Protesters gather outside of the Milwaukee FBI office to speak out against the arrest of Milwaukee Circuit Court Judge Hannah Dugan (Photo by Isiah Holmes/Wisconsin Examiner)
A federal magistrate judge recommended on Monday that the criminal case against Milwaukee County Judge Hannah Dugan proceed. Dugan has been indicted on charges that she helped an immigrant without legal status who came to her courtroom for a hearing on a misdemeanor charge evade federal immigration authorities.
Dugan was arrested in April and indicted in May. She’s pleaded not guilty to charges of concealing an individual to prevent arrest and obstruction.
The case has become an example of the Trump administration’s effort to punish judicial interference with its escalation of immigration enforcement. In April, 31-year-old Eduardo Flores-Ruiz was in Dugan’s courtroom when federal agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Drug Enforcement Agency and FBI arrived at the Milwaukee County Courthouse to arrest him.
Prosecutors say Dugan helped Flores-Ruiz out a side doorway to avoid arrest but the doorway Dugan led Flores-Ruiz and his attorney use led to the same hallway in which the agents were waiting and one took the elevator down with them. Flores-Ruiz was arrested on the street outside.
In May, Dugan had filed a motion to dismiss the charges against her, arguing she is immune from prosecution because she was acting in her official capacity as a judge and that the arrest violated Wisconsin’s sovereignty as a state by disrupting a state court hearing and prosecuting a state judge.
On Monday, U.S. Magistrate Judge Nancy Joseph recommended that the motion to dismiss be denied. The final decision on dismissal is up to U.S. District Judge Lynn Adelman, who does not need to follow Joseph’s recommendation.
“We are disappointed in the magistrate judge’s non-binding recommendation, and we will appeal it,” Dugan attorney Steven Biskupic, a former federal prosecutor, said in a statement. “This is only one step in what we expect will be a long journey to preserve the independence and integrity of our courts.”
In her recommendation, Joseph wrote that judicial immunity applies when a judge is being sued for civil damages, not criminal charges.
“A judge’s actions, even when done in her official capacity, does not bar criminal prosecution if the actions were done in violation of the criminal law,” she wrote.
A federal magistrate judge recommended Monday that the case proceed against a Wisconsin judge who was indicted on allegations that she helped a man who is in the country illegally evade U.S. immigration agents seeking to arrest him in her courthouse.
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.
A child celebrates Independence Day | Getty Images Creative
Your citizenship, like mine, is an accident of birth.
You were born here. So was I. The rub is I was born to immigrants who were not yet legal residents.
That makes me a birthright citizen under the 14th Amendment. That also allegedly makes me an “anchor baby.” I’m referring to the assertion that immigrants have come to the U.S. and have babies only so they can gain legal residency later.
Real life is more complicated than that for millions of immigrants who come to the U.S. for a variety of reasons — whether they are fleeing violence in their home countries or simply seeking a better life, as generations in our nation of immigrants have done.
Does the immigration status of my parents really matter? How long ago did your immigrant ancestors first step foot here? How many generations does it take for citizenship to be “deserved?”
The Constitution’s 14th Amendment says unequivocally that I’m as deserving as the accident of your birth makes you. If you are born here, you’re a U.S. citizen. Me, too. That’s birthright citizenship.
On Jan. 20, newly inaugurated President Donald Trump issued an executive order ending automatic citizenship for babies born to parents who don’t have lawful status in the U.S.
In a recent 6-3 ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court did not address the constitutionality of Trump’s order. Instead, it ruled that lower courts have no power to issue nationwide injunctions, voiding district courts’ rulings that Trump may not deport people who have been U.S. citizens all their lives.
After the ruling, some groups began the slow process to challenge the law in a nationwide class action lawsuit. But until the Court decides otherwise, the fundamental question whether someone is considered a U.S. citizen will have different answers in different states.
Meanwhile, raids on immigrant communities continue.
The Trump administration is clearly emboldened. The Supreme Court’s ruling allows the ban on birthright citizenship to take effect in those 28 states that didn’t challenge the president’s initial executive order. And the administration is counting on the high court to see it his way on the constitutional question eventually.
At this point, I lack the confidence to say it won’t.
I understand the argument that children born to U.S. citizens are more deserving than I am. “But my ancestors emigrated here legally,” say more “deserving” citizens. Never mind that the barriers to coming to this country legally have moved up and down. Today, even people with demonstrable asylum claims are being shut out.
Back in the day, if you showed up to these shores, you simply got in. It wasn’t until 1924 that the U.S. started enforcing quotas for national origin. Aside from immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe (deemed then as too foreign, i.e. not white enough), these quotas favored other white immigrants. And it specifically targeted Asians for exclusion.
This preference for white immigrants continues. White immigrants from, say, Canada and Ireland, don’t seem to be affected by this attempted purge.
So let’s be honest. Many of your immigrant ancestors were legal simply by default.
Other people will argue that ICE is targeting immigrants who have committed violent crimes. A couple of big problems: according to the libertarian CATO Institute, 65% of those taken by ICE have no criminal record and 93% have not committed a violent crime.
The issue is not criminality. It’s race. All across the country, Latinos are being detained because of the color of their skin.
Some folks insist that the 14th Amendment dealt only with the children of slaves freed after the Civil War.
Here’s what the amendment says: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof (my emphasis), are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”
Clearly, even those here without documents are subject to U.S. and state laws. That puts them under U.S. jurisdiction. The courts have confirmed birthright citizenship as early as the late 19th Century (United States v. Wong Kim Ark.).
Is military service an indication of deserving citizenship?
I contend that a chief quality of those who deserve citizenship is that they don’t take their citizenship for granted. They know their parents sacrificed much to make it happen. We are proud Americans. We belong here. And we deserve to stay.
Thousands of protesters marched up State Street and past the Wisconsin Forward statue at the state Capitol on Saturday. (Henry Redman | Wisconsin Examiner)
It was an encouraging week in Wisconsin. The state Supreme Court finally invalidated a cruel 1849 abortion ban, and Gov. Tony Evers declared victory after he and state legislative leaders reached a deal on the state budget he signed in the early morning hours on Thursday that adds back some badly needed support for schools and child care. The budget deal is not what a lot of Democrats and advocates wanted, but it’s better than the brutal austerity Republicans in the Legislature have imposed in the last several budget cycles. Most encouragingly, the end of gerrymandering forced Republicans to negotiate, since they needed Democratic votes in the Senate to get the budget passed.
Some Democrats still refused to vote ‘yes” on the budget. They pointed out that, while it includes a significant boost for special education, it leaves schools struggling with zero general state aid. A majority of school districts will see revenue go down, and most will have to beg local property owners to raise their own taxes. To make matters worse, the Trump administration is freezing billions in promised aid to K-12 schools.
Child care advocates who fought for desperately needed state support got about one-quarter of the aid Evers had originally proposed. Some were relieved, but others told Examiner Deputy Editor Erik Gunn that it’s just not enough to save centers from going out of business and parents from losing access to care.
The health care outlook is also bleak. With the feds poised to make Medicaid cuts that could cause 60,000 Wisconsinites to lose health care, the state budget fails to expand Medicaid and won’t even cover postpartum care — making us one of only two states to refuse health care to low-income mothers of newborns.
The worrisome backdrop to all of this is the federal budget plan President Donald Trump and Republicans are pushing through Congress that simultaneously runs up giant deficits and takes an ax to safety net programs on a scale we’ve never before experienced.
The massive bill that passed the U.S. Senate this week slashes health care and nutrition assistance and will lead to the closure of rural hospitals, decimate green infrastructure projects that have been a boon to Wisconsin and will make life harder and more expensive for most people — all to funnel millions of dollars in tax cuts to the richest Americans and to fund a chilling escalation of a militarized immigration police force.
Our own U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson threatened to vote against the House version of the bill, which was projected to increase the deficit by $2.4 trillion, because, he said, the deficits it created were “mortgaging our children’s future.” But Johnson then voted for the Senate version, which ratchets up the deficit even more, to $3.3 trillion. So much for the self-described “numbers guy.” Kowtowing to Trump and making permanent the tax cuts Johnson personally benefits from was more important to him than his alleged concern about deficits.
It makes sense that much of the news about the Republican budget deal has centered around the devastating health care cuts and the ballooning federal deficit. But the $170 billion in the budget for immigration enforcement is sure to change the landscape of the United States — escalating raids, deportations without due process and a massive new system of private detention centers on the model of the detention camp in a Florida swamp that apparently thrilled Trump when he visited it during congressional budget deliberations.
Brace yourself for the impact of the supercharged ICE budget. Unlike Texas — where terrorized immigrant workers are staying home after raids, causing farmers to fear they’ll go under as their labor force disappears — we haven’t experienced big workplace raids in Wisconsin. If ICE has a lot more manpower, that could change.
I spoke this week with a dairy farmer in the Western part of the state who reported that, despite the terrifying videos circulating online of violent arrests by masked immigration agents, his employees are carrying on as usual, coming to work, going out, not changing their plans. “We haven’t had any raids on dairy farms in Wisconsin,” he pointed out.
It’s eerie how normal life continues to be in rural Wisconsin, where 70% of the labor on dairy farms is performed by immigrant workers, almost all of whom lack legal documents to live and work in this country, because Congress has never created a visa for year-round, low-skilled farmwork. The farmer I spoke with said he had just returned from watching a soccer match among immigrant workers and everyone was in a good mood.
He added that officials in Trump’s agriculture and labor departments have repeatedly reassured an industry group he’s part of that the administration understands how dependent employers are on their immigrant workers and that they don’t want mass deportation to harm them.
Wisconsin dairy farmers and other employers are hoping Trump continues to be influenced by the people in his administration who tell him he shouldn’t destroy the U.S. agriculture, construction and hospitality industries. They felt encouraged by Trump’s recent statement that “we’re going to take care of our farmers and hotel workers,” and his claim that he’s working on deportation exemptions for whole classes of immigrant workers who don’t have authorization, but on whom U.S. industries rely.
But the Stephen Miller wing of the administration doesn’t care about any of that.
The whole narrative promoted by Miller, Trump’s anti-immigrant deputy chief of staff, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Trump himself, that the U.S. is suffering an “invasion” by a large number of immigrants who commit violent crimes is nonsense. Immigrants commit crimes at lower rates than U.S. born citizens. They are an absolutely essential part of the U.S. economy. And they are loved and valued members of our communities. Most of the people the Trump administration has been rounding up have never been convicted of any crime, let alone violent crime. They are landscapers, roofers, farmworkers, students, parents driving home from work — just like the people Trump claims he is going to protect. As the administration ramps up its program to incarcerate and deport them, with a militarized push on a scale our country has never seen, Trump is trying to have it both ways — reassuring employers that he won’t target the “good” immigrants who work for them, while peddling the lie that there are tons of “bad” immigrants who deserve to be kept in cages in an alligator-infested swamp.
The idyllic, peaceful atmosphere in Wisconsin, where we feel far away from violent kidnappings by unidentified, masked federal agents, could change in a dramatically dark fashion once the ICE receives the tens of billions of new dollars in the Republicans’ federal budget plan. We saw the showy arrest of Judge Hannah Dugan and immigrants who, trusting the legal system, showed up for their court dates in Milwaukee. We saw the needlessly cruel forced departure of Milwaukee teacher’s aide Yessenia Ruano and her U.S.-born little girls back to El Salvador — the country Ruano fled after her brother was murdered there by gang members and where she felt her life was threatened.
With tens of billions of dollars in new money to spend and quotas to meet for its mass deportation program, ICE could begin rounding up the hardworking immigrants who keep our dairy industry going, in parts of the state that overwhelmingly vote for Republicans.
That spectacle, along with the hideous cuts to health care, education, food assistance and other programs that make life livable in Wisconsin, will surely provoke a backlash against the politicians who enabled it. Let’s hope it’s not too late.
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.
Customs and Border Protection agents question families who have presented themselves at the Paso del Norte bridge to request asylum on May 11, 2023. (Photo by Corrie Boudreaux for Source NM)
WASHINGTON — A federal judge Wednesday ruled as unlawful an executive order by President Donald Trump that barred asylum by claiming an “invasion” at the southern border and the need to protect states.
It’s the first major blow to the Trump administration in its attempt to end the ability for asylum seekers to make asylum claims.
“The President cannot adopt an alternative immigration system, which supplants the statutes that Congress has enacted,” District of Columbia U.S. District Judge Randolph Moss wrote in his opinion.
“Here, nothing in the (Immigration and Nationality Act) or the Constitution grants the President or his delegees the sweeping authority asserted in the Proclamation and implementing guidance,” continued Moss, who was appointed by former President Barack Obama.
The order from Moss also prevents the U.S. Department of Homeland Security from enforcing the executive order.
He also agreed to certify a class for potential asylum-seekers, which comes after last week’s Supreme Court ruling that curtailed nationwide injunctions from lower courts. Certifying a class was suggested by the court to give judges an avenue to make an order broader.
Moss put his order on hold for 14 days, to give the Trump administration time to appeal his ruling. If the order is upheld by an appeals court and the Supreme Court, it would require the Trump administration to begin processing asylum applicants for migrants.
“(The executive order) is unlawful insofar as it purports to suspend or to restrict access to asylum, withholding of removal, or the existing regulatory processes for obtaining (Convention Against Torture) protection,” Moss wrote in his order.
Inauguration Day
The asylum order was one of several immigration-related executive orders that Trump signed on the Inauguration Day of his second term. The order proclaimed that the “current situation at the southern border qualifies as an invasion” and barred asylum-seekers from being able to claim asylum.
Trump characterized asylum-seekers seeking entry at the U.S.-Mexico border as an “invasion” and said that the states need “protection,” so the White House would suspend physical entry until the president deemed the “invasion” over.
The section Trump cited in his proclamation, section 212(f), is part of the Immigration and Nationality Act. Under that section, the president has the authority to “suspend the entry” of people who are not U.S. citizens under certain circumstances.
Complaint filed in February
The suit from the American Civil Liberties Union and other legal organizations, on behalf of Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services, or RAICES, and other immigration legal service providers, argued the executive order unlawfully denies asylum and other humanitarian protections that are “expressly granted by Congress.”
“It is returning asylum seekers—not just single adults, but families too—to countries where they face persecution or torture, without allowing them to invoke the protections Congress has provided,” according to the initial complaint filed in February. “Indeed, the Proclamation does not even exempt unaccompanied children, despite the specific protections such children receive by statute.”
RAICES, Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center and the Florence Immigrant And Refugee Rights Project, which provide legal services to immigrants, argued that the proclamation harms the legal aid work of the individual plaintiffs.
Those individual plaintiffs in the suit include people who allege they fled persecution in Afghanistan, Ecuador, Cuba, Egypt, Brazil, Turkey and Peru. Some plaintiffs have either been removed to their home country, or to a third country such as Panama, according to the filing.
About 48 Afghan refugees in central Wisconsin could lose legal status next month as the Trump administration ends temporary protected status. Advocates say the policy shift is already deepening fear, trauma and separation for those who once supported U.S. forces overseas.
Cuban asylum seeker Miguel Jerez Robles returned to family in McFarland on Thursday, a month after ICE agents arrested him following a routine immigration hearing in Miami.
His arrest was one of the first in a wave of courthouse arrests, which appear to be part of a new strategy by President Donald Trump’s administration to send many people who were in legal immigration processes on a fast-track to deportation. Jerez spent the next four weeks at an ICE detention center in Tacoma, Washington, uncertain what his future would hold.
Now, he is home.
“I still don’t believe it. I say it’s a miracle from God,” said Jerez, who got word he’d be released on his own recognizance just minutes before he was scheduled to request a bond before a judge.
Jerez still doesn’t know why he was arrested, or why he’s now been released. Andrew Billmann, a family friend, contacted Democratic U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin as soon as Jerez was detained. Jerez said he thinks that effort, along with news coverage about his detention, likely helped.
Miguel Jerez Robles hugs his sister Vivianne at Chicago O’Hare International Airport as his mother Celeste Robles Chacón (foreground) and wife Geraldine Cruz Dip look on. Jerez spent the last month at an immigration detention center in Tacoma, Washington. (Courtesy of Geraldine Cruz Dip)
He was released on Wednesday with just one other person, a fellow Cuban asylum seeker, though he says he met many other immigrants who came to the detention center in similar circumstances.
“They’d been living in the U.S. for three years. They had no criminal record. … Their cases were dismissed, and they were detained outside the courtroom,” Jerez said. “And they’re still detained.”
As he collected his clothes to leave the Northwest ICE Processing Center on Wednesday, an official told him just how unusual his situation was.
“He told me, ‘You’re very lucky because right now we’re not releasing anyone. Everyone who leaves here is going back to their country, or they’ve won an asylum case while detained, or they’ve gotten out on bond,’” Jerez said.
He agrees that he’s lucky. “There are a lot of people who don’t have the resources to pay for a lawyer. It’s very sad, what I saw inside there.”
Before his release, Jerez was connected with a local immigrant aid organization that brought him to the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, Billmann said.
“We booked a redeye for him, from (Seattle) to (Chicago),” Billmann wrote in a text message to the Cap Times and Wisconsin Watch Friday.
Billmann and his wife, Kathy, joined Jerez’s wife, sister and mother to pick him up at the airport Thursday morning.
Escape from Cuba
When Jerez crossed the U.S.-Mexico border in 2022, he turned himself in to Border Patrol agents and asked for asylum. He’d participated in protests against Cuba’s communist government in 2021 and had been targeted by the police and government ever since, his family said during his detention. Federal and international law requires the United States to allow people to apply for asylum if they fear persecution in their home countries based on their politics or identity.
At the time, Joe Biden was president and border agents routinely allowed asylum seekers to enter the country with temporary legal protections while their cases were pending in immigration court — a process that can take years due to court system backlogs.
Jerez hired a lawyer and followed the steps required by law. Then U.S. voters elected a new president who promised to carry out mass deportations. In January, Trump issued an executive order suspending legal protections for asylum seekers. In May, immigrant advocates say, judges began coordinating with ICE agents to dismiss asylum cases and detain asylum seekers in courthouses.
Jerez was detained in the first few days of that new strategy at courthouses, his attorney said. Jerez had flown to Miami with his wife and mother for the first hearing in his asylum case, usually just a bureaucratic step. Instead, at the request of the federal government’s attorney, the judge tossed his claim without explanation.
During the No Kings protest in McFarland, Andrew Billmann spreads the word about his friend, McFarland resident Miguel Jerez Robles, a Cuban asylum seeker who was detained by immigration officers outside his immigration hearing in Miami. (Ruthie Hauge / The Cap Times)
Plainclothes Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents met him outside the courtroom, arresting him and placing him in expedited removal proceedings, where immigrants can face immediate deportation unless they can show a “credible fear” of persecution in their home country for their politics or identity.
ICE gives no reason for release
Just like his arrest, Jerez’s release left his lawyers and family with questions.
Billmann said he received an email from Baldwin’s office informing them Jerez would be released Wednesday.
Ismael Labrador with the Miami-based Gallardo Law Firm, said Friday ICE gave the legal team no explanation for Jerez’s release.
“We didn’t get anything from the deportation officer regarding the reason why he got released. We just got the good news,” Labrador said, noting the legal team got the call on Wednesday.
The Department of Homeland Security claimed Jerez was taken into custody because he entered the U.S. “illegally.”
“Most aliens who illegally entered the United States within the past two years are subject to expedited removals,” the DHS wrote in an email Friday. “(Former President Joe) Biden ignored this legal fact and chose to release millions of illegal aliens, including violent criminals, into the country with a notice to appear before an immigration judge. ICE is now following the law and placing these illegal aliens, like Miguel Jerez Robles, in expedited removal.”
“(Homeland Security) Secretary Noem is reversing Biden’s catch and release policy that allowed millions of unvetted illegal aliens to be let loose on American streets,” the DHS wrote in the email.
Jerez arrived in the U.S. more than two years ago and has no criminal record.
The department did not respond to follow up questions on why Jerez was released.
Baldwin played role behind the scenes
Baldwin confirmed Friday her office pushed for Jerez’s release.
“From day one, the Trump Administration has sought to divide our communities by attacking immigrants – from executive orders to new policies,” Baldwin wrote in an emailed statement.
The senator became involved after Billmann contacted her office in May.
U.S. Sen. Tammy Baldwin pushed for the release of asylum seeker Miguel Jerez Robles, who was arrested in an apparent Trump administration strategy to send many people who were in legal immigration processes on a fast-track to deportation. Baldwin is shown on Sept. 4, 2024, in Milwaukee. (Joe Timmerman / Wisconsin Watch)
Her office contacted ICE, requesting information on the reason behind Jerez’s detention and the status of his case.
“After that they checked in with us from time to time,” Billmann wrote in a text message to the Cap Times and Wisconsin Watch. “(But) Wednesday was a total surprise.”
The senator’s office said it followed up multiple times with the ICE’s Seattle field office seeking more information on Jerez’s request for release. On June 24, ICE officials told Baldwin’s office they had no record of a request for release, at which point the senator’s office connected with Jerez’s legal team and re-sent the request to the Seattle office.
“I am glad to have been able to help Miguel reunite with his family and stand ready to continue to fight for Wisconsinites facing similar situations,” Baldwin’s statement said.
Billmann said he and his wife, Kathy, postponed a planned vacation this week after hearing Jerez was coming home.
“This was a better way to spend the (days),” Billmann said.
Future remains unclear
Despite the family’s joyous reunion, Jerez’s future remains shrouded in uncertainty.
Geraldine Cruz Dip and husband Miguel Jerez Robles sleep in the car on the drive from Chicago to McFarland Thursday morning after Jerez was released from immigration detention. (Courtesy of Geraldine Cruz Dip)
On June 12, while at the detention center in Tacoma, Jerez completed an interview to assess the validity of his fear of persecution in Cuba.
Jerez’s attorney said the law firm has not yet received the results and does not know when it will receive that information.
“We should have gotten that by now,” Labrador said.
Labrador said Friday he and other lawyers had appealed Jerez’s expedited removal as soon as he was arrested in May. If Jerez wins that appeal, they will file a second asylum request. If he loses that appeal, he may be forced to return to ICE custody.
For now, Jerez said, it looks like he may be back where he was before his month-long imprisonment. When he was released from detention on Wednesday, he was handed the same I-220A form he’d received when he crossed the U.S. border.
He and his wife, Geraldine Cruz Dip, said they’re glad for a fresh chance to make his asylum case “in freedom.”
The U.S. Supreme Court, as seen on Oct. 9, 2024. (Photo by Jane Norman/States Newsroom)
WASHINGTON — The U.S. Supreme Court Friday in a major decision reined in nationwide injunctions by some lower courts that had blocked President Donald Trump’s executive order barring birthright citizenship.
The high court declined to decide the constitutionality of birthright citizenship itself. But the justices said the Trump executive order rewriting the constitutional right to birthright citizenship could go into effect within 30 days after Friday’s ruling in the 28 states that did not initially sue.
The Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision thus raises the prospect that a child born in some states would be regarded legally as a U.S. citizen but not in others until the overall question of constitutionality is settled, unless there is further legal action.
The sweeping ruling also likely could hamper other legal challenges against Trump administration actions in which nationwide injunctions are sought. Democratic attorneys general in the states have been successful in obtaining injunctions in the months since Trump was elected.
“GIANT WIN in the United States Supreme Court!” Trump wrote on social media shortly after the ruling.
Speaking at the White House later, Trump said his administration will move forward with several executive orders that have faced nationwide injunctions, such as suspending refugee resettlement and revoking federal funds from “sanctuary” states and localities.
“Thanks to this decision, we can now promptly file to proceed with these numerous policies and those that have been wrongly enjoined on a nationwide basis, including birthright citizenship,” Trump said.
Liberals on the high court issued a strong dissent. “No right is safe in the new legal regime the Court creates,” wrote Justice Sonia Sotomayor. “Today, the threat is to birthright citizenship. Tomorrow, a different administration may try to seize firearms from law abiding citizens or prevent people of certain faiths from gathering to worship.”
Joining the dissent were Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson.
Barrett writes ruling
In the ruling, the conservative justices found that nationwide “injunctions likely exceed the equitable authority that Congress has given to federal courts.”
“The Court grants the Government’s applications for a partial stay of the injunctions entered below, but only to the extent that the injunctions are broader than necessary to provide complete relief to each plaintiff with standing to sue,” according to the ruling, written by Justice Amy Coney Barrett and joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Brett Kavanaugh, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch.
While the dispute before the court related to Trump’s executive order to rewrite the constitutional right to birthright citizenship, the Trump administration asked the high court to instead focus on the issue of preliminary injunctions granted by lower courts.
“The applications do not raise—and thus the Court does not address—the question whether the Executive Order violates the Citizenship Clause or Nationality Act,” according to the ruling, referring to the practice of granting citizenship to babies born on U.S. soil.
Attorney General Pam Bondi, who appeared at the White House with the president, predicted the Supreme Court in its new term in October will take up the merits of the executive order that aims to redefine birthright citizenship.
The high court’s ruling instructs lower courts to “move expeditiously to ensure that, with respect to each plaintiff, the injunctions comport with this rule and otherwise comply with principles of equity.”
“The lower courts should determine whether a narrower injunction is appropriate; we therefore leave it to them to consider these and any related arguments,” according to the ruling.
A narrower injunction could refer to a class action suit.
Barrett argued that a nationwide injunction would not grant more relief for barring the enforcement of Trump’s executive order against a pregnant person who is not a U.S. citizen and fears their child would be denied citizenship.
“Her child will not be denied citizenship. And extending the injunction to cover everyone similarly situated would not render her relief any more complete,” according to the ruling. “So the individual and associational respondents are wrong to characterize the universal injunction as simply an application of the complete-relief principle.”
Stateless people
Trump ran on a reelection campaign platform promising mass deportations of people without permanent legal status and vowed to end the constitutional right of birthright citizenship.
During the press conference at the White House Trump said that birthright citizenship historically was only meant to benefit the children of the newly freed African Americans, not the children of immigrants.
“It wasn’t meant for people trying to scam the system and come into the country on vacation,” Trump said.
Under birthright citizenship, all children born in the United States are considered citizens, regardless of their parents’ legal status.
If birthright citizenship were to be eliminated, more than 250,000 children born each year would not be granted U.S. citizenship, according to a recent study by the think tank the Migration Policy Institute.
It would effectively create a class of 2.7 million stateless people by 2045, according to the study.
In last month’s oral arguments, Solicitor General D. John Sauer, who argued on behalf of the Trump administration, contended that it’s unconstitutional for federal judges to issue nationwide injunctions. Instead, he said, the injunctions should be limited to those who brought the challenges.
‘Consequences for the children’
New Jersey Attorney General Matt Platkin said during a briefing with reporters that one group of private individuals that challenged the executive order has already filed a class action suit.
“I suspect more will come,” Platkin said.
Washington state Attorney General Nick Brown said at the press conference of Democratic attorneys general that because of Friday’s ruling, the rights of future newborns who hail from states that have not directly challenged the order will be in question.
“In Washington and New Jersey and Massachusetts, Connecticut, your rights are much more strong, but in all those other states, including many of our neighbor states, not participating in this case is going to have consequences for the children born in those states,” Brown said.
With 22 states part of the initial suits challenging Trump’s birthright citizenship order included, that means the order could impact the 28 states that were not part of the initial suit.
Those 28 states are: Alaska, Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, West Virginia and Wyoming.
‘The gamesmanship in this request is apparent’
Sotomayor, in her dissent, argued that the Trump administration brought the question of nationwide injunctions before the high court because it would be “an impossible task” to prove the constitutionality of the birthright citizenship executive order.
“So the Government instead tries its hand at a different game. It asks this Court to hold that, no matter how illegal a law or policy, courts can never simply tell the Executive to stop enforcing it against anyone,” she said. “Instead, the Government says, it should be able to apply the Citizenship Order (whose legality it does not defend) to everyone except the plaintiffs who filed this lawsuit.”
“The gamesmanship in this request is apparent and the Government makes no attempt to hide it. Yet, shamefully, this Court plays along,” she continued.
Sotomayor also questioned the irreparable harm the Trump administration would face.
“Simply put, it strains credulity to treat the Executive Branch as irreparably harmed by injunctions that direct it to continue following settled law,” she said.
She argued that the issue of birthright citizenship was ratified in the 14th Amendment of the Constitution in 1868, following the Civil War, to establish citizenship for newly freed Black people. It was meant to rectify a 1857 case in Dred Scott v. Sandford where the Supreme Court initially denied citizenship to Black people, whether they were free or enslaved.
“By stripping all federal courts, including itself, of that power, the Court kneecaps the Judiciary’s authority to stop the Executive from enforcing even the most unconstitutional policies,” Sotomayor said. “That runs directly counter to the point of equity: empowering courts to do complete justice, including through flexible remedies that have historically benefited parties and nonparties alike.”
Origins of birthright citizenship case
The case, Trump v. CASA, was consolidated from three cases.
George Escobar, the chief of programs and services of CASA, which brought the case, said in a statement that the ruling from the high court “undermines the fundamental promise of the Constitution — that every child born on U.S. soil is equal under the law.”
“Today’s decision sends a message to U.S.-born children of immigrants that their place in this country is conditional,” Escobar said. “But we are not backing down.”
The CASA case was on behalf of several pregnant women in Maryland who are not U.S. citizens who filed their case in Maryland; the second came from four states — Washington, Arizona, Illinois, and Oregon — that filed a case in Washington state; and the third came from 18 Democratic state attorneys general who filed the challenge in Massachusetts.
Those 18 states are California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Rhode Island, Vermont and Wisconsin. The District of Columbia and the county and city of San Francisco also joined.
This is not the first time the Supreme Court has addressed the issue of birthright citizenship.
In 1898, the Supreme Court upheld the 14th Amendment, in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, extending birthright citizenship.
In that 19th-century case, Ark was born in San Francisco, California, to parents who were citizens of the Republic of China, but had legal authority to be in the United States, such as a temporary visa. While Ark was born in California, his citizenship was not recognized when he went on a trip to China. Upon his return to California, he was denied reentry due to the Chinese Exclusion Act— a racist law designed to restrict and limit nearly all immigration of Chinese nationals.
When his case went all the way to the Supreme Court, the high court ruled that children born in the U.S. to parents who were not citizens automatically become citizens at birth.
The Trump administration has argued that the 1898 case was misinterpreted and point to a specific phrase: “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States.
Government attorneys contend that the phrase in the 14th Amendment means that birthright citizenship does not apply to people in the U.S. without legal status or temporary legal status who are “subject to the jurisdiction” of their country of origin.
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.
The director of the Immigrant Justice Clinic says immigrants are facing deportation without due process — and a lack of reliable information is adding more barriers to acquire the representation people are entitled to.
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 in New York City. (Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON — The Department of Justice in an unusual move has filed a lawsuit against all the judges in the federal court in Maryland, in an attempt to block the court’s two-day pause on deporting immigrants who challenge their detention in the state.
The action by the Trump administration represents the DOJ’s latest clash with the judicial branch, and one that may be repeated in other states. Holds on deportations have slowed the administration’s aggressive plans for mass deportation of people without permanent legal status, on the grounds of due process.
“Every unlawful order entered by the district courts robs the Executive Branch of its most scarce resource: time to put its policies into effect,” according to the complaint. “In the process, such orders diminish the votes of the citizens who elected the head of the Executive Branch.”
The complaint by DOJ argued that a standing order from Chief Judge George Russell of the District Court of Maryland is “nothing more than a particularly egregious example of judicial overreach interfering with Executive Branch prerogatives—and thus undermining the democratic process.”
In late May, Russell signed a standing order to halt deportations for two days in an effort to accommodate the sudden high volume of habeas corpus claims filed outside of normal court business hours. A habeas corpus claim allows immigrants to challenge their detention.
The Trump administration argues that the order stymies federal immigration enforcement and acts as a preliminary injunction or temporary restraining order without meeting the threshold and is therefore unlawful.
“Inconvenience to the Court is not a basis to enter an injunction, and filings outside normal business hours, scheduling difficulties, and the possibility of hurried and frustrating hearings are not irreparable harms,” according to the complaint.
The Department of Justice has also asked that the judges recuse themselves from the case, and that either the 4th Circuit hear the case or a judge randomly selected from another district.
Abrego Garcia case
The Maryland court in Greenbelt has halted several immigration-related moves by the Trump administration, with the most high-profile case handled by Judge Paula Xinis, who ordered the return of the wrongfully deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia who was sent to a prison in El Salvador.
The case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled the Trump administration must facilitate the return of Abrego Garcia. The Maryland man was brought back earlier this month, but to face federal charges on human smuggling that were filed after he was wrongfully deported and courts ordered his return.
The Maryland case is still ongoing, as Xinis is allowing discovery to determine if the Trump administration refused to comply with her order to return Abrego Garcia.
Another judge, Theodore David Chuang, in February partly granted a request from Quakers and other religious groups to limit the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s authority to conduct immigration enforcement in houses of worship.
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.
Essential immigrant workers and their families gather in front of the Federal Building in Milwaukee for the Day Without Immigrants call to action. (Photo | Isiah Holmes)
People who believe the call to action, Black Lives Matter, to be controversial and provocative should buckle up.
What we’ve been witnessing these last weeks has been a new call to action: Immigrant Lives Matter.
Yes, even undocumented immigrant lives matter.
Black Lives Matter stirred passionate backlash unlike anything I’ve seen since the 1960s.
Immigrant Lives Matter is now a cry to recognize the humanity of people who are suffering violent attacks after being demonized as “aliens.”
I’ve written on immigration as a reporter, columnist and editorial writer for decades. The most invective I’ve had directed my way has been about who I am as the son of immigrants.
“Go back to Mexico” was a common retort to things I wrote. Each time I’d chuckle to myself: “Hard to do since I’m from California.”
Yup, I’m not from Mexico. But my parents were. And they lived in this country without legal status until I was in grade school.
I’m quite familiar with immigrant life, although, thanks to the 14th Amendment (also under attack by the Trump administration), I’m a citizen.
I’ve seen up close what being afraid of deportation looks like. The fear that a family would be torn apart, loss of livelihood and loss of the country you chose to work in, pay taxes for, build a family in and the only one your children know. And, in my case as with many other immigrants and children of immigrants, the country in whose military you chose to serve.
That experience and those decades of writing on immigration taught me that among the hottest buttons around are those dealing with the border, particularly when people cross it who don’t look and talk like you.
Standard disclaimer: You don’t have to be a racist to be concerned about immigration and immigrants, but using terms such as invasion, infestation, vermin, criminals and threat to American identity and values is a big tell.
As is calling out the military to combat a non-existent foreign invasion.
Black Lives Matter speaks to the current plight of people whose ancestors were unwilling immigrants, packed into slave ships and brought here by force. Dehumanizing racism and the shocking mistreatment of Black citizens by police has dogged our nation from the beginning.
But even that call to action, after the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, was roundly disparaged.
Wrap your head around that. Americans who have been around since the country’s founding and over whose slavery a country fought a bitter civil war are still not considered American enough to insist on being treated as Americans.
All that immigrants and those who stand in solidarity with them are asking is that the basic precepts of fairness, humanity and, importantly, due process extend to them as well.
Immigrants are in a vulnerable position. Demagoguing about invasion and infestation is just too tempting for nativists and opportunists who prey on prejudices for political gain.
Los Angeles has been in the news because of protests that the Trump administration has been trying very hard to depict as a violent conflagration. But the protests have been mostly peaceful by people reasonably objecting to ICE raids. The ICE targets are people who have worked here for years, raising U.S. citizen children and doing the work Americans won’t do.
Despite footage of “violent“ protesters cast as “invaders” faced by brave military troops, California’s governor and many others have noted that there was no widespread, destructive civil unrest, much less the foreign invasion that the demagogues claim justifies military involvement.
Be afraid. We need to stop underestimating the appeal of nativism. It’s real in this country.
But something happened after President Trump’s unwarranted use of the military in Los Angeles and in reaction to his military parade in Washington D.C. (lightly attended, to the president’s dismay).
The “No Kings” protests.
I saw them as solidarity with Immigrant Lives Matter.
Black lives will always matter. After the phrase was coined, some people insisted that it meant other lives mattered less.
Nonsense, then and now.
Immigrant lives matter, as with Black lives, as much as your life does. And if we don’t protect the lives of the people in the crosshairs now, we all could be next.
Reading Time: 10minutesClick here to read highlights from the story
Last month, a McFarland man who arrived in the U.S. three years ago from Cuba attended what he thought would be the first hearing in his asylum case. Instead, in what appears to be a nationwide trend, a judge dismissed his case and ICE arrested him.
Miguel Jerez Robles was among the first people swept up in a recent wave of arrests inside immigration court buildings, a place considered off limits for such enforcement until the Trump administration loosened restrictions.
His story illustrates the volatility and randomness of the country’s immigration processes. While Jerez is now imprisoned in a Tacoma, Washington, detention center, his sister — who arrived in the U.S. just days later and was given different paperwork — has a green card.
Editor’s note:A day after this story was published Miguel Jerez Robles was released from an ICE detention center in Tacoma, Washington. Read an update here.
When McFarland resident Miguel Jerez Robles boarded a plane to Miami last month, he thought he’d be attending a routine immigration hearing about his asylum application and enjoying a rare vacation with his wife and mother.
The 26-year-old and his family had come to Wisconsin in 2022, fleeing political persecution from the Cuban government. They moved to the village just outside Madison, home to a friend his brother-in-law met while driving a taxi in Santiago de Cuba.
Jerez rented an apartment near the high school and got a job delivering packages all over southern Wisconsin, first for FedEx and later for an Amazon subcontractor. He and his wife started a popular YouTube channel, Cubanitos en la USA, where they shared videos about what it was like to work as a delivery driver, buy a car or shop for groceries in Wisconsin.
The Florida trip was Jerez’s first vacation since arriving. Jerez planned to go to the May 22 preliminary hearing in his asylum case, then take his family to the beach and explore the city.
Instead, immigration authorities arrested Jerez and sent him to a detention center, sweeping him up in what appears to be a coordinated strategy to fast-track deportations.
When Jerez appeared in the Miami courtroom, a federal attorney asked the judge to dismiss his asylum claim. According to Jerez’s family, the judge agreed without explanation, then wished him luck.
Jerez headed to meet his wife, Geraldine Cruz Dip, and his mother, Celeste Robles Chacón, who were waiting just outside the fifth-floor courtroom.
Miguel Jerez Robles and Geraldine Cruz Dip met while working at a Chinese restaurant in Santiago de Cuba, Cuba. They came to the United States seeking asylum in 2022 and married in Fitchburg in 2023. (Photo courtesy of the couple)
Plainclothes Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents were waiting too. They handcuffed and arrested him before he could reach his family, his mother said.
Three days later, Jerez was shackled and flown to a detention center in Tacoma, Washington, through a process called expedited removal, which allows the government to deport certain immigrants without first hearing their cases in court.
His wife and mother returned home to McFarland alone.
“The vacation turned into a nightmare,” Cruz said. “Everything fell apart in a moment.”
Jerez was among the first people swept up in a recent wave of arrests inside immigration court buildings, a place considered off limits for such enforcement until the Trump administration loosened restrictions earlier this year. Some, like Jerez, report judges unexpectedly dismissing their cases in what some immigrants and attorneys believe is a coordinated effort to quickly detain large numbers of people as soon as they lose legal immigration status — including those who, like Jerez, have no criminal history.
“It’s easier to go to a courthouse and pick up everyone there than go searching for them at home,” Cruz said.
These arrests, which appear to have begun in late May, are part of President Donald Trump’s sweeping immigration crackdown, some of which he promised on the campaign trail. The scale and methods reach far beyond what many expected from an administration that has vowed to prioritize removing people who threaten public safety. Recent ICE raids at schools and other sensitive locations have sparked multi-day protests in Los Angeles and other major cities.
For asylum seekers like Jerez, who followed steps laid out by the previous administration, the policy shift means they’ll now likely have to make their cases from behind bars.
His story illustrates the volatility and randomness of the country’s immigration processes. Had Jerez arrived five years earlier, before President Barack Obama ended the “wet foot/dry foot” policy that applied to Cuban immigrants since the 1960s, he and his family would have immediately qualified for legal status and a pathway to citizenship. And if he’d only been given the same paperwork as his sister — who arrived for the same reasons just days later — he may have a green card today like she does.
Attorneys: Judges and ICE collaborate in courthouse arrests
Jerez’s arrest shocked his attorneys too. For much of the past two decades, officials reserved the expedited removal process for immigrants arrested near the border within two weeks of arriving in the country.
Former President George W. Bush first implemented these guidelines in 2004. However, during his first term, Trump expanded use of expedited removal procedures to include immigrants anywhere in the United States who have spent less than two years in the country. Former President Joe Biden rescinded that expansion, only to see Trump restore it in January through one of the first executive orders of his new term.
People who are convicted of certain felonies can face expedited removal outside of normal parameters.
“But these people, they are clean. They have no crimes, no record, no nothing,” Ismael Labrador, an attorney with Miami-based Gallardo Law Firm who is representing Jerez, said of those affected by Trump’s latest tactics.
Jerez has been in the country longer than two years. But the Trump administration argues expedited removal should apply to similarly situated immigrants, as long as immigration authorities processed them within two years of their arrival.
“He had everything in order, and he was arbitrarily arrested and placed in expedited removal when he doesn’t qualify to be in expedited removal,” Labrador said.
Geraldine Cruz Dip, left, and Vivianne Jerez show a screenshot they took during a video call with their husband and brother Miguel Jerez Robles, who’s been detained at the Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, Washington, since May. They say detention has made him depressed. (Ruthie Hauge / The Cap Times)
The American Civil Liberties Union of New York sued the Trump administration in January, arguing Trump violated the rulemaking process and the Fifth Amendment’s due process clause in expanding the scope of expedited removal.
Now, the administration is further accelerating removals by dispatching ICE agents to courthouses to immediately arrest following the dismissal of immigration cases.
Labrador isn’t surprised immigration judges, government attorneys and ICE agents appear to be collaborating on the plan. While the federal government’s judicial branch houses most judges, immigration judges are part of the executive branch, employed by the Department of Justice.
“They work for the same boss,” he said, referring to Trump.
In light of the new practice, the nonprofit National Immigration Project recommends immigration attorneys consider requesting virtual hearings to protect clients from courthouse arrest.
“Unfortunately, if I remember correctly, he was imprisoned on the second day this new (courthouse arrest) strategy had begun,” Labrador said. “It was a surprise to all of us.”
Some of Labrador’s other clients have been detained in similar ways, prompting him to begin requesting virtual hearings.
He followed the rules. Then the rules changed.
Jerez sought asylum in the United States after mass demonstrations in his homeland in 2021, when people in dozens of Cuban cities took to the streets to protest shortages of food and medicine, as well as their government’s strict response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Jerez had spoken out against Cuba’s communist government and refused to perform his mandatory military service, putting him and his family in the crosshairs of the authorities, Cruz said. She recalled a time when police interrogated him for six hours and broke his cellphone.
“They told him that the same thing would happen to us as to that phone,” Cruz said. Another time, she said, the police chief came to the family’s home ahead of another round of protests and told them that if they wanted to live, they’d stay home.
The couple lost their jobs at a Chinese restaurant, she said, after police threatened to shut it down if they weren’t fired. The pressure wouldn’t let up, Cruz said, so Jerez and three family members flew to Nicaragua in separate trips and then spent two months traveling by land to the U.S.-Mexico border.
Jerez and his family followed all the government’s requirements while pursuing permanent legal status, his immigration attorneys said.
That included presenting themselves to Border Patrol agents and requesting asylum when they arrived in Nogales, Arizona, in 2022. Jerez was handed an immigration form called an I-220A, allowing immigrants to be released into the United States as long as they stay on the government’s radar — following certain rules and appearing at all court hearings.
Vivianne Jerez, sister of Miguel Jerez Robles, holds a letter from the Madison Police Department verifying that her brother has no criminal record in the jurisdiction. (Ruthie Hauge / The Cap Times)
Celeste Robles Chacón, mother of Miguel Jerez Robles, was waiting for him outside his asylum hearing when he was arrested by plainclothes immigration enforcement agents. (Ruthie Hauge / The Cap Times)
After the family settled in McFarland, Jerez drove to Milwaukee every year for a check-in with immigration agents. He never missed an appointment, his wife said. The government issued a work permit that authorized him to work in the U.S. until 2029.
In 2023, Jerez’s sister Vivianne received a green card, making her a permanent U.S. resident. That’s because she received different paperwork upon her release at the border. It placed her on humanitarian parole, which provides temporary legal status to people from certain countries.
The 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act allows Cubans to apply for permanent residency after having lived in the United States for more than a year. But Jerez was not eligible while his asylum case was pending in immigration court. The U.S. Board of Immigration Appeals ruled in 2023 that immigrants with I-220A status could not apply for green cards.
Meanwhile, a Trump executive action ended humanitarian parole for people arriving from a slew of countries, including Cuba.
Border agents’ choice to nudge a brother and sister toward divergent immigration pathways appears to be random, the family said. That fits a trend, said Labrador, as border agents receive little to no guidance — and wide discretion — on what paperwork fits each situation.
Seeking asylum a second time
Once in expedited removal proceedings, immigrants can be immediately deported unless the government determines they have “credible fear” that they would be persecuted in their home country because of their political views or identity.
On June 12, guards at the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma told Jerez to get dressed to go to the library, his sister said. When he got there, he learned this would be his official interview about why he’s afraid to return to Cuba — determining whether he’ll get a chance to bring his asylum case.
No one has told Jerez when he’ll learn the result, Cruz said, so she asked ChatGPT.
“It says it takes three to five business days, so I think it would be this week,” Cruz said in a June 17 interview. As of Friday, she was still waiting for news.
Based on Labrador’s experience, it can take up to a month.
If Jerez passes the interview, his lawyers will file a second asylum application. But that wouldn’t prompt Jerez’s release.
“He will have to defend his case in custody, unfortunately,” Labrador said.
Jerez’s mother calls uncertainty “psychological torture” for detainees.
Guards have offered Jerez and other detainees the chance to sign papers consenting to be deported, Cruz said.
“From the time they arrest them, the first thing they say is, ‘Sign this and you’ll go to your home country, or prepare to be detained here for up to two years,’” Cruz said.
Jerez and his family are still trying to understand why the government detained him after he did everything it asked, including attending immigration and court appointments, working and paying taxes.
“He doesn’t have so much as a traffic ticket,” his sister, Vivianne, said.
But they know he’s not alone. On TikTok, they see one woman after another “crying because they took their children or their husbands,” Cruz said.
They know others who voted for Trump, thinking he’d only deport criminals, only to have their loved ones detained too, Cruz added.
“He just wants white Americans who speak English when really Latinos are this country’s main workforce,” she said. “If they said they were going to search for people with criminal records, why are they arresting people who don’t have any kind of criminal record?”
In a recent New York Times interview, Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, claimed the administration is prioritizing “the worst first” for deportation but acknowledged other immigrants may get swept up in the fray.
“We’re prioritizing public safety threats, people who have committed crimes in this country or who have committed crimes in their home country and came here to hide,” Homan said. “But I’ve also said from Day One, if you’re in the country illegally, you’re not off the table.”
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not respond to questions about Jerez’s detention.
‘A total disaster’
To talk to his family from the Tacoma detention center, Jerez waits his turn to make video calls on a tablet shared by around a dozen detainees.
On those calls, he usually looks sad, Cruz said. She thinks detention has made him depressed.
Labrador also tries to speak with Jerez as often as possible. The conditions at the facility, one of the country’s largest, are “a total disaster,” he said.
“They are sleeping on the ground. They are being moved constantly. They are waking up in the middle of the night for (head) counting,” he said, adding that fights occur regularly and detainees get little to no medical treatment.
But Jerez’s mood was better last Saturday. When he called his family that day, his sister had just returned from protesting the Trump administration at the “No Kings” rally in McFarland, where she’d carried a hand-written sign covered with family photos .
“Freedom for Miguel,” it read. “He is not a criminal. He is a husband, a son and brother.”
He smiled as they showed him photos and told him about the people who approached her to express sympathy or outrage. Some hugged her and cried. Some said they would pray for her brother.
Cruz saved screenshots from that call. In the three weeks since his detention began, Vivianne said, it was the first time she’d seen him looking happy.
Andrew Billmann, the friend her husband met in his taxi years before, protested alongside Vivianne Jerez, carrying a sign that included a QR code with more information about the detention.
During the No Kings protest in McFarland, Andrew Billmann spreads the word about his friend, McFarland resident Miguel Jerez Robles, a Cuban asylum seeker who was detained by immigration officers outside his immigration hearing in Miami. (Ruthie Hauge / The Cap Times)
“This is not someone that snuck in. This is not someone who’s trying to conceal their location. He’s been completely forthcoming from the beginning,” Billmann said in an interview.
Billmann and his wife, Kathy, have helped the family settle in McFarland, find housing, set up bank accounts and stay on top of their immigration paperwork.
“They’ve literally done everything right,” Billmann said. “I helped Miguel get his driver’s license. He’s got a Social Security number, a work permit. This is all as it’s supposed to go.”
Instead, the arrest has upended life for the whole family. Vivianne canceled her June 9 wedding ceremony. That cost the couple $1,000, but they couldn’t stomach trying to celebrate. Their loved ones cried as the couple quietly signed their marriage license at the McFarland apartment they share with her mother.
And now? The family waits.
Vivianne, who worked as a doctor in Cuba, recently finished training to become a U.S. registered nurse. Her graduation photo sits in her living room, but she hasn’t celebrated that feat either. On the coffee table sit the now-shriveled roses Jerez gave his mom for Mother’s Day. She can’t bring herself to throw them out.
On the couch, Cruz sorts through the evidence she’s marshaled as proof of her husband’s good character: the letter from the Madison Police Department saying he had no record with the department, the awards he received from his delivery jobs, the letter in which his boss called him “an exemplary employee” and said he was “praying for his eventual return.”
Geraldine Cruz Dip, Vivianne Jerez and Celeste Robles Chacón discuss the status of their family member, Miguel Jerez Robles, a Cuban immigrant and refugee, who was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers after a scheduled immigration court hearing in Miami. (Ruthie Hauge / The Cap Times)
Cruz, who drives for the same company, has continued delivering Amazon packages to pay the bills.
Billmann set up a GoFundMe page where community members can donate money to help Cruz cover living expenses while her detained husband can’t work.
If the court gives Jerez another chance at release, she plans to use that money to pay his bond.
“They’re just wonderful, wonderful people,” Billmann said. “It’s just absolutely crazy what they’re putting this family through.”
The story was co-produced by The Cap Times and Wisconsin Watch.
California National Guard members stand guard at an entrance to the Wilshire Federal Building on June 13, 2025 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)
Vice President J.D. Vance took a victory lap to Los Angeles Friday, following a federal appeals court’s ruling that the administration could retain control of the California National Guard troops responding to protests earlier this month over immigration raids in the city.
“BIG WIN in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals on the President’s core power to call in the National Guard!” President Donald Trump wrote on social media following the decision.
Vance was scheduled to visit an FBI building being used by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, meet with law enforcement leadership and U.S. Marines and deliver remarks, according to a White House release Friday morning.
The trip was announced about 12 hours after the administration’s win at the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which held that Trump could keep control of the 4,000 National Guard troops he’d ordered to Los Angeles.
Three judges on the appeals court issued a unanimous opinion Thursday evening that courts had to afford the president wide discretion to decide when a state National Guard can be federalized, leaving command in Trump’s hands while California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s lawsuit challenging the deployment is ongoing. The case has been closely watched by leaders of states around the country.
The order overturns a lower court’s ruling that Trump return control of the troops to Newsom, a Democrat who opposed sending the National Guard to Los Angeles. Newsom has said the Guard troops’ presence has only inflamed tensions between anti-ICE protesters and law enforcement.
The president has the authority to deploy troops to a state with or without the governor’s consent, the panel of appeals judges said Thursday.
The state’s “concerns have more bearing on the question of whether the President should have federalized the California National Guard, not whether he had the authority to do so,” the panel, made up of two judges appointed by Trump and one by former Democratic President Joe Biden, wrote.
They opted to revoke the district court’s temporary restraining order, reasoning that the federal government stood a good chance of ultimately prevailing on the case.
Quelling rebellion, enforcing laws
Attorneys for the state had argued in federal court that Trump’s order was invalid because he did not show the conditions that the statute Trump cited, Section 12406 of U.S. Code Title X, required for federalization of a National Guard had been met and because the order was sent to the California National Guard adjutant general, not to Newsom himself.
The 9th Circuit panel rejected both arguments.
Based on the language of the statute alone, the judges might have required greater support for the federal government’s position, which may have helped California’s case, the order said.
But under U.S. Supreme Court precedent, the president only must meet a low standard to show that deployment is warranted to enforce laws or quell a rebellion, the judges wrote in language that resembled what Judge Jennifer Sung, the Biden appointee, said during oral arguments Tuesday.
“We are not writing on a blank slate,” they wrote. “The history of Congress’s statutory delegations of its calling forth power, and a line of cases … interpreting those delegations, strongly suggest that our review of the President’s determinations in this context is especially deferential.”
The federal government’s evidence that protesters had thrown rocks and other objects at ICE officers, vandalized federal property and attacked vans used by ICE was enough to satisfy that standard, the judges wrote.
Trump quickly took to social media. “The Judges obviously realized that Gavin Newscum is incompetent and ill prepared, but this is much bigger than Gavin, because all over the United States, if our Cities, and our people, need protection, we are the ones to give it to them should State and Local Police be unable, for whatever reason, to get the job done,” Trump wrote.
In amicus briefs in the case, Democratic state leaders have said they see Trump’s use of the National Guard as a threat to their ability to use their Guards for state-level functions, including drug interdiction and natural disaster relief.
Some reviewability
The opinion did, however, reject the U.S. Justice Department’s argument that a president’s federalization order could never be questioned in court.
In a statement, Newsom praised that aspect of the ruling and pledged to “press forward” with the case.
“The court rightly rejected Trump’s claim that he can do whatever he wants with the National Guard and not have to explain himself to a court,” Newsom said. “The President is not a king and is not above the law.”
U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer canceled oral arguments at a previously scheduled Friday morning hearing in the trial court, after the 9th Circuit order.
Breyer anticipated that the state may pursue a challenge based on a potential violation of the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits the military from engaging in domestic law enforcement, and asked each side to file a brief by noon Pacific time on June 23 arguing whether the trial court or appeals court should first hear that issue.
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