Immigration

For decades, Democratic strategists have envisioned Latinos as the key to making Texas a blue state — or at least a swing state. But so far, that hasn't happened. Nationwide, Donald Trump won 46 percent of the Latino vote in 2024; in Texas, according to the Texas Tribune, he carried 55 percent of Latino voters.

For Trump, immigration wasn't the liability among Latinos that Democrats hoped it would be. Many Latinos, include those in Texas, told pollsters that they wanted secure borders and had no problem deporting people who were in the country illegally and committed crimes. But according to the New York Times, the immigration issue is now hurting Trump among Latinos in Texas and other states.

This Wednesday, April 1, the U.S. Supreme Court is scheduled to hear oral arguments in the case Trump v. Barbara — which finds Trump defending an executive order declaring birthright citizenship illegal. Trump's critics, in the case, are arguing that he had no business issuing that order, as birthright citizenship is protected by the U.S. Constitution's 14th Amendment.

In an article published on March 31, Times reporter Jazmine Ulloa stresses that Latinos in South Texas — including those who voted for Trump in 2024 — strongly support birthright citizenship.

One of them is 62-year-old Samuel Garza, who voted for Trump in 2016, 2020 and 2024 but, according to Ulloa, "became dismayed when Mr. Trump signed an executive order last year seeking to restrict automatic citizenship for babies born in the United States to parents who are not citizens or legal permanent residents."

"In interviews with more than two dozen Latino Republicans," Ulloa explains, "almost all of them supported the right of citizenship upon birth on U.S. soil, which many saw as a fundamental tenet of the American Dream. Some expressed concerns about potential abuse, including by undocumented immigrants, but did not necessarily support eliminating the right altogether. Historically, Latino Republicans have been more supportive of birthright citizenship than non-Hispanic white Republicans, according to polling. That right has been central to questions of identity and belonging along the southern border, where the line defining who is American has shifted — figuratively and physically — over time."

Ulloa adds, "As the birthright debate has heated up, some Latino Republicans in the region said the Trump Administration's efforts to restrict the right added to their wider frustrations over how the president has carried out his immigrant detention and deportation campaign."

Garza told the Times, "I don't think I can vote Republican anymore."

Santiago Manrrique, a Latino Republican in South Texas, told the Times, "If you are born in the United States, you are a citizen — it's pretty clear in the 14th Amendment."

But Latino Republicans in Texas, Ulloa reports, fear that if the High Court agrees with the Trump Administration in Trump v. Barbara, an "emboldened administration could enable federal authorities to strip citizenship from Mexican-Americans retroactively."

Erica Hinojosa, a 49-year-old Mexican-American in South Texas, told the Times, "It would be a mess."

In 1998, Maria de Jesus Estrada Juarez was 15 when she arrived in the United States from Mexico — and 15 years later, in 2013, she was granted protection under Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). But during U.S. President Donald Trump's second term, Estrada (who had been living in Sacramento, California) was deported back to Mexico.

Now, a federal judge appointed by former President Joe Biden is ordering the Trump Administration to bring her back to the U.S. and is highly critical of the way the deportation was handled by the Trump-era U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

Politico's Kyle Cheney, in an article published on March 24, reports, "On February 18, Estrada — with her daughter in tow — attended a hearing as part of the process to attain lawful permanent residency. There, federal immigration officers denied her application, informed her that she was the subject of a decades-old removal order and detained her. She was deported to Mexico the next morning, despite protesting that her DACA status remained active."

But U.S. District Judge Dena Coggins, in an order issued on Monday, March 23, attacked the deportation as a "flagrant violation" of DACA and the due process Estrada enjoys under the U.S. Constitution.

According to Cheney, "Coggins, a [Joe] Biden appointee, directed the administration to facilitate Estrada's return by March 30. The Justice Department argued that the judge had no power to intervene in the dispute, saying Estrada was subject to a valid deportation order and that her DACA status merely deprioritized her deportation rather than eliminated the threat of it altogether. But Coggins said the Supreme Court's 2020 ruling preserving DACA underscored that DACA was not simply a matter of executive discretion, but rather, 'a program for conferring affirmative relief.'"

Cheney continues, "Coggins said her power also extended to demanding the return of someone illegally deported, which courts have blessed under 'extreme circumstances.'"

Estrada's daughter, now 22, is a U.S. citizen.

Coggins, in her ruling, wrote, "It is difficult to argue that Petitioner's removal constitutes anything less than an 'extreme circumstance.' Less than 24 hours after Petitioner's good faith appearance to pursue lawful permanent resident status in this country — she was removed to a nation where she had not lived in over 27 years pursuant to an order purportedly entered against her when she was fifteen years old."

During his years as governor of Texas, George W. Bush saw Latinos as crucial to Republicans maintaining — and even growing — their majority in the Lone Star State. And he wasn't the only Republican who held that view. GOP strategist Karl Rove and President Ronald Reagan also believed that Republicans needed to ramp up their Latino outreach, and they viewed immigrant workers as important to the U.S. economy.

But in a video posted on March 18, the New York Times reports that in Texas, President Donald Trump's U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids have become a major burden for the state's construction industry.

Mario Guerrero, executive director of the South Texas Builders Association, told the Times, "I did vote for Mr. Trump. Deporting the criminals is a great policy. But we voted for the American Dream, and unfortunately, right now, we're not seeing that."

Texas-based home builder Marco Santivañes told the Times that ICE has "raided us anywhere from 10 to 15 times" — making it increasingly difficult to complete projects.

According to the Times, "worksites across the Rio Grande Valley" in Texas have "ground to a halt" — and as a result, some Trump supporters in that area are now "changing their minds" about supporting him.

The Times reports, "Many who work in the construction industry here told us they largely rely on immigrant workers, some of whom are undocumented."

Eliud Cavazos, CEO of 57 Concrete in Texas, told the Times, "We are seeing a reduction of almost 60 percent of our volume on the residential side of our business. We applied for bankruptcy in December."

In the past, prominent conservatives — including President Ronald Reagan — were vocal proponents of immigration. Reagan famously argued that Latinos were natural-born Republicans — they just didn't realize it yet. And George W. Bush made a point of publicly speaking in Spanish when he was governor of Texas, which worried Lone Star Democrats who saw how many inroads he made among Latino voters.

GOP strategist Karl Rove had no problem with that, as he shared Reagan's view that Latinos, with the right messaging, could be persuaded to vote Republican. Florida has long been a bastion of right-wing Latinos, but as Reagan, Bush and Rove saw it, millions of Mexicans in the Southwest were potential Republicans.

But the GOP, critics argue, showed its xenophobic side when former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Georgia) attacked Mitt Romney in a campaign ad during the 2012 GOP presidential primary simply because he spoke fluent French. And in 2016, Donald Trump criticized former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush for speaking Spanish in public.

In his Friday, March 13 column, Never Trump conservative George Will argues that the GOP — a party he once belonged to — and the Trump Administration are making a huge mistake by failing to recognize the value of immigration.

"Two dissimilar government agencies have inadvertently combined to clarify the immigration debate," Will explains. "Stomach-turning excesses by Immigration and Customs Enforcement have turned many Americans' abstract political preference into something uncomfortably concrete. And the Census Bureau has demonstrated that the nation needs immigrants as much as they need the blessings of American liberty."

Will continues, "Given a clear binary choice — for or against deporting immigrants who are here illegally — most Americans favor deportation. However: One Sunday, a moderately pro-deportation American goes, as usual, for brunch at the neighborhood diner. Jose, who has put waffles in front of this American for 20 years, and who regularly exchanges pleasantries with him about their families, is gone. He has been deported for America's improvement. Suddenly, the immigration issue has a face, and complexity."

The conservative columnist notes that immigrants comprise "23.6 percent of STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) workers," while 15.9 percent of nurses are "foreign-born"— as are 28.4 percent of health aides.

"A recent Cato Institute report ('Immigrants’ Recent Effects on Government Budgets: 1994-2023') says: Immigrants 'generated more in taxes than they received in benefits from all levels of government,'" according to Will. "They 'created a cumulative fiscal surplus of $14.5 trillion in real 2024 U.S. dollars,' including $3.9 trillion in savings on interest that did not need to be paid on debt that was not added…. The Cato data comes from static, not dynamic, accounting: It does not, for example, gauge immigration's dynamism injection: Immigration — risk-taking for improved opportunity — is an entrepreneurial act."

Will continues, "Unsurprisingly, immigrants' workforce participation rate (66.5 percent) is higher than that of the U.S.-born population (61.7 percent), and immigrants’ portions of U.S. patents and start-ups exceeds immigrants’ portion of the population…. That fellow having brunch at the diner will still get his waffles. But he will miss Jose, and millions like him, in more ways that he can easily imagine."

By late 2025, former Border Patrol commander-at-large Greg Bovino had become well known for his unapologetic embrace of aggressive and at times even deadly approaches to mass deportation. Now new reporting based on leaked documents indicates that his “smash-and-grab tactics” have been implemented as the norm throughout the Department of Homeland Security.

After the fallout from Trump’s disastrous surge of DHS agents in Minnesota, which left two dead and resulted in scores of civil suits, many celebrated the replacement of Greg Bovino with border czar Tom Homan, but it is now becoming clear that the former’s violent mark has been left on the agency, with the changes implemented by Bovino and his allies now ingrained into the departmental culture.

As an example of this, a leaked internal memo issued two months before Border Patrol’s Minnesota blitz detailed how to get away with smashing a car window then dragging the occupant out with minimal legal liability. This has since become a common practice in cities across the country.

Another leaked memo rescinds borderland migrant entry safety guidelines implemented in 2022 that limited certain interdiction tactics in dangerous environments. As a result, Border Patrol agents are now allowed to arrest migrants in waterways and on the border fence, force them back into waterways or onto the wall, and forcibly remove them to the Mexican side of the border.

Bovino’s role in creating this aggressive enforcement culture is hard to deny. For example, a recent investigation determined that the border region overseen specifically by Bovino — who once praised an agent who had shot a US citizen five times as “excellent” — had the highest ratio of use-of-force incidents to assaults on agents of any sector in the nation, rating well above the average.

To counter Bovino’s impact on the agency, Representative Delia Ramirez of Illinois has introduced the DHS Use of Force Oversight Act, which would implement a DHS policy addressing use of force and de-escalation.

“A Use of Force Policy should NOT be a suggestion — it should be mandated by law,” said Ramirez. “Let me be very clear: reforms are NOT enough. Americans are past reform of a department that has used taxpayer dollars to execute people in broad daylight. ICE must be abolished, and DHS dismantled.”

"Aghast" federal judges are increasingly angry at President Donald Trump's Departments of Justice and Homeland Security for immigration judges making decisions they believe do not comport with the evidence, much less the law.

Legal reporter Kyle Cheney wrote for Politico on Friday that Trump's "unprecedented campaign to lock up thousands of immigrants with longstanding roots in the United States" is forcing families and even children to face off against these judges for trials that "have been fundamentally flawed or even pre-cooked." Some judges even decide that the individuals are a "danger to the community" or a "flight risk" without hearing evidence.

One immigration judge allegedly relied on "uncorroborated police reports" given by the detainee himself. He was released. Another, in Missouri, found that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers called the migrant a flight risk "without sufficient evidence."

The ready-made rulings are starting to infuriate federal judges, who are demanding "do-overs," the report said. In some cases, the judges don't even do re-trials; they simply order the person to be released. U.S. District Judge Irene Berger, a Democratic appointee, concluded a bond hearing by saying it would be pointless. Her GOP-appointed counterpart agreed, saying it “would be futile."

“The bond hearing has indications of predetermined outcome,” complained U.S. District Judge Douglas Harpool. “The [immigration judge’s] order enumerates that Petitioner: has been in the U.S. for 9 years, has not missed a court hearing, has family in the U.S. (husband and 3 children), and owns a home and operates a business in the U.S. The IJ’s determination regarding flight risk is clearly untethered by the facts and any logical conclusion to be determined from the facts.”

Cheney wrote that federal law forbids the courts from second-guessing “discretionary” bonds made by the "immigration judges."

“These federal judges simply disagree with the outcomes of the immigration judge bond decisions,” a Justice Department spokesperson told Politico. “They are impugning the integrity or competence of our immigration judges solely to give them a hook to review the IJ decisions they disagree with but would otherwise be unable to directly review.”

Wayne DeMario, a Florida Republican who voted for President Donald Trump, on Friday delivered a “desperate plea” to the president to return his wife, Yamile Alcantu, who’s been detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents for eight months.

“Please get her home,” DeMario told Local10 on Friday. “Please, she does not deserve this. She is the sweetest person, and she prayed for you.”

DeMario, a small business owner in Miami-Dade county, told Local10 he and his wife were Trump supporters prior to their ordeal.

According to DeMario, Alcantu, who Local10 reports “moved to the U.S. from Cuba 25 years ago through a Visa Lottery,” had “a minor run-in with the law during a traffic stop” back in 2008.

“They go through her purse, and then they dump the purse out, and three Xanax pills fall out,” DeMario explained.

His wife has checked in annually with ICE “for years,” Local10 reports. In June, things changed.

“They grabbed her, put her in shackles and chains,” DeMario said, likening her detention to being “kidnapped.”

“ICE held her at a detention center in Jacksonville and moved her to Louisiana,” Local10 reports.

“I really thought this was just going to be something more organized, but it’s obviously not,” DeMario told the outlet. “They just blanket everybody.”

Leading officials in the Trump administration have been aware of the skyrocketing use of violent force by federal agents, according to newly unearthed emails, with the trend being known well before two U.S. citizens were gunned down in Minnesota.

According to a Tuesday report from Politico, the emails were obtained by American Oversight — a "liberal leaning watchdog nonprofit" — using Freedom of Information Act requests. They reveal that instances of "lethal force or non-lethal efforts to physically restrain or subdue people or neutralize threats" began to increase "rapidly" among federal immigration officers after Trump's return to the White House, and that officials in charge of these agents were aware of it.

The Department of Homeland Security has maintained over the last year, in the face of mounting reports of ICE agents' harassment and brutal physical tactics, that its agents were acting in accordance with the standards set during training and using "incredible restraint" to avoid force in the field.

"Our ICE agents are following the law and are running their operations according to training," DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said last month, following the deaths of Renee Good and Alex Pretti at the hands of ICE and CBP agents.

The emails, however, show that instances of violent force quadrupled in the early months of Trump's second term.

"Caleb Vitello, at the time the official tasked with overseeing field and enforcement operations at ICE, was informed on March 20 that ICE officers had reported 67 incidents where they had used force in the first two months of Trump’s term, according to the emails," Politico's report detailed. "In the same time frame in 2024, that number was 17 incidents, representing a nearly four-fold increase. Days before, Vitello was informed that the use of force in the first two weeks of March alone had quadrupled compared with the same timeframe the year before, per another email."

The emails also reveal the priorities of those in charge when faced with this trend. According to Politico, ICE officials had no "particular urgency" as far as addressing the use of force by agents. Instead, they were more interested in shifting the narrative to assaults on ICE agents, which were also up more than fourfold in the early months of 2025. Officials also deflected blame onto Democratic leaders in the cities where their agents operated, accusing them of "stoking tensions."

"The email indicated that ICE leadership was keen to prosecute those cases," Politico explained. "With a unit chief writing to Vitello that a team in a regional office could 'package up a summary of the needed elements of the crime, definitions of what constitutes assault, etc with the intent of broadcasting to the workforce in an effort to drive more presentations for prosecution.'”

MAGA Republicans have been calling for progressive politicians they dislike to be stripped of their U.S. citizenship, from Somalia-born Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota) to Uganda-born New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. And Trump critics, including lawyers for the American Civil Union (ACLU) are firing back that denaturalizing U.S. citizens simply because their views run contrary to MAGA's would be unconstitutional.

According to NBC News reporters Colleen Long, Laura Strickler, Daniella Silva and Nicole Acevedo, the Trump Administration "is dramatically expanding an effort to revoke U.S. citizenship for foreign-born Americans as it works to curb immigration, according to two people familiar with the plans." But legal experts are pointing out the flaws in their plans.

In an article published on February 12, the journalists report, "Over the past several months, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency within the Department of Homeland Security that's responsible for legal immigration, has been sending experts to its offices around the country or reassigning staff members to focus on whether some citizens processed through those offices could now be denaturalized, these people said. The goal of emphasizing naturalized citizens is to supply the office of immigration litigation with 100 to 200 possible cases per month, one of the people familiar with the plans said. Such cases have typically been very rare, involving people who concealed criminal histories or previous human rights violations during their application processes."

The Trump Administration's denaturalization campaign, according to the NBC News reporters, "is part of the overall push" by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) "to drastically curtail immigration and deliver on Trump's policy agenda."

"The push has included DHS' sending scores of immigration enforcement officers into U.S. cities on deportation missions and purchasing mega warehouses to hold detainees," Long, Strickler, Silva and Acevedo explain. "DHS has also increasingly sought to remove legal immigrants from the U.S. by revoking thousands of visas, including for some people who participated in pro-Palestinian protests, and trying to deport green card holders."

Margy O'Herron of the New York University Law School's Brennan Center for Justice warns that the mere threat of denaturalization can chill free speech.

O'Herron told NBC News, "Citizens are afraid that if they do or say something the government doesn't like — even if those things are lawful and protected by the Constitution — they will be a target."

According to the Brennan Center's website, denaturalization "faces high legal hurdles."

Writing for the Brennan site, O'Herron and her colleague Faiza Patel explain, "It is not easy to strip naturalized Americans of their citizenship. The law imposes a high bar, and the Supreme Court has been particularly vigilant in cases where a person's political beliefs may be driving the effort. Unfortunately, if the administration's goal is to cast a pall of uncertainty over naturalized citizens, it can be achieved by bringing a small number of loudly heralded cases."

O'Herron and Patel note that anarchist Emma Goldman was "repeatedly targeted by President Theodore Roosevelt's administration" during the 1900s — and she was eventually denaturalized and deported back to Russia in 1919, when Democrat Woodrow Wilson was president.

"During World War I," according to O'Herron and Patel, "President Woodrow Wilson's administration began denaturalizing German- and Asian-born citizens, along with anarchists and people who spoke out against the war. President Franklin Roosevelt redoubled these efforts during World War II, adding alleged Nazi sympathizers to the list of targets. These abuses, which mainly attempted to use laws meant to correct fraud in the naturalization process, led to a series of Supreme Court decisions imposing strict guardrails on government attempts to deprive naturalized Americans of their citizenship. As a result, in recent decades, citizenship stripping has been rare, with only 11 denaturalization cases on average each year from 1990 to 2017."

The National Immigration Forum also offers legal insights on denaturalization.

According to a Q&A by Christian Penichet-Paul (the Forum's vice president of policy and advocacy), "The federal government may seek to revoke U.S. citizenship under two general grounds for denaturalization: (1) Procurement of naturalization by concealing a material fact or by willful misrepresentation…. (2) Illegal procurement of naturalization."

Penichet-Paul explains, "Are there limits on denaturalization? Yes. The federal government must meet a high burden of proof when attempting to revoke an individual's naturalization by civil proceedings or as a result of a criminal conviction for naturalization fraud…. For a criminal conviction, the federal government must show 'proof beyond a reasonable doubt' that the individual violated 18 U.S.C. § 1425 because the individual knowingly obtained or attempted to obtain naturalization through fraud for him or herself or for another individual. Denaturalization as a result of a criminal conviction is subject to a ten-year statute of limitation."

According to an ACLU fact sheet, "Denaturalization is a drastic measure that should only be taken in the most extreme circumstances. But the administration is dramatically expanding denaturalization, using questionable standards and proceedings."

An Irish immigrant has been stuck in an ICE camp for months despite having a valid permit and no criminal record, per an interview he gave to The Irish Times, likening his surroundings to a "concentration camp" while his wife called the predicament "traumatizing."

Seamus Culleton is a resident of Massachusetts, originally hailing from the town of Glenmore in Ireland's County Kilkenny. He is married to a U.S. citizen and operates a plastering business, and has been in the final stages of obtaining a green card.

"My whole life is here [in the US]. I worked so hard to build my business. My wife is here," he explained to the outlet.

Despite having a valid Massachusetts driver's license and work permit, he was detained by ICE agents in September following a traffic stop. While at a holding facility in Buffalo, New York, Culleton refused to sign off on his own deportation, opting instead to tick a box indicating that he wished to contest his arrest. Culleton insisted that his permit to live and work in the U.S. is valid, and that he has no criminal record, "not even a parking ticket."

Following this, he was taken to an ICE facility in El Paso, where he has remained for months. Speaking with The Irish Times, Culleton said that he has "been locked in the same large, cold and damp room" for months now, along with roughly 70 other men, most of whom do not speak English. Most of the detainees spend their days starving, he explained, as food is only served to them in "child-sized" portions.

Culleton was unsparing in his description of his detention, calling it, "like a concentration camp, absolute hell."

"To know he was just taken, and he or I had no idea where they were taking him, was traumatizing," Culleton's wife, Tiffaniy Smyth, said.

In a November ruling, a judge approved Culleton's release on a $4,000 bond, which Smyth paid. Despite that, nothing happened, with the couple later finding out that the government had denied his bond without explanation. During an appeal process, his lawyer, Ogor Winnie Okoye, said that ICE officers claimed that he had signed documents agreeing to be deported, a claim that Culleton "adamantly" denied.

A judge ultimately sided with ICE over the deportation documents, leaving Culleton without recourse under U.S. law. He is, however, pressing for the alleged signatures to be examined by a handwriting expert.

President Donald Trump said that Americans would see a de-escalation in Minnesota, and a “more relaxed” approach on the ground in Minneapolis after federal agents shot and killed two U.S. citizens in under three weeks. But Attorney General Pam Bondi’s messaging on Wednesday pointed in a different direction.

In a social media post Wednesday afternoon, the attorney general wrote:

"MINNESOTA ARRESTS — I am on the ground in Minneapolis today. Federal agents have arrested 16 Minnesota rioters for allegedly assaulting federal law enforcement — people who have been resisting and impeding our federal law enforcement agents."

"We expect more arrests to come," she added, appearing to suggest the arrests would target Americans who are protesting, rather than undocumented immigrants accused of crimes.

"I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: NOTHING will stop President Trump and this Department of Justice from enforcing the law."

Bondi then posted the names of the people who were arrested, and, in many cases, photos of them standing next to federal officers, who had their backs to the camera. It was unclear why they were identified as "rioters."

Critics slammed the attorney general.

"They’re not arresting the people responsible for the murders of Renée Nicole Good or Alex Pretti," wrote author and activist Lev Parnas. "No — they’re arresting Minnesota citizens and using them as props for a headline. Enough is enough. We need accountability. We need justice. And we are not backing down."

"No deal on ICE," political commentator Keith Olbermann wrote to U.S. Senator Brian Schatz (D-HI). "Bondi is boasting that they're rounding up protestors there now."

"It will be interesting to see if these actually hold up in court — DOJ track record under Bondi has not been good," noted The Independent's Andrew Feinberg.

CNN's Aaron Blake appeared to concur, writing, "the Trump admin has repeatedly accused people of assaulting law enforcement -- but then either not actually brought charges or seen the cases crumble."

"There ain’t no walk back," declared The Bulwark's Bill Kristol, appearing to invoke the president's call for de-escalation."They’re still all in on mass deportation and mass intimidation."

"Could we see some video of the 'assaults' you allege?" asked U.S. Rep. Daniel Goldman (D-NY). "Nobody believes you or your partisan DOJ — which is focused on protestors not ICE murderers."

Despite denials from a senior Trump administration official, secret watchlists of Americans are being used by federal agencies to track and categorize US citizens—especially protesters, activists, and critics of law enforcement—as “domestic terrorists,” investigative journalist Ken Klippenstein reported Wednesday.

Klippenstein said that two senior national security officials speaking on condition of anonymity told him that there are over a dozen “secret and obscure” watchlists that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the FBI are using to track anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and pro-Palestine protesters, antifa-affiliated individuals, and “others who are promiscuously labeled ‘domestic terrorists.’”

“I can reveal for the first time,” he wrote, “that some of the secret lists and applications go by codenames like Bluekey, Grapevine, Hummingbird, Reaper, Sandcastle, Sienna, Slipstream, and Sparta (including the ominous sounding HEL-A and HEL-C reports generated by Sparta).”

“Some of these, like Hummingbird, were created to vet and track immigrants, in this case Afghans seeking to settle in the United States,” Klippenstein explained. “Slipstream is a classified social media repository. Others are tools used to link people on the streets together, including collecting on friends and families who have nothing to do with any purported lawbreaking.”

“There’s practically nothing available that further describes what these watchlists do, how large they are, or what they entail,” he added.

Klippenstein’s revelation seemingly flies in the face of DHS Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin’s recent denial that the administration has a database containing the names of people accused of domestic terrorism.

“There’s just one problem: She’s lying,” wrote Klippenstein.

Many observers already thought as much, especially after a masked federal enforcer taunted an anti-ICE protester in Maine by telling her that “we have a nice little database, and now you’re considered a domestic terrorist.”

White House “border czar” Tom Homan—who was recently sent to Minnesota to oversee the anti-immigrant blitz following the departure of Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino amid outrage over the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti—also said this month that “we’re going to create a database where those people that are arrested for interference, impeding, and assault, we’re going to make them famous.”

Reporting Tuesday that Pretti—the nurse who was disarmed and then shot dead by federal enforcers in Minneapolis last week—was known to Trump officials after a previous encounter in which agents broke his rib raised further questions about government watchlists.

“We came out of 9/11 with the notion that we would have a single ‘terrorist’ watch list to eliminate confusion, duplication, and avoid bad communications, but ever since January 6, not only have we expanded exponentially into purely domestic watchlisting, but we have also created a highly secretive and compartmented superstructure that few even understand,” a DHS attorney “intimately familiar” with the matter told Klippenstein on condition of anonymity, referring to the deadly January 2021 Capitol insurrection.

According to Klippenstein:

Prior to 9/11, there were nine federal agencies that maintained 12 separate watchlists. Now, officially there are just three: a watch list of 1.1 million international terrorists, a watch list of more than 10,000 domestic terrorists maintained by the FBI, and a new watch list of transnational criminals, built up to more than 85,000 over the past decade...Among other functions, the new watchlists process tips, situation reports, and collected photographs and video submitted by both the public and from agents in the field; they create a “common operating picture” in places like Minneapolis; they allow task forces to target individuals for surveillance and arrest; and they create the capacity for intelligence people to link individuals together through geographic proximity or what is labeled “call chaining” by processing telephone numbers, emails, and other contact information.

Asked about how the Trump administration might try to legally justify these watchlists, Rachel Levinson-Waldman, the Brennan Center for Justice’s Liberty and National Security Program director, cited President Donald Trump’s National Security Presidential Memo 7 (NSPM-7), which mandates a “national strategy to investigate and disrupt networks, entities, and organizations that foment political violence so that law enforcement can intervene in criminal conspiracies before they result in violent political acts.”

Levinson-Waldman also noted Attorney General Pam Bondi’s December 5 memo directing federal agencies to expand the investigation and prosecution of “domestic terrorism,” including groups “aligned” with antifa, an anti-fascist ideology that does not exist as an organization.

One senior intelligence official who confirmed the existence of the watchlists warned Klippenstein: “Lists of this and that—this social media post, that video taken of someone videoing ICE, the mere attendance at a protest—gets pulsed by federal cops on the beat to check for criminality but eventually just becomes a list itself of criminality, with the cops thinking that indeed they are dealing with criminals and terrorists. Watchlists, and the whole watchlisting process, should be as transparent as possible, not the other way around.”

“If we don’t explore more why all of these secret lists exist,” the official added, there could be “even more of an environment of paranoia on the ground and more tragic killings.”

A drop in immigration amid President Donald Trump’s enforcement crackdown led to historically slow population growth in the United States last year.

Activity at the southern border is at a historic low. The population change reflects the last months of the Biden administration, when immigration controls began to tighten, and the first months of the Trump administration’s massive anti-immigration and deportation agenda.

Five states lost population, according to the new Census Bureau estimates released Jan. 27 covering changes between mid-2024 and mid-2025. The changes suggest Texas and Florida could gain congressional seats at the expense of California, Illinois and New York.

States that did gain population were concentrated in the South, where numbers appear to give Republican states in the region a political edge halfway through the decade.

An analysis by Jonathan Cervas at Carnegie Mellon University predicted four more seats in Congress after the 2030 census for Texas and Florida, with losses of four seats in California and two each in New York and Illinois. Cervas is an assistant teaching professor who researches representation and redistricting.

“We are still a long way off from 2030, so there is a lot of uncertainty in these projections,” Cervas said, adding that California’s loss in the next decade could be only two or three seats.

Another expert, redistricting consultant Kimball Brace of Virginia, said he was suspicious of the sudden drop in California’s population. Earlier projections had the state losing only one seat after 2030, he said.

“This acceleration in California’s population loss is not something that was in the projections at all,” Brace said. “I’ve got to be a little bit skeptical in terms of the numbers. It shows a significant difference in what we’ve seen in the early part of the decade.”

Brace was still working on his own analysis. William Frey, a demographer at The Brookings Institution, said net immigration was about 1.3 million nationally for the year, down by more than half from the year before.

“As a result most states showed slower growth or greater declines,” Frey said. California had about 200,000 fewer immigrants than the previous year, similar to Texas and New York, though those two states eked out populations gains anyway because of people moving in and births

Texas and North Carolina gained the most people between mid-2024 and mid-2025, while California and Hawaii lost the most.

Nationally, the population increased only about 1.7 million, or half a percentage point, to about 341.8 million. It was the lowest increase of the decade and the smallest gain since the pandemic sharply cut growth in 2020 and 2021. Growth was just 1.4 million between mid-2019 and mid-2020, and only about 500,000 between mid-2020 and mid-2021. Before that, national population growth was below 2 million only twice since 1975.

Among the states, Texas gained about 391,000 in population, up 1.2%, followed in the top 5 by Florida (197,000, or .8%, North Carolina (146,000, or 1.3%), Georgia (99,000, or .9%) and South Carolina (80,000, or 1.5%).

California went from one of the largest increases the previous year to the greatest population loss, about 9,500, less than .1%, followed by Hawaii (down 2,000, or .1%), Vermont (down 1,900 or 0.3%), New Mexico (down 1,300, or 0.1%) and West Virginia (down 1,300 or .1%).

Vermont had the largest percentage decrease and South Carolina had the largest increase.

Stateline reporter Tim Henderson can be reached at thenderson@stateline.org.

President Donald Trump has lost the battle, according to leaked private chat messages from federal agents in Minneapolis.

The Daily Beast cited reports of "furious agents begging to abandon Trump’s Minneapolis crackdown" after federal agents shot and killed Alex Jeffrey Pretti.

“This is a no-win situation for agents on the ground or immigration enforcement overall,” a Border Patrol official revealed in the chat, according to Ken Klippenstein's report in his Substack newsletter.

“I think it’s time to pull out of Minnesota; that battle is lost,” they added.

Other agents are complaining that the Trump administration is pulling them away from the actual immigration crackdown to instead fight with protesters. Those like Pretti and Minneapolis mom, Renee Nicole Good, are being labeled as "domestic terrorists" associated with "impeding" law enforcement.

Democrats have argued that the increase in violence between the two groups is helpful in laying the groundwork for Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act.

One new recruit for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) told Klippenstein “a lot of the guys… are honestly pretty sketchy." The new staffer described colleagues passing around flasks on stakeouts and showing off their “weird tattoos” that wouldn't normally be seen among federal law enforcement.

One ICE officer told Klippenstein that the briefings are now focused on the public's “retaliatory” plots against them.

“Lots of people are freaking out,” said an officer.

Agents are “getting seriously paranoid, afraid of being targeted by ‘retaliators.'"

One ICE agent was disgusted by the shooting of Pretti, calling out the justifications from Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.

"Ten versus one and somehow they couldn’t find a way to subdue the guy or use a less than lethal” method, the agent said. “They all carry belts and vests with 9,000 pieces of equipment on them and the best they can do is shoot a guy in the back?”

“We can’t always support what happens just because it’s one of us,” one agent said, according to Klippenstein.

See the full report here.

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.

Just one day after threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act in Minnesota, which would allow him to unleash domestic military forces onto American streets, President Donald Trump once again on Friday hinted he would do so while suggesting he may be “forced” to take action.

Trump targeted Governor Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, both Democrats, claiming they “don’t know what to do” after he deployed roughly 3,000 federal troops to the city.

“In Minnesota,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, “the Troublemakers, Agitators, and Insurrectionists are, in many cases, highly paid professionals.”

“The Governor and Mayor don’t know what to do, they have totally lost control, and our currently being rendered, USELESS! If, and when, I am forced to act, it will be solved, QUICKLY and EFFECTIVELY!”

The Guardian labeled Trump’s claims that protesters are paid as baseless.

Attorney Aaron Reichlin-Melnick wrote: “Note that the Trump admin hasn’t yet been able to produce evidence of a SINGLE ‘paid protestor.’ They’ve had total control of the FBI and the DOJ and ICE HSI and yet despite all of that, they can’t even find ONE person who they can accuse of being paid to protest.”

Separately, The Steady State, a group of over 365 former national security officials, while not referring to Trump’s remarks from Friday morning, noted that the Insurrection Act is “an extraordinary power meant for true emergencies, not a shield for unconstitutional policing. Using it to silence dissent or justify unlawful paramilitary activity at the hand of ICE undermines the rule of law.”

President Donald Trump's government has purchased a new tool that allows federal agents the ability to monitor the phones and social media of a neighborhood or city block without a warrant.

404 Media reported Thursday that it had materials showing ICE recently purchased two surveillance systems: Tangles and Webloc. The latter tracks phones without a warrant and connects the federal agents to the owners' homes or employers. Tangles alone cost $2 million when ICE first purchased it in September, said a Forbes report. In December, however, ICE spent another $312,500 to the company for more licenses.

A company named Penlink acquired commercial location data from millions of phones, all without warrants, and 404 Media said it's setting off alarm bells with civil liberties experts.

“This is a very dangerous tool in the hands of an out-of-control agency. This granular location information paints a detailed picture of who we are, where we go, and who we spend time with,” said Nathan Freed Wessler, deputy project director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s (ACLU) Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, when speaking to 404 Media.

On Wednesday, one of the 2,000 federal agents sent to Minneapolis shot and killed a 37-year-old mom while she was trying to move her car.

Webloc users can search a database of cell phone information using a "single perimeter analysis." It searches a given area for phones for a certain period of time. An agent can draw a target area and then select the maximum number of results.

"Once a Webloc user has identified a device of interest, they can get more details about that particular phone, and, by extension, its owner, by seeing where else it has travelled both locally and across the country," 404 Media explained. "Users can click a route feature which shows the path the device took. The material suggests that if users look at where the device was located at night, they might find the person’s possible home, and during the day, the person’s possible employer."

Details include the kind of phone it is, the days the device was at a given location, the amount of time at that location and the total number of location data for the phone, the report continued.

The tool uses "small bundles of code included in ordinary apps called software development kits, or SDKs" to gather the information. Those kit owners then pay app developers to hand over location data. Another way is through advertising tools in which a company can pay to get its ads on phones for a certain demographic. The targeting data includes GPS coordinates. The report noted that the "real-time bidding" information for ads have been used by spying firms in the past. Apps like Candy Crush, Tinder, MyFitnessPal and even prayer apps are among those cooperating with such spying firms, a previous report from 404 Media revealed.

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) has a history of investigating the location data industry. Speaking to 404 Media, Wyden said, “Under Trump, ICE has terrorized American cities with zero regard for due process or the wishes of the people who live there. In the hands of Trump’s shock troops, location data could do tremendous harm to people who have done nothing wrong.”

The ACLU obtained a copy of a document through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request that showed ICE's legal justification for not seeking warrants is that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Americans have "no reasonable expectation of privacy under the Fourth Amendment in information voluntarily disclosed to third parties."

They say users of the apps could remove the app that's gathering the data or turn off location services on their phone. 404 Media said that in their investigations apps don't always tell users "how their location data might be used or sold, and in some cases apps still collected data even when people opted-out, meaning users could not have meaningfully consented."

Read the full report here.

During a two-hour interview with the New York Times, U.S. President Donald Trump was asked how long he expected the United States to be in Venezuela following the capture of leftist President Nicolás Maduro — who is being held in a federal detention center in New York City while facing drug charges. The Times reporters asked: Six months, a year, or longer? And Trump responded, "I would say much longer."

Trump isn't shy about his desire for U.S. access to Venezuelan oil, saying, "We're going to be using oil, and we're going to be taking oil." And according to reporting from the Wall Street Journal, Trump and his allies "are planning a sweeping initiative to dominate the Venezuelan oil industry for years to come."

But Trump's aims for oil prices, WSJ reports, could put him at odds with the shale industry — which has been a "key backer of the president."

In an article published late Wednesday night, January 7, WSJ reporters Brian Schwartz Benoît Morenne and Josh Dawsey explain, "A plan under consideration envisions the U.S. exerting some control over Venezuela's state-run oil company Petróleos de Venezuela SA, or PdVSA, including acquiring and marketing the bulk of the company's oil production, people familiar with the matter said. If successful, the plan could effectively give the U.S. stewardship of most of the oil reserves in the Western Hemisphere, when factoring in deposits in the U.S. and other countries where U.S. companies control production."

This plan, the reporters add, "could also fulfill two of the (Trump) Administration's primary goals: to box Russia and China out of Venezuela and to push energy prices lower for U.S. consumers."

Trump, according to Schwartz, Morenne and Dawsey, "has repeatedly raised the prospect of lowering oil prices to $50 a barrel — his preferred level, two senior administration officials said."

"But oil prices are already low, with the U.S. benchmark hovering around $56 a barrel Wednesday, and Trump has struggled to persuade U.S. oil-and-gas producers to crank out more crude and help him accomplish his political goals," the WSJ reporters add. "Many companies see $50 a barrel as a threshold, below which it becomes unprofitable to drill, and a sustained period of low oil prices could decimate the U.S. shale industry, which has been a key backer of the president… The administration's actions amount to an expansion of its 'drill, baby, drill' mantra well beyond U.S. borders."

At a Goldman Sachs investor conference in Miami, Chris Wright — energy secretary for the Trump Administration — told attendees, "We're going to market the crude coming out of Venezuela — first this backed up, stored oil, and then indefinitely, going forward, we will sell the production that comes out of Venezuela into the marketplace."

Read the full Wall Street Journal article at this link (subscription required).