neumann-Ortiz, founding executive director of Voces de la Frontera, stands for a portrait outside the Voces office on June 27, 2025, in Milwaukee. (Jamie Kelter Davis for The 19th)
For the members of Voces de la Frontera, Neumann-Ortiz said, “there’s a feeling of sadness because it’s not what people want, or fought for.” During a meeting following Ruano’s departure, many members said they wanted to find ways to stay in touch with immigrants who are removed and deported, including Ruano.
Ruano also left behind her church community at Nuestra Señora de la Paz, where she was an active member of the prayer group and a mentor for a group of children preparing for their First Communion.
Blanca Cisneros, 70, said Ruano was a constant presence at the church’s community activities, always willing to volunteer when help was needed. “She’s really special: She’s both really humble and really strong,” Cisneros said. “Her situation just breaks my heart. It will be a big loss for our group because she has a strong desire to serve.”
On a recent Monday, Ruano woke up early to help her sister prepare grains of corn for milling, setting a large pot over a wood fire on the patio that was still glowing red hours later. In a video call from a rural community in Comasagua, El Salvador, where they’re living, Ruano said her family is slowly adjusting to their new life.
Ruano and her daughters were reunited with her mom, a grandmother whom the girls had only met through video calls. They’re also spending time with aunts, uncles and cousins; Ruano’s sister lives next door, and they take turns cooking for the entire family. There are no playgrounds or parks nearby, and shopping options are very limited. But recently, Ruano took the girls on a hike near the vast mountain range she grew up calling home. They picked guavas right from tree branches, a highlight of the last few weeks for the girls, and, Ruano said, “a lesson in living more with Mother Nature and less with things that are artificial.”
In many ways, the adjustment has been hard for all of them.
Ruano says she feels blessed to have been able to purchase a small, modest home for her mother last year, a home with a bright blue door that they now all share. But the roof leaks when it rains — which is nearly every day — so at night, Ruano and her girls move their bed from one end of their room to another to avoid the largest drips. They have to walk across the yard at night to use the nearest bathroom, which Ruano says no one has gotten used to.
“They got here happy, telling me they were relieved I wouldn’t be sad anymore and that we were all together,” Ruano said. “But after a few days, seeing how life is — it’s nothing like Milwaukee — they started to cry. And that breaks my heart.”
As for Ruano, a huge weight was lifted off her shoulders as soon as she boarded their plane out of Milwaukee, having shed the worry of being detained by ICE.
“I traded one burden for another,” she said.
The outside of Nuestra Señora de la Paz Catholic Church, where Yessenia Ruano and her family were devoted members. (Jamie Kelter Davis for The 19th)
Now, she and Miguel have some difficult decisions to make: where to send the girls to school, how to find gainful work. “I’ve already felt that feeling again that I felt when I was young, the feeling of wanting to flee,” Ruano added.
In a video recorded shortly after taking off in Milwaukee, one of Ruano’s daughters says in the background, “Las casas parecen casas de muñecas” — the houses look just like doll houses — while the camera points to the city’s skyline.
“Adiós, Milwaukee,” Ruano then says, popping into the frame. “Es mi segunda casa, donde vine a madurar, donde vine a aprender más, a realizar mis sueños económicos y familiares.”
Goodbye, Milwaukee. This is my second home, where I came to mature, to learn, to realize my dreams financially and for my family.
A protester holds a photo of Kilmar Abrego Garcia as demonstrators gather to protest against the deportation of immigrants to El Salvador outside the Permanent Mission of El Salvador to the United Nations on April 24, 2025 in New York City. (Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)
GREENBELT, Maryland — A federal judge at a hearing Monday sought more information on the Trump administration’s plans for wrongly deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia, whose attorneys are pressing to have him transferred to Maryland from a Tennessee jail.
Abrego Garcia lived in Maryland with his wife and family before he was mistakenly deported to the notorious CECOT prison in El Salvador in March. While there, he said he was tortured, physically and psychologically, by Salvadoran officials, according to court records.
Now he is in custody in Tennessee, where he faces federal criminal charges related to human smuggling. He could be released as soon as July 16, and Maryland District Judge Paula Xinis questioned Department of Justice lawyers about their intentions for him upon his release.
Abrego Garcia’s attorneys expressed concern that once he is released, immigration officials would immediately detain the Maryland man and either quickly remove him to a third country or send him back to El Salvador by attempting to remove his earlier deportation protections.
“We do need protection from the government waking up tomorrow and upon Mr. Abrego Garcia’s release from criminal custody, (removing him) to somewhere they haven’t identified,” said Andrew J. Rossman, of Quinn Emmanuel, the firm representing Abrego Garcia in his immigration case in Maryland.
DOJ attorney Jonathan Guynn said removing Abrego Garcia to a third country is likely the path forward, but could not confirm or detail which country.
‘Jello to a wall’
Xinis set a Thursday afternoon hearing to obtain testimony from a witness who will be involved in making the decision about what will happen to Abrego Garcia.
“It’s like trying to nail jello to a wall to figure out what happens next week,” she said of Abrego Garcia’s potential release on July 16 ahead of his trial.
Xinis said until she’s clear about what steps the Trump administration will take next, she’ll hold off on issuing an order bringing Abrego Garcia back to Maryland.
During the Monday hearing, Xinis also denied the Trump administration’s two requests to dismiss the case.
DOJ lawyers argued that because Abrego Garcia was returned to the United States, the case is now moot. Xinis said the case is not moot because the “status quo” has not been fulfilled — although Abrego Garcia was returned to the U.S., he is not back in Maryland, but instead is in the custody of U.S. marshals in Tennessee.
Attorneys for Abrego Garcia made the same request last month, on an emergency basis to try to bring him back to Maryland while his criminal case continues, but Xinis denied that request as well.
At that time she referred to an answer from DOJ attorney Guynn, who said Abrego Garcia’s removal to a third country was not immediate, as part of her reasoning.
“He will be taken into (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) custody and removal proceedings will be initiated,” Guynn said June 26 of Abrego Garcia’s release. “There are no imminent plans to remove him to a third country.”
Rossman during Monday’s hearing also raised concerns that Abrego Garcia, yet again, would not receive proper due process if he is to be removed to a third country. He said Abrego Garcia must be notified where he will be sent and have time to appeal if he fears he will face harm in that country.
Xinis said while that will likely fall under an immigration judge, she does have the authority to have access to the information detailing how the Trump administration is going to remove Abrego Garcia.
Tennessee case
Abrego Garcia was returned to the U.S. from El Salvador last month to face federal criminal charges lodged in Tennessee that accuse him “of conspiracy to unlawfully transport illegal aliens for financial gain” and “unlawful transportation of illegal aliens for financial gain.”
The indictment by the Trump administration occurred while Abrego Garcia was in prison custody in El Salvador. Abrego Garcia has pleaded not guilty to the charges.
During Monday’s hearing, Xinis pressed Department of Justice attorney Bridget O’Hickey on whether the federal charges played a role in the return of Abrego Garcia to the U.S.
“He was not indicted with the purpose of bringing him back,” O’Hickey said. “He was indicted because he was under investigation.”
Xinis questioned the timing of the investigation, which began on April 21, when Abrego Garcia was in a Salvadoran prison and shortly after the Supreme Court ordered the Trump administration to facilitate his return.
O’Hickey could not give an answer on when the investigation into Abrego Garcia began, but she said that he was “under investigation prior.”
Xinis also questioned O’Hickey on the DOJ’s motion to dismiss the case entirely in May.
On May 27, the Department of Justice told Xinis that nothing could be done to return Abrego Garcia from El Salvador and therefore the case should be dismissed because of a lack of jurisdiction. But federal charges were filed on May 21.
“Why else would you file an indictment against someone you couldn’t produce?” Xinis asked O’Hickey.
O’Hickey said that negotiations with El Salvador were ongoing and that it was not clear that the indictment would mean Abrego Garcia would be released from El Salvador.
“I am aware that the proceedings were moving in tandem,” she said.
U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem delivers remarks to staff at the Department of Homeland Security headquarters on Jan. 28, 2025 in Washington, D.C. (Photo by Manuel Balce Ceneta-Pool/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON — U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem ended temporary protections Monday for nationals from Nicaragua and Honduras, opening up roughly 76,000 people to deportations by early September.
The move is the latest effort by President Donald Trump’s administration to wind down legal statuses, such as Temporary Protected Status, amid an immigration crackdown and pledge to carry out mass deportations.
So far, the Trump administration has moved to end legal statuses, including work authorizations and deportation protections, for more than half a million immigrants.
TPS has been used since the 1990s and is granted to nationals from countries deemed too dangerous to return to due to violence, natural disasters or other unstable conditions.
Roughly 72,000 Hondurans and 4,000 Nicaraguans had temporary protections since 1999 following Hurricane Mitch, a Category 5 storm that destroyed parts of Central America and killed more than 10,000 people.
“Temporary Protected Status was never meant to last a quarter of a century,” the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement.
Noem determined that conditions in Nicaragua and Honduras had improved and TPS for the two countries is no longer needed, DHS said.
“It is clear that the Government of Honduras has taken all of the necessary steps to overcome the impacts of Hurricane Mitch, almost 27 years ago,” Noem said Monday. “Honduran citizens can safely return home, and DHS is here to help facilitate their voluntary return.”
Noem has also ended TPS for nationals of Afghanistan, Cameroon, Haiti, Nepal and Venezuela.
Federal authorities detain a man after attending a court hearing at immigration court at the Jacob K. Javitz Federal Building on July 1, 2025 in New York City. (Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s massive tax and spending cut bill cleared Thursday has as its centerpiece $170 billion for the administration’s immigration crackdown, helping fulfill the president’s 2024 campaign promise of mass deportations of people without permanent legal status.
The measure, passed by the House 218-214, would fulfill several of Trump’s key immigration priorities, such as bolstering border security, increasing immigration detention capacity and adding fees to legal pathways for immigration, among other things. Thousands more Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers are slated to be hired.
While most of the immigration-related provisions in the massive bill would vastly expand immigration enforcement, it also aims to limit benefits currently extended to some immigrants with legal status.
Immigrants with a lawful status, including asylum, under the bill would be ineligible to receive food assistance through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP. Immigrants without legal status or authorization to be in the country are already ineligible for SNAP benefits, which roughly 42 million people rely on.
The bill could also cut off tax benefits from mixed-status families, in which family members have different immigration statuses.
For example, while Republicans would raise the child tax credit to $2,200 per eligible child, the bill would exclude that benefit to U.S. citizen children who are born to immigrant parents without legal status. The proposal would require that the parent applying for the child tax credit also have a Social Security number.
The 870-page megabill was passed by the Senate 51-50 on Tuesday, with Vice President JD Vance casting a tie-breaking vote.
Here’s an overview of what else the bill will do:
Immigration enforcement
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement would be the highest-funded law enforcement agency in the country, at nearly $30 billion through September 2029.
Those funds would go toward hiring 10,000 ICE officers within five years. The money would also pay for retention bonuses, transportation of immigrants, upgrades of ICE facilities, detainment of families, and the hiring of ICE immigration lawyers for enforcement and removal proceedings in immigration court.
An ICE signing bonus would be given to those hired after the bill is signed into law, and as a retention bonus if an ICE agent has five years of service specifically dealing with immigration enforcement. The bill does not specify how much a signing bonus or retention bonus should be.
The Senate’s version provides ICE with added flexibility in which areas to allocate the nearly $30 billion.
DOD funding
Separately from ICE, the bill would include $1 billion for the Department of Defense to deploy military personnel for border-related operations, construction and temporary detention on military installations.
Trump in April directed several agencies to start militarizing a stretch of the southern border as he continues to intertwine the U.S. military with his administration’s immigration crackdown.
Created was a military buffer zone along the U.S.-Mexico border in Arizona, California and New Mexico. It means that any migrant crossing into the United States would be trespassing on a military base, and therefore allows active-duty troops to hold them until U.S. Border Patrol agents arrive.
National and military experts have raised concerns that militarizing that strip of land could violate the Posse Comitatus Act, an 1878 law that generally prohibits the military from being used in domestic law enforcement.
The bill sets aside $45 billion for building new centers to detain immigrants, from single individuals to families. It’s a more than 300% increase from ICE’s fiscal year 2024 budget for detaining immigrants, which was about $9 billion.
Building new detention centers takes time, so private prison companies such as CoreCivic and GEO Group are likely to enter into more contracts with ICE.
Those companies have begun expanding detention capacity. CoreCivic last month acquired a 736-bed facility in Virginia and GEO this month purchased a 770-bed facility in western California.
Border security
The bill would allocate $46.6 billion for U.S. Customs and Border Protection to construct a wall along the U.S. Mexico border, as well as make any repairs. That would be more than three times what the first Trump administration spent on barriers at the southern border, at roughly $15 billion.
Some of the technology that would be added on the border includes cameras, lights, sensors, and other detection improvements. The funds would be used beginning in fiscal year 2025 until Sept. 30, 2029.
Another $4.1 billion would go toward hiring CBP personnel, until the end of September 2029. Another $2 billion would go toward retention and bonuses for CBP personnel.
The bill would also set aside $855 million for the repair of vehicles that CBP officers use. Republicans included $5 billion for upgrades and repairs at CBP facilities.
Additionally, $6.1 billion would go toward buying nonintrusive equipment to detect illicit narcotics at ports of entry along the southwest, northern and maritime borders.
Also, any immigrant without legal authorization and who is apprehended at a port of entry would be subject to a $5,000 fine.
There is currently a civil fine ranging from $50 to $250. Asylum-seekers typically surrender themselves at ports of entry.
Legal immigration pathways, application fees
The bill would give the Department of Justice roughly $3.3 billion for the Executive Office for Immigration Review to prosecute immigration matters, such as noncitizen voting – something that is extremely rare – and violations of the Alien Registration Act.
In April, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem announced that immigrants in the country without legal authorization were required to register with the agency or face jail time and a fine of up to $5,000.
The bill would also overhaul immigration fees and application fees for immigrants seeking legal pathways, both permanent and temporary.
For the first time, there would be a fee to apply for asylum, set at $100. There are no fee waivers for nearly every new fee set or increased by the bill, except for applications dealing with unaccompanied minors. All fees would also be subject to adjustment for inflation.
Asylum-seekers who want to apply for initial work permits would also have to pay another fee of $550, something that is currently free.
For an asylum applicant wanting to renew work permits, the bill would lower the cost to $275, where it is currently $470 to renew online and $520 to mail in the paperwork.
For immigrants on Temporary Protected Status, meaning the DHS secretary has deemed the immigrant’s home country too dangerous to return to, the fee to apply would be $500. It’s currently $50.
The fee to apply for humanitarian relief would increase to $1,000, where it is currently $630.
The bill would slightly increase the initial work application fee for TPS holders and those with humanitarian status to $550, up from a $470 fee for submitting online and $520 to mail in the paperwork.
To renew those work permits, the bill would lower the cost to $275, down from $470 for online and $520 for mail.
The nonimmigrant visa, which is currently free and handled by the State Department, would now cost $250 under the bill. This visa is typically used for international students, agricultural workers and other special skilled immigrant labor.
Unaccompanied immigrant children
Some of the $2 billion in funding for DHS would go toward removing unaccompanied children under certain circumstances. That includes if the child is found by a port of entry, is not a victim of human trafficking, and does not fear returning to their home country.
The bill would also provide a $300 million fund for the Office of Refugee Resettlement, which handles unaccompanied children, to conduct background checks and home studies on any potential sponsor of an unaccompanied child.
There would also be funding to check children in ORR custody for their potential criminal and gang history. Those 12 and older would be subject to examinations “for gang-related tattoos and other gang-related markings,” according to the bill.
The special juvenile immigrant visa, which is for immigrant children who are either abandoned or abused by a parent, and allows them to apply for lawful permanent resident status, would now cost $250 under the bill, but the fee could be waived. It’s currently free.
State grants, World Cup and Olympics
The bill would also give some states $450 million for the Operation Stonegarden Grant Program, which gives funding to states and local governments that participate in border enforcement.
The bill would help states that are hosting major sporting events such as the World Cup in 2026 and the Olympics in 2028.
The bill allocates $625 million for security and other costs related to the FIFA World Cup and $1 billion for security and planning costs for the Olympics, which Los Angeles is hosting in 2028.
Prison officers stand guard at a cell block at the Salvadoran mega-prison Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, or CECOT, on April 4, 2025. (Photo by Alex Peña/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON — Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was wrongly deported in March to a notorious mega-prison in El Salvador, endured “severe beatings, severe sleep deprivation, inadequate nutrition, and psychological torture” while there, his attorneys wrote in a late Wednesday filing.
The filing, an amended complaint to the District Court of Maryland, provides the first disturbing details of what Abrego Garcia experienced at Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, or CECOT.
His wrongful deportation has become the most high-profile example of the conflict between the Trump administration’s aggressive mass deportations campaign and the judiciary’s call for the due process rights of immigrants.
The allegations of torture also raise questions about the U.S. State Department’s payment to El Salvador of up to $15 million to detain about 300 immigrant men at CECOT, a possible violation of the human rights law known as the Leahy Law.
The law bars State’s financial support of “units of foreign security forces” — such as military and law enforcement staff in prisons — facing credible allegations of gross human rights violations.
Hit with batons, forced to kneel for hours
When Abrego Garcia first arrived to CECOT, he was told by a prison official, “Welcome to CECOT. Whoever enters here doesn’t leave,” according to the filing from lawyers with Quinn Emmanuel, the firm representing Abrego Garcia in his immigration case.
Abrego Garcia was later kicked, hit with wooden batons and beaten by Salvadoran guards on his first day at CECOT on March 15, according to the new filing.
“By the following day, Plaintiff Abrego Garcia had visible bruises and lumps all over his body,” according to the complaint.
While in a cell, Abrego Garcia and 20 other incarcerated Salvadorans were forced to kneel from 9 p.m. to 6 a.m. and guards would strike “anyone who fell from exhaustion,” according to the filing. During that time, Abrego Garcia was denied access to a bathroom and soiled himself.
“The detainees were confined to metal bunks with no mattresses in an overcrowded cell with no windows, bright lights that remained on 24 hours a day, and minimal access to sanitation,” according to the complaint.
At CECOT, the guards would threaten to put Abrego Garcia in cells with gang members “who, they assured him, would ‘tear’ him apart,” according to the filing. Abrego Garcia’s lawyers have denied he is a gang member.
During his first two weeks at CECOT, Abrego Garcia’s health deteriorated, and he lost 31 pounds, his attorneys said.
Transfers to two more facilities
On April 9, Abrego Garcia and four others were transferred to a different sector in CECOT, “where they were photographed with mattresses and better food—photos that appeared to be staged to document improved conditions,” according to his attorneys.
Around April 10, he was later transferred alone to a separate prison facility in Santa Ana, El Salvador. On April 10, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Trump administration must “facilitate” the return of Abrego Garcia — who had deportation protections from his home country of El Salvador since 2019.
But for months, the Trump administration has argued that Abrego Garcia is in the custody of El Salvador, and the United States could not force El Salvador to return him.
At the new location, Abrego Garcia “was frequently hidden from visitors, being told to remain in a separate room whenever outside visitors came to the facility,” according to the filing.
“During his entire time in detention in El Salvador, Plaintiff Abrego Garcia was denied any communication with his family and access to counsel until Senator (Chris) Van Hollen visited him on April 17, 2025,” according to the brief.
The Maryland Democrat traveled to El Salvador in an effort to bring back Abrego Garcia, who is a longtime Maryland resident.
Criminal charges
While Abrego Garica was returned to the U.S. last month, it was to face federal criminal charges lodged in Tennessee while he was detained in El Salvador. His attorneys have denied the charges of human smuggling and say they are nothing more than the Trump administration trying to save face.
Abrego Garcia’s criminal case is being handled out of a Tennessee court and he’s being kept in jail due to fears Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers will deport him.
Department of Justice attorneys stated in the District Court of Maryland last week that the Trump administration plans to remove Abrego Garcia to a third country, but said the move was not immediate.
Attorneys for Abrego Garcia are trying to move forward with discovery to determine if the Trump administration flouted the district court’s order and the Supreme Court’s order in refusing to return Abrego Garcia to the U.S. after the Trump administration admitted his deportation was a mistake.
“Defendants’ disdain for the law and legal process, and their cruelty, shocks the conscience and demands immediate, sustained, judicial relief and oversight,” according to the complaint. “It also marks a profound constitutional crisis in which executive agencies have repeatedly and deliberately flouted the authority of multiple federal courts—including the Supreme Court itself.”
“This defiance undermines the foundational principles of our constitutional system by eroding the checks and balances and rule of law that protect individual liberty from government overreach,” the attorneys continued.
Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., right, meets with Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland resident who was erroneously deported to El Salvador by ICE agents. (Photo courtesy Van Hollen's office)
This report has been updated.
GREENBELT, Maryland — The Trump administration plans to deport Kilmar Abrego Garcia to a third country once he is released from federal custody, a Department of Justice attorney disclosed during a Thursday emergency court hearing.
Attorneys for the unlawfully deported Abrego Garcia had made an emergency request Thursday to bring him back to Maryland while his criminal case continues.
The move by the lawyers followed earlier public statements from Trump administration officials that they would deport Abrego Garcia to El Salvador upon his release from a Tennessee federal court as soon as Friday. But Thursday, plans appeared to have shifted to deportation somewhere else.
DOJ attorney Jonathan Guynn, under questioning by District of Maryland Judge Paula Xinis, said the Trump administration planned to deport Abrego Garcia, and “to a third country is my understanding.”
“He will be taken into (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) custody and removal proceedings will be initiated,” Guynn said of Abrego Garcia’s release. “There are no imminent plans to remove him to a third country.”
Xinis declined the request to return him to Maryland, arguing that Abrego Garcia has not been released and that she’s not clear if she has the jurisdiction to fulfill such a request.
She added that Guynn said the U.S. Department of Homeland Security does not have “imminent plans” to deport Abrego Garcia to a third country, while holding out that possibility.
The Supreme Court this week, ruled that it will allow, for now, the Trump administration to continue carrying out deportations to third countries, after a Massachusetts judge barred removals without proper notice. In such cases, immigrants are deported to countries that are not their native countries and may be far from them.
Jonathan Cooper, a partner of Quinn Emmanuel, the firm representing Abrego Garcia in his immigration case, tried to ask Xinis if she would require the Trump administration to notify Cooper and his team before deporting him to a third country.
“We have concerns that the government may try to move Mr. Abrego Garcia quickly over the weekend,” Cooper said.
Xinis said she would not because Guynn said that the Trump administration had no “imminent plans” to remove Abrego Garcia.
Cooper laid out the same concerns in the written emergency request to Xinis Thursday.
“The Government’s public statements leave little doubt about its plan: remove Abrego Garcia to El Salvador once more,” according to the complaint written by attorneys from Quinn Emmanuel.
“If this Court does not act swiftly, then the Government is likely to whisk Abrego Garcia away to some place far from Maryland,” it says.
Federal prosecutors in Tennessee court have said that should Abrego Garcia be released, he would be immediately arrested by ICE agents and could face deportation back to El Salvador, despite having protections from such removal since 2019.
Tennessee case
Abrego Garcia was returned from El Salvador earlier this month to the United States to face federal criminal charges lodged in Tennessee that accuse him “of conspiracy to unlawfully transport illegal aliens for financial gain” and “unlawful transportation of illegal aliens for financial gain.”
The indictment occurred while Abrego Garcia was housed in a Salvadoran prison.
The human smuggling charges stem from a 2022 traffic stop in Tennessee when police pulled Abrego Garcia over for speeding. Eight other men were in the car, but neither Abrego Garcia nor the passengers were arrested.
DHS opened an investigation into the three-year-old stop and Attorney General Pam Bondi held a press conference on the day Abrego Garcia was returned to the U.S. to face federal charges.
She argued that the traffic stop was part of a years-long human smuggling scheme where Abrego Garcia was paid by members of the MS-13 gang to transport migrants who entered the country without legal authorization to destinations across the country.
His attorneys have denied the charges and Abrego Garcia pleaded not guilty in federal court in Nashville.
Stephen Miller, the chief architect of many of the president’s immigration policies and a senior White House adviser, has written on social media that Abrego Garcia would be deported back to El Salvador if released. Abrego Garcia’s attorneys have pointed to that statement as to why they want him brought back to Maryland.
The Trump administration has alleged that Abrego Garcia is a leader of the MS-13 gang, and President Donald Trump has made those same allegations. During an interview, the president held up a photo of Abrego Garcia’s knuckles that were digitally altered to type MS-13 on his fingers.
House Democrats pressed DHS Secretary Kristi Noem in May about the doctored photo and she sidestepped questions about whether the photo was real, until she eventually said she was unaware it existed.
She added that even if Abrego Garcia was returned to the U.S. that he would be immediately deported.
Maryland arguments
In Maryland, Abrego Garcia’s lawyers said in their complaint they want to ensure he is not deported again.
“This motion does not ask this Court to adjudicate Abrego Garcia’s custodial status in the Tennessee criminal proceedings; that is for the Tennessee district court to resolve,” they wrote.
“Nor does this motion seek to alter any of the conditions of release set by the Tennessee district court or otherwise interfere with the Tennessee criminal proceedings. This motion simply seeks to ensure that when Abrego Garcia is released from criminal custody, he returns to, and remains in, this District (other than to travel to Tennessee as needed), until further order from this Court.”
Abrego Garcia lives with his family in Maryland. “Maryland is where he was on March 12 at the moment his unlawful removal saga began, when ICE agents with ‘no warrant for his arrest and no lawful basis’ arrested him and locked him up at an ‘ICE facility in Baltimore, Maryland,’” the complaint said.
“Returning Abrego Garcia to Maryland implements the Supreme Court’s directive and safeguards this Court’s jurisdiction in this matter,” it added.
Clashes between administration and judges
Abrego Garcia’s wrongful deportation drew national attention to the Trump administration’s aggressive mass deportations campaign that some judges have found skirted due process rights for immigrants. The White House has clashed with the judicial branch with some frequency over immigration decisions.
The Trump administration this week has, in an unusual move, sued the entire judicial bench of the District Court of Maryland, including Xinis, over a standing order to require a two-day pause for deportations due to a high volume of habeas corpus claims from immigrants challenging their detention in the state. A habeas corpus claim allows immigrants to challenge their detention.
Abrego Garcia has had deportation protections from his home country since 2019, but in March he was arrested in Maryland by federal immigration officials while driving his son home and informed his status had changed. Days later, he was deported to a notorious prison in El Salvador, a move the Trump administration admitted was a mistake.
In April, the Supreme Court ruled that the Trump administration had to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return to the United States, but stopped short of requiring it.
For the next two months, administration officials would testify in a Maryland court that Abrego Garcia’s return was out of their hands and up to the government of El Salvador.
Xinis has accused the Trump administration of stonewalling information and is allowing for discovery in the civil case to continue to determine if the Trump administration violated her court order to return Abrego Garcia.
Immigration officials questioned and detained contractors working on apartment buildings in Tallahassee, Fla., on May 29. Construction employs more immigrant laborers, many likely living here illegally, than any other industry, and the industry is starting to draw more attention — even in conservative states — as the Trump administration pushes for more deportations. (Photo by Jay Waagmeester/Florida Phoenix)
As President Donald Trump sends mixed messages about immigration enforcement, ordering new raids on farms and hotels just days after saying he wouldn’t target those industries, he has hardly mentioned the industry that employs the most immigrant laborers: construction.
Nevertheless, the Trump administration is going after construction workers without legal status to meet its mass deportation goals — even as the country has a housing shortage and needs new homes built. A shortage of workers has delayed or prevented construction, causing billions of dollars in economic damage, according to a June report from the Home Builders Institute.
Almost a quarter of all immigrants without a college degree work in construction, a total of 2.2 million workers as of last month, before work site raids began in earnest. That’s more than the next three industries combined: restaurants (1.1 million), janitorial and other cleaning services (526,000) and landscaping (454,000), according to a Stateline analysis of federal Current Population Survey data provided by ipums.org at the University of Minnesota.
Within the construction industry, immigrant workers are now a majority of painters and roofers (both 53%) and comprise more than two-thirds of plasterers and stucco masons. U.S. citizens in construction are more likely to work as managers and as skilled workers, such as carpenters.
Many immigrant workers are likely living here illegally, although there are some working legally as refugees or parolees, and others are asylum-seekers waiting for court dates. There’s also a small number of legal visas for temporary farmworkers, construction workers and others.
The pool of immigrant workers Stateline analyzed were employed noncitizens ages 18-65 without a college degree, screening out temporary workers with high-skill visas.
About half of the immigrant laborers in construction are working in Southern states, including conservative-leaning Florida, North Carolina and Texas, where there is more building going on, according to the Stateline analysis. Another 584,000, or one-quarter, are in Western states, including Arizona, California and Nevada.
In recent months, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, better known as ICE, has conducted construction worksite raids in Florida in Tallahassee and near Ocala, and in South Texas and New Orleans, as well as more immigrant-friendly California and Pennsylvania.
Roofers are right out there where you can see them.
– Sergio Barajas, executive director of the National Hispanic Construction Alliance
Roofers may have been the first targeted by new workplace raids because of their visibility, said Sergio Barajas, executive director of the National Hispanic Construction Alliance, a California-based advocacy group with chapters in five other states.
“That’s the first place we heard about it. Roofers are right out there where you can see them,” Barajas said. He added that all segments of construction work have been targeted for ICE raids, and that even some legal workers are not showing up for work out of fear.
“Six or eight weeks ago, I would have said we weren’t affected at all. Now we are. There’s a substantial reduction in the number of workers who are showing up, so crews are 30%, 40% smaller than they used to be,” Barajas said.
In residential construction, a system of contractors and subcontractors opens the door to abuses, said Enrique Lopezlira, director of the Low-Wage Work Program at the University of California, Berkeley Labor Center. Lopezlira said contractors hire workers, often immigrant laborers, for low-wage jobs and pay them in cash, to save money on benefits and make the lowest possible bid for projects.
“It becomes a blame game. The developers can say, ‘I hired this contractor and I thought he was above board and paying people a decent wage.’ And the contractors can say, ‘I rely on subcontractors,’” said Lopezlira. “It becomes a race to the bottom.”
In many places, residential construction draws more immigrant labor because of looser state and local regulations and lower pay. But in some states with weaker unions and rules that are less strict, such as Texas, the commercial construction industry also employs many immigrants who are here illegally.
Commercial construction labor costs are 40% lower in Texas than they are in large Northeastern cities where unions are more powerful, said David Kelly, a lecturer in civil and environmental engineering at the University of Michigan.
“The large difference [in cost] suggests workers and their employers in some regions are not paying for income taxes, overtime, Social Security or unemployment insurance,” Kelly said in an email. “Since undocumented workers have limited employment options they may be more willing than others to accept these conditions.”
Despite political claims that Democratic policies result in immigrants taking jobs others need, noncitizen immigrant laborers were about 7% of jobholders nationally as of May — about the same as 2015, according to the Stateline analysis.
That share has hardly budged over the past 10 years, including in 2019 under the first Trump administration, dipping to 6% only in 2020 and 2021.
In construction, however, the share of jobs held by immigrant laborers has increased from 19% in 2015 to 22% in 2024, according to the analysis. Immigrant laborers have gotten more than a third of the 1.5 million jobs added between 2015 and 2024, as home construction reached historic levels.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated with the full name of the University of California, Berkeley Labor Center and to clarify David Kelly’s remarks on regional labor costs. Stateline reporter Tim Henderson can be reached at thenderson@stateline.org.
Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org.
Workers moving equipment and road signs on a highway. (Getty Images)
A Rhode Island federal judge seemed likely Wednesday to block the U.S. Department of Transportation’s move to yank billions in congressional funding for bridges, roads and airport projects if Democrat-led states do not partake in federal immigration enforcement.
U.S. District Judge John James McConnell Jr. during a hearing pressed acting U.S. Attorney Sara Miron Bloom on how the Transportation Department could have power over funding that was approved by Congress, saying federal agencies “only have appropriations power given by Congress.”
“That’s how the Constitution works,” he said. “Where does the secretary get the power and authority to impose immigration conditions on transportation funding?”
The suit brought by 20 Democratic state attorneys general challenges an April directive from Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, a former House member from Wisconsin, that requires states to cooperate in federal immigration enforcement in order to receive federal grants already approved by Congress.
“Defendents seek to hold hostage tens of billions of dollars of critical transportation funding in order to force the plaintiff states to become mere arms of the federal government’s immigration enforcement policies,” Delbert Tran of the California Department of Justice, who argued on behalf of the states, said.
Arguing on behalf of the Trump administration, Bloom said that Duffy’s letter simply directs the states to follow federal immigration law.
McConnell, who was appointed by former President Barack Obama in 2011, said that while the states could interpret it that way, the Trump administration has gone after so-called sanctuary cities and targeted them for not taking the same aggressive immigration enforcement as the administration.
The judge said Bloom’s argument expressed a “very different” interpretation of the directive than how the administration has described it publicly. He also noted President Donald Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem have “railed on … the issues that arise from sanctuary cities.”
Trump this week directed U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to target Chicago, Los Angeles and New York — three major Democrat-led cities that have policies to not aid in immigration enforcement.
McConnell said he would make a decision whether to issue a preliminary injunction before Friday. The preliminary injunction would be tailored to the states that brought the suit and would not have a nationwide effect.
The states that brought the suit are California, Illinois, New Jersey, Rhode Island, Maryland, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Vermont, Washington and Wisconsin.
Undermines Congress
Tran said the Department of Transportation’s directive is not only arbitrary and capricious, but undermines congressional authority because Congress appropriated more than $100 billion for transportation projects to the states.
Cutting off funding would have disastrous consequences, the states have argued.
“More cars, planes, and trains will crash, and more people will die as a result, if Defendants cut off federal funding to Plaintiff States,” according to the brief from the states.
Transportation security and immigration
Bloom defended Duffy’s letter, saying it listed actions that would impede federal law enforcement and justified withholding of funds because “such actions compromise the safety and security of the transportation systems supported by DOT financial assistance.”
McConnell said that didn’t answer his question about the secretary’s authority to withhold congressionally appropriated funding.
“It seems to me that the secretary is saying that a failure to comply with immigration conditions is relevant to the safety and security of the transportation system,” Bloom said.
McConnell seemed skeptical of that argument.
“Under that rationale, does the secretary of the Department of Transportation have the authority to impose a condition on federal highway funds that prohibit a state that has legalized abortion from seeking a federal grant?” he asked.
Bloom said that question was beyond her directive from the Department of Transportation to address in her arguments to the court.
“I understand your question,” she said. “All I think I can say is that here the secretary has, in his statement, set out a rationale for why this is relevant to DOT funding.”
Tran said that the “crux of this case is” that the Trump administration is trying “to enforce other laws that do not apply to these grants,” by requiring states to partake in immigration enforcement.
“It’s beyond their statutory authority,” he argued.
U.S. Sen. James Lankford, an Oklahoma Republican, speaks to reporters on Feb. 6, 2024. (Photo by Jennifer Shutt/States Newsroom)
WASHINGTON — Members of a Senate Homeland and Governmental Affairs Committee panel Tuesday probed witnesses about how the federal government can ensure public safety at major international sporting events such as the Olympics and World Cup.
The hearing came at the same time as protests in Los Angeles over the administration’s immigration crackdown and shortly after President Donald Trump announced his travel ban.
While athletes, coaches and other staff are exempt from the travel ban, it’s unclear how fans wanting to support their home countries will fare.
Nationals from 12 countries face travel bans – Afghanistan, Burma, Chad, Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen. Iran is the only country from that list to qualify in the World Cup this year.
Citizens from seven countries have partial restrictions – Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan and Venezuela.
Senators, like the head of the panel, James Lankford, were concerned about visa wait times for international visitors wanting to attend the World Cup, which starts Thursday in Miami, Florida.
“While I’m confident there has been a lot of preparation, I am concerned we are getting a late start,” the Oklahoma Republican said.
Senators on the Border Management, Federal Workforce and Regulatory Affairs Subcommittee also raised concerns about drones and said local and federal partnerships can help in hosting sporting events to avoid terrorism threats, such as the New Year’s Day attack on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, Louisiana.
One of the witnesses, Gina Ligon, leads the Department of Homeland Security’s Academic Center of Excellence for Counterterrorism Research at the University of Nebraska. She said the attacker in New Orleans used artificial intelligence through Meta smart glasses to scope out the location before the attack that killed 14 people and injured dozens.
“The threats we observed in the New Orleans attack remain a very real concern that needs significant planning and resourcing given the spread of crowds before, during, and after these events,” she said.
Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman, the top Democrat on the panel, said hosting international sporting events is “an incredible opportunity to show the best of America to visitors.”
Los Angeles and the Olympics
Two GOP senators, Ashley Moody of Florida and Bernie Moreno of Ohio, questioned how LA would be capable of handling the Olympics in 2028, given the ongoing protests sparked after federal immigration officials raided several Home Depots across Los Angeles looking for people in the country without legal authorization.
In response, Trump has deployed 4,000 National Guard troops – without California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s authority – and 700 Marines to LA.
One of the witnesses, CEO of the LA28 Olympic and Paralympic Games Reynold Hoover, said local and state officials in California were capable of handling the Olympics and working with the federal government for security measures.
“There’s no place in the world like LA to host the world’s largest Olympics ever,” Hoover said. “I am confident, come July 14 of 2028, when we do the opening ceremony in the Coliseum and the stadium in Inglewood, the world will be watching and see America at its best.”
Hoover said that hosting the Olympics will be the equivalent of holding seven Superbowls for 30 days straight with more than 11,000 Olympic athletes and more than 4,400 paralympic athletes.
Drones and the Olympics
Democratic Sens. Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire and Fetterman raised concerns about drones getting too close to sporting events.
Hassan said while the federal government has taken steps to address private drones, she asked Hoover how he was preparing to address any drone issues for the 2028 Olympics.
Hoover said that “tools to include counter (unmanned aircraft systems) drone technology remain key priorities for our ongoing collaboration with our federal, state and local partners.” He added that coordinating with the Secret Service has been helpful in dealing with unmanned drones.
Ligon said she has seen drones being used near global sporting events.
“Malign actors can now more easily acquire, build, or customize drones at lower costs, with extended ranges, higher speeds, and greater payload capacities,” she said.
A protester holds a photo of Maryland man Kilmar Abrego Garcia as demonstrators gather to protest against the deportation of immigrants to El Salvador outside the Permanent Mission of El Salvador to the United Nations on April 24, 2025. (Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON — Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man wrongly deported to his native El Salvador three months ago, was brought back to the U.S. on Friday and will face federal charges, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi said.
Abrego Garcia’s case had become a flashpoint in a debate over what due process rights protect immigrants from deportation after federal officials conceded he was sent to a notorious El Salvador mega-prison because of an administrative error.
Still, President Donald Trump, El Salvador President Nayib Bukele, Bondi and other administration officials said for months Abrego Garcia could not be released because of criminal conduct they had not publicly produced evidence of.
In a gaggle with reporters on Air Force One Friday night, Trump declined to say whether it was his decision to bring Abrego Garcia back to the U.S., according to White House pool reports.
“He should have never had to be returned,” Trump said. “It’s a disaster.”
Bondi said Friday a federal warrant for Abrego Garcia’s arrest on human trafficking charges compelled his release from the Salvadoran prison system.
“Abrego Garcia has landed in the United States to face justice,” Bondi said at a Department of Justice news conference Friday afternoon. “He was a smuggler of humans and women and children.”
The 10-page indictment filed in the Middle District of Tennessee comes after a federal grand jury indicted him on May 21 for allegedly transporting migrants in the U.S. without legal authorization within the country.
Chris Newman, an attorney representing the Abrego Garcia family said at a virtual press event Friday that he remained skeptical of the federal charges lodged at Abrego Garcia.
“I can tell you that we should all treat whatever charges that are being leveled against him with a high degree of suspicion,” Newman said. “We should make sure that he gets a fair (trial) in court because he’s clearly not getting a fair hearing in the court of public opinion.”
Bondi did not detail when the investigation into Abrego Garcia began, but said the federal indictment charges contained “recently found facts.”
“This is what American justice looks like upon completion of his sentence, we anticipate he will be returned to his home country of El Salvador,” Bondi said.
WKRN in Nashville said Abrego Garcia’s arraignment has been scheduled for 10 a.m. Friday.
Outcry over due process
Abrego Garcia’s wrongful deportation to the notorious mega-prison Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, or CECOT, drew national outcry as the Trump administration clashed with a federal court that ordered the return of the Beltsville man and resisted the U.S. Supreme Court’s order to “facilitate” his return.
Despite the orders, Trump administration officials did not appear to take any public steps to secure Abrego Garcia’s release, and at times seemed to relish their defiance of the courts.
Bondi thanked El Salvador’s government Friday for releasing Abrego Garcia in compliance with the warrant.
The Trump administration has argued in federal court in Maryland for months that Abrego Garcia is in the custody of El Salvador and therefore cannot be returned, despite a $15 million agreement between the U.S. and the Salvadoran government to keep roughly 300 men removed from the U.S. and detained at CECOT. Abrego Garcia had been moved to a different El Salvador prison prior to his release.
He was pulled over by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in March and informed that his immigration status had changed. He was later placed on one of three deportation flights on March 15 to CECOT.
The Trump administration admitted his removal was an “administrative error” but has since alleged that Abrego Garcia was a leader in the MS-13 gang without producing evidence in the federal civil court overseeing the suit challenging his removal.
Maryland U.S. Sen. Chris Van Hollen, who traveled to El Salvador to press for Abrego Garcia’s release and return to the U.S., welcomed the news as a victory for due process rights.
“As I have repeatedly said, this is not about the man, it’s about his constitutional rights – and the rights of all,” the Maryland Democrat said in a statement. “The Administration will now have to make its case in the court of law, as it should have all along.”
U.S. Rep. Glenn Ivey, a Maryland Democrat who represents the district where Kilmar Abrego Garcia and his wife live, led the chant “bring him home” outside the U.S. District Court in Greenbelt before a hearing in Abrego Garcia’s case last month. (Photo by Ariana Figueroa/States Newsroom)
WASHINGTON — The Maryland federal judge overseeing the lawsuit concerning the wrongly deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia unsealed documents Wednesday that the Trump administration had asked to keep unavailable to the public under the so-called state secrets privilege.
The order from U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis unsealed three documents that she said did not contain any privileged information. Xinis questioned the Trump administration’s broad use of the privilege during a hearing last month.
The request to unseal the documents came from a coalition of news organizations, arguing First Amendment rights and the public’s right to information in a case that has become a flashpoint between the judiciary branch and the Trump administration.
“The Press Movants rightly contend that, at common law, the public enjoys a presumptive right to access court records, overcome only when outweighed by competing interests,” Xinis wrote Wednesday.
President Donald Trump has said Abrego Garcia, who was removed in March due to an “administrative error,” will not return to the U.S. and Department of Justice attorneys on behalf of the Trump administration have argued in court that the Maryland man is in the custody of El Salvador and the federal government has no authority to bring him back.
In a separate case of another wrongly deported immigrant to El Salvador, the Department of Justice submitted a document detailing that Secretary of State Marco Rubio was personally working with the Salvadoran government to return a 20-year-old referred to in court documents as only “Cristian,” after another federal judge ordered his return.
Discovery documents
Some of the filings that were unsealed Wednesday had been public until the Trump administration moved to seal them.
One unsealed record related to an April discovery request Abrego Garcia’s attorneys made to the government seeking information about how the administration was facilitating Abrego Garcia’s return from El Salvador. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled the Trump administration must facilitate the Maryland man’s return, but stopped short of requiring it.
Another document related to the Trump administration’s request for more time in discovery proceedings.
“It does not disclose any potentially privileged or otherwise sensitive information for which a compelling government interest outweighs the right to access,” Xinis wrote.
One document was partially redacted, because it “includes some information potentially implicated by the state secrets privilege,” Xinis wrote.
The document, signed by Abrego Garcia attorney Jonathan G. Cooper, objected to the Trump administration’s attempt to pause discovery. The government had argued that complying with discovery in the lawsuit would hinder efforts to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return.
“As we explained to the government, in our meet-and-confer, we do not understand why the production of documents or interrogatory responses — none of which has occurred in the public eye — has any bearing on efforts to facilitate Mr. Abrego Garcia’s release and return,” Cooper wrote in the partially redacted document unsealed Wednesday.
A fourth document, a transcript from a late April hearing, will be released but redacted until the high-profile case is settled, Xinis wrote.
“Although the Court does not wholly agree with the Defendants’ overbroad characterizations of the government interests at stake, the Court does recognize that certain information touches upon Defendants’ asserted state secrets privilege as applied to Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the State Department,” she wrote about the partially redacted transcript.
The U.S. Supreme Court, on Oct. 9, 2024. (Photo by Jane Norman/States Newsroom)
WASHINGTON — The U.S. Supreme Court Friday said it will allow the Trump administration to remove deportation protections for more than 500,000 nationals from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela who were given permission to temporarily remain and work in the United States by the Biden administration.
The move by the high court — which permits the deportations while a lawsuit continues to work its way through the courts — came after a district court in Massachusetts in April blocked the Trump administration from ending the Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela, or CHNV, program for 532,000 people.
It’s the second decision by the Supreme Court this month stripping immigrants of some form of temporary legal protections, affecting more than 800,000 people in the country without permanent legal status who are now subject to swift deportation.
On May 19, the Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to end Temporary Protected Status for 350,000 Venezuelans who were granted the protection from deportation because their home country was deemed too unstable to return to due to the political regime.
Department of Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin welcomed the ruling.
“Ending the CHNV parole programs, as well as the paroles of those who exploited it, will be a necessary return to common-sense policies, a return to public safety, and a return to America First,” she said in a statement.
Todd Schulte, the president of the immigration advocacy group FWD.us, said in a statement that the high court’s decision “penalizes half a million people for complying with our immigration laws.”
“This decision will have devastating and immediate consequences, and is part of a broader attempt by the executive branch to justify further immigration enforcement crackdowns against families across the country,” Schulte said. “The government failed to show any harm remotely comparable to that which will come from a half million people losing their jobs and becoming subject to deportation.”
In the emergency filing to the high court in Friday’s case, Solicitor General D. John Sauer argued that the Immigration Nationality Act bars judicial review of discretionary decisions, such as what is called humanitarian parole, for the CHNV program.
He added that Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem terminated the program because it does not align with the interests of the Trump administration.
Liberal justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented.
“The Court has plainly botched this assessment today,” Jackson wrote in her dissent. “It undervalues the devastating consequences of allowing the Government to precipitously upend the lives and livelihoods of nearly half a million noncitizens while their legal claims are pending.”
She argued that the Trump administration did not prove it would be harmed by the preliminary injunction. An appeals court previously rejected the government’s request to put the lower court’s order on hold.
“While it is apparent that the Government seeks a stay to enable it to inflict maximum predecision damage, court-ordered stays exist to minimize—not maximize—harm to litigating parties,” Jackson wrote.
President Joe Biden created the CHNV program in 2023. It temporarily granted work permits and allowed thousands of nationals from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela to remain in the country if they were sponsored by someone in the United States and passed a background check.
MILWAUKEE — When Yessenia Ruano walks through the door of her home after work, her husband, Miguel, is in the kitchen, shredding chicken with two forks, and her twin daughters are in the living room, playing on an iPad. The sound of “Primer Impacto” fills the background.
Ruano opens the fridge to keep the dinner prep going. On the top shelf, there are more than 150 corn tortillas lying flat in their plastic bags. On the bar counter, near unopened mail and trinkets, is a pack of zinnia seeds waiting for the last frost to pass before Yessenia and the girls plant them in the patio across the driveway.
This doesn’t look like the home of a family on the verge of being uprooted, until Ruano and her husband — one rolling chicken into tortillas over hot oil, the other tending to a pile of dishes on the sink — start talking about the questions suddenly pressing on their everyday lives.
Ruano prepares lunch for her 9-year-old twin daughters at home on April 6. (Jamie Kelter Davis for The 19th)
In February, during a check-in with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an agent told Ruano that the government would accelerate plans to deport her. Save for a change in her immigration status, the agent said, she should report back to ICE in two months with a plane ticket back to El Salvador set for 50 days out.
It’s April now; her next appointment with ICE is coming up in just a few weeks. “She said I should buy just one plane ticket,” Ruano, 38, tells her husband, recalling a conversation with a colleague at the local public school where she works. Her colleague reasoned that if Ruano bought a fare for everyone in the family and her deportation was averted, they’d be throwing a lot of money in the trash.
“I’ve always thought we should buy four tickets,” Miguel tells her, hunched over the sink. A few months ago, Ruano went on a ladies’ retreat with her church for two nights and left him and their two children to fend for themselves. The girls cried and cried and barely slept. Their dog — a fluffy, white Bichon Frisé who was named Snowflake before the family adopted him and is now named Copito, short for snowflake in Spanish — barely ate.
Ruano agrees that the family should stay together, but most days, she’s convinced they’ll never use any of the plane tickets in question. Ruano, for 14 years, has clung onto hope that the immigration powers that be will eventually see that she belongs in the United States. She has checked in with ICE 17 times, worn a GPS monitor. She’s also built the life she shares with her husband and their Milwaukee-born daughters, a job at a local school and volunteer work at her local Catholic parish.
Through it all, she has searched for ways to create roots in the United States. Recently, she petitioned for a visa created for human trafficking victims, based on her experience of forced labor when she first entered the country. That petition is stuck in the growing backlog at the agency that handles visa applications, one that has accelerated since the start of the Trump administration.
“Of course, practically speaking, they can do whatever they want,” Ruano says. “If they’re a little human, then I can prove I belong here. If they just care about detaining people to meet a certain quota and deport them — if I’m just another number — then I can already hear them saying, ‘Ma’am, I don’t care about your case. We’re so sorry, but we’re going to send you back to your country.’”
Yessenia Ruano speaks with people after her appointment at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office on April 15, 2025, in Milwaukee. (Jamie Kelter Davis for The 19th)
Ruano is among the millions of immigrants living in the United States who are facing deportation as the Trump administration ramps up the removal of people with no permanent immigration status. That includes immigrants who, like Ruano, have been in the country for more than a decade and have no criminal record, and whose ties to the country include young children — some of them U.S. citizens — and also careers and community.
Ruano’s precarious situation isn’t entirely the product of Trump-era policies. Like millions of immigrants living in the United States, she entered the country at the southern border, lured by the promise of safety and stability. Like thousands of others, she asked for asylum and was allowed to stay as she waited for a resolution on her petition, as long as she followed the law. Even after her petition was unsuccessful, the U.S. government allowed her to remain in the country provided that she checked in regularly with immigration officials.
Yessenia Ruano speaks to her attorney, Marc Christopher, outside the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office before going into her appointment on April 15, 2025, in Milwaukee. (Jamie Kelter Davis for The 19th)
Under the United States’ broken immigration system, one in which laws that haven’t been updated in decades no longer align with the reality of immigration patterns, the country’s reliance on the immigrant labor force or even the government’s ability to enforce such laws, immigrants like Ruano have always lived at the discretion — at the whim — of whoever is in power, from the president down to the ICE officer who is looking at their case that day.
When President Donald Trump was inaugurated in January, that dynamic changed again, fueled by an agenda that seems to be taking shape day by day.
Ruano remains in this limbo, bracing for her life to be upended while fighting for a different outcome. She follows the countless news stories about people who are in ICE detention, or who have been swiftly deported back to their home countries. Hundreds of thousands more are living just like her, navigating the shifting sands of American immigration policy.
Ruano’s day usually starts early, and by 6:15 a.m., her daughters Paola and Eli, 9, are in the dining room, ready for their mom to brush their hair. Back in El Salvador, Ruano didn’t think she would ever have children. The world seemed dangerous and broken, and life was expensive. “With the cost of living, I always thought, how?” she said one morning while brushing Eli’s hair and finishing it with a braid.
Ruano and her husband went to high school together in El Salvador and reconnected again in Milwaukee at the frozen pizza manufacturing plant where they both worked. Eventually, they started dreaming of growing their family. Soon there were four of them. Juggling two babies was hard, but they both landed steady work and were able to buy the duplex they live in, an older home they’ve improved slowly. Here, they are watching Eli and Paola thrive.
On a school morning, Yessenia Ruano gets her daughter Paola ready for the day in Milwaukee on April 15, 2025. (Jamie Kelter Davis for The 19th)
Eli loves art. She loves to take clay-like dirt from the backyard and shape it. In their living room, Ruano points to a little bowl made of coiled clay, brown and crumbly and beautiful. A bucket holds dozens of small figurines made with air-dry clay, detailed and complex.
Paola is much more interested in building with Legos, and Ruano says proudly that she is ahead of her peers in math. Barely older than her sister, Paola has also taken on a caretaking role in the family that Ruano says came to her naturally.
Ruano’s daughters have been learning the violin and the viola. They’ve been debating whether to keep going with the string instruments or move on to another extracurricular activity.
“All of those special skills and talents, we can’t really tend to them in my country,” Ruano said. “It’s like they’re trying to rip away my dreams, and also those of my two girls.”
Elizabeth and Paola, Yessenia Ruano’s twin daughters, stand in the side yard of their home on April 6, 2025, in Milwaukee. (Jamie Kelter Davis for The 19th)
Eli and Paola are U.S. citizens. Their lives would be significantly different in El Salvador, where economic opportunity, gender-based violence and more could alter the course of their lives. Their father, Miguel, has no legal immigration status. The 19th is not publishing his last name to protect his privacy and employment.
Both times Ruano has appeared before ICE this year, agents have alluded to her daughters. During her February appointment, the agent said Ruano should buy plane tickets for her girls as well because she “would hate to see the family separated,” Ruano recalls. During her April appointment, Ruano’s lawyer at the time recalled that the agent scanned Ruano’s plane ticket and asked why she hadn’t bought plane tickets for the girls.
Ruano has spent time talking to each daughter about the different possibilities ahead for their family, including a new life in El Salvador.
At a park in Milwaukee on April 6, 2025, Miguel — Yessenia Ruano’s partner — pushes their daughters on a swing. (Jamie Kelter Davis for The 19th)
“I tried to focus on the positive things, things I liked as a girl,” Ruano said. Ruano explained that the school day in El Salvador would be shorter — the country has one of the shortest school weeks in the world. There would be more time for play.
“I told them that they’d see mango trees, orange trees,” Ruano said. “Things we don’t have here.”
They’d still get to sleep next to each other, as they do in Milwaukee.
Ruano has a trove of files documenting her immigration journey in the United States, but one piece of paper worn thin from years of use tracks every check-in she’s had with ICE since she entered the United States from Mexico in 2011.
At the time, Ruano petitioned for the only form of relief she was told she was eligible for, a form of asylum called “withholding of removal,” which requires immigrants to prove that there is at least a 51% likelihood of suffering persecution in their home country.
When her case finally came up for review a decade later, a judge told Ruano that her petition would be denied and said Ruano could withdraw it to avoid having the denial on her record. During the hearing, the judge told Ruano through her then-lawyer that the U.S. government wasn’t actively deporting people like her, who had no criminal record. She could explore other avenues for legal status.
Ruano flips through the stack of paperwork documenting her 14-year fight to stay in the United States on April 6, 2025, in Milwaukee. (Jamie Kelter Davis for The 19th)
By 2024, she was running out of alternatives and time. ICE placed her in a monitoring program called Alternatives to Detention, or ATD, and told that her deadline to file for a different path to legal status was near.
ICE advertises the ATD program as having been designed for immigrants who were “thoroughly vetted” and deemed not a risk to public safety. To enroll someone in the program, ICE officers consider their ties to the community and status as a caregiver or provider. Ruano checked all of the boxes.
Ruano’s participation in the program left a mark: She has a band of pale skin around her wrist, where ICE secured a GPS device.
The device tracked her location, had facial-recognition software for regular check-ins with ICE, and had messaging capabilities between the agency and Ruano; “Please call your officer” was a regular prompt. Ruano could swap the batteries to make sure the wrist monitor was powered at all times. Sometimes the backup battery wouldn’t work, so she was left to plug the monitor — still attached to her wrist — directly into a wall outlet. When it became loose and couldn’t read her pulse, it would blare loudly. “I would be in the classroom with kids, trying to fix it,” Ruano said.
At home, Ruano pored over the internet and eventually found a firm in Chicago that helped her file for a T visa as a victim of human trafficking.
The application was almost complete when Ruano was asked to report to ICE for a check-in on Valentine’s Day. Ruano’s lawyer at the time told her that she feared there was a better-than-90% chance she would be detained. Ruano felt that the time she was promised to finish her application had been suddenly taken away.
She spent most of the week of the appointment working furiously to make sure her T visa application was in the hands of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, that her personal documents were in order, that there was a care plan for the girls beyond Miguel. She did all of that while juggling calls with reporters and advocates from Voces de la Frontera, the local immigrant advocacy group supporting her. She watched herself get to the brink of an emotional breakdown. The voice inside her head begged for surrender: “I’m done. I can’t keep going. I’ll go back to my country and start over, from zero. The fight is over.”
It’s a shift from her default, a hope and belief that things will work out.
“It’s been 14 years and I’ve suffered a lot of stress, a lot of anxiety. Every week before one of my hearings with a judge or a check-in with ICE, those are nights of no sleep,” Ruano said. “I’ll wake up at one in the morning needing to vomit.” She’s had 17 appointments over that time span, and 17 sleepless weeks.
Ruano looks ahead as she and her daughters walk to her appointment at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office on April 15, 2025, in Milwaukee. (Jamie Kelter Davis for The 19th)
Unlike many immigrants without authorization to permanently live in the country, Ruano has not and does not live in the shadows. The U.S. government knows exactly who she is, where she lives, where she works. Ruano said she was not — and is not — willing to defy a deportation order.
“It wouldn’t be worth it,” she said. “I would rather go back to my country, whatever may happen there. Because when I think about living in the shadows, not being able to use my real name, never being at peace … I don’t want to live in hiding, waiting for the day they knock on my door.”
At the bilingual public school where she teaches, in Milwaukee’s heavily Hispanic South Side, the chaos of Ruano’s immigration limbo dials down.
“I feel like I’m in my own world,” Ruano said. “My problems stay back home.” When she walks into a classroom full of kindergarteners, she tells herself, “Vamos a echarle ganas a este dia.” Let’s do this.
It’s an easy place for her mind to wander to the version of the future she has dreamed for herself. She’s an assistant teacher supporting the youngest learners with the most challenging needs. “I’m always thinking about getting my teaching license,” Ruano said, “so I can have my own classroom.”
Milwaukee has for years struggled with a shortage of teachers, falling victim to the nationwide teacher shortage. The district’s superintendent announced recently that the next school year would start with 80 vacant teaching positions, and that’s with a recent decision to thin the district’s central office by moving more than a fifth of its administrative staffers with teaching certifications into classroom positions.
Early in the morning, Ruano walks her dog, Copito, through her Milwaukee neighborhood on April 15, 2025. (Jamie Kelter Davis for The 19th)
In El Salvador, Ruano graduated from high school and worked her way through college to become an upper-grade teacher. She looked for work in education and wound up cleaning houses instead, joining other teachers with training but no place in the workforce. “You just end up having to do other work,” Ruano said. “I got here and saw that there’s so much opportunity. Here, they need teachers.”
Ruano’s workday begins outside the school, where her job is to welcome kids getting dropped off by their parents. On a frigid April day — she does this same job on frigid January days, too, just with extra gear — most of the interactions are quick hellos and good mornings. One little boy in a Minecraft backpack is refusing to walk in. He’s sad, and he’s asking for his mom. Ruano leans down to chat with him for a minute, a hand on his shoulder, a warm smile beaming. Eventually, he decides to go inside.
ALBA School, where Ruano works as an assistant teacher, stands quiet on a Sunday morning in Milwaukee. (Jamie Kelter Davis for The 19th)
Ruano’s job at this public school has anchored her firmly in this community. As part of Ruano’s public plea to immigration officials, teachers and parents from her school have written letters about the value she brings to her community. One parent wrote that their child had been upset for days, worried about the fate of his favorite teacher. Ruano read one of these letters during a news conference before she walked into her February check-in, surrounded by TV cameras and supporters from Voces de la Frontera. Within 48 hours, they collected 2,800 signatures in an online petition supporting Ruano.
When Ruano walked out of the courthouse that day, she went to the school to drop off her girls. Students filled the hallways and stairwells, erupting in cheers, relieved that she had not been detained.
“What was really sweet was that she led them in singing our school song. They’re usually quiet and shy when we sing it during our school assemblies. That day they were not,” said Brenda Martinez, who helped found the school and acts as its principal. Martinez has been worried about Ruano’s case and said the school can’t afford to lose her.
“She has a lot of patience to work with the littlest learners. That’s who she is,” Martinez said. “To lose her is like losing a member of our family.”
One of the most remarkable aspects of Ruano’s journey, she’ll say herself, is her own outlook in the face of so much upheaval. “La esperanza no se me quita,” Ruano said. For the most part, she can’t shake the hope that someday, things will inevitably work out.
When she reached a point of desperation earlier in the year, she said the thought that pulled her out was a Bible verse she’d memorized. “I could hear Joshua 1:9 in my head: ‘Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be frightened, and do not be dismayed, for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go.’”
A man raises his hand in prayer during Mass at Nuestra Señora de la Paz, on April 6, 2025, in Milwaukee. (Jamie Kelter Davis for The 19th)
Ruano and her family are devout Catholics and also involved with a local Evangelical church. Faith runs through their lives, though the urgency with which Ruano prays lately is new.
During a recent Spanish-language Mass at the parish the family attends — the large hall filled quickly to capacity — the Rev. Javier Bustos opened the service with a prayer that asked God for “justice for the nation’s immigrants.” Bustos said in an interview that since the start of the Trump administration, fear has become palpable in his community, and Ruano’s family is just one of the many whom he prays for.
In many ways, Ruano’s journey to the United States is not unique. She watched violence escalate in El Salvador, and grieved when her brother was kidnapped and later murdered. Her fear for her safety, combined with economic uncertainty, made a future in her home country look grim.
Yessenia Ruano stands for a portrait at her church, Nuestra Señora de la Paz, on April 6, 2025, in Milwaukee. (Jamie Kelter Davis for The 19th)
Her first attempt to enter the United States resulted in her immediate removal. She tried again less than a year later, paying a group of coyotes to guide her way into the country safely. Once in the United States, Ruano said, she became trapped in a filthy home and forced to work for her captors. She was eventually released after they extorted more money from her family back home. This forms the basis for her claim for a T visa, which requires her cooperation with law enforcement.
Bustos, Ruano’s priest, said in an interview that every immigrant’s story is different, but that losing closely knit members of this church community feels the same: “Like losing an arm, or a limb.”
Ruano is an active member of the church’s prayer group and volunteers during Mass. This Sunday, she was tasked with a Bible reading in front of the several hundred gathered, including her husband and daughters, who smiled watching her walk up to the lectern.
Parishioners stream into the sunshine after Sunday Mass at Nuestra Señora de la Paz on April 6, 2025, in Milwaukee. (Jamie Kelter Davis for The 19th)
Later, she attended a training for members hoping to work with young children, focused on keeping them safe. Ruano is part of a group of members who have committed nearly every Saturday for the next two years to walking a group of children through an intense curriculum in the Catholic faith, up to their First Communion.
Ruano already started the rigorous curriculum with her group of students. She hopes to be around to watch them reach the rite of passage.
There’s a single Salvadoran restaurant in Milwaukee. Its owner, Concepcion Arias, says business has changed since Trump was elected. Fewer customers are coming through the doors, and even some of the regulars are asking for their meals to go. “People don’t want to be out and about,” she said.
But Ruano and her family are here on a Sunday after church, one of their regular spots for a meal after Mass. Paola orders a plate of fries with ketchup, while Eli goes for traditional pupusas.
After church, Ruano and her family eat lunch at a neighborhood Salvadoran restaurant on April 6, 2025, in Milwaukee. (Jamie Kelter Davis for The 19th)
On the cover of the menu is a picture of a beach in El Salvador. “That’s where my uncle lives,” Ruano says. The girls glance at the small photo of the sunny tropical landscape. When Ruano was a teenager, she moved to this coastal town to work at her uncle’s hotel, a job that helped her pay for school. The girls agree the beach looks beautiful, but then Paola chimes in: “I’m really scared I’m going to die on a plane.” She’s thinking about the prospect of ever traveling to El Salvador, a place she only knows through her parents’ stories.
Little moments like this one remind all four that the threat of removal hangs heavily over their lives. When lunch is over, the family heads back home, and then Miguel goes out to meet with a contractor. Their home’s roof is overdue for a replacement — one of dozens of to dos that are suddenly urgent. Miguel is worried about leaving their home in less than good shape if Yessenia is removed to El Salvador.
Under the Biden administration, a pending T visa application would typically halt removal proceedings, but that guarantee no longer exists under the Trump administration. At the end of the Biden administration, the wait time for USCIS to confirm it had received a visa application averaged about four weeks. On the day of Ruano’s February check-in with ICE, the Trump administration fired 50 employees from USCIS. Within a few weeks, immigration lawyers were reporting that the wait time for visa application receipts had started to grow. When Ruano called USCIS to check on her case in early April, an agent said the average wait time was 10 weeks. When she checked in with USCIS in early May, they told her the wait had grown to four months.
Yessenia Ruano fixes her daughter’s hair while laughing with her twins on the sidewalk as they walk to her appointment at the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office on April 15, 2025, in Milwaukee. (Jamie Kelter Davis for The 19th)
Her lawyer, Marc Christopher, who has spent years working on immigration cases in the Milwaukee area, said he’s not sure why ICE hasn’t fast-tracked her deportation, but that in a multi-tiered system where so much is up to discretion, it’s not clear who will have the final say on her case.
She is due back for another appointment with ICE at the end of May. In an interview Tuesday, Ruano said she remains hopeful. She’s also started to sell household items they no longer use on Facebook Marketplace, a small step toward resignation. She hasn’t bought flights for her husband or daughters and hopes she won’t have to. The zinnia seeds are now one-inch sprouts.
Ruano’s daughters will turn 10 in early June. This year, they’re most looking forward to celebrating their birthday at school, with cupcakes in class, surrounded by their friends, their mom nearby.
Ruano’s flight is scheduled to leave the United States the next day.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Friday, May 16, 2025, that the Trump administration's attempt to deport a group of Venezuelans under an 18th-century wartime law "does not pass muster." (Photo by Jane Norman/States Newsroom)
WASHINGTON — The U.S. Supreme Court on Friday kept in place a block on the Trump administration’s efforts to deport 176 Venezuelans in Northern Texas under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798.
A majority of the justices found that President Donald Trump’s administration violated the due process rights of Venezuelans when the administration tried to deport them from North Texas last month by invoking the 18th-century wartime law. Conservative Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented.
“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,” according to the decision.
The justices did not determine the legality of the Trump administration using the Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelans 14 and older with suspected ties to the gang Tren de Aragua.
On his social media platform, Trump expressed his disapproval of the ruling.
“THE SUPREME COURT WON’T ALLOW US TO GET CRIMINALS OUT OF OUR COUNTRY!” he wrote on Truth Social.
The justices found that the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals “erred in dismissing the detainees’ appeal for lack of jurisdiction,” and vacated that order, sending the case back.
The Trump administration on Monday asked the high court to remove the injunction, arguing that detaining suspected members of Tren de Aragua poses a threat to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and staff.
In a Wednesday response, the American Civil Liberties Union, which brought the suit, warned that if the Supreme Court lifts its injunction, “most of the putative class members will be removed with little chance to seek judicial review.”
In Friday’s order, the justices noted that because the Trump administration has used the Alien Enemies Act to send migrants to a notorious prison in El Salvador, careful due process is needed.
“The Government has represented elsewhere that it is unable to provide for the return of an individual deported in error to a prison in El Salvador…where it is alleged that detainees face indefinite detention,” according to the order, noting the wrongful deportation of Maryland man Kilmar Abrego Garcia to El Salvador.
“The detainees’ interests at stake are accordingly particularly weighty,” the court continued.
Other rulings
On April 18, the ACLU made an emergency application to the high court, asking to bar any removals under the Alien Enemies Act in the Northern District of Texas over concerns that the Trump administration was not following due process.
Several federal judges elsewhere have blocked the use of the wartime law in their districts that cover Colorado, Southern Texas and Southern New York.
A federal judge in Western Pennsylvania Tuesday was the first to uphold the Trump administration’s use of the Alien Enemies Act, but said those accused must have at least three weeks to challenge their removal.
Maryland Democratic U.S. Rep. Glenn Ivey, who represents the district where Kilmar Abrego Garcia and his wife live, led the chant “bring him home” outside the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland shortly before a hearing in Abrego Garcia’s case on Friday, May 16, 2025. (Photo by Ariana Figueroa/States Newsroom)
GREENBELT, MARYLAND — A federal judge said Friday the Trump administration has “pretty broadly” invoked the state secrets privilege to withhold information on its efforts — or, the judge indicated, a possible lack of effort — to return a wrongly deported Maryland man from a prison in El Salvador.
President Donald Trump’s administration moved last month to invoke the so-called state secrets privilege to shield information about its process to facilitate the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the United States after a top immigration official admitted his removal to a prison in El Salvador was an “administrative error.”
The judge handling the case, U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis, granted an expedited discovery process after she found last month that “nothing has been done” by the administration to return Abrego Garcia.
She did not make a public order regarding the state secrets privilege Friday afternoon before closing her courtroom to the public to discuss sensitive matters with attorneys for Abrego Garcia and the Department of Justice.
The state secrets privilege is a common-law doctrine that protects sensitive national security information from being released. The Trump administration has argued the need to invoke it in this case to protect diplomatic relationships.
‘He’ll never walk free in the United States’
During the public portion of Friday’s hearing, Xinis pressed the Department of Justice attorneys about Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s comment that Abrego Garcia “will not return” to the U.S.
“That sounds to me like an admission that your client will not take steps to facilitate the return,” Xinis said. “That’s about as clear as it can get.”
DOJ attorney Jonathan D. Guynn disagreed and said the Trump administration is complying with court orders. He said Noem’s comment meant that if Abrego Garcia was back in U.S. custody he would be removed either to another third country or back to El Salvador.
“He’ll never walk free in the United States,” Guynn said.
He added that the Trump administration is “currently complying and we plan to comply.”
Xinis said she disagreed, and then she clashed with Guynn over the legality of Abrego Garcia’s removal.
Guynn said that he was lawfully deported.
Xinis answered that she found months ago that Abrego Garcia was unlawfully detained and removed from the U.S.
Few documents produced
One of the attorneys for Abrego Garcia, Andrew J. Rossman, said the Trump administration has invoked the state secrets privilege for 1,140 documents relating to the case. From that request, Rossman said his team received 168 documents, but 132 were copies of court filings and requests made by him and his team.
Xinis seemed visibly stunned by Rossman’s report and had to clarify that his team had only received 36 new documents, which Rossman confirmed.
Rossman said that none of the documents for which the government is invoking the state secrets privilege are classified.
“There’s ways to do this right, and they haven’t done it,” he said, noting that he has attorneys on his team who have security clearances and can review classified and sensitive information.
Rossman said that he and his team are seeking answers to three questions: the status of Abrego Garcia, what steps the Trump administration has taken, if any, to facilitate his return, and the steps the federal government will take, if any, to comply with court orders.
Guynn said the Trump administration received an update from El Salvador on Thursday that Abrego Garcia was in “good health” and had “even gained weight.”
The U.S. Supreme Court ordered that the Trump administration must “facilitate” the return of Abrego Garcia.
Rossman, said that it’s “deeply disturbing” that administration officials, including the president, have made public statements that contradict court orders directing the government to return Abrego Garcia to the U.S.
President Donald Trump has said he could easily pick up the phone and order El Salvador to return him but won’t because he believes Abrego Garcia is a member of the MS-13 gang.
Noem was pressed at a May 14 congressional hearing about a photo that appears altered to add letters across Abrego Garcia’s knuckles to indicate his inclusion in the gang. She said she was unaware of it.
A federal judge in the District of Columbia, in a separate case regarding Trump’s use of an archaic wartime law for deportations, questioned Department of Justice attorneys on the president’s claim that he could order Abrego Garcia to be returned. The attorney admitted that the president sometimes overstates his influence abroad.
El Salvador prison
Abrego Garcia has had protections from deportation since 2019, but he was one of nearly 300 men on three mid-March removal flights to a notorious prison in El Salvador known as CECOT.
Abrego Garcia has been moved to a lower security prison, according to Maryland Democratic Sen. Chris Van Hollen, who traveled to the country last month to meet with Abrego Garcia and inquire with Salvadoran officials about why he is being held there.
Those officials said Abrego Garcia was being held because of the agreement between the United States and El Salvador.
The U.S. has a $15 million agreement with El Salvador’s government to house immigrants removed from the U.S., mostly Venezuelans removed under the wartime law, the Alien Enemies Act of 1798.
Dozens of signs outside the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland in support of Abrego Garcia before Friday’s hearing. (Photo by Ariana Figueroa/States Newsroom)
The Trump administration has argued that Abrego Garcia is a national of El Salvador and in that country’s custody and the U.S. cannot force another government to return him.
Hours before Friday’s hearing, dozens of protestors gathered outside the court, calling for Abrego Garcia to be returned to the U.S., as well as criticizing the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.
U.S. Rep. Glenn Ivey, who represents the area in Maryland where Abrego Garcia and his family live, appeared outside the court and led chants calling for the release of Abrego Garcia from El Salvador.
“The president has to obey the orders of the Supreme Court,” Ivey said. “The Supreme Court has spoken here, and it’s time for him to follow it and bring him home.”
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers, some of them masked, work alongside Harrison County, Miss., sheriff’s deputies to make arrests in an investigation into illegal immigration and cockfighting in early May. States are increasingly setting policy for sheriffs on how much they can cooperate with ICE at local jails. (Photo by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement)
Local sheriffs are on the front lines in deciding whether to participate in the Trump administration’s mass deportation plans. But states increasingly are making the choice for them.
More and more, sheriffs’ hands are tied no matter whether they do — or don’t — want to help with deportations, though they often get the blame when conservatives draw up lists of sanctuary cities.
“‘Naughty lists,’ as we call them, are not super helpful here,” said Patrick Royal, a spokesperson for the National Sheriffs’ Association. “We all know there are places like Colorado where you can’t [help with deportations], and places like North Carolina where you have to.”
Cooperation between sheriffs and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement lies at the heart of the Trump administration’s immigration detention policy. The administration plans to punish noncooperative jurisdictions with funding cuts — though many legal experts agree that cooperation is voluntary unless state or local laws say otherwise.
Sheriffs, who typically run local jails, must decide what to do when faced with immigration detainers — requests from ICE to hold onto incarcerated people up to two extra days so ICE officers can show up and arrest them. ICE issues those detainers when the agency reviews fingerprints sent electronically for background checks as part of the jail booking process.
Otherwise, arrested suspects who post bond or are otherwise released by a judge might go free despite their immigration status, prompting ICE in some cases to pursue them in the community.
In North Carolina, Sheriff Garry McFadden ran on a platform of limiting cooperation with ICE when he was elected in Mecklenburg County, home to Charlotte, in 2018. But today, McFadden must comply with detainers because of a state law passed last year.
You can’t say we’re a sanctuary county and have state laws that say we have to work with ICE. You can’t have both.
– Sheriff Gary McFadden, Mecklenburg County, NC
In a now-retracted Facebook post, U.S. Sen. Thom Tillis in late April accused Mecklenburg and several other North Carolina counties of “shielding criminal illegal immigrants” as sanctuary jurisdictions. Tillis, a North Carolina Republican, said in the post he was writing federal legislation to prosecute sanctuary jurisdictions.
“You can’t say we’re a sanctuary county and have state laws that say we have to work with ICE. You can’t have both,” McFadden said. He added that he’d like more choice about whether to comply with detainers. A federal funding cutoff would endanger important jail programs such as rape counseling, he said.
“Everybody’s focused on immigration like that’s the biggest fire, and nobody wants to address the other things. The losers will be the prisoners who need all these services we provide,” McFadden said.
Conservative sheriffs in Democratic-controlled states also can be frustrated by state policy on detainers. Sheriff Lew Evangelidis of Worcester County, Massachusetts, said he’s been criticized for releasing prisoners wanted by ICE but sometimes has no choice: A 2017 state Supreme Court ruling prohibits holding prisoners based on detainers.
“If they [ICE] want this person and consider them a threat to public safety, then I want that person out of my community. I want to keep my community safe,” said Evangelidis. He supported a Republican-sponsored effort in the state legislature to allow 12-hour holds for ICE if a judge determines the prisoner is a threat to public safety, but the amendment was voted down in April.
States act on detainers
Many experts agree that ICE detainers can be legally ignored if states allow sheriffs to do that.
“That detainer request is just that, a request, it’s not a requirement,” said Cassandra Charles, a staff attorney at the National Immigration Law Center, which is opposing Louisiana’s lawsuit to reverse a court-ordered ban on cooperation between Orleans Parish and ICE.
The general counsel for the North Carolina Sheriffs’ Association, Eddie Caldwell, agreed that the detainers are voluntary under federal law.
The association supports a state bill now under consideration that would require not only the 48-hour detention but also a notice sent 48 hours before release to let ICE know the clock is running. The proposal has passed the House.
The notification matters, Caldwell said, because there can be criminal proceedings that take weeks or months, so ICE in many cases doesn’t realize the 48-hour window has started.
Tillis’ office said the senator’s disagreement with McFadden, a Democrat, and other sheriffs is about that notification.
“It’s not necessarily that [sheriffs] are breaking the law, but rather making it as difficult as possible for ICE to take prisoners into custody by refusing to do some basic things. Notification is important,” said Daniel Keylin, a senior adviser to Tillis.
States including California, Colorado and Massachusetts ban compliance with the ICE detainers, on the general principle that it’s not enough reason to hold people in jails when they’re otherwise free to go because of bail or an end to their criminal cases. Those three states have made recent moves to defend or fine-tune their rules.
California’s attorney general also has issued guidance to local jurisdictions based on a 2017 state law limiting cooperation with immigration authorities. That law withstood a court challenge under the first Trump administration.
Colorado has a law against holding prisoners more than six hours longer than required, and a new bill sent to Democratic Gov. Jared Polis last week would specify that even those six hours can’t be for the purpose of an immigration detainer.
Iowa, Tennessee and Texas are among the states requiring cooperation with detainers.
And Florida has gone further, requiring sheriffs to actively help ICE write detainers though official agreements in which local agencies sign up to help enforce immigration laws.
Cooperation boosts arrests
Such cooperation makes a big difference, experts say — jails are the easiest place to pick up immigrants for deportation, and when local sheriffs and police help out, there are more arrests.
“A larger share of ICE arrests and deportations are happening in places where local law enforcement is cooperative with ICE,” said Julia Gelatt, associate director for the Migration Policy Institute’s U.S. Immigration Policy Program, speaking at a recent webinar.
“A declining share of arrests and deportations are happening from places like California, where there are really strict limitations on local law enforcement’s cooperation with ICE,” she added.
ICE is making about 600 immigration arrests daily, twice the rate as during the last year of the Biden administration, said Muzaffar Chishti, an attorney and policy expert at the Migration Policy Institute, speaking at the same event.
Reports on deportations are incomplete, Chishti said, but he estimated the current administration is on track to deport half a million people this year and is trying to get that number higher.
“The Trump administration has not been able to change the laws that are on the books, because only Congress can do that,” Chishti said. “It’s going to take congressional action for the Trump administration to achieve its aim of higher [arrest and deportation] numbers.”
President Donald Trump has added more pressure, last month requesting a list from Attorney General Pam Bondi and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem of sanctuary cities, which he says would face funding cuts. The administration also has sued some states, including Colorado, Illinois and New York, over their policies.
Asked for comment on the legality of funding cutoffs for sanctuary policies, Bondi’s office referred to a February memo in which she promised to “end funding to state and local jurisdictions that unlawfully interfere with federal law enforcement operations.” The memo cites a federal law saying local officials “may not prohibit, or in any way restrict” communication about immigration status.
Local jurisdictions in Connecticut, Minnesota, New Mexico, Oregon and Washington joined a February lawsuit led by the city and county of San Francisco and Santa Clara County in California against a Trump administration executive order calling for defunding cities with sanctuary policies, calling the order “illegal and authoritarian.”
In April, a U.S. district court in California issued a preliminary injunction in that case preventing any funding cutoff over sanctuary policies to the cities and counties in the lawsuit. And on Friday, the federal judge, William Orrick, ruled that the injunction applies to any list of sanctuary jurisdictions the administration may target for funding cuts.
Trump’s new executive order seeking the list cannot be used as “an end run” around Orrick’s injunction, the judge wrote, while he decides the legality of detainer policies and other issues.
“The litigation may not proceed with the coercive threat to end all federal funding hanging over the Cities and Counties’ heads like the sword of Damocles,” Orrick wrote.
Stateline is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org.
Anjan Roy was studying with friends at Missouri State University when he got an email that turned his world upside down. His legal status as an international student had been terminated, and he was suddenly at risk for deportation.
“I was in literal shock, like, what the hell is this?” said Roy, a graduate student in computer science from Bangladesh.
At first, he avoided going out in public, skipping classes and mostly keeping his phone turned off. A court ruling in his favor led to his status being restored this week, and he has returned to his apartment, but he is still asking his roommates to screen visitors.
More than a thousand international students have faced similar disruptions in recent weeks, with their academic careers — and their lives in the U.S. — thrown into doubt in a widespread crackdown by the Trump administration. Some have found a measure of success in court, with federal judges around the country issuing orders to restore students’ legal status at least temporarily.
In addition to the case filed in Atlanta, where Roy is among 133 plaintiffs, judges have issued temporary restraining orders in states including New Hampshire, Minnesota, Montana, Oregon, Washington and Wisconsin. Judges have denied similar requests in some other cases, saying it was not clear the loss of status would cause irreparable harm.
International students challenge grounds for their status revocation
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said last month the State Department was revoking visas held by visitors who were acting counter to national interests, including some who protested Israel’s war in Gaza and those who face criminal charges. But many affected students said they have been involved only in minor infractions, or it’s unclear altogether why they were targeted.
The attorney for Roy and his fellow plaintiffs, Charles Kuck, argued the government did not have legal grounds to terminate the students’ status.
He speculated in court last week the government is trying to encourage these students to self-deport, saying “the pressure on these students is overwhelming.” He said some asked him if it was safe to leave their homes to get food, and others worried they wouldn’t receive a degree after years of work or feared their chances of a career in the U.S. were shot.
“I think the hope is they’ll just leave,” Kuck said. “The reality is these kids are invested.”
An attorney for the government, R. David Powell, argued the students did not suffer significant harm because they could transfer their academic credits or find jobs in another country.
At least 1,190 students at 183 colleges, universities and university systems have had their visas revoked or their legal status terminated since late March, according to an Associated Press review of university statements, correspondence with school officials and court records. The AP is working to confirm reports of hundreds more students who are caught up in the crackdown.
In a lawsuit filed Monday by four people on student visas at the University of Iowa, attorneys detail the “mental and financial suffering” they’ve experienced. One graduate student, from India, “cannot sleep and is having difficulty breathing and eating,” the lawsuit reads. He has stopped going to school, doing research or working as a teaching assistant. Another student, a Chinese undergraduate who expected to graduate this December, said his revoked status has caused his depression to worsen to the point that his doctor increased his medication dosage. The student, the lawsuit says, has not left his apartment out of fear of detention.
Tiny infractions made students targets for the crackdown
Roy, 23, began his academic career at Missouri State in August 2024 as an undergraduate computer science student. He was active in the chess club and a fraternity and has a broad circle of friends. After graduating in December, he began work on a master’s degree in January and expects to finish in May 2026.
When Roy received the university’s April 10 email on his status termination, one of his friends offered to skip class to go with him to the school’s international services office, even though they had a quiz in 45 minutes. The staff there said a database check showed his student status had been terminated, but they didn’t know why.
Roy said his only brush with the law came in 2021, when he was questioned by campus security after someone called in a dispute at a university housing building. But he said an officer determined there was no evidence of any crime and no charges were filed.
Roy also got an email from the U.S. embassy in Bangladesh telling him his visa had been revoked and that he could be detained at any time. It warned that if he was deported, he could be sent to a country other than his own. Roy thought about leaving the U.S. but decided to stay after talking to a lawyer.
Anxious about being in his own apartment, Roy went to stay with his second cousin and her husband nearby.
“They were scared someone was going to pick me up from the street and take me somewhere that they wouldn’t even know,” Roy said.
He mostly stayed inside, turned off his phone unless he needed to use it, and avoided internet browsers that track user data through cookies. His professors were understanding when he told them he wouldn’t be able to come to classes for a while, he said.
New doubts about students’ future in the US
After the judge’s order Friday, he moved back to his apartment. He learned Tuesday his status had been restored, and he plans to return to class. But he’s still nervous. He asked his two roommates, both international students, to let him know before they open the door if someone they don’t know knocks.
The judge’s restoration of his legal status is temporary. Another hearing scheduled for Thursday will determine whether he keeps that status while the litigation continues.
Roy chose the U.S. over other options in Canada and Australia because of the research opportunities and potential for professional connections, and he ultimately wanted to teach at an American university. But now those plans are up in the air.
His parents, back in Dhaka, have been watching the news and are “freaked out,” he said. His father mentioned to him that they have family in Melbourne, Australia, including a cousin who’s an assistant professor at a university there.
AP reporters Christopher L. Keller in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Hannah Fingerhut in Des Moines, Iowa, contributed to this story.
Wisconsin Watch is a nonprofit and nonpartisan newsroom. Subscribe to our newsletters to get our investigative stories and Friday news roundup.This story is published in partnership with The Associated Press.
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