American Pogrom: the Year in ICE Abductions |
A young girl who had been tear-gassed with her father in their car by ICE, while on their way to a Wal-Mart. Screengrab from a video posted on X.
A year into Trump’s mass purge of immigrants from the United States, it’s beyond debate that the people orchestrating and conducting the raids, round-ups and deportations have committed more grievous crimes than the vast majority of the people they’ve harassed, assaulted, arrested, jailed and sent into exile. They’ve committed crimes against the Constitution of the government they’re acting in the name of and they’ve used the force, often violent force, of the federal government against innocent people. They’ve lied to Congress and federal judges. They’ve systematically violated judicial orders. They’ve denied people the most fundamental right guaranteed to residents, regardless of legal status, in the US: the right to due process of law.
The man running Trump’s border policy, Thomas Homan, was under FBI investigation for accepting grocery bags stuffed with cash to steer contracts to the Trump administration. The man running Border Patrol’s commando squads, the maniacal Gregory Bovino, was excoriated by a federal judge for lying in a deposition about the circumstances of his violent crackdowns on protesters in Chicago.
Traditional sanctuaries–churches, schools, day care centers, hospitals and courthouses–have been violated. Members of Congress, including a U.S. senator, have been roughed up and arrested. Religious leaders have been tear-gassed, tasered and beaten. People have been deported to squalid prisons in unstable countries on continents they’ve never visited, never mind lived on. Arrest warrants and deportation orders have been post-dated and falsified.
For years, the libertarian right has warned about the militarized takeover of law enforcement. Using an entirely fictitious “immigrant invasion” as an excuse, Trump chucked these constitutional anxieties aside, along with the Posse Comitatus Act, and ordered federal troops into DC, Chicago, LA, Memphis and Portland.
People have been detained and deported for their political views and columns they’ve written. People have been deported for embarrassing the government. People have been deported for the hats and shoes they wear and their tattoos. Babies have been ripped out of their mothers’ arms. Children as young as four years old have been forced to defend themselves in immigration court. The torture cells of El Salvador’s most notorious prison were rented out for more than 200 Venezuelans swept up and deported in secret flights that violated a federal judge’s order. Conditions in US detention prisons are just as bad, if not worse.
The vast majority of those arrested had no criminal record. Many of them were arrested at their jobs washing cars, mowing lawns, cultivating plants, putting roofs on houses. Others were arrested while checking in with their immigration officers or showing up for scheduled court hearings. Apparently, it’s much easier to abduct people who are abiding by the law, than those who aren’t. Who knew?
People are being grabbed off the street or chased down in their cars because they “look” like they might be immigrants. Dozens, perhaps hundreds of American citizens, have been illegally stopped, interrogated, tasered, tear-gassed, arrested and detained by masked ICE and Border Patrol agents, who have routinely dismissed documents, even REAL IDs, as forgeries. Several American citizens have been wrongly deported. Racial profiling in the service of deportation has been sanctified by the Supreme Court, with Brett Kavanaugh calling such stops a minor inconvenience, even when they result in specious arrests.
Since Trump bought off most of the large law firms at the beginning of his term, most of the legal heavy-lifting to expose the corruption and criminality of the administration’s immigration crackdown has been done by small firms and non-profits, who have routinely kicked the government’s ass in courtrooms from Portland to Nashville, Las Cruces to Boston. ICE has proven itself to be a lawless agency whose mission is to spread terror through immigrant communities across the US. But they’ve succeeded in turning much of the country against them. Public support for immigration has climbed to record highs.
Block by block, city by city, the barbarous legions of ICE are being confronted, driven back and defeated. The Trump/Miller pogrom against immigrants is failing in all of its objectives except one: to inflict maximum cruelty on a vulnerable population that it has used as a scapegoat for the decline of the American economy, resulting from four decades of ruthless neoliberal policies. This shameful episode will stand as the ghastly hallmark of this misbegotten administration.
– JSC
“Welcome to America.” Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.
“Many people — many nations — can find themselves holding, more or less wittingly, that ‘every stranger is an enemy’. For the most part this conviction lies deep down like some latent infection; it betrays itself only in random, disconnected acts, and does not lie at the base of a system of reason.
– Primo Levi, Survival in Auschwitz
On January 31, Julio Noriega, a US citizen born in Chicago, was walking in Berwyn, Illinois, to get a pizza when ICE descended on him, placed him in handcuffs, and shoved him into a van with other shacked men. His wallet, which held his ID and Social Security card proving his citizenship, was confiscated. He was detained overnight before being released without a record of what occurred.
At 5:30 in the morning of January 27, Jhony Godoy Gregerio was driving with his brother Bayron to work in Maywood, Illinois, when he was pulled over. Bayron was wearing an ankle bracelet mandated by ICE. The officer asked if his name was “Brian.” After Jhony answered “no,” the officer opened the car door and pulled Jhony from the car, his hands and feet cuffed. As multiple trucks carrying 15 armed officers surrounded the vehicle, the officer said he was from ICE. The ICE agent didn’t show Jhonny a warrant, and he has no criminal history other than a few traffic citations. He was taken to Indiana, and before he was able to contact his wife and child or a lawyer, he transferred to the same Louisiana prison where ICE sent Mahmoud Khalil. Jhony has been living legally in the US for 15 years.
That same day, Jhony’s brother Marco Godoy Gregerio, who was driving in a second car, was also pulled over and arrested by ICE. The ICE agent also asked Marco if he was “Brian.” Marco said, “No,” and handed the officer his ID from the Guatemalan consul’s office. As armed ICE agents surrounded his car, Marco was told to turn the car off and that he was going to be placed under arrest. He wasn’t told why, and he wasn’t shown a warrant. Marco had no criminal record. Like his brother Jhony, he was taken into custody, held in Indiana, and quickly transferred to Louisiana without being able to contact his family or a lawyer. He was held for 25 days before being able to request bond from an immigration judge.
On January 26, ICE agents surrounded an apartment building in Chicago where Sergio Bolanos Romero lived. As he got into his car and started driving to work, he was pulled over by armed ICE agents who told him to exit the vehicle and demanded he show them proof of his immigration status. After Sergio didn’t provide any, he was handcuffed, taken to a parking lot, which served as an ICE processing center, and then transferred to a jail in Wisconsin. It turned out that ICE had mistaken Sergio for the target of a planned raid who lived in the same building, even though Sergio’s car did not match ICE’s intended target. Sergio had not committed a crime and was not shown a warrant for his arrest. He was released two days later.
On January 29, ICE pulled over Bernandino Randa Marinas on his way to work in Chicago. After handing his ID to an ICE agent, Bernandino was ordered to keep his hands on the steering wheel of his car and not to move. He was held this way for around 40 minutes before one of the ICE officers told him he was under arrest. When Bernando asked to see a warrant, the officer quickly flashed him his cell phone. But he was not shown a Notice to Appear, and at the time of his arrest, there were no pending proceedings against him. Bernandino has lived in the US for more than 20 years, has two children who are US citizens, and a third is due in May. He has no criminal history.
On the morning of February 6, 2025, Jose Ortega Gonzalez was arrested by ICE while driving to work in Kansas. Jose has lived in the US for 20 years and is the father of children who are US citizens. Armed ICE officers surrounded his car and demanded his immigration papers. Jose told them he didn’t have proof of his legal status on him. He was then asked if he’d been arrested for drug trafficking. Jose told the officers he had no criminal history besides a couple of traffic tickets. Jose was then handcuffed, taken to a local police station, and then to an ICE detention center, where he was held for three weeks before seeing a judge who freed him on bond.
On January 26, Abel Orozco Ortega was driving back from the grocery store to the same Lyons, Illinois house he’s lived in for 15 years when he was stopped and arrested by ICE. The ICE agents had mistaken him for his son, Abel Jr., who is more than two decades younger. After Abel handed an ICE officer his driver’s license, the immigration cop reached inside Abel’s car window, unlocked and opened the door, then grabbed Abel’s arm and told him he was under arrest. He was hauled out of the car, cuffed, and put into an ICE vehicle. Abel’s son Eduardo came out of the house to see what was going on. As Eduardo, who is a US citizen, tried to speak with his father, the driver of the ICE car drove over his foot. These traumatic events caused Abel to experience a severe health episode, which required his hospitalization. After he was discharged from the hospital, ICE transferred him to a detention center in Indiana, where he remains. Abel Ortega has no criminal record and was never shown a warrant for his arrest.
On the morning of January 27, ICE agents showed up at an apartment building in Chicago. They were looking for a man named Carlos. When one of the residents of the apartment told them no one named Carlos lived there, eight ICE officers busted through the door and began searching the apartment. They found 24-year-old Jockneul Hernandez Rojas in his room watching television while in bed. The officer told him to get dressed and that he was under arrest. Jockneul was handcuffed and led out of the building. Jocknuel was not shown a warrant and had no criminal record. He had previously been issued a Notice to Appear by ICE, but the immigration court had dismissed the case against him. Jocknuel was taken to the ICE center in Indiana and then swiftly transferred to Louisiana, where he was later released on the orders of an immigration judge.
In the early morning hours of January 28, federal agents broke down the door of Raul Lopez Garcia’s house in Elgin, Illinois. They located Raul in an upstairs bedroom, where they handcuffed him and confiscated his identification documents. He was taken to an ICE facility for processing. Raul was not shown a warrant for his arrest and had no criminal record. ICE later claimed that they encountered Raul while looking for his stepson. Raul was eventually released on bond by a federal judge.
ICE agents broke down the door of Senen Becerra Hernandez’s Chicago apartment, looking for his roommate. Senen was placed in handcuffs and ordered to wait outside for more than an hour as they looked for the target of their raid. Instead of releasing him, the ICE officers took Senen to a detention center. ICE later justified his warrantless arrest by falsely claiming that he didn’t live at the address and had no community ties. In reality, Senen lived in the apartment where the raid occurred, had a job, and attended a local church.
At 11 AM on February 7, an ICE team entered El Potro’s Mexican Café and Cantina in Liberty, Missouri. The 10-member team was armed and dressed in tactical gear. Several of the agents wore masks over their faces. One of the ICE agents told the cafe owner they were looking for someone and ordered him to make all his employees available for questioning. They didn’t provide a name, show him a photograph, or provide a warrant. Still, the owner felt he had to comply.
As two ICE agents guarded the door, the employees were rounded up and placed in separate booths in the restaurant, where each employee was ordered to provide their ID. One employee was almost immediately placed in handcuffs, while the others were detained in the booths for more than two hours as ICE seized the employment records from the restaurant. At 12:30, 12 employees were placed in handcuffs, marched out of the cafe, and taken into custody. Eleven workers were detained in Kansas, while another was taken to Kentucky and later to Indiana. All but two of the workers were soon released on minimal bonds. One was deported, and the other remains in detention.
In their mass roundups of alleged members of the Tren de Aragua gang, ICE has been using tattoos as justification to deport noncitizens to a life of hard labor and torture in Salvadoran prisons. Among those deported are: a tattoo artist who entered the US legally seeking asylum: a teenage boy in Arlington, Texas, who got a tattoo on his left hand of a rose with paper money as its petals because, his sister said, he thought it “looked cool;” and a 26-year-old man whose tattoos his wife claims are unrelated to any gangs, never mind TdA.
Here’s the declaration of immigration attorney Linette Tobin on the arrest and deportation to El Salvador of her client Jerce Reyes Barrios, a professional soccer player and dissident from Venezuela who was seeking asylum in the US as a political refugee.
1. I am the immigration attorney for Jerce Reyes Barrios, born in [sic] January 16, 1989 in Venezuela.
2. In February and March 2024, Mr Reyes Barrios marched in two demonstrations in Venezuela, protesting the authoritarian rule of Maduro. At the second demonstration, he was detained and taken to a clandestine building where he was tortured (electric shocks and suffocation) along with other demonstrators.
3. Shortly after his release, he fled Venezuela for the United States. He registered with CBP One in Mexico, then presented himself to CBP officials on the day of his appointment. He was taken into custody and detained at Otay Mesa Detention Facility in September 2024.
4. We applied for asylum, withdrawal of removal, and CAT protection in December 2024. His final individual hearing is set for April 17, 2025, before Judge Robinson at the Otay Mesa immigration court.
5. On March 15, 2025, Mr. Reyes Barrios was deported to El Salvador with no notice to counsel or family. It was not until March 18, 2025, that counsel was able to reach an ICE official and learn that he had, in fact, been deported.
6. Mr. Reyes Barrio was/is a professional soccer player in Venezuela. He has never been arrested or charged with a crime. He has a steady employment record as a soccer player, as well as a soccer coach for children and youth.
7. Initially, Mr Barrios was placed in maximum security at Otay Mesa and accused of being a Tren de Aragua gang member. The accusation is based on two things. First, he has a tattoo on his arm of a crown sitting atop a soccer ball with a rosary and the word “Dios.” DHS alleges that this tattoo is proof of gang membership. In reality, he chose the tattoo because it is similar to the logo for his favorite soccer team, Real Madrid. See the logo below.
8. Second, DHS reviewed his social media posts and found a photo of Mr. Reyes Barrios making a hand gesture that they allege is proof of gang membership. In fact, the gesture is a common one: It means “I Love You” in sign language and is commonly used as a Rock-and-Roll symbol.
9. After submitting a police clearance from Venezuela indicating no criminal record, multiple employment letters, a declaration from the tattoo artist who rendered the tattoo, and various online images showing similar soccer ball/crown tattoos and explaining the meaning of the hand gestures, Mr Reyes Barrios was transferred out of maximum security.
10. Nevertheless, on March 10th or 11th, he was transferred from Otay Mesa to Texas without notice. Then, on March 15, 2025, he was deported to El Salvador. Counsel and family have lost all contact with him and have no information regarding his whereabouts or condition.
If this is how they’re treating opponents of Maduro, imagine how they’re treating dissidents of the Bukele regime in El Salvador.
How does ICE justify these arrests and deportations to Buekele’s concentration camp-like prison, where torture, food deprivation and killings are commonplace? In truly Kafkaesque terms: “the lack of specific information about each individual actually highlights the risk they pose. It demonstrates they are terrorists with regard to whom we lack a complete profile.”
In late February, the Canadian actress Jasmine Mooney was kidnapped by ICE after she tried to renew her work visa at the US/Mexico border. She was cuffed, thrown into a van, held prisoner for 12 days, denied access to a lawyer, made to sleep on concrete floors and given a forced pregnancy test before being sent back to Canada with no explanation from DHS officials for the brutality of her treatment. Mooney described her surreal ordeal in vivid terms for an article in The Guardian.
On March 5, Ranjani Srinivasan was told by email that her student visa had been revoked after she attended a couple of protests and liked some social media posts in support of Palestinians in Gaza. Ranjani, a 37-year-old architect from India who was on the verge of completing her doctoral program in urban planning at Columbia, withdrew from school and fled to Canada after ICE knocked on her dorm door and accused her of advocating “violence and terrorism.” In an interview with Boston radio station WBUR, Ranjani said:
I’m not a terrorist sympathizer. I’m not pro-Hamas. And I think it’s really dangerous to label any free speech that somebody disagrees with, or any sort of peaceful objection to global issues, as terrorism. I think it just creates a climate of fear where people are scared to share their opinions. There’s a feeling that your visa could be revoked for even the simplest political speech, and the whole point of an American university is to have debate and nuance about ideas to contest them freely. I think there’s a general fear of doing that now.
On March 7, Fabian Schmidt was detained by immigration officers at Logan Airport in Boston on his way back from Luxembourg. Schmidt holds a green card and has lived and worked in the US since moving to the States with his mother in 2007. He became a permanent resident in 2008 and has worked in the US as an electrical engineer ever since. As ICE officers interrogated him and demanded he surrender his green card, his partner, a cardiologist and US citizen, waited for him for four hours at the airport. During his detention, Schmidt was stripped naked, placed in a cold shower, and deprived of food, water, and medication. He collapsed before being hospitalized at Mass General. After his release from the hospital, Schmidt was taken to an ICE facility in Burlington, Mass., and then transferred to an ICE jail in Rhode Island. Schmidt’s green card had recently been renewed and there were no pending legal cases against him. He wasn’t served with a warrant at the time of his arrest and wasn’t permitted to contact his family for three days. Schmidt has an 8-year-old daughter who is a US citizen.
On March 9, a French space researcher was subjected to a “random” search upon arrival in the US. His phone and computer were confiscated and searched. The DHS agents found a series of text messages describing Trump’s treatment of scientists, which they used to accuse him of harboring a “hatred of toward Trump that could be described as terrorism.” He was held in custody overnight and deported back to Europe the next day. Agence France Press later reported that DHS had accused him of “hateful and conspiratorial messages” and had referred him to the FBI.
On March 12, Dr. Rasha Alawieh was detained by immigration officials at Boston’s Logan Airport. She was told that her visa had been revoked and that she would be deported back to Lebanon, where she’d been visiting her parents. Her phone and computer were confiscated. Dr. Alawieh works at Brown Medicine and Rhode Island Hospital. She had secured an H-1B visa that doesn’t expire until 2027. She was trained in the U.S. at Ohio State, the University of Washington, and Yale as a transplant surgeon. She hasn’t been convicted or accused of a crime. In court filings, ICE claimed to have discovered photos on her phone that were “sympathetic” to leaders of Hezbollah. It turns out that the images weren’t Dr. Alaweigh’s but had been posted to a group chat she belonged to.
On March 17, masked ICE agents arrested Badar Khan Suri outside his own in Arlington, Virginia. Bara is an Indian national with a student visa who was doing post-doctoral research at Georgetown University. The agents told Badar his visa had been revoked and he would be deported to India. Badar has no criminal record and is married to a US citizen. Badar’s lawyer, Hassan Ahmad, told Politicothat he had been targeted because of his wife’s Palestinian heritage. In a sworn statement, Badar’s wife, Mapheze Saleh, said the detention of her husband “has completely upended our lives…Our children are in desperate need of their father and miss him dearly. As a mother of three children, I desperately need his support to take care of them and me.” A federal court blocked Badar’s deportation.
ICE is knowingly renditioning innocent people and sending them to a prison where the night-time sadism of Abu Ghraib is the operational plan 24/7…
The ACLU filed a sworn declaration from a Venezuela woman asylum seeker whom ICE detained and wanted to deport to El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act; she says she overheard ICE officials on the plane to El Salvador conversing about that court ruling ordering them to turn the plane back to the US. ICE defied the court order and renditioned the detainees to El Salvador despite stopping for “hours” to refuel. The Venezuelan asylum seeker was later returned to the Webb Detention Center in Laredo, Texas…
On Friday, we were told to gather our belongings and put on the bus at Webb [County detention center in Laredo, Texas] and sat in the bus for about 5 minutes and then were taken back to Webb.
Saturday morning, we were again told to gather our belongings and get on the bus. We went to the airport, and eight women were put on the plane with me.
When we got on the plane, there were already over 50 men on the plane. I could see other migrants walking to the plane, but we took off before any additional people boarded. Within a couple of minutes, I overheard two US government officials talking, and they said, “There is an order saying we can’t take off, but we already have.”
I asked where we were going and we were told that we were going to Venezuela. Several other people on the plane told me they were in immigration proceedings and awaiting court hearings in immigration court.
We were not allowed to open our window shades.
We landed somewhere for refueling. We were there for many hours. We were arm and leg shackled the whole time.
We took off again and landed fairly quickly. I was then told we were in El Salvador.
While on the plane the government officials were asking the men to sign a document and they didn’t want to. The government officials were pushing them to sign the document and threatening them. I heard them discussing the documents and they were about the men admitting they were members of TdA.
After we landed but were still on the plane, a woman opened the shade. An officer rushed to close the shade and pulled her down by her shoulders to try and stop her from looking out. The person who pushed her down had HOU-O2 written on his sleeve.
I saw out the window for a minute and I saw men in military uniforms and another plane. I saw men being led off the plane. Since I’ve been back in the US, I have seen news coverage, and the plane I saw looks like the one I’ve seen on TV with migrants from the US being delivered to El Salvador.
Neri Alvarado was working as a baker in Dallas when ICE showed up asking to see his tattoo. “We’re here because of your tattoos. We are finding and questioning everyone who has tattoos,” an ICE agent told him. Neri explained that the rainbow-colored ribbon on his arm was an Autism Awareness tattoo honoring his 15-year-old brother with autism. The ICE examined Neri’s phone and told him he was clean. But another agent ordered him kept in detention. Then, he was renditioned to El Salvador without any explanation. His only crime was having a tattoo.
ICE is trying to deport Yunseo Chung, a 21-year-old Columbia student who attended pro-Palestine protests. Chung came to the US from South Korea with her family at age SEVEN. She’s been a lawful permanent resident for more than a decade. She was the valedictorian of her high school class. She faced a disciplinary hearing from Columbia, which found she did not violate the university’s policies. Despite being cleared of any crimes or infractions (even that of trespassing on her own campus), ICE agents showed up at her parent’s house and told them her green card had been revoked. Armed ICE agents showed up twice at her campus apartment looking for her. On Wednesday, a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order stopping the Trump administration from detaining Yunseo.
A little after five in the evening on Tuesday, Runeysa Ozturk, a Ph D candidate at Tufts University, was accosted on the streets of Somerville, Mass., outside of Boston by hooded and masked agents, who initially refused to identify who they were and then falsely claimed they were “the police.” They were, in fact, ICE. Runeysa’s backpack, purse, and phone were seized. She was placed in cuffs, forced into a black van, and taken away. She was told her student visa had been revoked, and she was going to be deported. Ozturk, a Turkish citizen, was here legally, had committed no crimes, and wasn’t charged with a crime by ICE when they kidnapped her. Her sole offense? Co-writing an op-ed in the Tufts student paper opposing Israel’s mass killings of Palestinians. Even though a federal judge had ordered ICE to keep her in Massachusetts until a hearing on her status could take place, she was transported to an ICE detention jail in Louisiana.
On Thursday, Marco Rubio admitted that he’d personally revoked Runeysa’s visa and smeared her without evidence as being a terrorist sympathizer and a supporter of Hamas. “We do it every day,” Rubio boasted. “Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visas.” Rubio said he’s already revoked 300 student visas and intends to revoke many more.
Jonathan Karl, ABC’s This Week: Do they have any due process at all?
Thomas Homan, Trump’s Border Czar: Due process…what was Laken Riley’s due process?
Kilmar Abrego Garcia came to the US in 2012 to escape being recruited into a Salvadoran gang that had terrorized his family for more than two years. In 2016, he met his future wife, Jennifer Stefania Vasquez Sura, a US citizen living in Maryland. They eventually moved in together and Kilmar helped raise her two children. They later had a child together. Each of the three kids had some form of disability. Kilmar, according to Jennifer, was an attentive and devoted father to all of the children. He held a steady job, he stayed out of trouble, and then he was busted in 2019 while waiting to apply for a job at Home Depot and accused of being a member of the M-13 gang in Long Island, where he’d never........