One of America’s powers is taking smart people from other countries and using their energies and insights. Trump is dampening that power.
“Kseniia Petrova’s path from a Harvard laboratory to an immigration cell began with frogs.
The Russian national who has been working as a researcher at Harvard Medical School failed to declare “non-hazardous” frog embryos she was carrying with her on her return to the US from France in February, Petrova’s attorney said. Rather than issue a fine, Petrova’s exchange visitor visa was revoked, and she was taken into custody.
Revoking Petrova’s visa was “a punishment grossly disproportionate to the situation,” her attorney, Greg Romanovsky, said, calling the error on the customs form “inadvertant.””
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“an increasing number of student deportation threats involve the revocation of visas based on relatively minor offenses like years-old misdemeanors, according to immigration attorneys, or sometimes no reason at all.”
“”You gotta get scared that people who are not criminals are getting lassoed up and deported and sent to El Salvador prisons,” Joe Rogan said on his hugely popular podcast this week. “This is kind of crazy, that that could be possible. That’s horrific.”
Rogan was alluding to Venezuelan makeup artist Andry Hernandez, who was shipped off to El Salvador’s notorious Center for Terrorism Confinement (CECOT) last month. Based largely on innocent tattoos, Hernandez’s supporters say, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) mistakenly identified him as a member of Tren de Aragua, the Venezuelan gang targeted by President Donald Trump’s March 15 proclamation invoking the Alien Enemies Act (AEA).”
“The Trump administration has, for the fourth time in history, invoked the war-time Alien Enemies Act of 1798, even though our nation is not at war—and its last use remains one of the most shameful episodes in American history.
That involved President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 in 1942. It was the basis for the internment of around 112,000 people of Japanese descent, 70,000 of whom were American citizens.”
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“For years, we’ve endured constitutional conservatives’ bloviating about the importance of protecting the sacred principles enshrined in our Constitution. Those include the separation of powers—legislative, executive and judicial checks on one another—and due process. Many of these hypocrites are defending the administration’s policies and bashing a judge for halting the hasty airlift of accused criminal aliens to a prison run by a banana-republic strongman—a directive the president promptly ignored.
Perhaps most of these deportees are criminals and a threat (unlike peaceful Japanese residents who posed no threat whatsoever). They still deserve due process—their day in court, so to speak—to prove they have indeed violated the law. Constitutional conservatives of all people should understand that the government gets things wrong and individuals deserve protection from arbitrary actions by its agents.
We’ve already seen examples of immigrants who were deported based on the government allegedly mistaking a soccer tattoo for gang insignia. Let’s say you were walking around and, based on your attire or ethnic background, the police suspected you were a gang-banger and took you to jail. Wouldn’t your first call be to your lawyer? Don’t you deserve due process to prove you were a passerby before being shipped to Pelican Bay? (And non-citizens generally are considered persons under the Constitution—and also deserve due process.)
The administration isn’t just ignoring these constitutional due-process protections but seems to be actively mocking them. “What were all these young women that were killed and raped by members of (Tren de Aragua)—what was their due process?”” asked Tom Homan, director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Murder and rape always are horrific, but everyone still gets a trial to, you know, prove they actually committed the crime.”
“Rojas, 42, is one of potentially hundreds of people who have been detained in recent weeks despite complying with Ice requirements to regularly check-in. Ice does not appear to keep count of how many people it has arrested at check-ins. But the Guardian has estimated, based on arrest data from the first four weeks of the Trump administration, that about 1,400 arrests – 8% of the nearly 16,500 arrests in the administration’s first month – have occurred during or right after people checked in with the agency.
Lawyers and immigration advocates told the Guardian they believe that in order to oblige the president’s demand for mass arrests and deportation, immigration officials are reaching for the “low-hanging fruit” – people that Ice had previously released from custody while they pursued asylum or other immigration cases in a backlogged immigration court system.”
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“In Rojas’s case, he was allowed to stay in Spokane with his wife and children – who had pending asylum cases – and apply yearly for a permit to legally work.”
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“Both men had participated in Nicaragua’s April rebellion of 2018, a movement that started among university students. The movement was incited by unpopular changes to the social security system, but quickly grew into a massive movement calling for democratic reforms.
Government forces immediately responded with crushing brutality, shooting at young protesters. “I felt a lot of pain, sadness to see mothers crying for their children,” Rojas said. He felt called to join the cause.”
It was knowable in advance that Trump’s illegal immigrant crackdown was not going to involve just criminals. People have no excuse for not knowing this and are part of the reason this is happening.
“The construction industry needs to attract 439,000 new workers this year to meet demand, otherwise costs will rise — putting some projects out of reach — per projections from the Associated Builders and Contractors trade group out Friday morning.”
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“Immigrants make up about 26% of the construction workforce, per census data cited by Pew Research Center last fall.”
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“An estimated 13% of construction workers are undocumented”
“On March 15, the Trump administration loaded more than 200 men onto three planes bound for El Salvador, where they were to be locked in its notorious CECOT prison. A video of the men being marched, head-down, into police vehicles and into the facility ricocheted around the world, a symbol of the United States’ position on immigrants it accuses of having gang ties.
But not seen by the camera were eight women who were also on the planes but never got off. Shortly after they landed, according to court filings, El Salvador apparently refused to take them. So they were shipped back, to be locked up again on American soil.
Now, for the first time, two of those women are speaking out in an interview with NBC News, describing the chaos they say they witnessed during the Trump administration’s deportation efforts and how, they allege, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials deceived them about where they were being taken.
“We were lied to,” said one of the women, Heymar Padilla Moyetones, 24. “They told us we were going to Venezuela, and it turns out that, no. When we arrived at our destination, that’s when they told us we were in El Salvador.”
Trump administration officials have said all of the people it has sent to El Salvador were Venezuelans who were carefully vetted and had clear ties to Tren de Aragua, a gang from Venezuela that the administration has designated a terrorist organization.
But the vetting process apparently did not include determining whether El Salvador would accept female detainees.
Moyetones said ICE officials kept her on the aircraft. “They didn’t let us leave. They told us that we were going back, that we were coming back here,” she said.”
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““I came with a lot of dreams,” Moyetones said. Since she was a child, she said, the United States had been the country where she wanted “to make a life.” She ultimately came about a year ago, with her son, then an infant, to give him a better future.
“We thought that perhaps the treatment from people in this country would be different toward us,” she said, but after what happened with the flights, she is sad and disappointed with the United States and just wants to be deported back to her home country, Venezuela. But her son, now 2 years old, is in the care of a relative, and she does not know whether they will be reunited. “I am very afraid, because I have always been with my son,” she said. “I have always looked after my son, but I don’t know. I wouldn’t know what to tell you.””
“The Trump administration conceded in a court filing Monday that it mistakenly deported a Maryland father to El Salvador “because of an administrative error” and argued it could not return him because he’s now in Salvadoran custody.”