Latest news with #USImmigrationandCustomsEnforcement
Straits Times
15 hours ago
- Politics
- Straits Times
US judge blocks Trump plan to tie states' transportation funds to immigration enforcement
US President Donald Trump has signed executive orders calling for cutting off federal funding to so-called sanctuary jurisdictions that do not cooperate with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. PHOTO: REUTERS A federal judge on June 19 blocked President Donald Trump's administration from forcing 20 Democratic-led states to cooperate with immigration enforcement in order to receive billions of dollars in transportation grant funding. Chief US District Judge John McConnell in Providence, Rhode Island granted the states' request for an injunction barring the Department of Transportation's policy, saying the states were likely to succeed on the merits of some or all of their claims. The Trump administration did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The ruling came in a lawsuit filed by a group of Democratic state attorneys general who argued the administration was seeking to unlawfully hold federal funds hostage to coerce them into adhering to Mr Trump's hardline immigration agenda. The states argued that US Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy lacked the authority to impose immigration-enforcement conditions on funding that Congress appropriated to help states sustain roads, highways, bridges and other transportation projects. Since returning to office on Jan 20, Mr Trump has signed several executive orders that have called for cutting off federal funding to so-called sanctuary jurisdictions that do not cooperate with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, as his administration has moved to conduct mass deportations. Sanctuary jurisdictions generally have laws and policies that limit or prevent local law enforcement from assisting federal officers with civil immigration arrests. The Justice Department has filed a series of lawsuits against such jurisdictions, including Illinois, New York and Colorado, challenging laws in those Democratic-led states that it says hinder federal immigration enforcement. The lawsuit before Judge McConnell, who was appointed by Democratic President Barack Obama, was filed after Mr Duffy on April 24 notified states they could lose transportation funding if they do not cooperate with the enforcement of federal law, including with ICE in its efforts to enforce immigration law. The states argue that policy is improper and amounts to an unconstitutionally ambiguous condition on the states' ability to receive funding authorised by Congress as it leaves unclear what exactly would constitute adequate cooperation. The administration has argued the policy was within Mr Duffy's discretion and that conditions should be upheld as there is nothing improper about requiring states to comply with federal law. The 20 states are separately pursuing a similar case also in Rhode Island challenging new immigration enforcement conditions that the Homeland Security Department imposed on grant programs. REUTERS Join ST's Telegram channel and get the latest breaking news delivered to you.
France 24
18 hours ago
- Politics
- France 24
US immigration agents barred from LA baseball stadium: team
US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents arrived at the stadium and "requested permission to access the parking lots," the Dodgers said in a statement. "They were denied entry to the grounds by the organization," the Dodgers said in a statement, adding that the team's game later Thursday would go ahead as scheduled. Images and video shared on social media showed a line of unmarked trucks and masked ICE agents at one Dodger Stadium entrance while protesters chanting "ICE out of LA" gathered nearby. The incident comes against a backdrop of heightened tensions in Los Angeles, which has become ground zero of President Donald Trump's immigration crackdown across the US. The city has seen scattered violence but mostly peaceful protests in recent weeks ignited by an escalation in federal immigration sweeps that have targeted migrant workers in garment factories, car washes and other workplaces. In addition to mobilization of ICE agents, Trump ordered the deployment of thousands of US National Guard troops and hundreds of US Marines into the city in response to the protests -- a move that was opposed by city leaders and California Governor Gavin Newsom. The incident at Dodger Stadium on Thursday comes as the reigning World Series champions have faced criticism for their response to the immigration crackdown. A huge part of the team's fan base is drawn from the Latino community, with some fans claiming a sense of betrayal over the franchise's failure to speak out against the ongoing raids. © 2025 AFP
Yahoo
a day ago
- Yahoo
Wife of Colorado attack suspect says she and her 5 children are ‘suffering' in ICE custody
The wife of an Egyptian man accused of carrying out an antisemitic attack in Colorado earlier this month says she was in 'total shock' when she learned what her husband had allegedly done, detailing the 'grieving and suffering' her family is enduring in after federal custody , in a statement released Wednesday. Hayam El Gamal, 43, and her five children were detained by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement two days after federal prosecutors say her husband, Mohamed Sabry Soliman, drove to downtown Boulder with a homemade flamethrower and Molotov cocktails and attacked demonstrators at a peaceful event to support Israeli hostages in Gaza, injuring at least 12 people. For a full year, Soliman, 45, planned the violent assault driven by his simmering anger toward Israel and hatred of 'Zionists,' according to federal documents. But El Gamal says she and the children were not aware of Soliman's plan to hurt innocent people. 'Why punish any of us, who did nothing wrong?' El Gamal said in the statement. 'We are treated like animals by the officers, who told us we are being punished for what my husband is accused of doing.' On June 3, El Gamal says she and her children were arrested, put on a flight in the middle of the night and transferred from Colorado to the Dilley Family Detention Center in southern Texas. In the two weeks that have passed, El Gamal said her eldest daughter turned 18 in federal custody and her younger children – aged 4, 4, 7 and 15 – were 'forced to watch officials rough-up' another detainee. 'They cried and cried, thinking they would be roughed-up, too,' El Gamal said. 'How much longer will we be here for something we didn't do?' Conditions in the detention center are inhumane, according to El Gamal, who says detainees are always being watched and woken up in the middle of the night. CNN has reached out to the Department of Homeland Security for comment on conditions at the detention center following a referral from ICE and the facility's owner, CoreCivic, a private prison operator based in Nashville. 'Now my seven-year-old is about to have her birthday in jail, and my fifteen-year-old, too,' El Gamal added. 'All they want is to be home, to be in school, to have privacy, to sleep in their own beds, to have their mother make them a home-cooked meal, to help them grieve and get through these terrible weeks.' The exact reason for the detention of Soliman's wife and children is not clear, according to Eric Lee, the family's immigration attorney based in Michigan. The family entered the United States in August 2022, Lee told CNN Wednesday, before overstaying their visas. However, that's not why they were detained, he said. 'The issue here is whether they can be detained when the government has explicitly stated that its reason for detaining them is not because their visa overstays, but is because of their family relationship to their husband/father,' Lee told CNN Wednesday. Once detained, El Gamal and the children were placed under expedited removal, a process that allows immigration officials to remove noncitizens without a hearing before an immigration judge, Lee says. At the time of their detention, DHS did not provide additional details on the expedited removal process. DHS Secretary Kristi Noem has said the agency is 'investigating to what extent his family knew about this heinous attack, if they had knowledge of it, or if they provided support to it.' El Gamal has not been charged with a crime, according to Lee, who notes there is no legal basis for deporting Soliman's family. 'The government can't detain individuals for unlawful purposes,' Lee added. While Soliman faces a federal hate crime charge and state charges including attempted murder, his wife and children are hoping to remain in the US, Lee says. On Wednesday, a US District court approved a request to extend a temporary restraining order issued by a federal judge on June 4 that aims to keep El Gamal and her children in the US and prevents immigration officials 'from trying to deport this family illegally,' Lee told CNN. The order has been extended for an additional 14 days. The Trump administration opposed the extension request, stating that the family is not being placed under expedited removal, according to Lee. ' We don't understand if the government's being forthright about its statement that it is not anymore trying to put them into expedited removal,' Lee said. 'Why are they opposing the extension of an order which would prevent the administration from doing just that?' Since coming to the US, El Gamal says she and her family have tried to do everything right: learn English, find work, be good neighbors. 'All I want is to give my children good lives. My oldest daughter volunteered at a hospital; she has a 4.5 GPA and wants to become a doctor, to help people in this country,' El Gamal said. She and the children should be given the chance to grieve in peace, Lee added. 'That doesn't take anything away from the families of the people who are attacked in this terrible act,' he added. 'But, creating more suffering doesn't help anybody in this situation.'
France 24
a day ago
- Politics
- France 24
Stephen Miller: how an anti-immigrant crusade is remaking US policy
Stephen Miller no longer feels at home in his country. As tens of thousands of people across Los Angeles took to the streets last weekend to protest against a wave of immigration enforcement raids on workplaces and warehouses in the city's garment district, the deputy White House chief of staff took to social media to square off against Californian Governor Gavin Newsom. 'Huge swaths of the city where I was born now resemble failed third world nations,' he wrote. 'A ruptured, balkanised society of strangers.' Miller has become the face of US President Donald Trump's anti-immigration policies at their most militant. He is a figure who increasingly frames his calls for mass deportations as a public safety measure to keep the West free from foreign invaders pouring in from the global South – despite the government's own findings that even illegal immigrants commit crimes at dramatically lower rates than US-born nationals. During Trump's first term in the White House, Miller was the key architect of the president's 'Muslim ban', a 2017 executive order that banned people from six Muslim-majority countries from entering the US. Miller was also a vocal supporter of the policy of deliberately separating children from their parents at the Mexican border to discourage families from trying to seek asylum – a practice that reached new heights as a deliberately punitive measure under Trump. Miller has hardly softened since his return to the halls of the White House. Weeks before the wave of armed US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids on workplaces set off mass demonstrations in Los Angeles, Miller hammered the agency's leadership for its failure to make arrests at a rate that would allow Trump to keep his pledge to deport a million undocumented migrants in his first year. What the country needed, he said, was 3,000 arrests each and every day – a dizzying increase from the daily average of about 650 in the president's first five months in office. As of 2023, more than 13.7 million people were believed to be living in the US without legal authorisation, according to the Migration Policy Institute. The mass demonstrations that greeted this rise in arrests has so far not deterred the administration. Echoing Miller's warnings of degenerating inner cities overrun with foreign invaders, Trump on Monday called on ICE to ramp up their raids in Democratic-run cities such as Los Angeles, New York and Chicago, accusing the Democratic Party – without evidence – of using millions of undocumented migrants to artificially bloat their voter base and steal elections. 'I have directed my entire Administration to put every resource possible behind this effort, and reverse the tie of Mass Destruction Migration that has turned once idyllic Towns into scenes of Third World Dystopia,' he wrote on social media. Rut Bermejo Casado, associate professor in politics and public policies at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, said that Miller had played a powerful role in changing the public debate around immigration during the Trump interregnum. 'I think he's key,' she said. 'He has had time to strategically plan his policies from the first administration to the second one, and he has refined the coherence of the discourse – a cultural nativist discourse. During the first administration, [the Muslim ban] or the policy about separating families were just initiatives, not very well planned in advance. He has since had time to plan the discourse and the methods very well, to do it in a more rational way, and also to make it more difficult to … stop all of them.' Enfant terrible Miller, 39, rose quickly from being a congressional staffer to sit at the right hand of the president of the United States. Born and raised in the wealthy liberal enclave of Santa Monica in southern California, Miller found himself thrust into the state school system after an earthquake devastated a number of rental properties managed by his family's real estate business. In high school, Miller quickly made a name for himself as an arch-contrarian with a taste – and talent – for provoking his liberal peers. In a school divided between largely working-class Latinos and children from wealthier White families, he railed against his classmates' supposed lack of ' basic English skills ' and the school's policy of making announcements in both Spanish and English. Classmates recall a young Miller ostentatiously leaving his garbage lying around for custodial workers to clean up, at one point standing up to deliver a now-infamous speech calling on his classmates to throw their leftovers on the ground, according to Jean Guerrero's book, "Hatemonger: Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and the White Nationalist Agenda." 'Am I the only one who is sick and tired of being told to pick up my trash when we have plenty of janitors who are paid to do it for us?' he said. Warming to his role, the teenage Miller became an unrelenting critic of the school administration's allegedly liberal leanings and soon caught the attention of Larry Elder, a right-wing radio host who would have the ferociously articulate Miller on as a guest more than 70 times. At North Carolina's elite Duke University, Miller quickly leveraged his growing media presence and ties with right-wing ideologues such as David Horowitz to land a gig as a bi-weekly columnist for the campus newspaper. Flourishing in the tense climate of the US War on Terror, he was the national campus coordinator of Horowitz's Terrorism Awareness Project, designed to warn students of " Islamofascism", the threat of Islamic jihad and 'mobilise support for the defence of America and the civilisation of the West'. His big break came when three White lacrosse players were accused of raping a Black woman who had been hired to strip for them. Miller's outspoken support for the three men became a constant refrain across the national right-wing media landscape, with the college junior appearing on the Bill O'Reilly Show and Nancy Grace to denounce what he called 'the moral bankruptcy of the left's politically correct orthodoxy and the corruption of our culture'. When the players were found not guilty after a four-month secret investigation by the state attorney general, Miller championed it as a vindication of his view that the US had become a hostile place for White Americans. 'Three of our peers faced a devastating year-long persecution because they were White and their accuser Black,' he wrote. Rising star Miller's newfound national celebrity catapulted him into the fast-radicalising world of Republican politics, where he landed his first job as press secretary first to Tea Party heavyweight Michelle Bachmann and then Alabama senator Jeff Sessions. While working for Sessions, Miller played a key role in torpedoing a bipartisan immigration bill that would have tightened border security while providing a pathway to citizenship for millions of undocumented migrants in the US. The proposed legislation's collapse would mark an abrupt end to the Republican party's efforts to reach a compromise on undocumented migration, wilting before the onslaught of rising far-right calls for mass deportations. It was during these formative years that Miller would deepen his contacts with far-right figures such as Steve Bannon, frequently lobbying his publication Breitbart to cite reports from the explicitly anti-immigration Centre for Immigration Studies, a think-tank founded by the eugenicist John Tanton. 01:40 In leaked emails, he enthusiastically encouraged the publication to draw comparisons between US immigration policy and Le Camp des Saints, a French dystopian novel popular across the far right that imagines refugees from the global South flooding the West and overwhelming its White population. When Trump announced his presidential bid with a promise to crack down on irregular immigration and build a wall on the Mexico border, Miller launched himself into the campaign. Bermejo Casado said that Miller and his allies had been instrumental in the growing militarisation of immigration policy in the US. 'If they say that we are in a crisis, we are in an exceptional time, we need exceptional measures, that brings onto the table methods and tools that were unpalatable or would be considered draconian if we were in another moment,' she said. No more half-measures During Trump's first term, Miller led the fight to dismantle Obama's Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, a programme giving short-term renewable protections to undocumented migrants who had been brought to the US as children. He fought for, and won, a sharp reduction in the number of refugees accepted by the US each year – despite the fact that Miller's own family fled to the US at the turn of the century to escape anti-Semitic pogroms in the Russian Empire. Kathleen Bush-Joseph, a lawyer and policy analyst with the Migration Policy Institute's US Immigration Policy Program, said that the US's longstanding gridlock over immigration reform had given Trump a powerful platform on which to call for drastic action. 'The fact that the US immigration system is so outdated and overwhelmed and under-resourced means that yes, Trump has been able to exploit some of these really long-standing problems,' she said. 'In terms of the politics, even under the Biden administration there were leaders of so-called sanctuary jurisdictions who were calling for more federal action. They wanted coordination of new arrivals, they wanted help with the reception of tens of thousands of people who didn't have community ties that were trying to go into these city shelters – which are not designed for receiving immigrant families in such large numbers. So some of this is really a reflection at the end of the day of congressional inaction.' She said that the relentless spectacle of armed ICE raids and military planes packed with shackled deportees were designed to send a very clear message to Trump's base. 'Manufactured crisis of the nation: Stephen Miller depicting L.A. protests as an existential fight' 18:36 'There's rhetoric, and there are images,' she said. 'And there are these high-profile moves like Alien Enemies Act deportations, putting people in jail in El Salvador, sending people to Guantanamo Bay, using military planes for deportations. These are a very calculated part of the administration's rhetoric and narrative, and the story that they're trying to tell about immigration. And while those moves are happening, they've been laying the groundwork for doing the things that will actually lead to the deportation of large numbers of people over time – because the high-profile ones are not that.' Despite Miller's zeal, though, the ICE raids that set off the Los Angeles protests reveal the extent to which the Trump administration has been hard-pressed to deliver on its promised mass deportations. Liam Haller, a researcher at the German Centre for Integration and Migration Research, said that ICE just didn't have the means to make Miller's dream a reality. 'While immigration hawks such as Miller have certainly achieved short-term policy implementations such as increased ICE raids, long-term or fundamental reforms remain elusive,' he said. 'Although the ICE raids have garnered much attention and significant blowback, the agency is fundamentally constrained. They still do not have the manpower to enact deportations on the scale originally envisioned – which is largely why deportation numbers under Trump's second term still fall near where they were under Obama.' With Trump's 'Big Beautiful Bill' potentially devoting more than $150 billion to immigration enforcement, including the hiring of 10,000 new ICE agents and the construction of new detention centres capable of housing 100,000, Miller's dream of mass deportations may soon find itself on surer footing. In any case, Bermejo Casado said, the architect of Trump's most hardline immigration policies had already succeeded in taking the debate around migration into muddier waters. 'I think there has been a change – before, the discourse was to control borders, to focus on irregular migrants, but I think that focus has blurred in the last years, and particularly with the far-right discourse against migration,' she said. 'But it's very different, because in one case you are focusing on 'They are not law-abiding people' and this other one your focus is that 'They are not like us – they are different, they are not culturally integrated'. And that is also part of the discourse of Miller.'
The Verge
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Verge
The whiplash of covering Summer Game Fest 2025 in LA
I love going to Summer Game Fest. It's a rare opportunity to connect with my colleagues and friends in person, as well as listen to developers talk about why they make their games. In some ways, this year's SGF gave me everything I love about the event. But while I was comfortably ensconced in a happy bubble, the escalating conflict between demonstrators protesting against immigration raids and the Los Angeles Police Department cast a dark and soul-shaking pall that could not be ignored. Everything started on June 6th, when it was reported that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) had conducted a raid in LA's fashion district, the same area where most of SGF was being held. I wasn't around to experience that because I was at the YouTube Theater in Inglewood, California, watching Geoff Keighley announce a Game of Thrones RTS and a Wu-Tang game. But when Ian Proulx, Splitgate 2 creator and CEO of 1047 Games, came out with his now-infamous 'Make FPS Great Again' hat, it punctured the illusion of distance in time, space, and tone. In the months since President Donald Trump took office, ICE has ramped up its activities, sending agents to snatch parents from their children and children from their schools, enabled under the auspices that removing immigrants will be what makes America great again. Proulx's hat became the story of the day, if not the whole event. It was the main topic of conversation at the lobby bar of the JW Marriott hotel, where each night of SGF is capped off with a mixer. How could someone choose to reference such a statement, even in jest or irony, as the very people that slogan has been used to target are being snatched up mere blocks away? Saturday was business as usual. Proulx's hat was forgotten as I settled in to work, flitting between wall-to-wall appointments checking out Escape Academy 2, the new Lego Party game, and Deadpool VR with no time to chat or even eat. I didn't check my phone for hours, and every TV was playing a video game. I had no idea what was happening both in Los Angeles and in the White House. But when there was finally a lull, I popped online, where I was greeted with a deluge of messages from people who were watching the news, telling me that something (a nebulous, undefined, but nevertheless urgent something) was happening and that I needed to get back to the safety of my hotel. Thankfully, my worst fears about martial law declarations and curfews didn't come to pass while I was there, but they did after I was back home. People had taken to the streets of LA in protest of ICE action and began moving through parts of the city, demonstrating and occasionally clashing with the police (and autonomous vehicles). But at that moment, when I was hearing that insurrection acts were going to be invoked and that the National Guard was being mobilized to sweep the city, I became legitimately scared — particularly for attendees who weren't citizens and those with immigrant families. How could someone choose to reference such a statement, even in jest or irony? One such colleague, Janet Garcia, wrote an incredible account of what it was like working SGF and being the child of a Mexican immigrant. Her words right now are more important than mine. SGF also coincided with the BET Awards, and honoree Doechii also had a powerful message for the moment. There had already been several stories of international travelers being detained in the US for weeks, and I was scared that if something was happening, my journalist friends from Canada, the UK, and elsewhere could get caught in the mix. Word began spreading that something (again, what that was, nobody could say, and that uncertainty compounded the fear) was happening, and my friends and I all began to start asking aloud: do we need to leave? Some said yes, and I was ready to do just that, but something stopped me. I will never be able to adequately express how weird my job is in situations like this. It's really hard to write about the colorful pixels on a TV when it feels like the world is seconds away from catching fire. And yet I do it every day. Right when I was about to make the decision to leave early, a Capcom PR rep tapped me on the shoulder. I was late to my Resident Evil Requiem appointment. And I went, because in that scary moment I still thought, 'I have a job to do.' I did my best with Requiem, plodding along the abandoned hospital, being suitably impressed by how the sound of Grace's footsteps changed when she walked on the wooden floor vs. the floor covered in bits of broken drywall. But my phone kept buzzing with notifications throughout it all. Midway through the demo, my stress was so high from the ambient spookiness of the game and all the happenings outside the SGF bubble that I couldn't take it anymore. I made my profuse apologies to my PR contact (who was exceedingly gracious and understanding) and left. The mood that night at the hotel was less exuberant. It wasn't just everything going on in LA: the mood of the event itself was the lowest I'd ever seen it in the handful of years that SGF has served as E3's smaller, vibe-ier replacement. There were games there, good ones, but nothing big enough to anchor the show. As the industry faces its third straight year of rampant layoffs, cancellations, delays, and studio closures we're finally starting to see the pipeline of blockbuster games dry up. This was a stark contrast to last year when Sega had Metaphor: ReFantanzio and Shadow Generations, Bandai Namco showed off Shadow of the Erdtree, PlayStation was there with Astro Bot, and Xbox had just announced Gears of War: E-Day. I'm home now. And despite this year's strangeness, I look forward to going back to Summer Game Fest. Because if video games have taught me anything over the years, it's that in the face of overwhelming odds, the best thing one can do is stick together with your friends.
