From the ace reporting by Mike Elk for Payday Report:

PITTSBURGH, PA - Like any other bus shelter in Pittsburgh, I had passed by the bus stop at Smithfield & East Carson hundreds of times, never giving it a second glance. On Sunday, though, it had transformed into a shrine, decorated with candles, flowers, and photos of Daphy Michel, a 31-year-old Haitian immigrant, who was found unresponsive there on March 2nd with an electronic monitor from an ICE detention facility attached to her ankle.

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​In September, Daphy had been arrested in Charleroi, nearly an hour away, after she was found yelling and screaming in the street. It’s unclear what initiated her mental health crisis, but it was clear that her small Haitian community was being heavily targeted by Trump in high-profile remarks.

“The housing market is destroyed. Crime is rampant,” said Trump at a rally near Chareloi in 2024. “The jobs are taken by migrants illegally imported to our countries.”

​In recent months Trump’s rhetoric against Haitians has only intensified as he removed Temporary Protection Status from 400,000 Haitian refugees in the United States.

​As Trump ramped up his rhetoric against Haitian immigrants, Daphy Michel’s mental health condition worsened. Then, in September, she was found in the streets of Chareloi yelling. The police were called and Daphy was arrested.

​For 6 months Daphy languished in the Washington County prison with her family unable to afford bail, and the prosecution unable to figure out criminal charges to pin on her for simply yelling in the street. Seven times, her trial was postponed as her family worried about her wellbeing in prison, and prison officials did not perform a mental health evaluation.

Finally, on February 26th, a judge in Washington County dismissed all the charges against her, and it looked like she was going to be released from jail. But, the heavily GOP-Washington County has an agreement with ICE that forces them to notify ICE whenever an immigrant like Daphy is arrested. So when she was released from jail, she was handed over to ICE.

ICE held her for a day on Pittsburgh’s South Side. ICE enrolled Daphy into the “Alternatives to Detention” program, slapped an electronic monitor on her ankle, and released her out into the cold on Pittsburgh’s South Side.

​ICE didn’t return her to her home or notify her family members of her release. Instead, they attached an ankle monitor and left her on Pittsburgh’s South Side, an hour from her home. For five days, she roamed the streets of Pittsburgh, unable to return to Charleroi as there is no easily accessible public transit connecting the two cities.

​On March 1st, Jaime Martinez, an immigrant rights organizer with Frontline Dignity, began receiving phone calls from immigrant rights activists, who spotted her waiting in an alley on the South Side. The activists observed that Daphy had been waiting in the alley for nine hours on a cold March Day, but she repeatedly refused help.

​The activists offered to pay for an Uber for her, but she refused and kept insisting a ride was coming. Eventually, she vanished, and the next day she was found unresponsive at the bus shelter on Smithfield and East Carson Street. She was rushed to UPMC Presbyterian Hospital. The tragedy of her death led even a seasoned immigrant rights activist like Martinez to cry.

​“This is a really hard thing to speak about…. II’s one that’s filled me with a lot of grief lately,” Jaime told the crowd as he choked up.

​“The neighbors called and they tried to do something, and what they did wasn’t enough, because there is a system that works to dehumanize us and it kills us, and it sometimes overpowers the strength of community, as much as we want community to be the absolute force,” said Jaime as he battled back tears.

​Many activists at the memorial, who had been fighting ICE day and night for more than a year, cried with Martinez. Two weeks ago, I returned from Brasil after two months reporting there, and when I got back, I noticed how drained and tired most of my immigrant rights activist friends in the USA were compared to my friends in Brasil.

​“Authoritarian systems do not only control using laws and weapons, they control through fear, through exhaustion, through confusion, through making people feel powerless, through making people doubt their own thinking, through isolating people from one another,” says Liana Maneese, a therapist who runs Transitional Characters.

​“The antidote to that is not just individual therapy. The antidote is liberation. This antidote is critical thinking. The antidote is community,” says Liana. “Protecting each other means we build a community that is stronger than the systems that are failing us. There is a long tradition that teaches us that liberation is collective.”

​So on Sunday, immigrant rights activists gathered to grieve and honor the memory of Daphy Michel. Tyra Jamison, a Haitian-American involved in the Black Socialist Formation, recited a Haitian prayer.

​“We praise the honorable leaders of our tradition, and we praise the truth. We praise the power of the collective destiny,” says Tyra as she pours water in a libation. Nearby, some of Michel’s family members and her boyfriend watched as a sea of largely white strangers gathered to honor Daphy Michel.

​While some have speculated that Daphy died as a result of a mental health crisis, for Tyra it’s clear that her mental health problems were exacerbated by her imprisonment and pending deportation.

​“We recognize that Daphy’s life was cut short by the violent systems of the US, Western capital class and its comprador partners, both in Haiti and here in the US, with no care for her wellbeing or humanity,” says Tyra. “Michel’s passing at a bus stop, at this bus stop on Pittsburgh’s South Side, is a tragic reminder of Black and African people’s need at this time in history, for working people to have collective control over our governance system.”

​Sony Ton-Aime, a Haitian poet who has lived in the United States for 16 years, rose to speak after Tyra.

​”I’m a poet, and the work of a poet in Haiti is to memorialize moments, like first communions, wakes, funerals, and weddings. And we’re always called to write a poem,” says Sony. “And in Haiti, we have this word called ‘konbit’ where we come to work together. We do things together. And so everyone is called to bring what they can, what they have. And my words are the only things that I have that were worthy of this moment.”

​Sony then read the poem he wrote to honor Daphy, first in Creole and then in English.

​“The good God, who made the sun that laid his life on Earth, received her into his arm with words we all know, no weapon formed against Daphy will prosper. Her name will flower in the sun, where ice melts,” Sony concluded.

Though he is a prominent poet and executive director of the Pittsburgh Arts and Lecture Series, Sony said that what happened to Daphy scared him personally.​

“I’m scared, to be honest, scared, but at the same time, angry, because a human being is a human being, and whatever happens to someone can happen to me, and this is closer to me, because this is someone who looks just like my sister, but also share my skin color, share my nationality,” says Sony.

​Sony states bluntly that the death of Daphy is another sign of the “boomerang effect” of how violence used by colonial powers abroad eventually comes back to be used against those in the colonizer country.

​“This way of not giving any regard to human lives is a danger to all of us,” says Sony. “And it doesn’t matter what your status is here, it doesn’t matter what your background is. You’re always close to that.”

​But on Sunday, at the memorial, ​Sony Ton-Aime says that he felt heartened by the sense of community that activists are building in the wake of her tragic death.

​“It is good to see you all come in here for someone you did not know,” says Sony. “But deep down, you know you knew her because she was you.”

Photos and Videos by Amos Wolf

WASHINGTON — A federal appeals court panel that crossed every line of presidential appointment upheld a preliminary injunction Wednesday shielding journalists, protesters, and legal observers from the indiscriminate use of crowd-control weapons by federal immigration agents — a ruling that carries extra weight precisely because of who signed it.

9th Circuit Ruling

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Judge Mark J. Bennett, a Donald Trump appointee, joined Clinton-era Judge Ronald M. Gould and Obama pick Jacqueline H. Nguyen in affirming that the Department of Homeland Security and Secretary Kristi Noem likely violated the First Amendment when federal agents — drawn from ICE, Customs and Border Protection, and the Federal Protective Service — opened fire on members of the press and peaceful demonstrators during anti-ICE protests across Southern California in the summer of 2025.

The ruling was unanimous. That matters, especially for outlets like Migrant Insider where this is our 165 story about ICE during Trump’s second term. We couldn’t do it without the support of our paid subscribers and and founding members here on Substack. Consider upgrading your subscription if you can.

WHAT THE RECORD SHOWED

Writing for the panel, Judge Gould did not mince words about what the record showed: federal agents shot a protester in the head, legs, and feet with pepper balls at close range while the person was complying with orders. A member of the press was struck in the head with a rubber bullet and sustained a concussion. Another reporter was hit in the arm by a tear gas canister while retreating — diagnosed with a hematoma and treated for a burn. A fourth person was hit in the hand by a canister fired from 50 to 75 feet away, requiring stitches.

“In some instances,” the court found, “officers issued no warnings and shot individuals who posed no threat to the officers or to any other person.”

DHS DEFENSE FALLS FLAT

The government’s defense — that the injuries were incidental to controlling violent protests — landed with a thud. The district court had “carefully reviewed each incident,” the 9th Circuit noted, and rejected DHS’s alternative explanations. Having policies on paper prohibiting the targeting of sensitive body areas meant nothing when agents were aiming at heads anyway.

“A plaintiff can show a custom or practice of violating a written policy,” the panel wrote; “otherwise an entity always could avoid liability by pointing to a pristine set of policies.”

The court found what it called an “avalanche” of circumstantial evidence that federal officers were specifically targeting journalists and legal observers standing far from any protest activity — a finding that satisfied the First Amendment retaliation standard even without a federal agent confessing intent on the record.

WHO SUED — AND WHO HAS STANDING

The Los Angeles Press Club and NewsGuild-Communications Workers of America joined individual journalists, legal observers, and protesters as plaintiffs. The 9th Circuit found all of them had standing — including the organizations, whose institutional interests were deemed sufficiently tied to the lawsuit’s core claims.

WHERE THE INJUCTION WENT TO FAR

The panel did not, however, give the district court’s injunction a clean pass.

Gould and his colleagues found several provisions overreached — protecting “any person” from tear gas canisters and flash-bang grenades, shielding all journalists and legal observers from dispersal regardless of individual standing, and imposing a dual audible warning requirement the court said invited “strategic or near-frivolous contempt proceedings.” Those sections, the court ruled, went further than the law allows after the Supreme Court’s 2025 decision in Trump v. CASA tightened standards on broad injunctive relief.

WHAT SURVIVED

What made it through scrutiny: the prohibition on firing kinetic impact projectiles at the head, neck, groin, back, or other sensitive areas. That provision, the court held, was directly tethered to the documented harm.

WHAT COMES NEXT

The case — Los Angeles Press Club v. Noem, No. 25-5975 — now returns to District Judge Hernan Diego Vera in the Central District of California to craft a narrower injunction consistent with the appeals court’s guidance.

For reporters covering the immigration beat, the message from all three judges — regardless of who put them on the bench — was consistent: the press does not forfeit its constitutional protections when it shows up to cover the government doing its work.

EDITOR’S NOTE: If you’ve made it all the way to the bottom, I’m curious: What do you think of the banner graphic at the top of this post? Most of my posts include no images. Do visuals like this improve your reading experience of Migrant Insider?

Today, Thursday, April 2, 2026, Kaleth and his mother, Joani, walked out of the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas. Lidia Terrazas of N+ Univision got it first.

The boy is free.

Write that down somewhere. It matters.

The Hell That Held Him

The place that held him is called, in the bloodless language of the federal government, a “family residential center.” It is operated by CoreCivic, a private prison company that holds a government contract and calls the health and safety of detained families its “top priority.” The facility sits in Dilley, Texas, a town of fewer than 4,000 people roughly 85 miles southwest of San Antonio. At capacity, it can hold 2,400 human beings.

There are still about 400 children inside right now.

Some of them are infants.

Kaleth arrived on March 19. He stopped eating almost immediately. The food at Dilley — and detainees and their lawyers have said this for years, in court filings, in congressional testimony, in letters that children drew in crayon — is sometimes spoiled. Advocates relayed reports of mold. Of worms. A toddler with a working nose and functioning instincts will not eat food that smells wrong. Neither would you.

When Joani asked the staff for help, she was told the problem was mental.

Mental.

The child was two.

The Lawyer, the Congressman, and the Government’s Answer

Elora Mukherjee is a professor at Columbia Law School. She has testified before the United States Senate about what happens to children inside places like Dilley. She was Kaleth’s attorney. She said what the staff told Joani was wrong. She said the twelve days without solid food was a medical emergency.

In Washington, Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-Texas, went to social media and called the facility a “Dilley trailer prison.” He said Kaleth was getting sicker every day. He said the boy had a fever. He said someone needed to act.

ICE and the Department of Homeland Security said, as they always say, that every detained person receives three meals a day, potable water, clothing, bedding, showers, hygiene items, and access to medical staff including a pediatrician.

The boy weighed the government’s statement against twelve days without a meal and came up light.

This is how the American immigration detention system works in the second term of Donald Trump: the Dilley facility was closed in 2024. Then it was reopened in 2025 because the administration needed somewhere to put families. By early 2026, more than 1,400 people were inside — including roughly 400 children, some of them not yet old enough to walk.

A double board-certified critical-care pediatrician named Anita Patel explained, in a video statement amplified by advocates, what happens to a toddler who does not eat. Dehydration. Electrolyte imbalances. Rapid deterioration. Children have limited energy reserves. They go downhill fast. This is not a political opinion. This is pediatric medicine.

The government’s position, delivered by DHS Deputy Assistant Secretary Lauren Bis in February, was that allegations of inadequate medical care at Dilley were “false claims.” Bis also said that “being in detention is a choice” — that parents could use a government app to arrange a free flight home.

Kaleth did not have the app. He was two.

How This System Works

Twelve days is a long time when you are small and frightened and the food in front of you looks wrong and your mother cannot make it better and the people in charge keep telling her the problem is in your head.

Twelve days is a long time in any language.

Today it ended. Kaleth and his mother walked out of Dilley, Texas. The exact terms of their release — what monitoring, what check-ins, what legal proceedings await them — have not been disclosed, as is standard practice for the protection of families still navigating the immigration system.

What is known is simple: A boy stopped eating inside a government detention facility, advocates raised the alarm, a congressmember raised his voice, Lidia Terrazas reported the release, and the machinery of attention ground slowly, reluctantly, toward mercy.

Twelve days.

In Dilley, Texas, there are still roughly 400 children who have not been released.

Their names have not yet made the news.

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1. The Government Wants Your Social Media Handles. All of Them.

On March 5, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services published a notice in the Federal Register that should have stopped the internet cold.

Federal Register Report

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Under OMB Control Number 1615-NEW, USCIS announced a sweeping new program to collect social media identifiers — handles, platform names, the works — from applicants filing nine of the agency’s most widely-used immigration forms. We’re talking the N-400, the application for naturalization. The I-485, the green card adjustment form. The I-589, asylum. The I-590, refugee registration. The I-131, I-192, I-730, I-751, and I-829 round out the list.

By USCIS’s own accounting, approximately 3.6 million people per year will be required to hand over their social media identifiers as a condition of pursuing immigration benefits — adding an estimated 285,999 hours of cumulative burden on applicants annually.

The legal hook is Executive Order 14161, signed by President Trump, directing “rigorous vetting and screening” for all grounds of inadmissibility. But here’s what the notice doesn’t explain: how USCIS adjudicators will handle false positives, common names, or satirical accounts. What the data retention policy is. Who else inside DHS or law enforcement gets access. Whether a decade-old tweet can sink a naturalization case.

Executive Order 14161

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This isn’t a pilot program for a narrow category of applicants. It covers people already years into a path to permanent residence and citizenship. And it was advanced through a routine Paperwork Reduction Act notice — not a formal rulemaking with public comment.

The surveillance state just expanded, quietly, by millions of people.

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Six Guatemalan men had driven 70 miles from Glen Burnie — tools loaded, tarps spread, shingles laid — and by the morning of March 23, the job on Bayly Road was nearing the finish line. Somewhere close to $10,000 was waiting for them at the end of it.

It never came.

Instead, federal immigration agents arrived. The workers were surrounded, commanded down from the roof, and taken into custody. Their van sat in the driveway, doors open, thousands of dollars in tools left behind like a still life of a raid. One of the men’s wives was five months pregnant. They have two other children.

The woman at the center of it all — Karen Trevino, identified in court records as Karen Jeanette Trevino — now finds herself under the weight of a potential felony investigation, a viral condemnation, and a Maryland extortion statute with teeth.

@etchaskej

Ed Choi on Instagram: "Ken Trevino, 1- bot paying someone for s…

What the Law Says

Maryland Criminal Law Code Section 3-701 is not ambiguous. It prohibits obtaining services — or avoiding payment for them — through the threatened use of a person’s immigration status as leverage against them. Legal experts, including Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council, have said the alleged conduct in Cambridge fits that statute with uncomfortable precision.

The math matters here. At approximately $10,000, the alleged extortion lands in a sentencing tier carrying up to 15 years in prison and a $15,000 fine.

Whether Dorchester County State’s Attorney prosecutors pursue charges is the central question hanging over this story.

“She Said She Would Call ICE”

Bryan Polanco was on that roof. A Dominican national and permanent U.S. resident, Polanco was not detained — but he watched everything. He also hit record.

His 30-minute livestream, captured from the job site on March 23, has since traveled around the world. It shows agents closing in, workers descending, a confrontation that was tense but, contrary to the official ICE account, largely calm.

Polanco told witnesses that Trevino had explicitly threatened to report the workers to immigration authorities if anyone returned to the property to finish the job or collect payment. According to the document reviewed by this outlet, he described a pervasive “sense of persecution among Hispanics in the United States” and said plainly: “seeing it is not the same as experiencing it.”

Trevino has denied making the call. She told The Baltimore Sun the accusations were false, and said she feared for her family’s safety amid the public backlash.

The Financial Context

One detail in the public record is difficult to ignore. Court filings in Maryland show that a Karen Jeanette Trevino appeared as a defendant in a “Contract - Large Claims” case just seven days before the ICE raid — on March 16. The plaintiff was Cavalry SPV I, LLC, a firm that specializes in debt collection.

A woman already navigating debt litigation, facing a $10,000 bill for a roof she would now not have to pay. That is the picture the evidence assembles.

ICE’s Version

The agency called it a “targeted enforcement” operation and said several of the workers had final orders of removal. ICE fields approximately 15,000 anonymous tips per month through its public reporting line. The timing of the Bayly Road arrest — agents appearing precisely as workers were stationary on a rooftop, nearing the end of a high-value contract — has led legal observers to conclude the tip was specific, local, and deliberate.

What Accountability Looks Like

Six men are in federal custody. Their families are in freefall. The homeowner has a new roof. No charges have been filed against Trevino as of press time, though sources cited in local reporting say talks regarding a felony-level fraud case have taken place within Dorchester County.

The state of Maryland built Section 3-701 for exactly this kind of moment — a statute that says, in plain language, that the labor of a human being does not become free simply because that human being is undocumented. Whether prosecutors are willing to test that principle against a viral case in a rural county is now the question that matters most.

For the wife in Glen Burnie — five months pregnant, two kids at home, husband in a federal detention facility — the answer cannot come fast enough.

That changed last Friday.

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Eloy is not a place that gives people back whole. It is one of the most notorious ICE detention facilities in the country — a place that has been the subject of investigations, lawsuits, and death. Maksim went in as a gay Russian man seeking asylum from a country that had made his life impossible. He came out the other side of something that nearly broke him. Nearly.

I communicated with Maksim throughout his detention. When he got out, he agreed to sit down with me. The full interview is on YouTube. But what he told me demands more than a timestamp.

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Maksim fled Russia because of what Russia has become for LGBTQ people — a country where persecution is no longer extralegal. It is the law. He came to the United States believing that the worst was behind him.

Instead, he was locked up.

Inside Eloy, being an openly gay man made him a target. There was no protection — not from other detainees, not from the system designed to hold him. The harassment was constant. The threat of violence was ambient.

He described something worse for transgender detainees: extortion. Sexual favors, extracted in exchange for protection. Inside a federal detention facility. On American soil.

Maksim himself was threatened with rape by a guard if he refused to sign a voluntary deportation order. I reported on that threat previously. That story is here:

Beyond the violence, he described a facility that simply did not function as a humane institution. Medical care was inadequate. The food was poor. Resources for asylum seekers — people who came here with a legal right to make their case — were effectively nonexistent.

What Eloy offered instead was time. Indefinite, structureless time. No certainty about his case. No certainty about his future. Just walls, and waiting, and the slow erosion of hope.

Maksim is direct about what that did to him. The isolation, the uncertainty, the daily accumulation of small humiliations and large threats — it produced severe depression. A sense that the country he had trusted with his life had put him in a cage and forgotten him there.

He calls it his breaking point. He reached it. He wants you to know that he is not the exception. He is the pattern.

Maksim is out now. He is speaking because the people still inside cannot.

If you want to do something — for Maksim, for the transgender detainees being extorted for protection, for the asylum seekers rotting in a system that offers them nothing — he is clear about where to start: legal representation and mental health advocacy, specifically for LGBTQ asylum seekers in detention.

Organizations doing this work exist. They are underfunded. Find them. Support them.

And watch the full interview on YouTube:

@pablo.manriquez

Pablo Manriquez on Instagram: "🚨SCOOP: A discharge petition to…

The petition — Discharge Petition No. 15 of the 119th Congress — was filed January 22 by Rep. Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., targeting the Committee on Rules. It seeks to yank H.Res. 965 out of that committee’s grip, a rule that would allow the full House to immediately consider H.R. 1689, legislation that would require the Department of Homeland Security to designate Haiti for TPS.

Reaching 218 means the petition now has a majority of the full House behind it. That doesn’t happen by accident. It takes organizing. It takes pressure. And it almost always requires members of the majority party to break ranks with their own leadership.

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What a Discharge Petition Is — and Why It Matters

Think of House leadership as a bouncer outside a very exclusive club. The Speaker and the Rules Committee decide which bills get in the door. A discharge petition is what happens when enough members of Congress sign a piece of paper and say: we don’t need the bouncer anymore.

Under House rules, if a bill has been stuck in committee for at least 30 legislative days, members can begin circulating a discharge petition. Once 218 members — a simple majority of the 435-seat House — sign it, the petition matures, and the bill gets placed on the Discharge Calendar. From there, on the second or fourth Monday of the month, any member who signed can call it up for a floor vote.

It is one of the rarest procedural maneuvers in American legislative history. Since 1931, only two discharge petitions have successfully forced a bill to passage — a testament to how effectively party leadership suppresses them.

Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, R-Pa., who signed the petition, helped supply rare Republican cover for the effort. His signature was a signal: this wasn’t just a Democratic protest document. It was a bipartisan intervention.

What Happens Next

Reaching 218 does not mean Haiti TPS is law. It means the fight moves from hallways and whip counts to the House floor — and that’s significant.

Here’s the sequence: The petition is now technically “ripe.” On the next eligible Monday, a signatory can call it up under the discharge procedure. The House would then proceed directly to consideration of H.Res. 965 — the rule that sets up debate on H.R. 1689. Under the terms of the resolution itself, one hour of debate would follow, equally divided, with one motion to recommit. Then a vote.

If H.R. 1689 passes the House, it goes to the Senate — and the resolution requires the Clerk to transmit it within one week of passage. In the Senate, the bill would face its own fight, including the filibuster threshold of 60 votes.

The underlying bill is short and direct. It would require the DHS Secretary to designate Haiti for TPS, and it would hold that designation in place until three months after January 20, 2029 — insulating it from any near-term executive reversal.

The Stakes

Haiti’s TPS designation has been a live wire since the Trump administration first attempted to terminate it in 2017. Hundreds of thousands of Haitian nationals in the United States have lived in legal limbo through court battles, re-designations, and policy whiplash. The current administration has escalated deportations to Haiti even as the country faces gang-controlled chaos in Port-au-Prince and a functional collapse of civil governance.

For those communities, Saturday’s count of 218 wasn’t a procedural milestone. It was a lifeline — still partial, still uncertain, but real in a way it wasn’t yesterday.

Nobody — until Friday.

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Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, R-Pa., a former FBI agent who knows what a warrant looks like, walked up to the Capitol Hill microphone with Rep. Tom Suozzi, D-N.Y., and dropped the Bipartisan ICE Reform Act of 2026 on a Congress that has been debating everything except solutions.

“It’s really the only practical solution right now,” Fitzpatrick said.

That’s a sentence worth reading twice.

The bill does two things Washington said couldn’t happen at the same time: it fully funds the Department of Homeland Security — at the levels already passed in H.R. 7147 — and it puts handcuffs on how that money gets used.

Body cameras. Identification badges. No more masks on federal agents who knock on your door and don’t say who they are. Warrants — actual warrants, signed by actual judges — before ICE can make a criminal arrest or walk into a school, a hospital, a church, a synagogue, or a polling location on Election Day.

“That hasn’t even been talked about,” Fitzpatrick said, with the flat delivery of a man who’d looked at the competing bills and found them wanting. “That’s here.”

Independent FBI investigations for every ICE agent-involved shooting. Findings go to the U.S. Attorney where it happened and to the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia. That’s accountability with an address.

The bill also expands anti-doxxing protections for law enforcement officers — adding license plates, GPS coordinates, biometric data, and workplace addresses to the definition of “restricted personal information” — which is the kind of protection nobody argues against, which is precisely why it’s in here.

Fitzpatrick was direct about what’s missing from everything else moving through this building right now.

“What the Senate sent over has no reforms. What the House is considering today has no reforms, and this whole debate’s been about reforms and nobody’s offered it in either chamber.”

He and Suozzi are prepared to push it to the floor. Force a vote. Make people go on the record.

Asked about reception from colleagues, Fitzpatrick didn’t spin it.

“I’ll let you know,” he said. “We just put it out today. We’ll find out.”

That is the most honest thing said in this building all week.

The bill isn’t perfect for immigration advocates — it requires local and state law enforcement to cooperate with federal immigration actions, with funding penalties for those that don’t. That’s a pressure point. Sanctuary cities will notice.

But warrants at churches. Cameras on agents. No masks. FBI oversight of shootings.

In a Congress full of people who talk about reform and introduce none of it, two guys from Pennsylvania and New York put paper to the idea.

Now comes the hard part: finding out who else in this building means what they say.

Fitzpatrick/Suozzi DHS Proposal 1-Pager

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Six hours. Hundreds of people. Mothers and neighbors and organizers who had taken the bus, gotten off work early, found a babysitter — all of them standing up one at a time to say the same thing in different ways: don’t do this to us.

Von Wilpert listened. Then she voted yes anyway.

“I cannot, in good conscience, take away a factual, evidential tool to prevent crimes and keep San Diegans safe on the theoretical possibility that this government — which is doing atrocious things, I agree — could access our data.”

Theoretical.

That was December 9, 2025. By then, the San Diego County Sheriff’s Department had already been caught conducting searches on behalf of ICE and sharing license plate data with Customs and Border Protection agents — in violation of California sanctuary law. The state of Illinois had formally accused Flock Safety, the surveillance contractor, of handing data to the Department of Homeland Security in violation of state law. Flock admitted it. ICE officials had already tapped into Flock cameras more than 4,000 times through local police departments that had no business doing their dirty work.

None of that was theoretical. All of it was in the newspapers.

Von Wilpert voted for the $12 million contract anyway. The vote was 5-3. She was a yes.

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Now she is running for Congress in California’s 48th District, where Republican Rep. Darrell Issa just announced his retirement and Democrats smell a pickup. And somewhere between December and January — forty-eight days, to be exact — Von Wilpert discovered that ICE was bad, actually.

“Reckless tactics,” she started calling them. In January.

By March, after Kristi Noem got pushed out of DHS, Von Wilpert put out a press release. It said she had “been leading the charge in San Diego against ICE’s reckless tactics.”

Leading the charge.

The civic coordinator from Alliance San Diego had stood at that microphone in December and said it plainly: “A vote to continue Flock contracts puts more San Diegans at risk of being harmed by a federal administration that is focused on targeting and criminalizing our communities. There is no real way to protect our data from getting in the hands of federal immigration enforcement with Flock.”

Von Wilpert heard that. Then she voted yes.

When a Democratic primary challenger recently raised her Flock record, Von Wilpert did not apologize. She did not say she had been wrong, or that she hadn’t known, or that she wished she could take it back.

She said: “There’s worse out there.”

She said: “You’re already being tracked.”

That is the argument of a person who has run out of better arguments. It is the argument of a tollbooth operator who, when caught letting cars through without paying, says: Look, people speed on the highway too.

The mailers going out to voters in CA-48 portray Marni Von Wilpert as a champion for immigrants.

The votes are public record.

Six hours of testimony. Hundreds of people. A contractor caught sharing data with ICE. A sheriff’s department caught doing ICE’s bidding illegally. A state suing Flock Safety in open court.

And one councilmember who called all of it theoretical, signed the check for $12 million, and forty-eight days later started calling herself the one who led the charge.

In San Diego, the license plate readers are still running.

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He told you himself. Didn’t bury it. Didn’t whisper it. Said it out loud, in an interview, like a man proud of his résumé.

“I’ve prosecuted many, many people for coming to this country illegally,” Crosswell said in October 2025. “I have a familiarity with all these issues that are front and center. I don’t really need to study for the test.”

Many, many people.

In Allentown and Bethlehem, where Latino families have been living in terror since ICE turned American neighborhoods into a stalking ground, those words land like a fist on a kitchen table.

Controversial Career

The year was 2018. Jeff Sessions, then Attorney General of the United States, flew to San Diego — Crosswell’s city, Crosswell’s district — to announce that the federal government would separate migrant children from their parents at the border. He told the assembled prosecutors, the federal attorneys who worked those Southwest border cases, that they would “take on as many of those cases as humanly possible until we get to 100 percent.”

Crosswell was in that office. He stayed.

He stayed through the Muslim ban. He stayed through the raids. He stayed through the screaming of children in cages that the whole world heard on the news. He stayed, prosecuting what he himself called “border crimes, including immigration offenses,” until May of 2020 — nearly the entire first Trump administration, beginning to end, in a border district, on immigration cases.

He didn’t resign in protest. He didn’t blow a whistle. He worked the docket.

Latinos Will Decide This

Now Ryan Crosswell wants to represent a district with one of the largest concentrations of Latino voters in Pennsylvania. He has found, conveniently, that ICE “violated Fourth Amendment protections.” He thinks local officials should decide whether to cooperate with the agency.

That’s a minority position among Democrats.

It is a more complicated position when you spent three years as the man federal immigration authorities called to make their cases stick in court.

Crosswell was a registered Republican from at least 2012 through the 2024 general election — through the chaos of January 6th, through the family separations, through every ugly chapter of it. He voted for George W. Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney for president. He called McCain his “hero.” He never once voted for Barack Obama.

He changed his registration to Democrat after the election that returned Donald Trump to power. The timing, like everything else about this candidacy, is worth sitting with.

The Bottom Line

There is a woman in Allentown right now who goes to bed every night not knowing if her neighbor will still be there in the morning. There is a father in Bethlehem who coaches his kids on what to do if ICE comes to the door. They are the people who vote in Democratic primaries in Pennsylvania’s 7th district. They are the people Ryan Crosswell is asking to trust him.

He wants them to believe he is on their side now.

Maybe he is. People change. Conversions happen.

But when a man tells you — proudly, in his own words — that he prosecuted “many, many people for coming to this country illegally” while working for the administration that gave the world family separation, the least you can do is take him at his word.

He studied for that test for three years.

Primary Day is May 19th.

JACKSONVILLE, FLA. — Last Friday evening, city residents and organizers with the Jacksonville Immigrant Rights Alliance (JIRA) gathered outside Jacksonville’s federal courthouse to demand the release of Venezuelan immigrant Gabriela Sousa.

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Sousa’s husband, Brandon Garrison held his cellphone to the mic at the center of the rally. On the other line was none other than his wife – calling from the inside of Baker County Detention Center – or what Florida Gov. Desantis infamously dubbed ‘deportation depot.’

“I wanna say thank you, really,” said Sousa to the crowd, choking up over the phone.

For the past five months Sousa has been transferred between ICE detention facilities and county jails in – what their legal team says – is a concerted effort by the government to evade detention limits and prolong incarceration by shuffling detainees between facilities.

Sousa and Garrison were both arrested during a misunderstanding with local police – and the charges were later dropped. While Garrison was able to bail out, Sousa was transferred to ICE custody, kickstarting their current legal nightmare.

Legal Limbo

Garrison told Migrant Insider the judge overseeing Sousa’s case, Judge Pratt (chosen by President Trump in May) has failed to accept a writ of habeas corpus petition filed by their legal team. Without habeas corpus, Sousa can’t have a bond hearing and thus has no means to challenge her detention, preventing her release and effectively trapping her in ICE custody.

Judge Dalton, a senior judge in the same district court, granted habeas corpus to another Venezuelan woman by the name of Daniela Guiaiquire – whose case Garrison says is nearly identical to Sousa’s.

The legal discrepancy arises from the government’s misapplication of sections 1225 and 1226 of the Immigration and Nationality Act. According to the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA), section 1225 allows for mandatory detention of immigrants detained at the border – often without bond hearings. Section 1226 allows for immigrants who were already in the U.S. with pending immigration cases (like Sousa) to have bond hearings should they be detained, providing a pathway for release.

“I don’t understand how two people can have identical cases in front of a court system and get different results based on what judge they get,” Garrison told Migrant Insider outside Jacksonville’s federal courthouse.

Both Guiaiquire and Sousa entered the United States after fleeing Venezuela. Sousa entered under a Biden-era humanitarian parole program granting TPS (temporary protected status) to immigrants from countries in crisis like Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela. The second Trump administration has since rescinded these programs, rendering those who used them vulnerable to detention and deportation.

Like Guiaiquire, Sousa’s immigration case is pending. Under the law, this should protect her from prolonged detention and afford her a bond hearing – and thus a pathway to release – under section 1226. Due to Judge Pratt’s failure to follow previous court interpretation and grant habeas, Sousa remains trapped, unable to plead her case and challenge her detention’s legality.

In Judge Dalton’s granting of habeas corpus for Guiaiquire, he names Judge Pratt 9 times, criticizing the newer judge’s recent rulings in similar cases.

Time is limited and the stakes are high. If Judge Pratt fails to grant habeas corpus before Monday, March 30, Garrison and Sousa will be forced to petition for voluntary departure. Because of the second Trump administration’s cancellation of TPS for immigrants like Sousa who entered on humanitarian parole, by April 19 Sousa will have accrued over one year of unlawful presence, barring her from reentering the country for ten years.

Present and Future

In a video published by OwlMedia, immigrant women inside Sousa’s same detention center are subject to conditions unimaginable to most.

The footage shows women taking turns sharing their living predicaments, displaying the dirty, used underwear they’re expected to don, and the insulation they’re told to sleep on as mattresses and pillows.

“The conditions are very bad and I think that’s intentional to try and get people to hurry up and self deport,” said Garrison, addressing the crowd at JIRA’s protest outside Jacksonville’s federal courthouse.

If Judge Pratt doesn’t grant habeas corpus and Garrison and Sousa move forward with voluntary departure, Garrison told Migrant Insider he plans to move with Sousa to Colombia – a country he’s never been to with a language he doesn’t speak – to keep his family together.

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The math is simple. You need 60 votes to advance anything in the Senate. The Republicans don’t have them. They can’t get them. They haven’t had them since the moment DHS funding lapsed on Feb. 14, and they will not have them when the Senate gavels in for the expected Thursday vote on the latest Republican proposal — a plan to fund 94% of the department while withholding $5.5 billion for ICE’s deportation arm and promising to make it up later, in some future reconciliation bill that half the Republican conference has already called a pipe dream.

Sen. Rick Scott of Florida is one of the senators with the most to say about deporting people. He looked at this plan and said what needed to be said: “This idea that they’ll get funded through a reconciliation package is a pipe dream. We’re not going to get a reconciliation package done.”

He said the quiet part out loud, which is all anyone has managed to do for 40 days.

Tuesday night, Sen. Katie Britt of Alabama stood outside the White House and told reporters she had a solution. She had just come from a two-hour meeting with President Trump. Also in the room were Sens. Lindsey Graham, Steve Daines and Bernie Moreno. They had a plan. They were confident.

“We do,” she said, when asked if they had an answer. “I am going to be working through the night, so hopefully we can figure out how to land this plane.”

By Wednesday morning, Democrats had rejected the offer as containing no meaningful reforms. By Wednesday afternoon, Britt was back at the Capitol telling reporters there were “deals on the table” and that “we look forward to hopefully finding a way to move forward.” Asked if a deal could close by week’s end, she said: “We have to.”

She has been saying variations of this for weeks.

Britt is the chair of the Senate Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee. That is the committee that is supposed to write the bill that funds DHS. Her job, in the most basic description of it, is to get DHS funded. DHS has not been funded since Feb. 14.

In March, when Sen. Patty Murray of Washington tried to pass a narrower bill — fund TSA, fund FEMA, fund the Coast Guard and CISA, leave ICE and Border Patrol for later — Britt walked onto the Senate floor and objected. She said Murray’s approach would “effectively defund our law enforcement officers.” She said Democrats were playing “political games.”

TSA hasn’t been paid since February. Britt’s objection made sure it stayed that way.

She said she worked through the night. The plane has not landed.

@migrantinsider

Migrant Insider on Instagram: "Sen. Katie Britt (R) objected a …

While senators negotiate, LaShanda Palmer goes to work. So does Robert Echeverria — except Echeverria doesn’t anymore. He had nine years as a lead TSA officer in Salt Lake City. He quit during the shutdown because his family used up its savings in the last one. “Emotionally,” he said, “we couldn’t go through that strain anymore.”

More than 480 TSA officers have quit since February. At some airports, 40 to 50 percent of the workforce is calling out on any given day.

Ha Nguyen McNeill, the TSA’s acting administrator, testified before Congress on Tuesday and chose her words carefully: this has produced, she said, “the highest wait times in TSA history.” She warned that without a deal, airports may have to close security checkpoints entirely. By Friday, she said, TSA will have accumulated nearly $1 billion in unpaid payroll.

The FIFA World Cup starts June 11. Even if DHS reopens tomorrow, the TSA won’t have enough trained officers to staff the checkpoints by then. Three months is not enough time to hire, train and certify screeners for the biggest sporting event ever held on American soil.

Delta Air Lines has suspended its specialty congressional services — the dedicated reservation lines, the expedited screening — as a pointed message to the people who caused the problem. The airline CEOs wrote an open letter to Congress. “TSA officers just received $0 paychecks,” the letter said. “That is simply unacceptable.”

The senators, meanwhile, have their own expedited screening.

Across town, in the immigration detention centers that are still very much open — funded by $175 billion from last year’s Big Beautiful Bill Act signed into law July 4th — an estimated 40,000 to 45,000 people are waiting. Their lawyers are having trouble getting through. Their hearings are being rushed. Unaccompanied children are appearing alone before immigration judges on “rocket dockets” because the funding for their legal representation was cut.

Twenty-three people have died in ICE custody since October.

The department is not shut down in the places that matter most to the people in power.

The reason for all of this — the reason a Democratic senator will walk to the floor on Thursday and vote no on the Republican plan — goes back to January, when federal immigration agents in Minneapolis fatally shot two U.S. citizens: Renee Good and Alex Pretti. Democrats want the law changed. They want judicial warrants before agents can enter private homes. They want agents to show their faces and their badges. They want body cameras. They want ICE out of schools and churches and hospitals.

The Republicans offered some of this. Not the warrant requirement. Not the mask ban. Not the sensitive locations rule.

Sen. Patty Murray said it plainly on Tuesday: “If we are talking about funding any part of ICE or CBP, we absolutely must take some key steps to rein them in. The current Republican offer in front of us does not do that.”

So the shutdown continues.

Chuck Schumer stood on the Senate floor Wednesday and said the Democratic counteroffer contained “the very same asks Democrats have been talking about now for months.” He called the Republican accusation of goalpost-moving “nonsense.” He said: “Time is of the essence. The Easter holiday is coming.”

Congress leaves for Easter recess at the end of this week. If they leave without a deal, the shutdown crosses 60 days when they return on April 13. That’s the situation. The plane has not landed. And there’s no runway in sight.

The Risk at the Gate

The shifting landscape at airports has already led to consequences. The video highlights that at least one undocumented person has been arrested in San Francisco following the arrival of ICE agents at security checkpoints [00:07].

When asked directly if undocumented immigrants should be flying, Congressman Castro was blunt about the current climate:

“To be honest with you... I wouldn’t go over there. I mean, straight up. We’ve had people reach out who are citizens that are worried, who are permanent residents that are worried, and then I know that the undocumented community is concerned as well.” [00:30]

Castro noted that the current conduct of immigration enforcement has shown a lack of respect for rights over the past year, creating an environment of unpredictability even for those currently in the asylum process [00:52].

A “Dangerous Time” for Travel

Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who represents the area surrounding LaGuardia Airport, echoed these sentiments. She pointed to the instability caused by funding disputes affecting TSA and the resulting presence of secondary agents.

“Obviously, it’s a very dangerous time. I wish we weren’t here, but I think we are.” [02:15]

For those navigating the complexities of the U.S. immigration system, these warnings from Capitol Hill suggest that the airport is currently a high-risk environment where standard travel procedures have been disrupted by enforcement priorities.

How to Stay Informed

In times of rapid policy changes and increased enforcement, having access to boots-on-the-ground reporting is essential. Migrant Insider will continue to press lawmakers shaping these policies, offering a perspective you won’t find in mainstream soundbites.

If you want to stay updated on travel safety, detention center updates, and legislative shifts that affect the migrant community, subscribe to Migrant Insider on YouTube and here on Substack.

Follow along for daily reporting on YouTube, X, and Instagram to ensure you have the facts before you travel.

Actionable Advice for Travelers:

• Consult Legal Counsel: Before booking any air travel, speak with an immigration attorney to assess your specific status and current local risks.

• Monitor Port Reports: Stay tuned to news outlets like Migrant Insider for real-time updates on ICE presence at specific airports.

• Know Your Rights: Carry documentation of your legal rights and the contact information for a legal representative or advocacy group.

Please share this with any undocumented people who you think would benefit from this report

It belongs to Renee Good, or rather it belonged to her — the 37-year-old prize-winning poet, hobby guitarist, wife and mother of three who was shot and killed behind the wheel of that car on a public Minneapolis street on the morning of January 7, by an ICE agent named Jonathan Ross.

The car is shrink-wrapped. It has never been examined. It has never been processed. Minnesota’s Bureau of Criminal Apprehension obtained a judicial search warrant for it. They asked the FBI, repeatedly, to hand it over or let them execute the warrant. The FBI either refused or didn’t bother to respond.

That car — untouched, sealed in plastic, locked inside a building controlled by the federal government — is what this lawsuit is about.

Minnesota filed suit in federal court in Washington today, March 24, the same week Markwayne Mullin was confirmed by the U.S. Senate to run the Department of Homeland Security. The state is asking a federal judge to order the Trump administration to stop obstructing state investigators and hand over the evidence they need to determine whether the men who killed Renee Good and Alex Pretti broke Minnesota law.

It is an extraordinary thing for a state to have to do. And the fact that Minnesota had to do it tells you everything.

Minnesota Lawsuit versus DHS

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Alex Pretti was an ICU nurse at the Minneapolis Veterans Administration Health Care system. He lived in Minneapolis. On the morning of January 24, federal immigration agents shot and killed him on a public street. Video widely circulated afterward suggested he was restrained by multiple officers when two masked agents shot him dead.

Hours after the shooting, President Trump logged onto Truth Social and posted a photograph of what he said was Pretti’s firearm — sitting on the seat of a car, surrounded by charging cords. Not in an evidence bag. Not in a crime lab. Surrounded by charging cords.

The Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension arrived at the Pretti scene that morning to do what investigators do. A federal agent — serving as incident commander — told them he’d been ordered not to let them in. Even after they went to the Whipple Federal Building and waited for hours to conduct interviews, the HSI Assistant Special Agent in Charge eventually walked out and told the BCA: you’re not allowed to participate in any part of this investigation.

They still don’t have the names of the masked agents who shot him.

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Three shootings in 17 days. Three times, federal agents initially signaled they’d cooperate with their state counterparts. Three times, within hours, the cooperation evaporated — not because of any case-specific investigative need, the lawsuit says, but because senior officials at the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security intervened and said no.

It wasn’t a series of independent decisions. It was a policy.

The lawsuit, brought by Attorney General Keith Ellison, Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty, and BCA Superintendent Drew Evans, makes that case methodically. DOJ never responded to the formal document requests — called Touhy demands — that Minnesota submitted in February. Not a denial. Not an extension request. Nothing. The deadlines passed. DOJ said nothing.

DHS at least wrote back. Their response, dated March 3, argued that their own disclosure regulations don’t apply to requests from state law enforcement in criminal investigations. Minnesota’s lawyers called that argument legally meritless — and noted that DHS’s own regulations say precisely the opposite in plain language.

Then-DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee on that same day — March 3 — was asked about the department’s refusal to let state and local investigators participate in these probes. Her answer: “That is not my decision.”

She pointed to DOJ. DOJ pointed nowhere. The car stayed shrink-wrapped.

This is not how it used to work.

In November 2019, when a deputy U.S. Marshal shot a suspect at a St. Paul gas station, the BCA led the investigation and the feds cooperated. In June 2021, when two members of a U.S. Marshals task force killed a man in Minneapolis’s Uptown neighborhood, same thing — BCA led, feds helped.

For decades, the complaint argues, federal and state investigators shared witnesses, shared evidence, shared the work that criminal accountability requires. It was, as the lawsuit puts it, “a core attribute of state sovereignty” — the right of Minnesota to investigate murders committed on Minnesota streets.

In January, that ended. Six prosecutors at the Justice Department resigned. An FBI agent resigned after being pressured to drop a civil rights inquiry into the agent who shot Renee Good — and redirect it toward investigating Good’s wife instead.

The Justice Department’s deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche, went on television and said: “We investigate when it’s appropriate to investigate. And that is not the case here.”

Renee Good was a U.S. citizen. Alex Pretti was a VA nurse. And somewhere in Brooklyn Center, their evidence sits sealed in plastic, waiting for a federal judge to decide whether the rule of law still means anything in the state of Minnesota.

Minnesota is betting it does.

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His name is Stephen Miller. And as of this week, the numbers are in.

A new Race to the White House internal polling average covering 27 of the most recognizable political figures in the United States, found that Miller sits dead last. Not near the bottom. Not in a cluster. Last.

Among voters who have formed an opinion about him — and 57% of Americans have — 68% view him unfavorably. That is a net favorability of negative 36 points, the worst mark on a list that includes Donald Trump, JD Vance, Pete Hegseth, and Pam Bondi.

He beat them all. Going the wrong way.

Walk the halls of the Dirksen Senate Office Building on any given Tuesday and you will hear senators talk about the border, about ICE, about deportations. What you will not hear — at least not with any regularity, and certainly not with any spine — is the name Stephen Miller.

That is not an accident. It is a choice.

Miller has spent the better part of a decade constructing a political architecture that lets elected officials collect the votes his policies generate while avoiding the man himself. He is the architect who never gets invited to the ribbon-cutting.

The Race to the White House numbers explain why. Trump comes in at negative 16 points among voters with an opinion. Vance, at negative 12. Bondi — whose confirmation hearings were a study in senatorial discomfort — posts a negative 32. But Miller, the man with no title on a ballot, no face on a campaign sign, clears them all at negative 36.

Some men run from their unpopularity. Miller seems to cultivate it.

He has 18.4% overall favorability in the survey. That means roughly one in five Americans who know his name looks at him and thinks: yes, that’s the guy.

The other four look away.

For context, even Kristi Noem — who brought a dog story to a book and turned it into a political obituary — posts a negative 24 among voters with an opinion. She still beats Miller by twelve points.

There is a version of Washington where a number like negative 36 ends careers. There is also the version where it gets you a West Wing office and control over the machinery that determines who gets to stay in this country and who gets put on a plane.

We live in the second version.

The polling average draws on multiple recent surveys. It is not a single snapshot. It is a pattern. And the pattern is consistent with what Navigator Research, YouGov, and advocacy-linked surveys have found for months: when Americans hear Stephen Miller’s name, they do not feel good about it.

What is notable about the Race to the White House data is the breadth of the field. This is not a poll of immigration hardliners versus reformers. This is Barack Obama to Pam Bondi — the whole American political spectrum, laid flat — and Miller finishes last.

Obama, for the record, is at positive 18 points.

The distance between the two men is 54 points, which is not a gap. It is a canyon.

There will be those in this town who read these numbers and conclude that Miller’s unpopularity doesn’t matter because he does not answer to voters.

That argument has a flaw in it.

Policies travel. The travel ban, family separation, mass deportation operations, the targeting of legal immigrants and their families — these are Miller’s ideas, and they have been attached, in the public mind, to the Republican Party that employs him and the president who champions him.

The man may not be on the ballot. His work is.

What do you think? Drop a comment below and follow along — more on Miller, the data behind the enforcement machine, and the politics of immigration are ahead at Migrant Insider. If someone forwarded this to you and you want to keep up: subscribe here.

• Patsy Montecinos had it first on IG

Her release came after she posted a $10,000 bond an immigration judge had approved Monday, March 16 — the same day ICE filed an emergency appeal that temporarily froze the ruling and kept her locked up for days longer.

She leaves behind a legal fight that is far from over.

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Rodríguez, a reporter for Nashville Noticias who covers immigration enforcement in Middle Tennessee, was arrested on the morning of March 4 after ICE agents in unmarked vehicles surrounded the car she was riding in with her husband, Alejandro Medina, in a South Nashville gym parking lot — minutes after the couple had dropped their young daughter at school.

Her attorneys say agents presented no arrest warrant at the scene. The government insists a warrant had been issued two days earlier and that agents executed it lawfully.

What is not disputed: the day before her arrest, Rodríguez had been in the suburbs southeast of Nashville, filming and reporting on ICE raids targeting Latin American immigrants in apartment complexes and neighborhoods. Her attorneys argue the timing was not a coincidence. By March 7, they had formally added a First Amendment retaliation claim to her federal habeas petition, asserting that her detention was punishment for stories that often criticized ICE.

ICE and DHS called the arrest routine, describing her as “an illegal alien from Colombia” who overstayed a tourist visa and failed to report to required check-in appointments. Her attorneys counter that she filed for political asylum after receiving death threats for her journalism in Colombia, holds a valid work permit, and has a pending green card application through her U.S. citizen husband — and that a January appointment was missed because an ice storm shut down the Nashville ICE office.

She spent part of her detention in conditions her attorney described as “inhumane and difficult,” including a stretch in solitary confinement. Limited phone and counsel access complicated her legal defense throughout.

Her release Thursday does not resolve the underlying immigration proceedings — her asylum case, green card application, and federal constitutional claims in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Tennessee all remain active and unresolved. The government has argued the federal court lacks jurisdiction to intervene while the immigration court process continues.

A coalition of more than 40 press and civil rights organizations had demanded her release, warning that detaining a reporter who covers ICE sends a chilling message to immigrant journalists across the country.

That message, her case made plain, was received.

Read them slowly.

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The administration promises to expand body cameras — except when it doesn’t, because undercover officers are exempt, and nobody who watched masked federal agents gun down Renee Good in Minneapolis is going to feel better about a carve-out that swallows the rule.

The administration promises to limit enforcement at sensitive locations like hospitals and schools — except for national security, except for flight risks, except for public safety. Which is to say: except whenever they decide they don’t want to.

Then there’s the fifth bullet point. Save it. Frame it. The administration has solemnly promised that it will not deport American citizens.

That is already a crime. It is called wrongful deportation. Sen. Brian Schatz of Hawaii — a Democrat from Hawaii — did the math on the whole letter and concluded publicly that three of the five so-called concessions are simply commitments to follow existing federal law. “That isn’t a ‘concession to Democrats,’” Schatz wrote. “Hilariously and alarmingly the last bullet point is a commitment to NOT DEPORT AMERICANS which is already illegal.”

When your counteroffer requires a senator to point out that you have heroically promised not to commit a federal crime, the negotiations have not gone well for you.

White House Wants ICE Agents in Masks

Here is what Homan did not offer: He did not offer to unmask his agents.

That is the thing that matters most, and it is the thing that is not in the letter.

In Minneapolis, federal officers moved through American streets with their faces covered. There are photographs. There is video. Renee Good was shot. Alex Pretti was shot. The agents who pulled those triggers were, in some cases, not immediately identifiable by name, by badge, by agency, by anything a citizen has a right to know about the person pointing a weapon at them.

The White House says masks are a safety issue. Agents are under threat. The argument is that anonymity protects the protectors.

But anonymous power is not accountability. It is the other thing.

Every local police department in this country — every one that has reformed in the last decade — has learned the hard way that when you let officers hide their faces and their names, you do not get safer officers. You get bolder officers. You get officers who understand, on some cellular level, that no one is watching, and that no one will be able to say with certainty that they were there.

The White House counteroffer is a document about visibility that leaves the masks on.

“Hostage”

The letter closes with a warning. Democrats, it says, “must stop holding the safety and security of the American people hostage.”

Hostage. The word from a letter signed by a man who runs an agency that held Daphy Michel in a detention facility, released her, and sent her home to die.

The word from an administration whose agents detained Nashville journalist Estefany Rodríguez — press credentials and all — and let the machinery of enforcement grind while the country watched.

The word from Tom Homan, who spent years on television promising the most aggressive immigration enforcement operation in American history, and who now, when asked to put on paper what his agents may and may not do, produces a document that is mostly a restatement of laws already on the books.

Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries called it “incomplete and insufficient.” They said it contained “neither details nor legislative text.” They were being generous.

What Homan sent was not a counteroffer in any meaningful sense. It was a press release wearing a letter’s clothes. Five bullet points, three of which are existing law, one of which carves out the very situations the letter is supposed to address, and one — the last one, the signature — that promises not to do something that has already been illegal since before anyone reading this was born.

Renee Good was shot in January. The masks are still on. The agents who wore them have not been named in any binding accountability mechanism Homan’s letter would create.

That is the offer. That is the whole offer.

The people of Minneapolis — and Minneapolis is not the border, Minneapolis is a city in the middle of this country where Americans live — deserve better than a promise to follow the law.

They deserve to know who pulled the trigger.

More on Tom Homan—

Secure residential care.

That is what Richard Hoar — in-house lobbyist for GEO Group, the largest private prison company in the United States — calls a cage.

He is not alone in his word choices, or his paycheck.

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Right now, at this hour, more than 70,000 human beings are sitting inside 225 detention facilities scattered across this country. The government that put them there — ICE, the one that calls itself a law enforcement agency — keeps its own numbers, and its own numbers show that nearly three out of four of those people have no criminal conviction. Not a felony. Not a misdemeanor. Not so much as a DUI that stuck.

They are in there because they are migrants, and because someone figured out long ago that migrants are worth money.

The math is not complicated. GEO Group told its investors that ICE contracts account for 43 percent of its revenue. CoreCivic — GEO’s chief rival, its partner in this particular American enterprise — pegs its ICE share at 30 percent. Together, the two companies are worth roughly six billion dollars. The day after Donald Trump won reelection, GEO’s stock jumped 41 percent. CoreCivic’s went up 29.

The men who protect that money work on K Street, and their names are in the public record if you know where to look.

At GEO Group, the outside lobbying operation reads like a Republican Party reunion. There is Brian Darling of Liberty Government Affairs — $15,000 from GEO so far this year. There is Lanier Avant of Avant, Bishop et al — $40,000. There is Rick Sullivan of State Federal Strategies — $50,000. There is the firm Navigators Global, which sent Ryan Berger, Chris Cox, and Sarah Beatty Rogers to work GEO’s account for $100,000 more. And there is Continental Strategy, where Alejandro Garcia and Carlos Trujillo combined for $150,000 — the single biggest outside line item in GEO’s 2025 federal lobbying disclosure.

Last year GEO brought in Checkmate Government Relations, a four-lobbyist shop whose team includes Christopher LaCivita — yes, that LaCivita, one of Trump’s own 2024 campaign managers — to lobby on “contracts related to detention centers.”

The whole operation, inside and out, ran $1.38 million in federal lobbying in 2024 alone.

Richard Hoar files the paperwork.

CoreCivic runs its own army.

Its in-house lobbyist, Jeremy Wiley, has been signing federal disclosure forms for CoreCivic since 2003. Two decades. Seventy-eight filings. Roughly $31.5 million in expenditures attributed to his hand on the pen. The man has outlasted administrations the way good furniture outlasts tenants.

Around Wiley, CoreCivic keeps long-term relationships with some of the heaviest firms on K Street. Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld — $320,000 in 2024, with lobbyists William Stamper and James R. Tucker Jr. on the account. Venture Government Strategies — $460,000, with Hamilton Bloom and Robert Hobart. The Vogel Group — $270,000, with Alex Vogel and Ali Khimji. Greenberg Traurig for $120,000. Miller Strategies for $140,000. Simmons & Russell Group, where lobbyist Robert Russell filed disclosures describing his work as focused on the “construction and management of privately operated prisons and detention facilities” — and on ICE funding, U.S. Marshals funding, and Bureau of Prisons appropriations.

CoreCivic spent $1.77 million on federal lobbying last year. Through just the first quarter of 2025, it has already reported $490,000 more.

Every one of those filings includes a line of boilerplate. CoreCivic’s lobbyists are required to state, per company policy, that they do not lobby “for or against any policies or legislation that would determine the basis for an individual’s incarceration or detention.”

They just lobby for the money that pays for it.

The distinction is, in their telling, everything. In practice, it is nothing. ICE has since issued requests for proposals worth up to $45 billion for detention facilities tied directly to Trump’s border emergency declaration. GEO and CoreCivic contributed $500,000 apiece to Trump’s 2025 inaugural committee — twice what they gave in 2017.

You do not write a half-million-dollar check to an inaugural committee and then politely decline to ask for anything in return.

Below GEO and CoreCivic, the industry runs deeper still. Management & Training Corp — MTC — runs the Otero County Processing Center in New Mexico and spent $630,000 on federal lobbying in 2024, with eight lobbyists working its account, three of them fresh off government jobs. Then there is LaSalle Management, which owns immigration detention centers across the South and whose Irwin County Detention Center in Ocilla, Georgia became the site of accusations that a doctor performed coerced hysterectomies on detained women. LaSalle does not show up in the seven-figure federal lobbying tables. Its influence flows through campaign contributions and state capitols — quieter, harder to trace, no less deliberate.

A Brennan Center analysis describes GEO and CoreCivic as positioned for an “enormous windfall” as the administration reopens mothballed prisons, expands bed capacity, and signs multi-year contracts from California City to Kansas. Meanwhile, Trump officials have sought to gut the internal oversight offices that investigate civil rights violations inside these same facilities.

More beds. Less oversight. The lobbyists are doing their job.

Todd Lyons, ICE’s acting director, in a moment of candor that should have been a scandal and was not, recently likened the agency’s new mass deportation operation to “Amazon Prime, but with human beings.”

He meant it as a compliment.

In a country that understood what it was doing, that sentence would have ended a career. Instead, it described a business model, and on K Street, Richard Hoar and Jeremy Wiley and Hamilton Bloom and the rest of them went back to their phones, their filings, and their very particular definition of residential care.

The cages stay full.

The checks keep clearing.

Help us go through the receipts in the chat:

That’s the short version. Here’s what actually happened.

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