Human Rights

Between a series of Democratic election victories in late 2025 and early 2026 and President Donald Trump's weak approval ratings in a long list of recent polls, Republican strategists are growing increasingly worried about this year's midterms —which are a little over nine months away.

Never Trump conservative and New York Times columnist David French fears that Trump and his allies will use militarized U.S. Immigration and Customs and Enforcement (ICE) raids to "intimidate" non-white voters in November. And Guardian opinion columnist Arwa Mahdawi worries that MAGA Republicans will resort to another tactic to discourage Democratic voter turnout: making it harder for women to vote.

Mahdawi is especially concerned about the SAVE Act (Safeguard American Voter Eligibility), which, if passed, would amend the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 to require "documentary proof of United States citizenship" in order to vote. The SAVE Act passed in the U.S. House of Representatives in 2025 but is stalled in the U.S. Senate.

In her Sunday, February 1 column, Mahdawi argues, "As the U.S. grows increasingly violent, increasingly cruel, every day brings a legion of new horrors. So I'm very sorry to say that I'm here to ruin your weekend by giving you yet another thing to worry about. That thing is called the Save Act, and if the Trump Administration gets its way, it could have an oversized impact on the November midterms — particularly when it comes to minorities and married women being able to vote."

Mahdawi contends that the SAVE Act's goal is "disenfranchisement" of female voters.

"If it became law, the Save Act would require Americans to provide a birth certificate, passport, or other citizenship document to register or re-register to vote," the columnist explains. "Per one Brennan Center Study, more that 21 million American citizens, many of whom are engaged voters, do not have easy access to these documents. While just over 8 percent of self-identified white American citizens don't have these documents readily available, the Brennan Center found the number is nearly 11 percent among Americans of color."

Mahdawi adds, "Women who changed their name when they got married may also face a logistical nightmare: reports show that as many as 69 million women who have taken their spouse's name don't have a birth certificate that matches their legal name."

Arwa Mahdawi's full column for The Guardian is available at this link.

As a growing number of encounters between civilians and Department of Homeland Security agents — including the widely scrutinized fatal shooting of Renee Good in Minneapolis — are scrutinized in court records and on social media, federal officials are returning to a familiar response: self-defense.

In more than a handful of recent encounters, the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection, has said its agents acted in self-defense during violent encounters, even as eyewitness testimony and video footage raised questions about whether those accounts fully matched what happened.

And in a ruling for a recent civil lawsuit, a U.S. district judge said federal immigration officials were not forthcoming about enforcement efforts, citing discrepancies between official DHS statements and video evidence.

“We’re now in a situation in which official sources in the Trump administration are really tying themselves quite strongly to a particular narrative, regardless of what the widely disseminated videos suggest,” said César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, a law professor at Ohio State University.

The cases come amid an aggressive expansion of federal immigration enforcement and increasing scenes of violent and intimidating arrest tactics. President Donald Trump’s administration has sharply increased the hiring of immigration agents, broadened enforcement operations and accelerated deportations, as protests have spread across major cities.

The use of force, paired with conflicting official statements and evidence, has raised questions about whether federal immigration officials can be held accountable and highlighted the steep hurdles victims of excessive force might face in seeking legal recourse.

The Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not respond to multiple requests from Stateline for comment on discrepancies between official accounts and publicly available evidence.

Since last July, there have been at least 17 open-fire incidents involving federal immigration agents — including fatal shootings, shootings with injuries and cases in which shots were fired — according to data compiled by The Trace, a nonprofit and nonpartisan news outlet investigating gun violence. A recent Wall Street Journal investigation also found 13 incidents since July in which immigration agents fired at or into civilian vehicles.

One of the most prominent examples unfolded in Minneapolis this month: Good’s fatal shooting by a masked ICE agent. The Department of Homeland Security initially said the agent, Jonathan Ross, fired in self-defense after Good, 37, allegedly tried to run over officers. Videos taken by bystanders show Good’s vehicle reversed, shifted and began to turn away from officers after one yelled and pulled on her car handle. Ross positioned himself near the hood of her car, and he began firing.

Minnesota officials later stated the footage did not support DHS’ description of an imminent threat, prompting renewed scrutiny of how the Trump administration is characterizing use-of-force encounters.

Similar discrepancies have surfaced in other cases. The Department of Homeland Security recently revised its account of a December shooting in Glen Burnie, Maryland, after local police contradicted its initial version. DHS first claimed both men injured in the incident were inside a van that ICE officers fired at in self-defense, but later said that one of the injured men had already been arrested and was in custody inside an ICE vehicle when he was hurt. The other man was shot twice and is facing two federal criminal charges.

In August, federal immigration agents fired at a family’s vehicle three times in San Bernardino, California. DHS maintained the shooting was justified after at least two agents were struck by the vehicle, but available footage shows an agent breaking the driver-side window moments before gunfire erupted. Surveillance footage from the street does not show agents being struck by the vehicle.

“I can’t think of another time in my lifetime — I’m 50 years old — where we’ve seen this sort of force in the streets in the United States,” said Mark Fleming, the associate director of federal litigation at the National Immigrant Justice Center. Fleming has been an immigration and civil rights attorney for the past 20 years.

García Hernández, the law professor at Ohio State University, echoed Fleming’s point, saying that what also stands out is how often agents are deploying less‑lethal weapons in ways that would generally be prohibited — including firing rubber pellets and similar projectiles at people’s faces or heads.

In its use-of-force policy, DHS agents may use force only when no “reasonably effective, safe, and feasible” alternative exists and only at a level that is “objectively reasonable.” DHS policy emphasizes “respect for human life” and directs officers to be proficient in de-escalation tactics — using communication or other techniques to stabilize or reduce the intensity of a potentially violent situation without, or with reduced, physical force. The policy also states that deadly force should not be used solely to prevent the escape of a fleeing suspect.

ICE, as an agency under DHS, is bound by this guidance, but the policy on shooting at moving vehicles differs from what many law enforcement agencies nationwide now consider best practices. While DHS prohibits officers from firing at the operator of a moving vehicle unless it is necessary to stop a serious threat, its rules do not explicitly instruct officers to get out of the way of moving vehicles when possible.

Use of force

A growing pattern of aggressive tactics and conflicting evidence has raised serious questions about how federal immigration agents use lethal and less-lethal force, and how DHS officials describe the incidents to the public.

In September, 38-year-old Silverio Villegas González was fatally shot during a traffic stop in Franklin Park, a suburb near Chicago. DHS claimed that one agent was “seriously injured” after being dragged by González’s car as he tried to flee. But body-camera footage shows the agent telling a Franklin Park police officer that his injury was “nothing major.”

In a statement, DHS said the agent responded with lethal force because he was “fearing for his own life” — a narrative very similar to the department’s description of the fatal shooting of Good in Minneapolis.

In recent months, DHS officials have claimed that immigration agents have been repeatedly attacked with vehicles.

“We’ve seen vehicles weaponized over 100 times in the last several months against our law enforcement officers,” Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said during an interview with CNN this month.

In court filings related to a civil lawsuit about Operation Midway Blitz in Chicago, the department provided body-camera footage and other internal records to bolster their claims of self-defense.

But U.S. District Judge Sara Ellis found the evidence “difficult, if not impossible to believe.” In her lengthy opinion issued in late November, Ellis acknowledged that agents sometimes encountered aggressive drivers but also found that agents treated cars that were merely following them as potential threats.

In October, an ICE agent shot a community observer, Marimar Martinez, five times during a confrontation in Chicago. DHS claimed that she rammed the ICE vehicle with her car and boxed it in, but surveillance footage does not show the agents were trapped.

Martinez survived, but the Trump administration quickly labeled her a “domestic terrorist” — the same label used to describe Good. Martinez’s criminal charges were dropped in November after the federal Department of Justice abruptly moved to dismiss the case.

In Ellis’ ruling on the civil lawsuit, she wrote that federal officials “cannot simply create their own narrative of what happened, misrepresenting the evidence to justify their actions,” and that the violence used by federal agents “shocks the conscience,” a legal standard meaning a situation that seems grossly unjust to an observer.

Ellis also explicitly questioned the conduct and leadership of Greg Bovino of U.S. Border Patrol during the Chicago immigration operation. Bovino, who has led the administration’s big-city campaign, was deposed under oath, and in her November ruling, Ellis described him as “not credible,” writing that he “appeared evasive over the three days of his deposition, either providing ‘cute’ responses … or outright lying.”

In a footnote, Ellis also noted an instance in which an agent asked ChatGPT to draft a use-of-force report from a single sentence and a few images — further undermining the credibility of official DHS accounts.

A narrow path to accountability

Holding federal immigration agents accountable for misconduct is difficult, even as video evidence and police or court records increasingly contradict official government accounts.

With more evidence surfacing and legal claims already underway, some experts say it’s likely that even more lawsuits will emerge this year.

“We should expect to see more examples, more instances in which cellphone video is used to bolster legal claims against DHS, ICE, Border Patrol and specific officers as well,” said García Hernández, of Ohio State University.

Federal officers are shielded by legal doctrines such as qualified immunity and U.S. Supreme Court rulings that restrict when people can sue federal officials for constitutional violations. In recent years, the courts have narrowed the circumstances under which individuals can bring claims for excessive force or wrongful death.

Suing individual federal immigration agents is nearly impossible.

People can, however, pursue claims against the federal government under the Federal Tort Claims Act if a government employee causes financial or bodily harm. These cases, which can include claims for wrongful death, face significant hurdles: no punitive damages, no jury trials, state-specific caps on compensation and protections for discretionary government decisions.

Internal DHS investigations can lead to discipline or policy changes, but their findings may not be made public.

Several state lawmakers in California, Colorado, Georgia, New York and Oregon are pursuing measures that would allow residents to sue federal immigration agents for constitutional violations. Illinois has a similar law already in place, but this pathway remains largely untested, and experts say it faces significant legal and logistical hurdles.

Stateline reporter Amanda Watford can be reached at ahernandez@stateline.org.

As Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, agents continued to use aggressive and sometimes violent methods to make arrests in its mass deportation campaign, including breaking down doors in Minneapolis homes, a bombshell report from the Associated Press on Jan. 21, 2026, said that an internal ICE memo – acquired via a whistleblower – asserted that immigration officers could enter a home without a judge’s warrant. That policy, the report said, constituted “a sharp reversal of longstanding guidance meant to respect constitutional limits on government searches.”

As hundreds of Minneapolis residents assembled in Whittier Park Saturday evening to demand once again that federal immigration agents leave Minnesota following the second fatal shooting of a legal observer in less than three weeks, one speaker demanded that the gathering must not simply be “another damn vigil.”

“This is a turning point,” said Edwin Torres DeSantiago of the Immigrant Defense Network.

He spoke to the crowd hours after several federal officers were filmed surrounding Alex Pretti, 37, after he attempted to help a woman one of them had pushed to the ground, and fatally shooting him.

Torres DeSantiago’s words were echoed by the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention, which did not mince words about the agents of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection who have for months roamed the streets of cities including Minneapolis, Chicago, and Los Angeles, arresting immigrants and US citizens and opening fire nearly two dozen times—killing at least six people including Pretti.

The federal agents recruited by the Trump administration with flyers imploring them to choose between their “homeland” and an “invasion,” said the Lemkin Institute, “are loyal agents of Nazis and white supremacists within the Republican Party. They are behaving as enemies both of the Constitution and of the American people and they must be treated as such.”

“The United States is at a crossroads: Either the American people are able to wrest power from the current fascist leaders or those leaders will continue to radicalize, using violence and terror to dismantle democracy and commit even greater mass atrocities,” said the organization. “History is clear about this.”

The warning came as the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said it would be investigating the shooting involving its own officers instead of the FBI. The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension said DHS representatives had blocked them from accessing the crime scene late Saturday, even though officials had obtained a judicial search warrant.

The bureau joined the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office in filing a lawsuit to prevent the “destruction of evidence” by DHS.

Edward Ahmed Mitchell, national deputy director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, called on Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey to order the city’s police department to “take control of the scene of the latest deadly ICE shooting, launch an independent criminal probe, and protect peaceful protesters at the scene from ICE violence.”

“Calling for ICE to leave is not enough. This shooting happened on a city street in the jurisdiction of the Minneapolis law enforcement and they must lead an independent investigation into what appears to be another horrific, unnecessary execution of a Minneapolis resident,” said Mitchell. “ICE should immediately end its deadly and disastrous siege of Minnesota and turn over all evidence and information about this shooting and the prior shooting of Renee Good to local authorities.”

Meanwhile, Trump administration officials continued pushing a narrative which was contradicted by numerous videos of the shooting and the moments leading up to it, claiming Pretti had “approached” federal agents with a gun. Footage shows Pretti holding only a phone, not a firearm, and one of agents involved in wrestling him to the ground after he was pepper-sprayed reaches into the scuffle empty-handed and then pulls out a gun before the multiple shots were fired.

Pretti was armed with a gun that he was carrying lawfully and had a permit for, local authorities said.

Despite the video evidence, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem repeated almost verbatim the claim she made earlier this month when an ICE agent fatally shot Renee Good in another incident that did not match the administration’s description in footage taken by bystanders: “Fearing for his life and the lives of his fellow officers around him, an agent fired defensive shots.”

Stephen Miller, President Donald Trump’s homeland security adviser and deputy chief of staff, said without any evidence soon after the shooting that Pretti was a “domestic terrorist” who “tried to assassinate federal law enforcement,” and Trump called Pretti a “gunman.”

The shooting came days after seven Democrats in the US House joined Republicans in passing a funding bill for DHS without securing restrictions on ICE, despite growing national outrage over federal immigration agents’ operations and Trump’s mass deportation agenda.

The bill still needs to go through the Senate and is one of several funding measures that need to pass by January 30 to keep the government open.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said in a statement after Pretti was killed that “Senate Democrats will not provide the votes to proceed to the appropriations bill if the DHS funding bill is included.”

“What’s happening in Minnesota is appalling—and unacceptable in any American city,” said Schumer. “Democrats sought common sense reforms in the Department of Homeland Security spending bill, but because of Republicans’ refusal to stand up to President Trump, the DHS bill is woefully inadequate to rein in the abuses of ICE.”

Democratic senators who had been expected to support the $64.4 billion in DHS funding, which includes $10 billion for ICE, said after the shooting that they would not do so.

“I cannot and will not vote to fund DHS while this administration continues these violent federal takeovers of our cities,” said Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.).

Over the past year, images of masked, heavily armed Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arresting men, women and children – outside of courts, at schools and homes – have become common across the United States.

Two gay men who came to the United States seeking asylum are set to be deported out of the Mesa Gateway Airport to their home country of Iran, and what their attorney fears will be their deaths.

They are scheduled to be deported alongside about 40 other Iranians, to a country experiencing widespread unrest after thousands were killed in anti-government protests.

Homosexuality is a crime in Iran and the country has executed men for it as recently as 2022.

“That is punishable by death in Iran and so there is a very, very real — not speculative — concern,” Rebekah Wolf, an attorney for the American Immigration Council, who is representing the two men, told the Arizona Mirror. “The last time when we got very, very close to one of them being deported, he was destroying all of his documents so he wasn’t carrying anything with him.”

Wolf declined to publicly identify her clients out of fear for their safety, but the Mirror has reviewed court documents and detention records that confirm key details of their story.

But even if her client isn’t carrying any identifying documentation, if he’s deported and arrives in Iran, ICE will provide the names of all the passengers on the aircraft to Iranian authorities. The agency is required to cooperate with countries to which it deports people.

Wolf’s clients, who have no criminal convictions and who both came to the United States in 2025 on asylum claims, were arrested by the Iranian “morality police” for being gay years ago. That spurred them to flee the country.

On Wednesday the men were told that they would be deported to Iran along with other Iranian detainees that include Iranian Christian asylum seekers, Wolf told the Mirror.

“We are just really in the dark on where these plans came from,” she said. “It is the worst case I’ve ever had and I’ve been doing this for over 10 years.”

Between 3,000 and 4,500 Iranians were recently killed when their government brutally cracked down on protesters. The unrest led to the Federal Aviation Administration issuing a no-fly zone over the region as tensions between Iran and the United States escalate.

ICE did not respond to a request for comment about what agreement it had made to allow its deportation aircraft to fly into Iran and what agreement it may have come to with the country allowing it to conduct the deportation.

Wolf’s clients were denied asylum in spring 2025 and have been working on appealing that denial but were not granted stays of removal. Now, the attorney is working to appeal the deportation order, filing emergency orders to ask the courts to adequately assess the merits of the case, but Wolf said the clients were told their deportation flight leaves Sunday.

“Against that backdrop in particular, the fact that the Trump administration would be sending Iranian asylum seekers back to that regime is essentially a death sentence,” Democratic U.S. Rep. Yassamin Ansari, of Arizona, told the Mirror.

Ansari said that her office has been working to prevent the deportation flight from happening by reaching out to the Trump administration, Republican and Democratic colleagues, as well as the Department of State and Department of Homeland Security.

Last year, Ansari and U.S. Rep. Dave Min, a California Democrat, sent a letter to DHS and the Department of State seeking clarification about why the U.S. began making deportations to Iran late that year, but Ansari confirmed that they have yet to receive any substantial response.

“Given [Trump]’s own statement that ‘help is on the way,’ this is very explicitly a way to help Iranian people who would literally be sent back to their death if they get on that plane Sunday,” Ansari said.

Trump has promised Iranian protestors that “help is on its way” and has not ruled out possible military action in the region.

Ansari added that the deportations signal a concerning larger issue.

“It is deeply disturbing because it demonstrates that there is a relationship between the Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States,” she said.

The Mesa Gateway Airport that the two men are scheduled to fly out of plays a crucial role in ICE’s ramping up of aerial deportation efforts. It hosts the agency’s headquarters for its “ICE Air” operations, which uses subcontractors and subleases to disguise deportation aircraft.

The airport has also been part of the administration’s efforts to send immigrants to African nations like Ghana, often when those aboard are not even from the continent.

The airport is also home to a lesser-known detention facility.

The Arizona Removal Operations Coordination Center, or AROCC for short, is a 25,000-square-foot facility at the airport. It opened in 2010 to little fanfare and can house up to 157 detainees and 79 employees from ICE, according to an ICE press release from 2010.

The success of the TV show "Heated Rivalry," about two closeted hockey players who fall in love, may be masking the fact that anti-gay bias has "surged particularly sharply" since 2020, say two research psychologists in a New York Times opinion piece.

Five years after the U.S. Supreme Court's 2015 decision that found same-sex couples have the same rights and responsibilities to marriage as their different-sex peers, support for gay people began to "sharply reverse," according to Dr. Tessa E.S. Charlesworth and Dr. Eli J. Finkel.

Perhaps most "surprising" are the groups where anti-gay bias is surging.

Charlesworth and Finkel noted that anti-gay bias trends "were distinctly robust among the youngest American adults — those under 25. This group increased its animus against marginalized groups in general and gay people in particular at a faster rate than older Americans did."

"Also surprising is that although anti-gay bias has risen faster among conservatives, it has also risen among liberals," they noted.

A 2024 Gallup poll found that support for same-sex marriage was dropping, especially among Republicans.

When asked if marriage equality should be legal, Republicans’ support fell to 46% from a high of 55% in 2021 and 2022. But support also fell among Democratic and independent voters who were asked the same question.

The percentage of Americans who think homosexuality is morally acceptable had also fallen since 2022’s record high. In that year, 71% thought it was morally OK to be gay, but that fell to 64% in 2023.

Charlesworth and Finkel acknowledge that they are unsure of why support for gay people has reversed.

They speculate that social instability and anti-establishment sentiment could be to blame.

"Gay and lesbian people, newly woven into the fabric of mainstream society, may have been collateral damage in a broader revolt against a system that felt broken, especially among younger generations grappling most intensely with uncertainty about their future," the researchers wrote.

And they issued a warning.

"At a time when social advances can coexist with backlash, watching queer stories on television can feel comforting. But comfort on the couch is not the same thing as progress."

Far-right activist Nick Fuentes continues to gain momentum.

Federal law enforcement agencies are detaining US citizens who do not carry proof of their citizenship in what civil rights advocates describe as a flagrant violation of constitutional rights—and a top Trump administration official is claiming the government has the authority to do so.

A Somali-born Minnesota man was alarmed by the practice last Tuesday when immigration agents tackled him, handcuffed him, and arrested him, refusing to accept his REAL ID as proof of his legal residence in a video that was widely circulated on social media.

The man, who identified only as Mubashir, was placed into a chokehold and forced to his knees in the snow on his way to get food in Minneapolis’ Cedar-Riverside neighborhood, which has a large Somali population.

As the Sahan Journal describes:

Mubashir said he told officers multiple times that he is a US citizen and asked if he could show them his ID. Officers ignored him, dragged him in the snow, and pushed him into a car as witnesses yelled and blew whistles, according to the video of his arrest.The arrest occurred as federal agents walked into nearby businesses in the Somali-heavy neighborhood, questioning people and asking them to show their passports. Mubashir said he was in the car with officers for about 20 minutes, asking them repeatedly if he could show them his ID. They refused, he said.

According to the report, officers asked if they could photograph Mubashir to check whether he’s a US citizen—likely to run his information through a facial recognition application that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has acknowledged it uses during immigration stops, including on US citizens without their consent.

Mubashir declined to have his photo taken, asking: “How would a picture prove I’m a US citizen?”

He was later taken to a federal building that houses an immigration court and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) offices. Only after having his fingerprint taken was Mubashir allowed to present his ID and given permission to leave.

Officers refused to drop him back off at Cedar-Riverside, instead telling him to walk home more than seven miles in the midst of a snowstorm, which had led authorities to issue a weather advisory.

“I deserve to be here like anyone else—I’m a US citizen,” Mubashir said. “I can’t even step outside without being tackled—no question—because I’m Somali.”

“I apologize that this happened to you in my city, with people wearing vests that say ‘police.’ That’s embarrassing,” Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara said to Mubashir during a press conference on Wednesday.

According to legal experts, there is no requirement under US law that American citizens must be prepared to prove their citizenship at a moment’s notice.

In comments to KQED, a public radio station in San Francisco, earlier this month, Richard Boswell, a law professor at the University of California Law School, called it “most troubling” that US citizens have felt the need to carry their ID to avoid harassment.

“There is no reason why government officers can or should be questioning people about their citizenship without any reason to suspect that they are noncitizens who are here unlawfully,” he explained.

Under the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA), noncitizens must carry proof of their legal status, such as a green card or a foreign passport with stamps indicating a lawful visa.

About two dozen states require residents to identify themselves if stopped by law enforcement. But none require citizens to carry a physical ID at all times, except in specific cases, such as operating a motorized vehicle.

And, as Bree Bernwanger, a senior attorney at the ACLU of Northern California, explained, “there is no legal requirement that US citizens carry papers or have proof of their citizenship on them.” Unless police have reasonable suspicion that a person is in the US unlawfully, she said, “there shouldn’t be a reason to have to carry your papers, because immigration agents aren’t supposed to stop people or detain them.”

But as backlash rolled in from the video of Mubashir’s arrest, the man leading Trump’s mass deportation crusade, US Border Patrol Commander-at-Large Gregory Bovino, seemed to falsely suggest via social media that citizens are required to carry proof of their citizenship.

“One must carry immigration documents as per the INA. A REAL ID is not an immigration document,” he wrote in response to a post about Mubashir’s arrest, which noted his citizenship.

Jeremy Konyndyk, the president of Refugees International, responded that “in no way does the INA require citizens to carry immigration documents” and that Bovino is “just letting his jackboot thugs presumptively detain whomever they like.”

Immigration lawyer Jared McClain later noted on social media that, in response to a class-action suit arguing against indiscriminate workplace raids, Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) argued that an Alabama construction worker, who was kept in handcuffs even after presenting multiple REAL IDs to agents, had still not done enough to prove his citizenship, according to the federal officers.

“This is the official policy—not a one-off,” McClain said.

Aaron Reichlin Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, said the filing was “official confirmation that ICE HSI believes that it can, in fact, detain US citizens for immigration checks, and keep them handcuffed while they have their biometrics run.”

“That is a chilling assertion,” he said.

ProPublica found in October that at least 170 Americans have been detained by immigration agents, sometimes for days, with some having been “dragged, tackled, beaten, tased, and shot.”

But months after the report was published, top administration officials—including Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem—continue to emphatically deny that any US citizens have been detained during the second Trump administration.

At a House Homeland Security Committee hearing on Thursday, Noem abruptly left before Democrats could grill her on reports that citizens had been arrested, claiming she had to speak at a different committee hearing. Reports later found that the hearing had already been cancelled, leading to accusations that Noem misled Congress.

In response to Bovino’s assertion that REAL IDs are not immigration documents, Nicole Foy, a reporter at ProPublica, told the Border Patrol commander: “We’ve been trying to request an interview with you for months now about the enforcement operations you’re leading and the detention of US citizens.”

“Why does a US citizen need to carry immigration documents?” she asked. At press time, Bovino had not publicly responded to Foy’s question.

Comedian and podcaster Deborah Frances-White isn’t joking in her recent column for The iPaper, where she describes a growing movement of men who believe women’s right to vote should be taken away.

"The Guilty Feminist" host noted that she first assumed that it was rumblings coming from the "manosphere," an umbrella term for a loose network of online communities that promote ideologies of male supremacy and anti-feminism.

"However, even the most fiercely anti-feminist forces haven’t openly questioned women having the vote in my lifetime, because no one can remember a time when it wasn’t normal," wrote Frances-White.

She recalled being cornered in the lobby of one of her comedy shows, by a woman who claimed that women are "too emotional" to have the right to vote.

"That was my first alarm bell," she confessed.

White women in the U.S. earned the right to vote in 1920. Frances-White noted that Native American women weren't even classified as citizens until 1924 and some Black women were blocked from voting until the 1960s — particularly in the South.

But in the last decade, Supreme Court rulings eliminated the Roe v. Wade standard, allowing the government to regulate reproductive health.

Frances-White pointed to the "Project 2025" handbook, a plan authored by those working with the conservative think tank The Heritage Foundation amid President Donald Trump's 2024 campaign.

The goals include not just replacing FBI staff with Trump loyalists, but the complete dismantling of the Department of Education, the mass deportation of immigrants and cuts to Medicare and Medicaid.

One section, however, focuses on enacting laws pushed by Christian nationalists, including laws that criminalize reproductive health.

"Much of this is being actioned now," she warned.

"Part of this new political climate includes the visibility of the Communion of Reformed Evangelical Churches (CREC), which counts more than 160 congregations across North America, Europe, Asia and South America," she continued. "Their most recent outpost was strategically planted in Washington DC under the leadership of Pastor Doug Wilson. While they are not directly connected to Project 2025, many of their aims align neatly with it."

CREC spokespeople are outright arguing to overturn a woman's right to vote and put women "back to the household." Women's suffrage is "eroded family values" in their eyes. Women should only be voting, they believe, if she is the head of the household. That does not mean that men who are not the head of the household are not allowed to vote, however.

This reflects a broader argument within the Trump coalition. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has contended that if women are to be included in combat roles, they must meet the same physical standards as male soldiers.

In her closing remarks, Frances-White contends that what marks the beginning of the journey "on the road to Gilead" is not the overturning of a ruling like Roe, but rather when ideas questioning women's voting rights spread through conversations, social media, and videos without significant public opposition.

"It’s a quiet conversation in a church basement," she said. "It’s a campaign shared on social media. It’s ideas dropped in YouTube videos with millions of hits. It’s a moment when someone says, “maybe women shouldn’t vote,” and it doesn’t get laughed off. If you believe democracy means that each of us has a voice – the right to vote, choose, speak, dissent – now is the time to guard it."

Read the full column here.

Although MS NOW host, Never Trump conservative and ex-GOP Congressman Joe Scarborough often says that the United States' immigration laws must be obeyed and enforced, he is vehemently critical of the way in which President Donald Trump's

United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids are being carried out. Scarborough considers the raids reckless and blatantly cruel.

Scarborough isn't alone in that view.

In an article published by the conservative website The Bulwark on November 29, journalist/author Adrian Carrasquillo reports that companies helping ICE with the raids are facing an angry backlash from consumers.

"Companies that have collaborated with immigration enforcement agencies in various ways to aid Trump's mass deportation initiative — whether through allowing ICE to raid their parking lots, taking on contracts with DHS, or a variety of other actions — are starting to feel the rumblings of a consumer revolt," Carrasquillo reports. "Home Depot is possibly the most visible case after the company’s parking lots became a familiar setting for shocking viral clips and local news segments depicting federal agents' aggressive attempts to apprehend unsuspecting day laborers. The home-improvement chain now faces the prospect of a national boycott."

Carrasquillo adds, "But that's not the end of their troubles: Bold and unpredictable protests are beginning to disrupt retail operations across the country…. For months now, Home Depot has been singled out for its role as a staging ground in the Trump deportation regime."

Another possible target for boycotts, according to Carrasquillo, is AT&T.

Carrasquillo reports, "There's also speculation that AT&T data could have been used by DHS to target people during the shocking raid at the 7500 South Shore Drive residential building raid in Chicago."

Chris Newman, general counsel for the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON), doesn't see these boycotts letting up anytime soon.

Newman told The Bulwark, "People are becoming more emboldened to cross Trump as his power wanes. The shared goal of the corporate overlords and ICE is to make people feel powerless, and these actions are a way of resisting that sense of powerlessness."

Adrian Carrasquillo's full article for The Bulwark is available at this link.

On the night of Oct. 8, a man named Delmar Gomez drove to pick up his younger brother from a mechanic’s shop on Lamar Avenue. He never came home.

On the return trip, law enforcement officers with the Memphis Safe Task Force pulled over his 2011 Toyota Tundra pickup and arrested the brothers on immigration charges.

The Guatemalan brothers — both longtime Memphians — are known in national Pentecostal Christian circles as well-traveled worship singers, performing at churches from New York to Florida.

They were moved from one immigration detention center to another, finally arriving at a lockup in Louisiana, more than 300 miles from Memphis. The younger brother, Eber Gomez, a 30-year-old with no known criminal record, was soon deported, leaving behind a wife and two young children in Memphis.

Delmar Gomez, a 38-year-old husband and father of four U.S. citizen children, is still holding on. Though he had only minor motor vehicle violations on his record, he’s spent more than 40 days in an immigration detention as he heads into a hearing Tuesday that could result in his deportation.

Not only did the Trump administration lock up the brothers, the government published a news release with false information portraying Delmar Gomez as one of 11 “worst of the worst” immigrant criminals in Memphis.

The allegations deeply upset his wife, Sandra Perez.

“I want people to know that all of the charges that they’re accusing him of now are false, that none of that is true,” she told the Institute for Public Service Reporting in a Spanish-language interview. “He’s a person who is very respectful, honest, very hardworking. He is a good person.”

The news release included the false claim that Delmar Gomez had been arrested on an aggravated assault charge. The claim was re-published on at least one local TV station’s website.

In a second version of the news release, the Trump administration published Delmar Gomez’s mug shot and misidentified him as “Miguel Torres, a criminal illegal alien from Mexico arrested for selling synthetic narcotics, vehicle theft, traffic offense and drug possession.” The same caption also appears under another man’s photo.

Weeks later, the government has not corrected the misidentification, or explained how it happened, even after a reporter repeatedly asked about it.

The situation reflects broader issues. The Trump administration is conducting a massive immigration crackdown in Memphis and across the country, spending billions of dollars to arrest, detain and deport people, using stories of criminal immigrants as justification for harsh treatment.

The arrest and detention of the Guatemalan singing brothers illustrates the sharp contrast between the administration’s rhetoric — that it’s arresting hard-core criminals — and the reality on the ground in Memphis and across the country: that it’s mostly arresting immigrants with minor criminal records or no criminal record at all.

As of this month, 74% of immigrants in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention had no criminal convictions, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University. Many of those who were convicted committed only minor offenses, such as traffic violations.

Detailed numbers for Memphis are not available. The top state prosecutor in the Memphis area, Steve Mulroy, told The Institute in October that immigration arrests account for about 20% of total task force arrests, and most of the immigrants have no criminal history other than unlawful presence in the United States.

Delmar Gomez’s wife Sandra acknowledges her husband entered the country illegally in January 2005, more than 20 years ago. He was 17 at the time.

Sandra said Delmar was unable to gain legal immigration status, but has lived a clean life.

Delmar Gomez’s attorney, Skye Austin with advocacy group Latino Memphis, said she is aware of the federal government’s news release that included the false information.

“When I was first made aware of it, my immediate thought was, ‘Do people think that all Hispanics look alike?’ ” Austin said. “Do people think that it is OK to mix up names and faces and histories?”

There is no evidence that Gomez was ever accused of aggravated assault, drug dealing, vehicle theft or any other major crime, she said.

The Institute for Public Service Reporting conducted its own independent records search and was unable to locate any such criminal charges against Delmar Gomez.

Austin said Gomez’s entire criminal history consists of six traffic tickets issued over a period of nearly two decades, from 2006 to this spring. The tickets were for violations such as driving without a license and without insurance — both misdemeanors, and an Atlanta ticket for driving too fast for conditions and a related driving charge. The most recent ticket came this March, when he was cited for following too closely and driving with an expired tag, she said, adding that prosecutors dropped those charges.

“I think that people should view this as unjust and that this is the opposite of the narrative that we’ve seen where criminals are being taken into detention,” she said. “Because my client’s not a criminal. He is an everyday hard worker just trying to provide for his family.”

From work and singing to detention

Delmar Gomez’s wife Sandra spoke in an interview in the kitchen of her family’s East Memphis home, which is decorated with a poster depicting the Ten Commandments.

She said she learned of the arrests when Eber Gomez called her on the way back from the mechanic’s shop, when the two brothers were in Delmar’s truck. Delmar was driving, but Eber blamed himself for what happened, she said, because if hadn’t needed the ride, Delmar wouldn’t have gone on the errand at all.

“He just told me ‘I’m sorry, it’s my fault that they stopped us.’” she said. “And I told him ‘It’s not true.’

He said ‘Yes it is. Listen.’ And I heard them (law enforcement officers) talking in English.”

“‘Now we can’t do anything,’ he told me. That’s all he said.”

Sandra Perez is a stay-at-home mother to four children who range in age from 17 to three. Delmar Gomez is the family’s primary breadwinner and earns money mainly by mowing yards. He has a lineup of about 60 houses, and he and his father typically mow about 30 yards one week, then about 30 more the next, his wife said.

He’s also a lead vocalist for a Christian band called Agrupacion Vision Emanuel, or Vision of Emanuel Group, which has produced studio recordings and professionally edited music videos.

In the band’s music videos, Delmar Gomez stands in front of as many as 15 musicians, singing passionately at scenic locations including Shelby Farms, the Overton Park shell, and near the “Memphis” sign on Mud Island. One of the videos has been watched more than 400,000 times.

His younger brother Eber Gomez has worked as a roofer and sang with a different touring band called Adoradores de Cristo Memphis, which means “Christ Worshipers of Memphis.”

The two bands have traveled as far away as Chicago, Florida, Alabama, New York and Atlanta to perform at weddings, church anniversaries and other Pentecostal church events, family members said.

Delmar Gomez’s band doesn’t treat these performances as a money-making endeavor, his wife said.

“They don’t charge. They go for faith. If the brothers (at the other churches) want, they give them an offering for their expenses, and if they don’t, they cover their own expenses,” his wife said. “They go for love of the work of God.”

Amid a surge of well over 1,000 federal agents and state troopers in Memphis, community groups say law enforcement officers are arresting and detaining immigrants every day here, often in traffic stops.

The Memphis Safe Task Force has released little information about the immigration arrests. In a statement early this month, the task force said it had made 319 immigration arrests in October.

That’s about 17% of about 1,900 total arrests.

As of November 17, the task force arrest total had risen to 2,790 arrests, Supervisory Deputy U.S. Marshal Ryan Guay said in an email to The Institute.

He did not say how many of these were immigration arrests, referring questions to the Department of Homeland Security, which did not respond.

Delmar Gomez was taken to an ICE office near the airport, then an immigration prison in Mason, Tennessee, then a lockup in Alabama, and finally to a big ICE prison in Jena, Louisiana, his wife said.

She said she wants one thing. “That they let him go,” she said through tears. “That he can be with my family and with me, because he’s been a good person. To be together as a family and work on the things of God, that’s been our desire.

“We’re a very decent family, and it’s unfair what they’re accusing him of.”

Mass deportation campaign

The federal government generally has treated unlawful presence in the United States as a civil violation, not a crime. Under prior presidents, including Republican George W. Bush and Democrats such as Barack Obama and Joe Biden, it’s unlikely people like the Guatemalan singers would ever have been detained.

The background: Businesses wanted a low-cost, reliable workforce. Congress didn’t want to increase legal immigration.

The federal government found a solution: quietly tolerate illegal immigration. Consequently, the government usually enforced immigration law only at the border.

But in non-border areas like Memphis, the federal government rarely bothered to expel unauthorized immigrants, unless the immigrants committed crimes. Unauthorized immigrants like Delmar Gomez could live normal lives – working and raising families, but they often had no way to gain legal status.

The Trump administration has thrown out the practice of non-enforcement and is arresting people who have allegedly committed civil immigration violations, but have no other criminal history. It is also arresting some people who have legal immigration papers, and has even arrested and detained U.S. citizens, most of them of Hispanic origin.

The October 20 news release involving Delmar Gomez demonstrates how Trump’s government is also publishing false information about specific immigrants in Memphis and across the nation.

It’s part of a broader pattern by President Trump and his administration of portraying immigrants as dangerous and evil. Trump famously launched his first presidential campaign in 2015 by calling Mexicans “rapists” and claimed in a presidential debate last year that Haitian immigrants in Ohio are eating other people’s cats and dogs.

Today, the administration sometimes labels immigrants as “terrorists” as justification for deporting them.

In high-profile cases, including a big raid on an apartment building in Chicago, nonprofit news outlet ProPublica has found that those claims were frequently false — that the so-called “terrorists” are often ordinary immigrants with no criminal records.

In fact, multiple studies from the Cato Institute, the U.S. Department of Justice and other researchers have concluded that immigrants are less likely than U.S. citizens to commit crimes — even if the immigrants are in the country illegally.

The Institute contacted the White House for comment for this story. Spokeswoman Abigail Jackson responded by criticizing the reporter.

“Violent criminal illegal aliens who murder, rape, and assault innocent American citizens deserve to be condemned in the strongest possible terms. It’s despicable for any so-called journalist to try and compare these monsters with law-abiding immigrants. This is why no one trusts the media.”

News release includes unverifiable claims

Memphis TV station Action News 5, which had originally re-published the government’s false aggravated assault claim about Delmar Gomez, has since broadcast a follow-up story saying there’s no evidence to support it.

Not only does the government’s October 20 news release include false information about Delmar Gomez, it also includes unverifiable information about at least four other men arrested in the Memphis area.

For instance, the news release says a man named Jardi Caal Requena was arrested “for domestic violence and for making a physical threat.” A reporter with The Institute found no criminal records for anyone with this name in local or federal courts.

The news release claims that a man named Simeon Sosa-Camargo had been convicted of “smuggling aliens into the U.S.”

Federal records show that a man with the same name was convicted in Texas for at least three cases of entering and re-entering the U.S. illegally.

But The Institute found no record that he was ever convicted of human smuggling.

The news release says a man named Wilmer Flores Godoy was convicted of “illegal alien in possession of a firearm and arrested for larceny.” A man named Wilmer Flores was arrested on a felony domestic violence charge in the Memphis area in 2024, and the case was dismissed in October.

But a reporter found no local or federal court records related to gun possession or larceny.

Delmar Gomez is misidentified in the news release as Miguel Torres, a man from Mexico whom the feds accused of drug dealing, vehicle theft, traffic offense and drug possession.

A search for the real Miguel Torres turned up little – the name is common, with hundreds of criminal cases against people with that name in the nationwide federal court system.

But a reporter found no records that matched those allegations for Torres in the Shelby County criminal court system or in federal courts for the western district of Tennessee.

The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to written questions about the Delmar Gomez case and the other men mentioned in the Oct. 20 news release.

Younger brother accepts deportation

The father of the two brothers, Ramiro Gomez, told a reporter he originally had eight children. One of them, Jaime Gomez, was a heavy drinker who was found dead in the Mississippi River several years ago, he said.

By contrast, he said arrested sons Delmar and Eber are clean-living family men. “What I want is for my sons to come back. My grandchildren need them,” he said.

Days after that interview, on Oct. 30, the younger brother, Eber, accepted deportation back to Guatemala, according to an online system that allows people to search immigration court hearings by an identifying number. He arrived back in Guatemala on Saturday, Nov. 8, his father said.

Ramiro Gomez said he had spoken with his son briefly by phone from Guatemala, but he didn’t have a chance to talk with him about why he accepted deportation.

However, the Trump administration has made it extremely difficult for detained immigrants to win release on bond. Instead, detained immigrants are forced to fight their deportation cases from behind bars.

Critics say that by denying bond, the government is using the hardship of imprisonment to grind down immigrants’ will and ability to fight and pressure them to sign paperwork accepting deportation.

Ramiro Gomez said the deportation has caused severe hardship for his son’s wife and their two children. “She’s still at home and paying rent and food for the children.”

Delmar continues to fight deportation

Delmar Gomez remains behind bars in Louisiana. As of today, he’s been locked up for 48 days.

He is scheduled for an individual hearing Tuesday before Immigration Judge Maithe Gonzalez at the lockup in Jena, Louisiana.

Gomez’s attorney Skye Austin will appear via remote link from Memphis and argue for “cancellation of removal” — an immigration judge’s formal ruling that he should not be deported.

Her argument: Delmar Gomez has lived in in the U.S. at least 10 years continuously, and his deportation would harm his four U.S. citizen children. “I also have to prove that he is a person of good moral character and has not been convicted of a crime that would have serious immigration consequences.”

What would she say if an ICE attorney argues that his six traffic tickets for driving without a license, speeding and other violations show bad moral character?

“So, my pushback would be that a number of these traffic violations have been (dropped by prosecutors) or closed, and that my client does everything in his power to pay the fines and make sure that he has nothing pending with the court. He’s not causing any judicial delay or anything of that nature.”

Austin said she’s collected dozens of reference letters to present to the immigration court on her client’s behalf.

“Seven local ministers have written me letters, and that’s on top of again, neighbors, friends, clients of Señor Delmar just wanting to let people know, ‘Hey, this is a good man. I know him personally. I’ve known him for years,’ et cetera, et cetera.”

Most immigrants who go before Judge Gonzalez lose their cases, according to data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.

In 2024 and 2025, the judge decided 148 asylum cases and denied about 87% of them, slightly higher than the denial rate of 78% across judges at the Jena immigration court.

“Mommy, where did Papi go?”

Meanwhile, Delmar Gomez’s children are struggling with his absence.

His oldest child, 17-year-old high school senior Nancy Gomez, said her father had only a limited education in Guatemala and is pushing for her to study.

She’s already been accepted to the University of Memphis.

“He always has given me advice on everything that I do and always has been proud of me and everything that I have done. And then I just want to see him again. I feel really something that has been taken away from me that I want back. Every time he came from work, I would hear his truck coming in, but now I haven’t heard that and I just want to hear it again,” she said.

“When the house is quiet and he comes from work, he fills the environment with his laughter. And he always be talking about his day and asks us about our day, how it was. And I just want to see him back. I just miss him a lot.”

As the adults showed a reporter a family album during a recent visit, the youngest child, three-year-old Betuel, spoke up.

“Mommy, where did Papi go?” he said in Spanish, crying.

His mother picked him up, gave him a hug and kissed him.

“He went to sing, my love,” his mother said.

“He’s working?” the boy said.

“Yes, my love.”

As of Monday the news release with the false information identifying the Guatemalan singer as a Mexican drug dealer remains on the official Department of Homeland Security website, uncorrected.

Indian Americans are increasingly finding themselves the targets of racism by far-right Christian nationalists, and those who identify as MAGA Indian Americans who work in President Donald Trump's administration aren't immune to the vitriol, reports Harmeet Kaur in Newsweek.

When FBI director Kash Patel wished his followers on X a Happy Diwali—a holiday elebrated by Hindus, Jains, Sikhs, and some Buddhists across the world—"far-right Christian nationalist and white nationalist accounts flooded his post with bigoted memes and rhetoric," Kaur writes.

"Similar hostility followed Diwali greetings on X from former UN ambassador Nikki Haley, former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy and Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon, as well as posts about the holiday from the White House, the State Department, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders," Kaur notes.

Some Indian Conservatives, she writes, are shocked by these reactions, including one who is known for making his own racist statements.

"After one X user said that the existence of Indians disgusted them, Dinesh D’Souza, the right-wing commentator who has peddled racism against Black Americans for decades, mused: 'In a career spanning 40 years, I have never encountered this type of rhetoric. The Right never used to talk like this. So who on our side has legitimized this type of vile degradation?'" Kaur notes.

While this vile rhetoric isn't new, Kaur says, it's rising from the political right, and Trump's aggressive immigration crackdowns are leading MAGA to freely say the quiet parts out loud, "openly suggesting that only white Christians belong in America," she writes.

Siddharth Venkataramakrishnan, an editorial manager and analyst at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue who has examined anti-Indian hate speech and the far right online, says to look no further than the White House for the source of this racism.

“The call is coming from inside the house,” Venkataramakrishnan says.

Kaur says that Indian immigrants and Indian Americans are "the latest target of a growing anti-migrant movement in the US and around the world" and "the most consistent anti-Indian bigotry online focuses on the H-1B visa program, of which Indian nationals are the biggest beneficiaries," she writes.

"The program, which admits highly skilled foreigners into the US to work in specialized fields, has sparked infighting among Trump supporters, with visa opponents such as deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller accusing India of 'a lot of cheating on immigration policies,'" Kaur writes.

The far-right has taken aim at Indian Americans, saying they are the ones depriving other—read: white—Americans of good paying jobs.

"They accuse Indians of hiring only within their caste or ethnicity, invoke stereotypes about Indians being dirty or smelly, and highlight behaviors like eating with one’s hands as cultural backwardness," Kaur says.

And it's not just far-right trolls invoking these tropes, she writes.

"During the recent New York City mayoral race, the independent campaign of former Democratic governor Andrew Cuomo released (then quickly deleted) an AI-generated attack ad depicting Zohran Mamdani sloppily eating rice with his hands," she says.

Success of Indian Americans makes them a prime target for hatred, according to Rohit Chopra, a professor at Santa Clara University who studies far-right online communities and who co-auth.ored the reports for the Center for the Study of Organized Hate.

Indian immigrants and Indian Americans are among the highest-earning ethnic groups in the US, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of census data.

“The public image of the Indian community has been that of these basically successful tech professionals and CEOs,” Chopra says. “And the Indian community and Indian American community significantly plays up that image too.”

And, "as long-simmering resentment against affluent Indian Americans metastasizes into a demonization of the entire community," Chopra says "there’s a danger that this could inspire real-world violence."

Most recently in Florida, a Republican councilman, Chandler Langevin, posted on social media that Indians come to the U.S. to “drain our pockets.” Despite constituents calling for him to resign, he refused, but was formally censured.

In Irving, Texas, a Dallas suburb popular with Indian American tech executives, three masked men staged a roadside protest carrying signs that read “Don’t India My Texas,” “Deport H-1B Visa Scammers” and “Reject Foreign Demons," Kaur writes.

A South Asian community leader in Texas said that white supremacist groups were harassing people outside Hindu temples, Kaur reports.

Salil Maniktahla, an Indian American who lives in Springfield, Virginia, said he was accosted by someone in a restaurant who hurled slurs at him, saying "Trump is your president," and "go home."

“What I see now is that a lot of people are mouthing off in ways that they felt they were prevented from doing prior to 2016,” Maniktahla tells Kaur.

Vice President JD Vance, "whose wife Usha Vance is Indian American, dismissed remarks from a government staffer such as “normalize Indian hate” as youthful indiscretion," Kaur says.

Chopra says that Indian Americans need to wake up to what's going on.

“I think that sections of the Indian American community have been living in this fool’s paradise,” Chopra says.

"This should serve as a kind of wake-up call — that racism that’s directed at people of color and minority groups, you are not exempt from. And maybe that should spark some kind of reflection about questions of solidarity with other vulnerable groups," he adds.

In the early morning hours of Nov. 14, after almost a year of being shuffled between immigration detention centers and once nearly being sent to Venezuela, Iraq war vet José Barco was deported from Arizona.

His family still doesn’t know where.

Ricardo Reyes, the executive director of VetsForward, a progressive veterans advocacy organization, called Barco’s removal a “national disgrace.”

“When one veteran is deported, every single veteran is dishonored,” he said. “When a nation abandons its warriors it undermines the very values we swore to defend.”

Barco, who was born in Venezuela but has lived in the U.S. since he was 4 years old, served two tours in Iraq and was awarded a Purple Heart for saving two soldiers who were pinned under a burning Humvee after an improvised explosive device was detonated. During that rescue, Barco sustained severe burns and a traumatic brain injury.

In 2008, Barco was convicted of two counts of attempted first-degree murder and one count of menacing after he fired a handgun into a crowd of teenagers at a house party in Colorado Springs, Colorado. A bullet hit 19-year-old Ginny Clemens, who was pregnant.

Barco’s supporters say a combination of PTSD, his brain injury — which was worsened by several more explosions during his second combat tour — and his struggles with alcoholism and attempts to self-medicate contributed to his actions that day. He has said he has no memory of what happened.

Barco was sentenced to 52 years in prison, but was released on January 21 – a day after Trump took office – after 15 years due to good behavior. On the same day that he walked out of prison, hopeful about meeting his daughter for the first time, ICE agents were waiting for him. What followed were months of detention, as he was transferred between ICE facilities in Colorado and Texas and, finally, the immigration detention center in Florence, Ariz.

Part of what prolonged Barco’s imprisonment was uncertainty around where he should be deported to. In April, the Trump administration flew Barco and several dozen other Venezuelan nationals to the South American country, but Venezuelan officials refused to take him, questioning his birth certificate and Cuban accent, so he was returned to Texas.

While Barco was born in Venezuela, his parents were exiles from Cuba, where his father was once held as a political prisoner. When Barco was a toddler, his family left Venezuela and sought asylum in the United States.

Barco’s wife says she fears for his safety if he is deported to either country. As of Friday afternoon, Reyes, who is in contact with Barco’s family, said it was still unclear where he had been sent.

ICE did not respond to a question about where Barco was sent.

Speaking in front of ICE’s Phoenix Field Office on Friday morning, state Rep. Cesar Aguilar denounced the increase in veteran deportations under Trump.

“‘Deported veteran’ should not even be in a sentence,” the Phoenix Democrat said. “When you serve this country, you should be given citizenship.”

While no exact figures are available, an estimated 10,000 veterans were deported between January and June, according to a letter sent to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security by members of Congress concerned about the trend.

During Biden’s presidency, ICE was directed to take into consideration a noncitizen’s military service and not to initiate removal proceedings against them if they are eligible for naturalization, unless significant aggravating factors exist. That guidance was rescinded in an April memo, which emphasized that “military service alone does not automatically exempt aliens from the consequences of violating U.S. immigration laws.”

Only residency is required to enlist in the U.S. military. But military service offers a pathway to citizenship. In court filings, Barco’s commanding officer wrote that he helped Barco complete and submit an application for naturalization in 2006. At some point, that packet got lost.

Reyes faults the government for that missing application, and on Friday criticized ICE for barring discussion of Barco’s military service during deportation hearings.

“A man who bled — a man who literally burned alive for this country — was never allowed to speak about the very service that we claim as America to honor,” he said.

Reyes, who is also a veteran, lambasted the move to expel people who have served in the military from the country as “outrageous” and called on the Trump administration to bring Barco and others back.

“It’s a stab in the back to deport any veteran, but especially a combat veteran who stood in harm’s way for this nation while others stayed home — while others got a doctor’s note claiming they have bone spurs,” Reyes said, in a dig at Trump, who avoided being drafted during the Vietnam war because he was diagnosed with bone spurs in his heels.

When Reggie Williams turned 18 two decades ago, his mother entrusted him with his birth certificate. Keep it on you at all times, she advised, in case you encounter police.

On a recent afternoon, he had a copy in his wallet, along with his state ID, as he walked from his uptown apartment in Memphis, Tennessee, to a nearby corner store.

A Memphis Police Department cruiser pulled up, and two officers questioned him: Where was he coming from? Where was he going?

Williams responded, and the interrogation continued: Did he have any weapons on him? No. Any drugs? No. When asked to empty his pockets, the 39-year-old artist turned over his wallet and phone.

Minutes later, four men poured out of an unmarked SUV with tinted windows. They carried rifles and wore body armor — but no identifying badges.

He thought of his family. “Deep down, I felt like I was not gonna make it home,” said Williams, who is Black.

The Oct. 15 incident occurred about two weeks after the National Guard and 30 other local, state and federal agencies descended upon Memphis as part of President Donald Trump’s order authorizing “hypervigilant policing” to end violent crime. In addition to targeting violent criminals, the operation dubbed “Memphis Safe Task Force” has ensnared innocent residents of this majority-Black city.

Among those who have reported being harassed: a ride-share driver stopped for not wearing a seat belt despite having one on as she drove a passenger to the airport; a pastor pulled over for looking lost as she left a church gathering; and, in a case of mistaken identity, a 72-year-old man roused from bed and marched out of his apartment while clad in only his robe and underwear.

None of these people were ultimately ticketed or arrested. But they told MLK50: Justice Through Journalism and ProPublica that they feared for their safety during what they described as indiscriminate and intimidating police encounters. While none of the law enforcement agencies involved responded to specific questions about these residents’ experiences, the news organizations corroborated their accounts using contemporaneous text messages and social media posts, as well as interviews with neighbors and relatives.

“I really believe that if I didn’t have that birth certificate, I would be somewhere in a facility,” said Williams, recalling one of the armed federal agents approaching him aggressively to ask if he was from Ethiopia or Ghana. “If you’re not white, we’re just all going to be targeted.”

When the Memphis police returned Williams’ wallet, the officer cautioned him: Don’t do anything bad and keep your ID on you. That warning, said Williams, who posted about the stop on Facebook, echoes a slavery-era requirement that free African Americans carry “freedom papers,” official court documents to prove they weren’t enslaved lest they be returned to bondage by slave patrols or law enforcement.

The U.S. Marshals Service, which leads the task force, did not respond to specific questions about Williams’ experience but disputed accounts of Black residents being harassed.

“The suggestion that our federal law enforcement officers are racially profiling citizens is not founded in reality and undermines the credibility and safety of the Task Force Officers who should be commended for the exceptional work they are doing to keep this community safe!” Ryan Guay, a spokesperson for the U.S. Marshals Service, said in a written statement.

“The Memphis Safe Task Force remains focused on its mission to make Memphis safer by removing violent offenders from our streets,” he said.

The Memphis Police Department did not respond to requests for comment about Williams’ encounter.

The U.S. Marshals Service told MLK50 and ProPublica that the task force does not track the number of stops law enforcement agencies have made since they surged into the city or how many of those stops resulted in citations or arrests. Nor does it track the racial demographics of the people stopped or arrested, a spokesperson said.

With spotty data, the task force’s operations remain opaque, making it difficult to capture a complete picture of its work. MLK50 obtained an Oct. 13 task force summary of its first two weeks of activity showing more than 1,500 personnel — just under half of whom are city and county law enforcement — on the ground, making 854 arrests and issuing 4,160 traffic citations. An MLK50 analysis of one day’s worth of arrest records obtained by the news organization found that nearly three quarters of the 51 people arrested Oct. 13 were not charged with a violent crime.

The task force said it has made 1,744 arrests as of Oct. 29, though it did not specify how many of those were related to violent crimes.

Democratic mayors and governors have vocally resisted Trump’s move to deploy the military against residents of Los Angeles, Chicago and Portland, Oregon. In Memphis, Mayor Paul Young has said he opposes the deployment of the National Guard but has tried to cast the federal insurgence as an opportunity to strengthen the Memphis Police Department’s crime-fighting efforts. Memphis, which has a history of aggressive policing, reported a record high of 428 homicides in 2023, but crime overall had dipped to a 25-year-low earlier this year.

“Before the federal task force came to Memphis, we were already making strides to bring violent crime down,” Young, a Democrat, said in a statement. “We are pushing for the federal task force to remain focused on violent crime.”

Free the 901, a campaign supported by more than 20 community organizations, hosts weekly press conferences to share how the deployment is affecting residents and has joined protests to oppose the militarization of the city. At one demonstration, a Black Hawk helicopter circled overhead, reviving concerns that law enforcement was surveilling residents engaged in activities protected by the First Amendment.

Across the city, residents have reported a pattern: Tennessee Highway Patrol initiates a traffic stop, then federal agents roll in.

That’s what happened to Alandria London, a ride-share driver, as she was taking a passenger to the airport on Oct. 8. Wary of the heavy police presence in the area, she said she drove extra cautiously. A Tennessee Highway Patrol trooper on a motorcycle pulled her over anyway.

As soon as the officer approached the car he said, “Oh, I didn’t see your seat belt,” London recalled. He told her he needed to “call it in,” then let her go without asking for her driver’s license. She said a white van with “Immigration” written on the side pulled up behind the motorcycle; she suspected the officer had stopped her after mistaking her ethnicity.

“I do think that I was profiled. I think they were looking for someone of Hispanic descent,” said London, who is Black and posted about her experience on Facebook that afternoon along with a photo of herself wearing a seat belt. “After this incident, I could see why people should stay home, to stay out of the line of fire and move smart.”

Neither the Tennessee Highway Patrol nor Immigration and Customs Enforcement responded to questions about London’s experience.

Despite the task force’s stated focus on violent crime, a fifth of arrests made in the first two weeks were related to immigration, data obtained by MLK50 shows. Brady McCarron, a U.S. Marshals Service spokesperson, would not give an updated number of immigration-related arrests but responded in an email that “while all the work completed by the Task Force is very important, we remain focused on the violent crime within the City of Memphis.”

Community organizers say many Hispanic residents are changing their daily patterns for fear of being detained: Patients are skipping doctors’ appointments, and parents are keeping their children home from school. Prior to the task force, Vecindarios 901, an immigrant resource organization, typically logged about 15 calls and messages a day reporting law enforcement sightings to its hotline. The group says it now logs around 120 per day.

To prepare residents for the influx of police, community organizations shared on social media a list of best practices: Avoid making eye contact with law enforcement, don’t argue in public and steer clear of highly patrolled areas. Memphians appeared to heed the last warning, prompting the city’s tourism agency to encourage people to return to downtown restaurants, museums and other businesses.

Appearing in Memphis on Oct. 1 to launch the task force, U.S. homeland security adviser Stephen Miller told hundreds of law enforcement officers gathered before him that they were “unleashed.”

“The handcuffs that you’re carrying, they’re not on you anymore. They’re on the criminals,” Miller bellowed as he stood in an East Memphis warehouse, flanked by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi. “Whatever you need to get it done, we’re gonna get it done.”

Miller’s comments alarmed many residents and community organizers, especially coming shortly after the last two Memphis police officers involved in the fatal beating of Tyré Nichols, an unarmed Black man, in a 2023 traffic stop were released on bail. (The men were acquitted on state charges related to the death but are still facing federal prosecution.) The former officers were part of a special unit focused on violent crime that was disbanded after Nichols’ death.

A subsequent U.S. Department of Justice investigation found that Memphis police have a pattern of escalating encounters involving low-level offenses, using unjustified force, and making unconstitutional stops and unlawful arrests. Memphis police treated Black residents more harshly than white ones engaged in similar conduct, the Justice Department said. Trump’s Department of Justice withdrew the report and closed the investigation, characterizing Biden-era scrutiny of civil rights violations by law enforcement as a “failed experiment of handcuffing local leaders and police departments.”

After Nichols’ death, the Memphis City Council banned the police from stopping drivers for minor infractions like broken taillights to search for more serious violations, but Tennessee’s Republican-led legislature passed a bill last year that undid the city ordinance. Now, those same types of traffic stops, called pretextual stops, have become a major part of the task force’s activities in Memphis, according to MLK50 and ProPublica’s review of more than three dozen affidavits of people arrested as part of task force operations.

ELaura James Reid, pastor of Coleman Chapel CME Church, said she was pulled over by a man driving an unmarked SUV with a matte army green finish as she was leaving her denomination’s unity summit at an East Memphis hotel on Oct. 10. She’d seen a car like it in the hotel parking lot with a National Guard license plate on the back.

The man, wearing camouflage fatigues, approached James Reid’s window and told her he stopped her because she looked lost.

James Reid, 49 and a lifelong Memphian, had been to the hotel many times before, including for annual ecumenical meetings. When she informed the man she was not lost, he said she looked like she was “driving unsure.”

James Reid didn’t know what that meant. She’d stopped at the stop sign. And she’d signaled her left turn.

The man asked for her license, but James Reid, a former schoolteacher who is familiar with the National Guard’s role in natural disasters, said she had a question for him first: Was it normal for National Guard members to ask for residents’ licenses when they go to cities to help people? In response, she said, he told her to have a nice day and to be safe.

Kealy Moriarty, a spokesperson for the Tennessee National Guard, did not respond to specific questions about the incident, including what “driving unsure” looks like, but said it is not conducting traffic stops. The military branch is “supporting the U.S. Marshals Service and multiple local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies as part of the Memphis Safe Task Force,” Moriarty said. “Tennessee Guardsmen and women are currently assisting with tasks such as community safety patrols, site security, and traffic control in support of ongoing efforts to reduce crime and promote public safety in Memphis.”

Residents interviewed for this article said it was at times unclear which agencies’ officers were stopping them. Across the city, reporters have witnessed officers patrolling without badges or uniforms that identify their agencies.

When law enforcement officers do not identify their agencies while making stops, residents can’t demand accountability, civil rights advocates say. “This is way more than a police operation,” said Josh Spickler, executive director of Just City, a local criminal justice reform organization. “This is a power grab and a rapid erosion of your civil liberties.”

James Reid, who spoke about the incident to members of her congregation, said her experience counters the task force’s stated mission of targeting violent crimes.

“I don’t feel safe,” said James Reid, who is Black. “It fits into the narrative of keeping us in our place. I don’t think it fits the narrative of stopping violent criminals, unless you driving down the street is considered violent.”

To lower crime for good, governments must invest in violence interruption programs, public education and access to mental health care — not just policing, said James Reid and several Democratic state legislators and local politicians.

Some Memphis residents living in high-crime neighborhoods said they welcome the increased policing to make their communities safer.

“It’s good they’re here. Traffic is a lot lighter, and hopefully things will get better,” said Ann Morris, a 61-year-old bartender. Morris, who is Black, said she hopes it will serve as a “wake-up call” to the young men in the city.

Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee, a Republican who welcomed the federal intervention, has said that while “the surge will diminish at some point,” the task force’s operations and collaboration between organizations “will last forever.” Lee’s spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment.

“If they’re not a criminal element, then they shouldn’t be afraid,” Lee said at the Oct. 14 news conference.

But staying out of trouble does not protect residents from nerve-racking police encounters.

Just days after the task force was deployed to Memphis, Phillip Lewis was awakened by loud knocks and the doorbell. The 72-year-old yelled for whoever was at the door to hold on as he put a robe over his underwear and walked slowly across his South Memphis apartment. Cancer has taken the 6-foot-6-inch-tall former high school basketball standout from 185 pounds in his prime to 123 pounds.

“Are you Slim?” asked one of the two armed officers standing outside his second floor apartment, where Lewis’ full name is printed neatly below the doorbell.

The officer didn’t say which agency he was with, Lewis said, but his uniform said HSI — Homeland Security Investigations. (Security camera footage reviewed by MLK50 and ProPublica showed an officer identifying himself to the landlord as a U.S. marshal.)

“I thought they was ICE,” Lewis said.

One of the officers grabbed his arm, and the other told Lewis to walk down the stairs and sit on the bottom step. A third officer showed Lewis a photograph on his cellphone of a sex offender the officers were looking for. “I said, ‘That ain’t none of me.’”

They then asked Lewis for identification. “How I got ID and I’m in my drawers?” Lewis snapped.

They took him back to his apartment for his wallet, and an officer pulled out Lewis’ state ID. He was not the man they were looking for.

If officers had asked for his ID earlier, Lewis said, they would have recognized their mistake, and he would have been spared the indignity of being questioned by police in his nightclothes in front of his neighbors. MLK50 and ProPublica reviewed Lewis’ notes made after the Oct. 2 incident as well as text exchanges with his sister about the encounter, and interviewed his sister, a neighbor and his landlord.

The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees Homeland Security Investigations, did not respond to questions about Lewis’ experience. Neither did the U.S. Marshals Service.

As the officers left without an apology, one offered a fist bump. But Lewis was angry. “I said, ‘Y’all done pissed me off with all this bull, and y’all don’t even know who you’re looking for!’”

Although Gloria Estefan was born in Havana, Cuba, the 68-year-old pop star has lived in the United States since she was two and is a longtime U.S. citizen. Estefan, whose family moved to Florida to escape from Fidel Castro's communist dictatorship, is fluent in Spanish but has performed primarily in English over the years.

But during a late October interview with the Times of London, Estefan revealed that she now carries her U.S. passport as a form of identification because of President Donald Trump's anti-immigration crackdown.

"I have lived in the U.S. for 66 years — never have I seen freedoms being eroded in the way they are now," Estefan told the Times. "We need to stay very firm and protect those freedoms…. I know people who are in the country legally and have been taken away. One was the girlfriend of our guitar technician. She had been in the U.S. for 25 years, came in with a visa, paid taxes. In her last appointment at immigration, she got carried away and has been at a detention center for five months. Why?"

The former Miami Sound Machine singer continued, "It's inhumane, it's scary and not necessary. We don't have much power other than letting people know that that’s not what the U.S. stands for. I am not Republican or Democrat."

Estefan, born in 1957, rose to prominence in pop music during the 1980s as lead singer for the Miami Sound Machine — whose major hits included "Conga," "Bad Boy," "1-2-3," "Rhythm Is Gonna Get You," among many others. The singer became a full-time solo artist after the group broke up.

During the Times interview, Estefan drew a parallel between Trump's second administration and the crackdown on civil liberties in Castro's Cuba during the 1960s.

Estefan told the Times, "I carry my passport card around just in case, because who knows what can happen. I was born in Cuba — that's why we're so wary of what's happening, because this is the way things happened there. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that you can be stopped and questioned if you're speaking Spanish or you have darker skin…. It's tough. When we're out with the family, it's very natural to speak Spanish. It's weird that, all of a sudden, you'd have to fear that."

Read the Times of London's full interview with Gloria Estefan at this link.

During former President Joe Biden's four years in the White House, "Real Time" host Bill Maher and "The View's" Sunny Hostin had some major disagreements on "wokeness" and "cancel culture."

Maher, who is a scathing critic of President Donald Trump and the MAGA movement but also has an intense disdain for "political correctness," attacked "wokeness" and "cancel culture" as detrimental to the left and a departure from traditional liberalism. But Hostin objected to Maher using the word "woke," which originated in the African-American community, in a negative way and argued that "cancel culture" was really "consequence culture."

Following the fatal shooting of Turning Point USA's Charlie Kirk, many MAGA Republicans argued that retaliation against people who criticized Kirk wasn't "cancel culture," but rather, "consequence culture" — the same term liberal Hostin had used during the Biden years.

Quite a few Trump critics, both Democrats and right-wing Never Trump conservatives, are accusing Republicans of hypocritically promoting the type of "cancel culture" they accused liberals and progressives of. But The New Republic's Liza Featherstone, in an article published on October 24, stresses that the Trump Administration's assault on free speech is much worse than the "cancel culture" that came from the left in the past.

"The New York Times reported that in seeking to punish offensive speech, Republicans were 'trying to rebrand a practice they once maligned,'" Featherstone explains. "Former President Barack Obama made a similar comparison after Jimmy Kimmel was suspended amid the Trump Administration's threats to retaliate against media outlets. 'After years of complaining about cancel culture,' Obama wrote on X, 'the current administration has taken it to a new and dangerous level.'"

Featherstone continues, "Obama is right that the Trump Administration's attacks are 'new and dangerous,' but where he’s wrong — perhaps in a clumsy attempt to be evenhanded — is that they don't even belong in the same conversation as 'cancel culture.' This is organized state repression, veering crassly and thuggishly into a reign of terror."

Featherstone describes "cancel culture" of the past as "the prosecutorial and puritanical style of liberalism that became popular on the internet during the second half of the Obama Administration and intensified during Trump's first term."

"It was a bad vibe," Featherstone recalls. "Discursive mistakes — insensitive jokes, ill-conceived tweets — could attract a mob of internet denunciation. The term could be overused, at times seeming to imply that people were out of line in criticizing celebrities and other powerful people for abusive behavior. But at its worst, cancel culture undermined solidarities, encouraged the bullying of some vulnerable people, and drove others to the right. Even worse, some of its targets lost their livelihoods."

Featherstone continues, "As misguided as 'cancel culture' was, though, that’s not what Trump and his minions are up to today…. 'Cancel culture' never involved the machinery of the federal government, yet Trump's defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, is banning journalists from the Pentagon who won't agree to government-imposed restrictions on their reporting, and has deemed these new rules — rejected by every legitimate news outlet — necessary to regulate a 'very disruptive' press. Speaking of the Pentagon, Hegseth is also presiding over McCarthyite investigations within the agency to root out employees who aren't fans of Charlie Kirk. Then there is the misuse of law enforcement powers to punish anti-Trump public figures."

Featherstone emphasizes that while "it's not outlandish to suggest that aspects of left 'cancel culture' contributed to what we're seeing today," Trump's war on the First Amendment is considerably more dangerous.

"Conservatives are now using the liberal term 'consequence culture' to argue that irresponsible speech should have dire consequences for offenders' lives," Featherstone warns. "But to equate Trump’s current repression with 'cancel culture' is to trivialize it. While cancel culture was intolerant and unpleasant, Trump's policies are making complaints about it seem quaint."

Read Liza Featherstone's full article for The New Republic at this link.

Most of us, whether we admit it or not, engage in a great deal of passive scrolling through social media daily.