“An investigation by ProPublica has revealed nearly 50 instances of officers shattering windows while conducting immigration-related arrests in the last six months. Although not comprehensive and hard to verify without government statistics, only eight occurrences were found in the decade preceding Trump’s return to office. The uptick in window destruction coincides with growing uneasiness around how federal agents conduct themselves—and how aggressive behavior may even be rewarded within the Trump administration.
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American citizens have also been implicated during these forceful arrests. In a since-deleted Facebook Live video, agents pulled over Jennifer Gribben, a U.S. citizen, and her boyfriend Martin Rivera (ProPublica did not note his citizenship status), and told them they were looking for a fugitive named Garcia. Officers then smashed the car’s window to arrest them. Gribben said in a Facebook post that she was hit in the head by officers and that Rivera suffered a broken arm. She was later charged with resisting arrest and third-degree assault, to which she pleaded not guilty.”
“the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit largely affirmed a lower court ruling that found that the Trump administration was likely guilty of conducting illegal immigration raids in the greater Los Angeles area that violated the Fourth Amendment rights of multiple U.S. citizens.
Generally speaking, Fourth Amendment caselaw requires that an officer must have reasonable suspicion of criminal activity in order to stop someone. In the immigration context, a federal officer must have reasonable suspicion that a person is in violation of immigration law in order to detain them.
In this case, Perdomo v. Noem, the lower court held, and the appellate court agreed, that the Trump administration was apparently carrying out immigration raids and arrests without any semblance of reasonable suspicion, which invariably meant that U.S. citizens were also getting caught up in the federal dragnet.”
“The Republican Party’s big bill of tax breaks and spending cuts that Trump signed into law July 4 included what’s arguably the biggest boost of funds yet to the Department of Homeland Security — nearly $170 billion, almost double its annual budget.
The staggering sum is powering the nation’s sweeping new Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations, delivering gripping scenes of people being pulled off city streets and from job sites across the nation — the cornerstone of Trump’s promise for the largest domestic deportation operation in American history. Homeland Security confirmed over the weekend ICE is working to set up detention sites at certain military bases.
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The crush of new money is setting off alarms in Congress and beyond, raising questions from lawmakers in both major political parties who are expected to provide oversight. The bill text provided general funding categories — almost $30 billion for ICE officers, $45 billion for detention facilities, $10 billion for the office of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem — but few policy details or directives. Homeland Security recently announced $50,000 ICE hiring bonuses.
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In the months since Trump took office, his administration has been shifting as much as $1 billion from the Federal Emergency Management Agency and other accounts to pay for immigration enforcement and deportation operations, lawmakers said.
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Polling showed 79% of U.S. adults say immigration is a “good thing” for the country, having jumped substantially from 64% a year ago, according to Gallup. Only about 2 in 10 U.S. adults say immigration is a bad thing right now.”
“Noem v. Perdomo is not a normal case. Instead of disavowing the apparently unconstitutional behavior at its core, the Trump administration is openly embracing that behavior and urging the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court to do the same. It is the rare case in which both the government and its opponents agree that federal agents behaved in a specific way; the two sides only disagree about whether the specific behavior should count as good or bad.
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according to the emergency application to SCOTUS signed by Solicitor General John Sauer, “apparent ethnicity can be a factor supporting reasonable suspicion in appropriate circumstances.” Translation: If a federal agent thinks that someone “looks illegal,” the agent should be free to seize that person based only on his “apparent ethnicity” without setting off any sort of Fourth Amendment alarm bells.
Furthermore, in response to the argument that the federal government’s alleged racial profiling has resulted in an overly broad dragnet that inevitably ensnares innocent U.S. citizens, the Trump administration told the Supreme Court that “the high prevalence of illegal aliens should enable agents to stop a relatively broad range of individuals.”
Take a moment to let that sink in. The Trump administration wants the Supreme Court to give its blessing to a kind of systematic racial profiling that involves federal agents stopping a “broad range of individuals” based exclusively on factors such as the individuals’ “apparent ethnicity.” And if the rights of U.S. citizens—such as the Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures regardless of your skin color—happen to get trampled along the way, the Trump administration’s message to those victimized citizens is this: tough luck.”
“The census is a constitutionally mandated count of every person in the United States every 10 years, which was last conducted in 2020. A full census has never been conducted mid-decade in this manner, nor has one ever excluded noncitizens from the count.
Censuses are immensely important in American governance; each count determines how many House seats every state gets through a process called apportionment, and the results of the census help direct billions of dollars in federal, state and local funding.
Trump has been trying to include a citizenship question on the census since his first term, though the Supreme Court struck the effort down on procedural grounds in 2019. Apportionment numbers have also historically included people residing in the United States regardless of their immigration status.
A 2020 Pew Research Center report indicated removing noncitizens could cost multiple states House seats, including California and Texas.
Any attempt to do a mid-decade census would likely result in a flurry of legal and logistical challenges. Preparing for the decennial count takes multiple years, and planning for the 2030 census is already well underway.
It is unclear how the Trump administration plans to exclude undocumented people from the count, or if the president intended to just remove them from apportionment totals, which would also face legal hurdles.”
“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.”
“The Trump administration has awarded a Virginia-based defense contractor a $1.26 billion contract to build a 5,000-bed immigration detention center in El Paso, Texas, reports Bloomberg. The newest—and biggest—facility will be located at the 1 million-acre Fort Bliss Army base, equipped with tents for detention infrastructure and an airport to serve as a deportation hub.”
“Abrego Garcia is accused of some unsavory actions—apart from the vague allegations of trafficking and gang membership, his wife filed for a temporary order of protection against him in 2021, which she later withdrew.
But importantly, he was never convicted of any of these things; before he was deported to a maximum security prison in Central America, he had not been charged with them, either.
Hanid Ortiz, meanwhile, was arrested, tried, and convicted of three murders, and yet the Trump administration used hundreds of people as bargaining chips, in part, to get him released and back on American streets. Trump seems to care much more about someone’s immigration status than the actual danger they pose.”