“The Trump administration is now struggling to reconcile its mass deportation efforts with the need to keep farm production going. Huerta is not optimistic about how it will all play out, though she was able to poke at Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins’ recent suggestion that automation will soon replace human laborers. “I guess I could just wait until they get enough robots to do the farm work,” Huerta joked.”
“State contracts for Florida’s controversial “Alligator Alcatraz” detention camp were removed from a public database and replaced with far less detailed documents after media outlets began writing about them…
The Florida Division of Emergency Management (FDEM), which is overseeing the state’s new immigrant detention camp in the Everglades, says the contracts contained “proprietary information.”…
open government advocates and state Democratic lawmakers say that removing details of the contracts flies in the face of Florida’s promises to provide transparency in public spending, especially given the massive expenditures of taxpayer money involved. The most recent reporting on the ballooning costs of the Everglades detention camp puts it at $250 million and growing.”
“A woman who died of a heart attack in a federal immigration detention facility in South Florida told her son over the phone on the day she died that staff refused to let her see a physician for chest pains, her son told a county investigator.
Marie Ange Blaise, a 44-year-old Haitian national, died on April 25 at the Broward Transitional Center (BTC)—a privately run facility in Pompano Beach, Florida, that contracts with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). A medical examiner’s report obtained by Reason through a public records request concluded that she died of natural causes from cardiovascular disease.”
“Over the past three months, the Trump administration has filed lawsuits against Los Angeles, Illinois, Colorado, New York state, New York City, and other places for the express purpose of forcing them to abolish their “sanctuary city” policies and start aiding the feds in rounding up undocumented immigrants and enforcing federal immigration laws.
But unless the U.S. Supreme Court rapidly overturns several of its own precedents, including a recent one from 2018, all of these cases will be constitutional losers for President Donald Trump. Why? Here is how the late conservative legal hero and long-serving Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia once spelled it out.
“The Federal Government may neither issue directives requiring the States to address particular problems,” Scalia wrote for the Court’s majority in Printz v. United States (1997), “nor command the States’ officers, or those of their political subdivisions, to administer or enforce a federal regulatory program.”
…
federal agents still retain their own independent authority to enforce federal immigration law inside of sanctuary states and cities, just as federal authorities retain the independent authority to enforce other federal laws in states and cities. The key point under Printz is that it is unconstitutional for the feds to compel local officials to lend them a helping hand in carrying out the enforcement of federal law.”
“Paola Clouatre, the wife of Marine Corps veteran Adrian Clouatre, was released on Monday after two months in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention, with the help of Sen. John Kennedy (R–La.). Cloutare’s arrest is symbolic of President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, which has mostly targeted people with no criminal record, despite his claim that he’s deporting the “worst of the worst.”
…
After coming to the United States as a teenager with her mother to seek asylum over a decade ago, the 25-year-old began the green card application process shortly after marrying her husband last year. Clouatre was surprised to discover through the application process that ICE had issued a deportation order against her in 2018, stemming from her estranged mother’s failure to appear at an immigration hearing in California.”
“Prisoners at Florida’s newly opened immigrant detention center in the Everglades are suffering in squalid conditions and are cut off from legal access, according to attorneys, detainees, family members, and lawmakers.”
“The judge found that many of those swept up in immigration raids were taken to the basement of a federal building in Los Angeles to a room known as “B-18” meant to temporarily house arrestees while they are being processed. Frimpong found that many detainees were held there for hours without access to counsel.”
“In one recent raid in Montebello, Border Patrol agents—masked and driving an unmarked SUV—descended on a parking lot and detained a local man.
“One agent soon twisted Jason Brian Gavidia’s arm and pressed him against a black metal fence outside the lot where he runs an auto body shop,” according to The New York Times. “Another officer then asked him an unusual question…’What hospital were you born at?’…He did not know the hospital’s name. ‘I was born here,’ he shouted at the agent, adding, ‘I’m an American, bro!'” I don’t know about you, but I couldn’t instantly tell you the name of the hospital where I was born.
The agents ultimately released him, but confiscated his driver’s license. There’s a lot wrong with this picture. In a constitutional republic, armed officers should not be wearing face masks as if they are members of some third-world paramilitary organization. There’s no reason for that unless they are behaving in a manner that skirts the boundaries of the law.
Civilian policing is the norm in free countries for obvious reasons. If you’re walking down the street and a gang of masked, armed men jumps out of an unmarked vehicle and abducts you, how do you know they’re legitimate officers and not bandits or kidnappers?”
…
“A number of Trump-voting business owners and farmers who have had ICE agents whisk away part of their work force have made similar points. Same with people who have had family members deported—sometimes after they were “disappeared” in broad daylight, with no notification to loved ones. They didn’t expect their workers and loved ones to get nabbed. Frankly, they are among the least sympathetic opponents of the raids. They voted for these policies—and only seem upset now that it’s affecting them and not just other people.
The end result of these sweeps: All Americans—and especially those with darker skin—need to always carry our papers. The Fourth Amendment is clear: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated.” Then again, the administration isn’t keen on the due-process concept either, which simply requires the government to prove its case before it sends you to a gulag in El Salvador.”
“As Trump has acknowledged, he is torn between the economic concerns of business owners, including many of his own supporters, and the demands of hardliners like White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller. That tension is apparent in the contrast between the administration’s immigration rhetoric, which emphasizes the removal of dangerous criminals, and workplace raids that target peaceful, productive people with strong, longstanding ties to the United States. And it reflects the general public’s mixed attitude toward immigration enforcement, which includes an openness to legal pathways that would allow people in the latter category to remain in the country.
“In 2020–22,” the U.S. Department of Agriculture reports, “32 percent of crop farmworkers were U.S. born, 7 percent were immigrants who had obtained U.S. citizenship, 19 percent were other authorized immigrants (primarily permanent residents or green-card holders), and the remaining 42 percent held no work authorization.” But as Trump tells it, he was not aware of how his deportation campaign might affect U.S. farmers until Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins, who attended the Des Moines rally, brought the issue to his attention. “You were the one that brought this whole situation up,” he said to her at the rally. “Brooke Rollins brought it up, and she said, ‘So we have a little problem. The farmers are losing a lot of people.'”
Trump has repeatedly promised to execute “the largest deportation program in American history”—a goal that he reiterated in Des Moines. Yet he sounded surprisingly sympathetic toward at least some of the people affected by that crackdown. “These people…work so hard,” he said. “They bend over all day. We don’t have too many people [who] can do that.” He added that “some of the farmers…cry when they see [immigration raids] happen.” He alluded to “cases where…people have worked for a farmer on a farm for 14, 15 years” and “then they get thrown out, pretty viciously.” His conclusion: “We can’t do it. We’ve got to work with the farmers and people that have hotels and leisure properties.”
If the agricultural sector’s reliance on undocumented workers somehow was news to Trump even after he served as president for four years, he should have been intimately familiar from his own businesses with the potential impact of immigration enforcement on the hospitality industry. In 2023, the American Immigration Council estimated, U.S. hotels and restaurants employed 1.1 million unauthorized workers, 7.6 percent of the total work force.
Trump did not mention construction. But last September, the National Immigration Forum estimated that undocumented workers accounted for “almost a quarter” of employees in that industry.
It was completely predictable, in other words, that a broad crackdown on unauthorized U.S. residents that included workplace raids would have an outsized impact on several kinds of businesses”
…
“a Pew Research Center survey conducted in early June, 54 percent of respondents opposed “more raids where people in the U.S. illegally may be working,” and 65 percent thought “there should be a way for undocumented immigrants to stay in the country legally, if requirements are met.” Despite Trump’s rhetorical emphasis on deporting criminals, 57 percent of respondents anticipated that his immigration policies would have “no impact” on crime or lead to “more crime.” A plurality (46 percent) thought those policies would make the U.S. economy “weaker,” while just 34 percent said they would make it “stronger.””