Thread: US Deportation of Illegal Immigrants

What we know about Kilmar Abrego Garcia and MS-13 allegations

The case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia - a 29-year-old from El Salvador who was deported from the US in March - has prompted a legal showdown over the administration's immigration policy.

Judges all the way up to the US Supreme Court have ruled that Mr Abrego Garcia was deported in error and that the US government should help "facilitate" his return to his home in Maryland.

But the White House has accused Mr Abrego Garcia of being a member of the transnational Salvadorian gang MS-13, a designated foreign terrorist organisation, saying that he "will never live" in the US again.

Mr Abrego Garcia denies he is a member of the gang and he has not been convicted of any crime.

BBC Verify has examined court documents and public records to determine what's known – and what is still unknown – about Mr Abrego Garcia and his alleged ties to MS-13.
What do we know about alleged MS-13 links?

Mr Abrego Garcia has acknowledged entering the US illegally in 2012, according to court documents.

In March 2019 he was detained along with three other people in Hyattsville, Maryland, in the car park of a Home Depot.

Officers at the Prince George's County Police Department said the men were "loitering" and subsequently identified Mr Abrego Garcia and two of the others as members of MS-13.

In a document titled the "Gang Field Interview Sheet", the local police detailed their observations.

They said Mr Abrego Garcia was wearing a "Chicago Bulls hat and a hoodie with rolls of money covering the eyes, ears and mouth of the presidents on the separate denominations".

Officers claimed the clothing was "indicative of the Hispanic gang culture" and that "wearing the Chicago Bulls hat represents thay (sic) they are a member in good standing with the MS-13".

Steven Dudley, a journalist and author who has spent years studying the MS-13 gang, said that it is true that "at some point, the Chicago Bulls logo with the horns became a stand-in of sorts for the MS-13's devil horns symbol".

But wearing the logo of the hugely popular basketball team, he added, is of course not exclusive to the gang.

"Any assertions about gang affiliation would need to be corroborated with testimony, criminal history, and other corroborating evidence," Mr Dudley said.

According to the field interview sheet and other court documents, officers said they were also advised by a "proven and reliable source" that Mr Abrego Garcia was an active member of MS-13's "westerns clique", with the rank of "chequeo".

However, Mr Dudley says that a "chequeo" is not a rank but is instead used to refer to recruits who are yet to be initiated.
Getty Images Jennifer Vasquez Sura, the wife of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, speaking at a microphone in front of the Federal Court in MarylandGetty Images
Jennifer Vasquez Sura, the wife of Mr Abrego Garcia, has denied he's an MS-13 gang member

Lawyers for Mr Abrego Garcia's argued in court filings that the "westerns clique" is based in New York, where they say their client has never lived. And according to government documents, he has dismissed the information given to police against him as "hearsay".

According to his lawyers, Mr Abrego Garcia has never been convicted of any criminal offence, including gang membership, in the US or in El Salvador. He lived in the US for 14 years, had three children and worked in construction, according to court records.

But the judge who presided over his 2019 case said that based on the confidential information, there was sufficient evidence to support Mr Abrego Garcia's gang membership. That finding was later upheld by another judge.

Kilmar Abrego Garcia and MS-13: What is alleged and what we know


2 Judges found that Garcia was a gang member. That should be the end of the legal recourse for him. Asylum for being 'in danger from other gang members' is nonsense.

.......

US may soon deport migrants to Libya on military flight

US President Donald Trump's administration may deport migrants to Libya for the first time this week, according to US officials, as part of his immigration crackdown and despite Washington's past condemnation of Libya's harsh treatment of detainees.


Two officials said the US military could fly the migrants to the North African country as soon as Wednesday (May 7), but stressed that plans could change.

A US judge said on Wednesday that any effort by the Trump administration to deport migrants to Libya would "clearly" violate a prior court order barring officials from swiftly deporting migrants to countries other than their own, without first weighing whether they might face persecution if sent there.


It is unclear how many migrants would be sent to Libya or the nationalities of the individuals that the administration is eyeing for deportation. The relatives of one Mexican national told Reuters he had been told to sign a document allowing for his deportation to the African nation.


Lawyers for a group of migrants pursuing a class action lawsuit said the individuals potentially subject to deportation to Libya included Laotian, Vietnamese, and Philippine migrants. They added that sending them to Libya without first providing them a chance to raise their safety concerns "blatantly defies" the judge's injunction.


LIBYA REJECTS USE OF ITS TERRITORY FOR US DEPORTATIONS


Libya's Government of National Unity said on Wednesday it rejected the use of Libyan territory as a destination for deporting migrants without its knowledge or consent. It also said there was no coordination with the United States regarding the reception of migrants.

Khalifa Haftar's Libyan National Army, which controls eastern Libya, also rejected in a statement the idea of the country taking migrants deported from the United States, saying it "violates the sovereignty of the homeland".


Trump, who made immigration a major issue during his election campaign, has launched aggressive enforcement action since taking office, surging troops to the southern border and pledging to deport millions of immigrants in the United States illegally.


As of Monday, the Trump administration has deported 152,000 people, according to DHS.


The administration has tried to encourage migrants to leave voluntarily by threatening steep fines, trying to strip away legal status, and deporting migrants to notorious prisons in Guantanamo Bay and El Salvador.

"LIFE-THREATENING PRISON CONDITIONS"


In its annual human rights report released last year, the US State Department criticised Libya's "harsh and life-threatening prison conditions" and "arbitrary arrest or detention."


In its travel advisory, the Department advises US citizens against visiting the country due to "crime, civil unrest, kidnapping and armed conflict."


Libya's west is overseen by the GNU under Prime Minister Abdulhamid al-Dbeibah, who was installed in Tripoli through a UN-backed process in 2021. Eastern Libya has a parallel administration and is controlled by Commander Khalifa Haftar's Libyan National Army.


Major fighting ended with a truce in 2020 but the underlying political dispute between the sides remains and there are sporadic clashes between rival factions.

"SOME OF THE MOST DESPICABLE HUMAN BEINGS"


US Secretary of State Marco Rubio last week said the United States was not satisfied only with sending migrants to El Salvador, and hinted that Washington was looking to expand the number of countries to which it may deport people.

"We are working with other countries to say: We want to send you some of the most despicable human beings, will you do this as a favour to us," Rubio said at a cabinet meeting at the White House last Wednesday.


"And the further away from America, the better."


A fourth US official said the administration has for several weeks been looking at a number of countries to send migrants to, including Libya.


It wasn't immediately clear if the administration had struck an agreement with the Libyan authorities to accept deportees of other nationalities.


On April 19, the Supreme Court justices temporarily barred the Trump administration from deporting a group of Venezuelan migrants it accused of being gang members. Trump's administration, which has invoked a rarely used wartime law, has urged the justices to lift or narrow their order.

It is unclear what kind of due process might be underway ahead of any Libya deportations.


Libya has had little peace since a 2011 NATO-backed uprising, and it split in 2014 between eastern and western factions, with rival administrations governing in each area.


A Tripoli-based Government of National Unity under Prime Minister Abdulhamid al-Dbeibah was installed through a UN-backed process in 2021, but the Benghazi-based House of Representatives no longer recognises its legitimacy.

Ukraine considers move to euro from dollar amid geopolitical shifts - CNA

Perhaps he could send them to Yemen. That would seem to meet his humanitarian standards.

Trump administration considers suspending habeas corpus

Donald Trump's administration is "actively looking at" suspending habeas corpus - the right of a person to challenge their detention in court - one of the US president's top aides has said.

Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, told reporters on Friday that the US Constitution allowed for the legal liberty to be suspended in times of "rebellion or invasion".

His comments come as judges have sought to challenge some recent detentions made by the Trump administration in an effort to combat illegal immigration, as well as remove dissenting foreign students.

"A lot of it depends on whether the courts do the right thing or not," Miller said.

There are several pending civil cases against the Trump administration's deportation of undocumented migrants based on habeaus corpus.

Trump administration considering suspending habeas corpus


I am not sure of the extended implications of this, but I do think that, in general, illegal immigrants should have restricted access to legal recourse when it comes to fighting deportation orders. The courts have elaborate and time consuming procedures that are more deservatory for the treatment of citizens, permanent residents and legal visitors.

Originally Posted by Looper

I am not sure of the extended implications of this, but I do think that, in general, illegal immigrants should have restricted access to legal recourse when it comes to fighting deportation orders. The courts have elaborate and time consuming procedures that are more deservatory for the treatment of citizens, permanent residents and legal visitors.

The constitution guarantees due process to EVERY citizen, legal status is irrelevant.

Constitutional amendments require 38 states to assent.

So, again, it doesn't matter a fucking jot what you "think".

There is no "rebellion" in the US, nor is there an "invasion".

This is just more trumpanzee bullshit.

^I don’t understand what you are saying here and have to admit that I agree with Looper in the statement above. If one is a citizen, they have legal status. If one has NO citizenship, green card, work permit, or any other legal permission including being under review for asylum, I think they should be sent home unceremoniously with no resources wasted on them. Sent back to the country they came from, not some third country.

I don’t agree with Looper on the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia in that he had legal permission to live in the US and convicted of no crime to revoke that status. Some officer saying he was a gang member doesn’t hold water.

Habeas corpus should extend to anyone who has any kind of legal status for being in the USA. Period. There is no reason to revoke it and I think it’s just mouthy Trump spouting nonsense AGAIN.

Judge says 2-year-old US citizen appears to have been deported with ‘no meaningful process’

A federal judge is raising alarms that the Trump administration deported a two-year-old U.S. citizen to Honduras with “no meaningful process,” even as the child’s father was frantically petitioning the courts to keep her in the country.


U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty, a Trump appointee, said the child — identified in court papers by the initials “V.M.L.” — appeared to have been released in Honduras earlier Friday, along with her Honduran-born mother and sister, who had been detained by immigration officials earlier in the week.

The judge on Friday scheduled a hearing for May 16, which he said was “in the interest of dispelling our strong suspicion that the Government just deported a U.S. citizen with no meaningful process.”

The judge on Friday scheduled a hearing for May 16, which he said was “in the interest of dispelling our strong suspicion that the Government just deported a U.S. citizen with no meaningful process.”

The child, whose redacted U.S. birth certificate was filed in court and showed she was born in New Orleans in 2023, had been with her mother and sister during a regular immigration check-in at the New Orleans office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement on Tuesday. Officials there detained them and queued them up for deportation.


Trump administration officials said in court that the mother told ICE officials that she wished to take V.M.L. with her to Honduras. The filing included a handwritten note in Spanish they claimed was written by the mother and confirmed her intent. But the judge said he had hoped to verify that information.

“The Government contends that this is all okay because the mother wishes that the child be deported with her,” Doughty wrote. “But the Court doesn’t know that.”


“This parent made the decision to take the child with them to Honduras. It is common that parents want to be removed with their children,” Assistant DHS Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement. “Parents are asked if they want to be removed with their children or ICE will place the children with someone the parent designates. In this case, the parent stated they wanted to be removed with the children.”

“We take our responsibility to protect children seriously and will continue to work with federal law enforcement to ensure that children are safe and protected,” she added.


The court battle ignited Thursday, when lawyers for the family filed an emergency petition in the Western District of Louisiana seeking V.M.L.’s immediate release from ICE custody and a declaration that the girl’s detention had been unlawful. The petition was filed under the name of Trish Mack, who the lawyers indicated had been asked by V.M.L.’s father to act as the child’s custodian and take her home from ICE custody.


Lawyers for the guardian told the court that V.M.L.’s father had been attempting to contact the girl’s mother to discuss plans for their child but ICE officials denied him the chance to have a substantive phone call. He says ICE allowed the two to speak for about one minute on Tuesday, while the mother was in ICE custody, but that they were unable to make any meaningful decisions about their child.


As a U.S. citizen, V.M.L. is likely to have the ability to return to the United States, setting her case apart from others that have drawn national attention in recent weeks, such as the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia. The Salvadoran native was deported to a prison in his home country in violation of a 2019 immigration court order. But the Louisiana case is the latest concern by the courts that the Trump administration’s rush to carry out deportations is violating due process rights — in this case, the rights of a U.S. citizen child.


Doughty said he attempted to investigate the emergency matter himself on Friday, seeking to get V.M.L.’s mother on the phone to determine whether ICE’s representation about her desire to bring V.M.L. to Honduras was accurate. The judge said he was “independently aware” that the plane he believed was carrying the family was already “above the Gulf of America.”


Trump administration lawyers called the judge back Friday afternoon and said a phone call with the mother would not be possible “because she (and presumably VML) had just been released in Honduras,” Doughty wrote. Doughty then scheduled the May hearing.


Doughty is based in Monroe, Louisiana, about 100 miles north of the staging facility in Alexandria where lawyers who filed the petition said they believed the mother and her daughters were being held prior to their deportation.

Just a moment...

Originally Posted by misskit

If one is a citizen, they have legal status. If one has NO citizenship, green card, work permit, or any other legal permission including being under review for asylum, I think they should be sent home unceremoniously with no resources wasted on them.

Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution -- Rights Of Persons

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

Notice, the constitution says nothing about residency, permit status, or citizenship. However, it does mention persons.

This is about persons being held in prison for no reason. If a person is deported, they are not being imprisoned, they are being transported out of the country.

A case happened near my hometown many years ago which shaped the way I think about the treatment of illegal immigrants. A construction worker with no legal status was picked up by police for drunk driving and released. Not long after he killed a young woman in a drunk driving accident. He then was held and convicted of homicide.

If this man had been deported in the first place the woman would still be alive AND the state wouldn’t be burdened with paying for his court case and incarceration.

Don’t think I am anti immigrant. I am not. I am against immigrants being “ghosts” with no legal status. If they are illegal and report to immigration and get permission though the court to stay, good on them.

Originally Posted by misskit

Habeas corpus should extend to anyone who has any kind of legal status for being in the USA.

Habeas corpus is not limited to people who are in the country, legally.

Ok. You have me there. But, if that person is brought before a judge right after they are taken into custody and it is found they are in custody because of illegal immigration status, they can be promptly deported. No?

Originally Posted by misskit

Ok. You have me there. But, if that person is brought before a judge right after they are taken into custody and it is found they are in custody because of illegal immigration status, they can be promptly deported. No?

I guess, in a perfect world, that would be the case. Are we going to do that with 11 million + people?

^ The problem in a nutshell. Anyway, I don’t see the point of deporting anyone who is not a criminal.

Trump is only using illegal immigrants as a way to get people to go along with the suspension of habeas corpus. His real reason for suspending habeas corpus is so that he can go after his political enemies and journalists.

Kinda too late, folks.
Your beloved Obama already permanently suspended habeas corpus [for everyone regardless of status] under an extension of the even more beloved Patriot Act.

And the truth of the situation is here. America relies on these illegal immigrants.


Inside Trump’s Extraordinary Turnaround on Immigration Raids


President Trump’s decision to pause most raids targeting farms and hospitality workers took many inside the White House by surprise. It came after intensive lobbying by his agriculture secretary.

On Wednesday morning, President Trump took a call from Brooke Rollins, his secretary of agriculture, who relayed a growing sense of alarm from the heartland.


Farmers and agriculture groups, she said, were increasingly uneasy about his immigration crackdown. Federal agents had begun to aggressively target work sites in recent weeks, with the goal of sharply bolstering the number of arrests and deportations of undocumented immigrants.


Farmers rely on immigrants to work long hours, Ms. Rollins said. She told the president that farm groups had been warning her that their employees would stop showing up to work out of fear, potentially crippling the agricultural industry.


She wasn’t the first person to try to get this message through to the president, nor was it the first time she had spoken to him about it. But the president was persuaded.

The next morning, he posted a message on his social media platform, Truth Social, that took an uncharacteristically softer tone toward the very immigrants he has spent much of his political career demonizing. Immigrants in the farming and hospitality industries are “very good, long time workers,” he said. “Changes are coming.”


Some influential Trump donors who learned about the post began reaching out to people in the White House, urging Mr. Trump to include the restaurant sector in any directive to spare undocumented workers from enforcement.


Inside the West Wing, top White House officials were caught off guard — and furious at Ms. Rollins. Many of Mr. Trump’s top aides, particularly Stephen Miller, his deputy chief of staff, have urged a hard-line approach, targeting all immigrants without legal status to fulfill the president’s promise of the biggest deportation campaign in American history.


But the decision had been made. Later on Thursday, a senior official with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Tatum King, sent an email to regional leaders at the agency informing them of new guidance. Agents were to “hold on all work site enforcement investigations/operations on agriculture (including aquaculture and meat packing plants), restaurants and operating hotels.”‘

It remains to be seen how effective the order will be and whether Mr. Trump will stick with his decision. Raids at other work sites, like the one in Los Angeles’s garment industry that led to mass protests, are still allowed. On Friday, the day after Mr. Trump issued the new guidance, farm workers were being rounded up in the fields of Oxnard, 50 miles north of Los Angeles, according to advocates.

But the president’s decision to shield farmers and the hospitality industry — a business he knows well from his years as an owner of luxury hotels — reveals the tension between his deportation efforts and concerns about maintaining crucial support in his political coalition.


This account of Mr. Trump’s retreat is based on interviews with 11 people, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe private discussions.


“President Trump has always stood up for our farmers, who were a major part of his November victory, by working to negotiate fairer trade deals and cut red tape,” Anna Kelly, a White House spokeswoman, said in a statement. “He will continue to strengthen our agricultural industry and boost exports while keeping his promise to enforce our immigration laws and remove the millions of unvetted illegals who flooded into the United States under Joe Biden.”


‘Let’s go after the criminals’


The scope of Mr. Trump’s immigration crackdown has unsettled some Republicans as the raids on farms began disrupting operations. More than 40 percent of the nation’s crop workers have no legal immigration status, the Agriculture Department has estimated.

On Tuesday, federal agents started fanning out across California’s vast agricultural area, from along the coast to the Central Valley. The raids spread chaos in Oxnard, which grows much of the nation’s strawberries, as well as in Kern and Tulare Counties, where vegetables, grapes and delicate fruit, like peaches, are starting to be harvested.


Growers reported that 30 to 60 percent of workers stopped reporting to the fields in the days after the raids.


Agricultural associations in California, Idaho and elsewhere, whose members are typically Republicans, have been bombarding their Senate and congressional offices to voice concerns.


“We all need to focus on convicted criminal aliens,” Representative Tony Gonzalez, Republican of Texas, said on CNN this week. “If we focus there and we’re not going after the milker of cows who’s, you know, in 103-degree weather, going after that guy and we’re going after the convicted criminal, I think we’re on the right path.”


Representative Glenn Thompson, Republican of Pennsylvania and the chairman of the House Agriculture Committee, said ICE raids at farms were “just wrong.”

“They need to knock it off,” he told reporters this week. “Let’s go after the criminals and give us time to put processes in place so we don’t disrupt the food supply chain.”


During an agriculture committee hearing on Wednesday, he pressed Ms. Rollins about what the administration was doing to ensure ICE raids were not “impacting food security.”


Ms. Rollins said she had spoken about the issue to Mr. Trump both on Tuesday in the Oval Office and on Wednesday morning.


“This president’s commitment to ensuring that all laws are followed remains paramount,” Ms. Rollins said. But she added that Mr. Trump understood “the significant challenges” in finding the necessary farm labor.


Still, some of the president’s most fervent supporters say they are unhappy with the change.


Jack Posobiec, a right-wing activist, said Saturday that Ms. Rollins was under pressure from outside groups, including Big Ag and wealthy donors, to scale back the president’s deportation plan.

“Why not focus on all illegals?” he said. “Sure, you know criminals go first. The violent illegals go first. But the policy should focus on all illegals.”

Mike Howell, the head of the Oversight Project, a conservative group, pointed to the news as proof that a mass deportation campaign was not happening in the way some expected.


“I think it would be to everyone’s benefit if we could end the shared fiction that mass deportations are happening,” he said on social media. “Elements of both the right and left know it to be false but pretend it is true, for different reasons.”


Seth W. Christensen, a spokesman for the Agriculture Department, said Ms. Rollins “fully supports President Trump’s immigration agenda, starting with strong border security and deportations of all illegally present.” He added, “This agenda is essential to fixing a broken farm-labor economy and restoring integrity to the American work force.”

Protecting farmers


Mr. Trump has often made policy exceptions for farmers, a key base of support. In his first term, he provided farmers with billions of dollars in aid amid a trade war with China. He deemed agricultural laborers to be essential workers during the coronavirus pandemic. He even allowed their employers to provide them with letters to show law enforcement so they would not be deported.


In his second term, Mr. Trump has weighed a new round of emergency relief to farmers this year because of Mr. Trump’s tariffs.


“It’s entirely predictable that Trump would backpedal on enforcement in the sectors he cares about — hospitality, where his own businesses operate, and agriculture, where his voters are over represented,” said Wayne Cornelius, a professor emeritus at the University of California, San Diego, who researched immigrant labor.


Farmers say they routinely resort to hiring workers without work authorization because they cannot find Americans willing to do the physically onerous work. Often, the workers have been paying Social Security taxes and other federal taxes for decades.


Half of the farmworkers interviewed for the National Agricultural Workers Survey, released in 2022 by the Labor Department, had spent 11 to 30 years on farms, and nearly one in five had done so for more than three decades. They were earning an average of $20,000 a year.

On Friday, there were reports that some immigration raids were still happening, according to groups that represent growers and farm workers in California.


Immigrant advocates received a rash of calls from children trying to locate their parents who were being transported to detention facilities in Oxnard. Agents had been in the area much of the week, arresting workers in packing houses and in the fields, according to the Ventura County Farm Bureau. Many farms remained closed because of the presence of roving federal agents, particularly Border Patrol.


“Agents were driving by, they would see workers and they would go into the fields to detain them,” said Teresa Romero, the president of the United Farmworkers Union, which represents 10,000 field workers in California, Oregon, Washington and New York and presses for their interests nationwide. (In most states, farm workers have no legal right to unionize.)


She said that Mr. Trump’s guidance did not go far enough to protect vulnerable, essential workers because it allowed enforcement to continue in rural towns.


“If Trump is serious about protecting farm workers then the raids in the streets in agricultural areas have to stop right now,” Ms. Romero said.


“Even if ICE and the Border Patrol are not going directly to the field but are driving around agricultural areas,” she said, “that is enough for farm workers out there to be scared and still be detained.”

nytimes.com

Originally Posted by HuangLao

Kinda too late, folks.
Your beloved Obama already permanently suspended habeas corpus [for everyone regardless of status] under an extension of the even more beloved Patriot Act.

Stay in the shallow end, Jeff, the grown ups are talking at the deep end.

No, President Obama did not suspend habeas corpus. In fact, his administration took steps to reaffirm the right of habeas corpus for detainees, particularly those held at Guantanamo Bay, according to Wikipedia. On January 21, 2009, he issued an executive order stating that detainees at Guantanamo Bay had the right to the writ of habeas corpus.

^^Of course you are correct here.

What I mean is when someone is caught without any kind of documentation that they have contacted some state or federal entity and reported themselves, they should go to jail, be seen by a judge promptly and deported.

So many of these immigrants being deported have no immigration status but do possess work permits or some other proof they are in the ‘system.’

Originally Posted by misskit

So many of these immigrants being deported have no immigration status but do possess work permits or some other proof they are in the ‘system.’

And of course the undocumented contribute $97Bn a year to the tax coffers.