Attention to the Unseen

Radley Balko writes: With astonishing speed, the administration has toppled the most cherished pillars of a free society. Masked secret police now tear-gas entire city streets, jump out from unmarked vehicles to abduct and detain suspected undocumented people, and demand that foreign-looking people (mostly Latino) produce papers on demand. These deportation forces have been told by the president and his advisers to cast a wide net, that immigrants are “animals,” that the activists defending them are “domestic terrorists,” and that…

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  A video analysis of one early morning raid in Los Angeles revealed the vast web of consequences brought by new aggressive Border Patrol tactics.

Adam Serwer writes: Last July, while on his way to his job as a security guard at a cannabis farm in California, George Retes was tear-gassed, pepper-sprayed, and arrested by federal agents conducting an immigration raid. The agents ignored the license plate on Retes’s car and the sticker on his windshield, both of which identified him as a U.S. Army veteran, and did not even bother to determine whether he was a citizen before strip-searching him and locking him up…

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The Guardian reports: On a December day when temperatures dipped below 20 degrees, Street Vendor Project staff walked along a busy commercial street in the Bronx, handing out “know your rights” information to vendors selling fruits and vegetables. Several vendors mentioned they were scared after watching videos of immigration raids across the city. “We used to go around helping vendors apply for permits so they wouldn’t get fined,” said Eric Nava-Pérez, Street Vendor Project’s Spanish-speaking member organizer. “But now, we’re…

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The Wall Street Journal reports: A Chinese citizen who fled the country after gathering evidence of alleged human-rights violations against the nation’s Uyghur population is at risk of being returned there after being detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, his supporters said. Heng Guan is jailed in upstate New York awaiting an immigration hearing on Monday that could lead to his removal from the U.S. and ultimately land him back in China, according to his lawyer and a New…

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  By Mauricio Rodríguez Pons This story was originally published by ProPublica It was a chilly afternoon in January, just a week after President Donald Trump returned to the White House, when I met Yineska, a Venezuelan mother who had been living in the United States for nearly two years. Trump’s election, she told me, had put her in a bind. On his first day back in office, Trump announced that he planned to end the humanitarian parole program that…

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Spencer Ackerman writes: One of the most horrific torture methods that the CIA employed in its post-9/11 incommunicado “black site” torture chambers was the Confinement Box. Not many detainees in CIA custody experienced the Box. The most prominent of them is the man known as Abu Zubaydah, the first CIA detainee post-9/11 and someone the agency used as a guinea pig for all who came into their custody later. What follows is not pleasant reading. For 20 days in August…

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The Copper Courier reports: Three-year-old Lucy approached the lawyer’s table wearing a multi-colored and floral dress and bright red pants. The child, barely old enough to talk, was one of 25 immigrant children forced to fight removal efforts by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) at the Pima County immigration courthouse in Tucson on Nov. 24. Unable to reach the chair on her own, Lucy was lifted into the seat by Ana Islas, a lawyer with the Florence Immigrant and…

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Amanda Frost writes: Sixty years ago, the United States abolished immigration restrictions based on nationality alone. By 1965, such discrimination had become an embarrassment. In an emotional ceremony by the Statue of Liberty, President Lyndon B. Johnson declared that the legislation he was signing “corrects a cruel and enduring wrong” and makes Americans “truer to ourselves both as a country and as a people.” Now the Trump administration is reviving nationality-based discrimination. After an Afghan refugee was arrested in the…

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