Immigration

The Guardian - Attorneys for the Trump administration are aiming to deport Liam Conejo Ramos, the five-year-old boy whose photograph in a bunny hat in snowy Minneapolis circulated globally after his detention last month by federal officials during the aggressive anti-immigration crackdown there. 

The child, Liam, returned home to Minnesota earlier this week after being taken into custody alongside his father last month and transferred to a notorious family detention facility in Texas.

The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) said on Friday it is seeking a deportation order for the Ecuadorian boy.

MS NOW -- A recent independent analysis found that the number of children detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement has skyrocketed, from an average of 25 per day at the end of Joe Biden’s term to about 170 per day in Trump’s second term — and as many as 400 on some days, write Kay Guerrero and Jacob Soboroff. At the end of January, one of those children was 2-year-old Chloe Tipan Villacis, who was swept up during a raid in Minneapolis, spent 27 hours in federal custody and was flown to Texas with her father until ICE released her after a federal judge’s order. Read more.

Headline USA -   The United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit has sided with two immigrants who were held in detention for extended periods without being given the opportunity to appear before a judge to request their release on bond. The Monday decision involved Adolph Michelin and Adewumi Abioye, who both challenged their detention by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as unconstitutional.

Abioye, a Nigerian citizen, came to the United States on a tourist visa in 2018. After completing a prison sentence for conspiracy to commit wire fraud, ICE detained him in May 2022. He remained locked up for more than 16 months without a hearing to determine whether he could be released on bond. In October 2023, Abioye filed a legal petition arguing that holding him for so long without a hearing violated his constitutional right to due process under the Fifth Amendment.

The U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania agreed with Abioye and ordered that he receive a bond hearing. Following that hearing, he was released in December 2023 after posting a $5,000 bond. Abioye then requested that the government pay his legal bills under the Equal Access to Justice Act (EAJA), a law that allows people to recover attorneys’ fees when the government’s position in a case was not reasonably justified. The District Court granted his request, awarding him $18,224.58.

.... Michelin’s case followed a similar path. The Jamaican citizen was taken into ICE custody in January 2022 and spent more than a year detained without a bond hearing. He filed his own legal challenge in early 2023, and the District Court ordered his release on a $10,000 bond. Like Abioye, Michelin sought payment of his legal expenses under the EAJA and was awarded $15,841.60.

 The New Republic - We're now learning that this year, Immigration and Customs Enforcement plans to retrofit around two dozen vast new facilities. In keeping with Trump-Miller's visions, ICE vows to detain an additional 80,000 people in them. Some will reportedly hold up to 10,000 detainees apiece. In other words, the Trump-Miller threat to create a system of new detention camps is just getting underway in earnest.

To put a ghoulish twist on the oft-discussed ideal of bureaucratic "capacity," this will allow Trump and Miller to imprison and then deport vastly more people a whole lot faster. Right now, more than 70,000 migrants are languishing in detention-a record-but the administration is running out of space. Add another 80,000 beds, and it would supercharge expulsion capacity.

Yet these detention dreams are hitting stiff opposition. ICE wants to buy a warehouse in Virginia's Hanover County, which went for Trump by 26 points in 2024 and combines rural territory with Richmond's northern suburbs. Residents recently turned out in force and angrily condemned the proposed sale, with local reports suggesting only a "handful" backed it. The GOP-heavy Board of Supervisors opposed the transaction. The warehouse owner canceled the sale.

....The pushback has come together surprisingly quickly. What explains this? A bizarrely overlooked finding in a recent Pew Research poll sheds some light: It finds that a huge majority of Americans oppose mass immigrant detention. The wording is critical here:

Do you favor or oppose keeping large numbers of immigrants in detention centers while their cases are decided?

Favor: 35 percent

Oppose: 64 percent