Human Rights

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.

As anticipated, US President Donald Trump’s economic and immigration policies are harming American farmers’ ability to earn a living—and testing the loyalty of one of the president’s staunchest bases of support, according to reports published this week.

After Trump slapped 30% tariffs on Chinese imports in May, Beijing retaliated with measures including stopping all purchases of US soybeans. Before the trade war, a quarter of the soybeans—the nation’s number one export crop—produced in the United States were exported to China. Trump’s tariffs mean American soybean growers can’t compete with countries like Brazil, the world’s leading producer and exporter of the staple crop and itself the target of a 50% US tariff.

“We depend on the Chinese market. The reason we depend so much on this market is China consumes 61% of soybeans produced worldwide,” Kentucky farmer Caleb Ragland, who is president of the American Soybean Association, told News Nation on Monday. “Right now, we have zero sold for this crop that’s starting to be harvested right now.”

Ragland continued:

It’s a five-alarm fire for our industry that 25% of our total sales is currently missing. And right now we are not competitive with Brazil due to the retaliatory tariffs that are in place. Our prices are about 20% higher, and that means that the Chinese are going elsewhere because they can find a better value.And the American soybean farmers and their families are suffering. They are 500,000 of us that produce soybeans, and we desperately need markets, and we need opportunity and a leveled playing field.

“There’s an artificial barrier that is built with these tariffs that makes us not be competitive,” Ragland added.

Tennessee Soybean Promotion Council executive director Stefan Maupin likened the tariffs to “death by a thousand cuts.”

“We’re in a significant and desperate situation where... none of the crops that farmers grow right now return a profit,” Maupin told the Tennessee Lookout Monday. “They don’t even break even.”

Alan Meadows, a fifth-generation soybean farmer in Lauderdale County, Tennessee, said that “this has been a really tough year for us.”

“It started off really good,” Meadows said. “We were in the field in late March, which is early for us. But then the wheels came off, so to speak, pretty quick.”

It started with devastating flooding in April, followed by a drier-than-usual summer. Higher supply costs due to inflation and Trump’s tariffs exacerbated the dire situation.

“So much of what has happened and what’s going on here is totally out of our control,” Meadows said. “We just want a free, fair, and open market where we can sell our goods... as competitively as anybody else around the world. And we do feel that we produce a superior product here in the United States, and we just need to have the markets.”

Farmers are desperate for help from the federal government. However, Congress has not passed a new Farm Bill—legislation authorizing funding for agriculture and food programs—since 2018, without which “we do not have a workable safety net program when things like this happen in our economy,” according to Maupin.

Maupin added that farmers “have done everything right, they’ve managed their finances well, they have put in a good crop... but they cannot change the weather, they cannot change the economy, they cannot change the markets.”

“The weather is in the control of a higher power,” he added, “and the economy and the markets are in control of Washington, DC.”

It’s not just soybean farmers who are hurting. Tim Maxwell, a 65-year-old Iowa grain and hog farmer, told the BBC Sunday that “our yields, crops, and weather are pretty good—but our [interest from] markets right now is on a low.”

Despite his troubles, Maxwell remains supportive of Trump, saying that he is “going to be patient,” adding, “I believe in our president.”

However, there is a limit to Maxwell’s patience with Trump.

“We’re giving him the chance to follow through with the tariffs, but there had better be results,” he said. “I think we need to be seeing something in 18 months or less. We understand risk—and it had better pay off.”

It’s also not just Trump’s economic policies that are putting farmers in a squeeze. The president’s anti-immigrant crackdown has left many farmers without the labor they need to operate.

“The whole thing is screwed up,” John Painter, a Pennsylvania organic dairy farmer and three-time Trump voter, told Politico Monday. “We need people to do the jobs Americans are too spoiled to do.”

As Politico noted:

The US agricultural workforce fell by 155,000—about 7%—between March and July, according to an analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data. That tracks with Pew Research Center data that shows total immigrant labor fell by 750,000 from January through July. The labor shortage piles onto an ongoing economic crisis for farmers exacerbated by dwindling export markets that could leave them with crop surpluses.

“People don’t understand that if we don’t get more labor, our cows don’t get milked and our crops don’t get picked,” said Tim Wood, another Pennsylvania dairy farmer and a member of the state’s Farm Bureau board of directors.

Charlie Porter, who heads the Pennsylvania Farm Bureau’s Ag Labor and Safety Committee, told Politico that “it’s a shame you have hard-working people who need labor, and a group of people who are willing to work, and they have to look over their shoulder like they’re criminals—they’re not.”

Painter also said that he is “very disappointed” by Trump’s immigration policies.

“It’s not right, what they’re doing,” he said of the administration. “All of us, if we look back in history, including the president, we have somebody that came to this country for the American dream.”

From her home-based day care in Washington D.C., Alma peers out the door and down the sidewalks. If they’re clear and there are no ICE agents out, she’ll give her coworker, an undocumented Latina who lives nearby, a call letting her know it's safe to head in for work.

This story was originally reported by Chabeli Carrazana of The 19th. Meet Chabeli and read more of her reporting on gender, politics and policy.

They have to be careful with the kids, too. Typically, she took the five children she cares for to the library on Wednesdays and out to parks throughout the week, but Alma — who is also undocumented — had to stop doing that in August, when President Donald Trump declared a “crime emergency” in the district. Now, two of the kids she cares for are being pulled out of the day care. The parents said it was because they weren’t going outside.

Trump has deployed the National Guard and a wave of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents into the district. ICE arrests there have increased tenfold. The situation has thrust the Latinas who hold up the nation’s child care sector into a perpetual state of panic. Nationwide, about 1 in 5 child care workers are immigrants, but in D.C. it’s closer to 40 percent; about 7 percent nationally are undocumented. Nearly all are women.

Many are missing work, and others are risking it because they simply can’t afford to lose pay, providers told The 19th. All are afraid they’ll be next.

“What kind of life is this?” said Alma, whose name The 19th has changed to protect her identity. “We are not delinquents, we are not bad people, we are here to work to support our family.”

Alma has been running a home-based day care for the past decade. She’s been in the United States for 22 years, working in child care that entire time. With two kids being pulled, she will have to reduce her staffer’s hours as she tries to find children to fill those spots.

Her four school-age children also depend on her. This month, she had to write out a signed document detailing what should happen to her kids if she were to be detained. Her wish is that they be brought to detention with her.

“I can’t imagine my kids here without me,” she said.

She said she understands the president’s approach of expelling immigrants with criminal convictions from the country, but teachers who are working with kids? Who haven’t committed any crime?

By targeting them, she said, the administration is “destroying entire families.”

The Multicultural Spanish Speaking Providers Association in D.C., which works with Latina child care providers, has seen this panic first hand for the past couple of weeks as more and more Latinas in child care have stopped coming into work. The center also helps workers obtain their associate’s degree in early childhood education, and since the semester started in mid-August, many teachers have asked for classes to be offered virtually so they don’t have to show up to campus at night.

Latinas have flocked to the child care industry for multiple reasons: Families seeking care value access to language education, and Latinas have a lower language barrier to entry, said Blanca Huezo, the program coordinator at the Multicultural Spanish Speaking Providers Association.

“In general, this industry offers them an opportunity for a fresh start professionally in their own language and without leaving behind their culture,” Huezo said.

Though the number of undocumented child care workers has historically been low, recent changes from the Trump administration to revoke or reduce legal protections have likely increased it. This year, the administration has narrowed opportunities for claiming asylum at the border, tried to bar certain groups from obtaining Temporary Protected Status and temporarily paused humanitarian protections for groups of migrants, thrusting more workers into the “undocumented” category.

The changes, coupled with increased enforcement, has fostered fear among Latinx people regardless of immigration status. That fear among workers is deepening a staffing crisis in an industry that already couldn’t afford additional losses, Huezo said.

“There is a shortage — and now even more,” she said. “There are many centers where nearly 99 percent of teachers are of Hispanic origin.”

Washington, D.C., has been a sanctuary city since 2020, where law enforcement cooperation with immigration officials was broadly prohibited. Earlier this year, however, Mayor Muriel Bowser proposed repealing that law and, in mid-August, Washington’s Metropolitan Police Department Police Chief Pamela Smith gave officers leeway to share information with ICE about individuals they arrested or stopped.

“There was some peace that living in D.C. brought more security," Huezo said. Now, “people don’t feel that freedom to walk through the streets.”

Child care centers are also no longer off limits for ICE raids. The centers were previously protected under a “sensitive locations” directive that advised ICE to not conduct enforcement in places like schools and day cares. But Trump removed that protection on his first day in office. While reports have not yet surfaced of raids in day cares, ICE presence near child care care centers, including in D.C., has been reported.

A similar story of fear and surveillance has already played out in Los Angeles, where ICE conducted widespread raids earlier in the summer. Huezo said her organization has been in touch with child care providers in L.A. to learn about how they managed those months.

In the meantime, the best the organization can do, she said, is connect workers with as many resources as possible, including legal clinics, but the ones that help immigrants are at their maximum caseload. The group has put child care workers who are not leaving their homes in touch with an organization called Food Justice DMV that is delivering meals to their doorsteps. Prior to last month, people who needed food could fill out a form and get it that same week. Now, the wait time is two to three weeks, Huezo said. For those in Maryland and Virginia, it’s closer to a month.

Thalia, a teacher at a day care, said her coworkers have stopped coming to work. It’s all the staff talks about during their lunchtime conversations. When she rides the Metro into work, she looks over her shoulder for the ICE agents, their faces covered, who are often at the exits.

“They are hunting us,” she said.

Thalia, whose name has been changed because she is undocumented, has been living in the United States for nine years and working in child care that entire time. Like her, many of the Latina teachers she works with have earned certifications and degrees in early childhood education.

“We are working, we are cooperating, paying taxes,” she said. “We are there all day so other families can benefit from the child care.”

As a single mother, Thalia has also had to consider what would happen to her three children if she was detained. This past month, she retained a lawyer who could help them with their case in case anything were to happen. Her school-age kids know: Call the lawyer if mom is detained and get tickets to Guatemala to meet her there.

This is what she lives with every day now: “The fear of leaving your family and letting them know, ‘If I don't return, it’s not because I am abandoning you.’”

U.S. President Donald Trump's administration earned condemnation from Amnesty International on Thursday over its leaked plans to downplay human rights violations in countries favored by the American government.

News of the plan was originally reported on Wednesday by The Washington Post, which documented how the administration has been revising State Department reports on human rights in El Salvador, Israel, and Russia to "strike all references to LGBTQ+ individuals or crimes against them." The Post also added that "the descriptions of government abuses that do remain have been softened."

In the case of El Salvador, where the administration earlier this year began lawlessly shipping immigrants deported from the United States, the administration's report stated that were "no credible reports of significant human rights abuses" there, even though a State Department report under former President Joe Biden's administration issued last year documented "significant human rights issues" in the country.

Human rights violations against LGBTQ+ people were deleted from the State Department's report on Russia, while the report on Israel deleted references to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's corruption trial and to his government's threats to the country's independent judiciary.

Amanda Klasing, Amnesty International USA's national director of government relations and advocacy, ripped the administration for selectively whitewashing human rights records of nations favored by the president.

"The leaked chapters of the latest Annual Human Rights Report reveal a disturbing effort by the Trump administration to purposefully fail to fully capture the alarming and growing attacks on human rights in certain countries around the globe," she said. "Alarmingly, we understand that the mandate from Secretary Rubio was... to go back and wipe out portions of the reports that had already been written—to delete stories from survivors of human rights violations."

Klasing went on to accuse the administration of turning the human rights report "into yet another tool to obscure facts to push forward anti-rights policy choices."

She also emphasized that "it would be a travesty and subversion of congressional intent to downplay or ignore human rights violations faced by marginalized populations including refugees and asylum seekers, women and girls, Indigenous people, ethnic and religious minorities, and LGBTQI+ people throughout the world."

An unnamed State Department official this week told the Post that the administration was merely simplifying the human rights reports to make them more "readable."

"The 2024 Human Rights report has been restructured in a way that removes redundancies, increases report readability, and is more responsive to the legislative mandate that underpins the report," the official said. "The human rights report focuses on core issues."

NOW READ: DOJ memo reveals Trump’s dark plan for a new Red Scare — and it may be perfectly legal

"We're taking father/son bonding to a whole new level."

That's how the U.S. Department of Homeland Security on Wednesday told social media users that it is lifting age limits for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) applicants—evidence, critics said, of the Trump administration's desperation to fill the ranks of federal agencies tasked with carrying out its cruel and illegal anti-immigrant policies.

In a move reminiscent of how the U.S. military attempted to stem flagging enlistment during the George W. Bush administration's so-called War on Terror by lowering recruitment standards to welcome felons, gang members, white supremacists, and high school dropouts, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced Wednesday that "we are ENDING the age cap for ICE law enforcement."

Approved applicants will be joining an agency rife with human rights and legal abuses as it scrambles to satisfy alleged ICE arrest quotas and President Donald Trump's desire to carry out the biggest mass deportation campaign in the nation's history—a campaign of kidnapping, unlawful imprisonment and expulsion of innocent people, family separation, concentration camps, terrorization of American communities, alleged torture and sexual crimes, and many other outrages.

Noem told Fox & Friends Wednesday that in addition to lifting the 40-year-old age cap, ICE applicants can now be as young as 18.

"What could possibly go wrong?" independent journalist Tina Vasquez quipped on Bluesky.

Author Patrick S. Tomlinson wrote on X that "ICE opening up recruiting to teenagers because they can't find enough adults willing to be their racist storm troopers is some real dystopian s---."

Wednesday's announcement is the latest Trump administration effort to lure 10,000 new recruits, including by offering $50,000 sign-up bonuses and student loan repayment assistance—policies that can be paid for thanks to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act's historic funding for ICE.

Some critics pointed to a similar move to increase recruitment at U.S. Customs and Border Protection, where lower hiring standards resulted in increased reports of sexual misconduct and corruption among Border Patrol recruits.

"If they start waiving requirements there like they did for Border Patrol, you're going to have an exponential increase in officers that are shown the door after three years because there's some issue," former senior ICE official Jason Houser told The Associated Press last week.

Sunrise Movement, the youth-led climate campaign, offered some friendly advice for those considering working for ICE: "Instead of joining the Gestapo, perhaps find a unionized workplace that's not involved in kidnapping instead."

NOW READ: The one big reason why most Republicans are acting irrationally — without consequences

It was meant to be a routine discussion on pollution. One by one, delegates at the United Nations expressed support for a new panel of scientists who would advise countries on how to address chemicals and toxic waste.

ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

But the U.S. delegate took the meeting in a new direction. She spent her allotted three minutes reminding the world that the United States now had a “national position” on a single word in the documents establishing the panel: gender.

“Use of the term ‘gender’ replaces the biological category of sex with an ever-shifting concept of self-assessed gender identity and is demeaning and unfair, especially to women and girls,” the delegate told the U.N. in June.

The Trump administration is pushing its anti-trans agenda on a global stage, repeatedly objecting to the word “gender” in international resolutions and documents. During at least six speeches before the U.N., U.S. delegates have denounced so-called “gender ideology” or reinforced the administration’s support for language that “recognizes women are biologically female and men are biologically male.”

The delegates included federal civil service employees and the associate director of Project 2025, the conservative blueprint for Trump’s policies, who now works for the State Department. They delivered these statements during U.N. forums on topics as varied as women’s rights, science and technology, global health, toxic pollution and chemical waste. Even a resolution meant to reaffirm cooperation between the U.N. and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations became an opportunity to bring up the issue.

Insisting that everyone’s gender is determined biologically at birth leaves no room for the existence of transgender, nonbinary and intersex people, who face discrimination and violence around the world. Intersex people have variations in chromosomes, hormone levels or anatomy that differ from what’s considered typical for male and female bodies. A federal report published in January just before President Donald Trump took office, estimated there are more than 5 million intersex Americans.

On at least two occasions, U.S. delegates urged the U.N. to adopt its language on men and women, though it’s unclear if the U.S.’ position has led to any policy changes at the U.N. But the effects of the country’s objections are more than symbolic, said Kristopher Velasco, a sociology professor at Princeton University who studies how international institutions and nongovernmental organizations have worked to expand or curtail LGBTQ+ rights.

U.N. documents can influence countries’ policies over time and set an international standard for human rights, which advocates can cite as they campaign for less discriminatory policies, Velasco said. The phrase “gender ideology” has emerged as a “catchall term” for far-right anxieties about declining fertility rates and a decrease in “traditional” heterosexual families, he said.

At the U.N., the administration has promoted other aspects of its domestic agenda. For example, U.S. delegates have demanded the removal of references to tackling climate change and voted against an International Day of Hope because the text contained references to diversity, equity and inclusion. (The two-page document encouraged a “more inclusive, equitable and balanced approach to economic growth” and welcomed “respect for diversity.”)

But the reflexive resistance to the word “gender” is particularly noteworthy.

Advocates for LGBTQ+ rights said the U.S.’ repeated condemnation of “gender ideology” signals support for more repressive regimes.

The U.S. is sending the world “a clear message: that the identities and rights of trans, nonbinary, and intersex people are negotiable,” Ash Lazarus Orr, press relations manager at the nonprofit Advocates for Trans Equality, said in a statement.

Laurel Sprague, research director at the Williams Institute, a policy center focused on sexual orientations and gender identities at the University of California, Los Angeles, said she’s concerned that other countries will take similar positions on transgender rights to gain favor with the U.S. Last month Mike Waltz, Trump’s nominee for ambassador to the U.N., told a Senate committee that he wants to use a country’s record of voting with or against the U.S. at the U.N. as a metric for deciding foreign aid.

In response to detailed questions from ProPublica, White House Deputy Press Secretary Anna Kelly said in a statement: “President Trump was overwhelmingly elected to restore common sense to government, which means focusing foreign policy on securing peace deals and putting America First — not enforcing woke gender ideology.”

A clash between Trump’s administration and certain U.N. institutions over transgender rights was almost inevitable.

Trump’s hostility to transgender rights was a key part of his election campaign. On his first day in office, he issued an executive order called “Defending women from gender ideology extremism and restoring biological truth to the federal government.” The order claimed there were only two “immutable” sexes. Eight days later, Trump signed an executive order restricting gender-affirming surgery for anyone under 19. Federal agencies have since forced trans service members out of the military and sued California for its refusal to ban trans athletes from girls’ sports teams.

In June, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights criticized American government officials for their statements “vilifying transgender and non-binary people.” The human rights office urges U.N. member states to provide gender-affirming care and says the organization has “affirmed the right of trans persons to legal recognition of their gender identity and a change of gender in official documents, including birth certificates.” The office also supports the rights of intersex people.

“Intersex people in the U.S. are extremely worried” that they will become bigger targets, said Sylvan Fraser Anthony, legal and policy director at the intersex advocacy group InterACT.

“In all regions of the world, we are witnessing a pushback against women’s human rights and gender equality,” Laura Gelbert Godinho Delgado, a spokesperson for the U.N.’s human rights office, said in an email. “This has fueled misogyny, anti-LGBTI rhetoric, and hate speech.”

The Trump administration’s insistence on litigating “gender” complicates the already ponderous procedures of the U.N. Many decisions are made by consensus, which could require representatives from more than 100 countries to agree on every word. Phrases and single words still under debate are marked with brackets. Some draft documents end up with hundreds of brackets, awaiting resolution at a subsequent date.

At the June meeting on chemical pollution, delegates decided to form a scientific panel but couldn’t agree on crucial details about whether the panel’s purpose included “the protection of human health and the environment.” A description of the panel included brackets on whether it would work in a way that integrates “gender equality and equity” or “equality between men and women.”

The U.S. delegate, Liz Nichols, reminded the U.N. at one point that it “is the policy of the United States to use clear and accurate language that recognizes women are biologically female and men are biologically male. It is important to acknowledge the biological reality of sex to support the needs and perspectives of women and girls.”

Career staffers like Nichols are hired for subject-matter expertise and work to execute the agenda of whichever administration is in charge, regardless of personal beliefs. Nichols has a doctorate in ecology from Columbia University and has worked for the State Department since 2018. When asked for comment, she referred ProPublica to the State Department.

A State Department spokesperson said in a statement, “As President Trump’s Executive Orders and our public remarks have repeatedly stated, this administration will continue to defend women’s rights and protect freedom of conscience by using clear and accurate language and policies that recognize women are biologically female, and men are biologically male.”

Gender is a crucial factor in chemical safety, said Rachel Radvany, environmental health campaigner at the Center for International Environmental Law who attended the meeting. Pregnant people are uniquely vulnerable to chemical exposure and women are disproportionately exposed to toxic compounds, including through beauty and menstrual products.

Radvany said the statement read by Nichols contributed to the uncertainty on how the panel would consider gender in its work. The brackets around gender-related issues and other topics remained in the draft decision and will have to be resolved at a future gathering that may not happen until next summer.

The U.S. has also staked out similar positions at U.N. meetings focused on gender. At a session of the Commission on the Status of Women in March, Jonathan Shrier, a longtime State Department employee who now works for the U.S. Mission to the United Nations, said the U.S. disapproved of a declaration supporting “the empowerment of all women and girls” that mentioned the word “gender.” The phrase “all women and girls” in U.N. documents has been used as a way to be inclusive of trans women and girls.

Shrier read a statement saying that several factors in the text made it impossible for the U.S. to back the resolution, which the commission had recently adopted. That included “lapses in using clear and accurate language that recognizes women are biologically female and men are biologically male.”

During the summit, Shrier repeated those talking points at an event co-sponsored by the U.S. government and the Center for Family and Human Rights, or C-Fam. The group’s mission statement says its goal is the “preservation of international law by discrediting socially radical policies at the United Nations and other international institutions.”

Shrier directed questions to the U.S. Mission to the United Nations, which did not respond. Responding to questions from ProPublica, C-Fam’s president, Austin Ruse, said in a statement that the U.S. position on gender is in line with the definitions found in an important U.N. document on the empowerment of women from 1995.

Some countries have pushed back against the U.S.’ stance, often in ways that appear subtle to the casual observer. The U.N. social and environmental forums where these speeches have been delivered tend to operate with a culture of civility and little direct confrontation, said Alessandra Nilo, external relations director for the Americas and the Caribbean at the International Planned Parenthood Federation. Nilo has participated in U.N. forums on HIV/AIDS and women’s health since 2000.

When other delegates speak out in support of diversity and women’s rights, it’s a sign of their disapproval and a way to isolate the U.S., Nilo said. During the women’s rights summit, the delegate from Brazil celebrated “the expansion of gender and diversity language” in the declaration.

Nilo said many countries are scared to speak out for fear of losing trade deals or potential foreign aid from the U.S.

Advocating an “America First” platform, Trump has upended U.S. commitments to multinational organizations and alliances. He signed orders withdrawing the U.S. from the World Health Organization and various U.N. bodies, such as the Human Rights Council and the cultural group UNESCO.

It’s rare for the U.N. to directly affect legislation in the U.S. But the Trump administration repeatedly cites concerns that U.N. documents could supersede American policy.

In April, the U.S. criticized a draft resolution on global health debated at a meeting of the U.N. Commission on Population and Development. Spencer Chretien, the U.S. delegate, opposed references to the U.N.’s Sustainable Development Goals, which provide a blueprint for how countries can prosper economically while improving gender equality and protecting the environment. Chretien called the program a form of “soft global governance” that conflicts with national sovereignty. Chretien also touted the administration’s “unequivocal rejection of gender ideology extremism” and renewed membership in the Geneva Consensus Declaration, an antiabortion document signed by more than 30 countries, including Russia, Hungary, Saudi Arabia and South Sudan. The first Trump administration co-sponsored the initiative in 2020 before the Biden administration withdrew from it.

Chretien helped write Project 2025 when he worked at The Heritage Foundation. He is now a senior bureau official in the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration. Chretien couldn’t be reached for comment.

The U.N. proposal on global health faced additional opposition from Burundi, Djibouti and Nigeria, where abortion is generally illegal. Delegates from those countries were upset about references to “sexual and reproductive health services,” which could include abortion access. The commission chair withdrew the resolution, seeing no way to reach consensus.

During a July forum about a document on sustainable development, the U.S. delegate, Shrier, asked for a vote on several paragraphs about gender, climate change and various forms of discrimination. In his objections, he cited two paragraphs that he argued advanced “this radical abortion agenda through the terms ‘sexual and reproductive health’ and ‘reproductive rights.’”

The final vote on whether to retain those paragraphs was 141 to 2, with only the U.S. and Ethiopia voting no. (Several countries abstained.)

When the results lit up the screen, the chamber broke into thunderous applause.

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After months of national protests over U.S. President Donald Trump's mass deportation agenda, even some of his supporters—including an Alabama man who runs day-to-day operations at construction sites—have come to the conclusion that workplace raids aimed at rounding up undocumented immigrants are the wrong way to go.

In an interview with Reuters published Monday, construction site superintendent Robby Robertson expressed frustration at the way the Trump administration's hard-line immigration policies have impacted his business.

He said that trouble at his site began in late May shortly after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raid on a construction site in Tallahassee, Florida, which he said scared off nearly his entire workforce for several days afterward. Even though nearly two months have passed since then, he said a little more than half of his workforce has come back.

This is negatively impacting his current project, which he said was projected to be finished already but which has been slow to complete now that his initial 22-person roofing team has dwindled down to just a dozen workers. As if that weren't enough, Reuters wrote that Robertson's company "is facing potentially $84,000 in extra costs for the delays under a 'liquidated damages' clause of $4,000 for every day the project runs beyond" its deadline.

"I'm a Trump supporter," Robertson told Reuters. "But I just don't think the raids are the answer."

Robertson added that the raids aren't just intimidating undocumented immigrant workers but also Latino workers who are in the country legally but who don't want to get swept up in raids "because of their skin color."

"They are scared they look the part," Robertson explained.

Tim Harrison, the CEO of the construction firm that is building the project being overseen by Robertson, told Reuters that finding native-born American workers to do the kind of work he needs is extremely difficult, especially since Alabama already has a low unemployment rate that makes trying to attract workers to a physically demanding industry difficult.

"The contractor world is full of Republicans," explained Harrison in an interview with Reuters. "I'm not anti-ICE. We're supportive of what the president is trying to do. But the reality of it is our industry has to have the Hispanic immigrant-based workers in it."

A report issued earlier this month by the progressive Economic Policy Institute (EPI) projected that the construction industry could take a severe hit from Trump's mass deportation plan given how many undocumented immigrants work in that industry.

"Employment in the construction sector will drop sharply: U.S.-born construction employment will fall by 861,000, and immigrant employment will fall by 1.4 million," wrote EPI senior economist Ben Zipperer, who added that the Trump administration's plans risked "squandering the full employment... inherited from the Biden administration and also causing immense pain to the millions of U.S.-born and immigrant workers who may lose their jobs."