The ad, “Keeping NM Safe,” first logged by AdImpact on Oct. 2, is the clearest sign yet that the Republican challenger to Rep. Gabe Vasquez, D-N.M., sees his deportation record as a liability in a swing district along the border. That district includes the Otero County Processing Center, an ICE detention facility Cunningham has fought to keep open. The ad does not mention it.

The Ad

Cunningham opens the 30-second spot on his police-detective résumé. Then he turns to Vasquez, who he says “sides with criminals and supports defunding the police.” No source for that claim appears on screen.

Nine seconds later comes the pivot. Cunningham promises to fix “our broken immigration system” by “focusing on criminals, cartels, and gang members, not families following the legal process.”

What He Said Before the Ad

Cunningham’s record from before the ad reads differently.

As Migrant Insider first reported Aug. 7, Cunningham said of undocumented people caught up in raids: “They got to go, so they are collateral damage to a system that put ICE in the position where they have to go locate this person.” The Santa Fe New Mexican confirmed the context three days later.

On a district podcast, he discussed Renee Good and Alex Pretti, the two U.S. citizens killed by federal agents in Minneapolis. He called them “ideologically opposed … intent on disrupting,” and said “you do not have the right to actively interfere with law enforcement … and that’s what happened in both cases.”

Source NM asked him Sept. 29 whether he backed the Legislature’s push to bar public entities from contracting with ICE for detention, including at Otero. He said: “I don’t support that. … They want that facility. They need that facility for their community, for jobs, for opportunity, for stability.”

His complaint about the raids, he told the Washington Reporter on Sept. 16, is not about who ICE arrests. It is about where: “If we would just allow ICE to work at the jail level like they’re supposed to, we would eliminate a lot of what you’re seeing right now.”

President Donald Trump endorsed Cunningham on June 1. In the Truth Social post, he promised to “Stop Migrant Crime” and accused Vasquez of wanting to “stop deporting Criminal Illegal Aliens.” In September, Cunningham spoke at the RNC’s Midterm Convention.

The Bill Behind “Sides With Criminals”

Groups backing Cunningham have tied the “criminals” attack to Vasquez’s cosponsorship of H.R. 1589, the American Dream and Promise Act of 2025. That bill would open a path to conditional permanent residency for Dreamers brought to the U.S. as children and for holders of Temporary Protected Status and Deferred Enforced Departure.

The bill’s text does not extend that path to criminals. Anyone convicted of “any felony offense” is ineligible. So is anyone with three or more misdemeanors, other than traffic, cannabis and civil-disobedience offenses, and anyone with a misdemeanor domestic violence conviction. Recent gang offenses disqualify an applicant. Every applicant must clear “security and law enforcement background checks.” Conditional status can be revoked from anyone who later runs afoul of those bars.

More than 4,000 DACA recipients live in New Mexico.

Who ICE Is Actually Holding

Cunningham’s ad describes an enforcement system aimed at “criminals, cartels, and gang members.” The numbers describe a different one.

As of July 11, 46,436 of the 65,765 people in ICE detention, or 70.6%, had no criminal conviction, according to TRAC at Syracuse University. When detention hit its record of 70,766 people on Jan. 24, 74.2% had no conviction. “Since the summer, nearly all of the growth in ICE detention has come from people without criminal convictions or charges,” Syracuse researcher Austin Kocher told Stateline in February.

The facility Cunningham wants to keep open in Otero County is not a jail for cartel bosses. It is an immigration detention center. And in centers like it across the country, seven in 10 of the people inside have never been convicted of anything.

Cunningham is hoping New Mexico voters forget what he said in August. We don’t forget. Subscribe and Migrant Insider will keep the receipts on every candidate rewriting his deportation record before November.

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That detail is buried in footnote 35 of a Government Accountability Office report released Sept. 24. The report found that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement started six new detention initiatives after January 2025 without a plan to guide any of them, and has since scaled back four.

Gao Report On Ice Wasting Money

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The footnotes hold a harder story than the headline finding. They show shelter dollars redirected to detention, federal lockups operating without federal paperwork, a contract still paying for meals nobody eats, and a bed target that exists only in conversation. Meanwhile, ICE’s daily detained population rose 71%, from 39,314 on Jan. 20, 2025, to 67,180 on July 30, 2026.

The Associated Press’s Ryan J. Foley broke the report last week. His story centered on the unused tents at Guantánamo Bay, the empty warehouses and the rate Florida charges to hold detainees. What follows comes from the rest of the report’s 18 pages.

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The shelter money

FEMA reimburses Florida through a Detention Support Grant Program, which it built in April 2025 with ICE. Florida was the only eligible recipient. According to FEMA officials, the program was assembled from money appropriated for shelter facilities and services.

That money has a paper trail. In fiscal 2023, Congress required a transfer of $800 million from Customs and Border Protection to FEMA to support sheltering by non-federal groups. FEMA used it to create the Shelter and Services Program. Another $650 million followed in fiscal 2024. Congress’s explanatory statement for that year said the money was to provide temporary shelter to people released from DHS custody and to “facilitate the safe, orderly, and humane release of asylum seekers and families.”

On Sept. 30, 2025, FEMA awarded Florida $608.4 million under the detention program. The grant authorizes $249 per detainee per day, 171% above ICE’s median of $92. FEMA disbursed $58.2 million in May 2026. The facility closed in June. Florida can keep submitting costs through July 31, 2027, and the eligible window begins June 1, 2025, a month before the facility opened.

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So be careful with every number in this column. Most district polls this cycle are paid for by one side or the other. “Independent” can mean a registered unaffiliated voter, a Republican who is embarrassed to say so, or a man who hangs up halfway through the call. Four years ago the national polls missed by the widest margin in decades.

Here is the thing, though. When a dozen pollsters with different methods and different paymasters keep finding the same answer, you stop calling it noise and start calling it news.

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The number that keeps coming back

Fox News surveyed 1,211 registered voters from Sept. 11 to 14 and found 53% saying the administration’s immigration enforcement has gone too far. The rest split evenly at 23% between not far enough and about right. Among independents, the too-far figure was 60%. That was Fox News, not a Democratic firm. Pollsters for both parties ran the survey.

Fox also asked those voters why. Among those who said too far, 45% blamed excessive force and 49% said the wrong people are being picked up. Independents leaned slightly toward the force answer. So the complaint is about how enforcement is being done and who it is catching. It is not a complaint about the border itself.

Now the skeptic’s point, which matters. Fewer than one voter in ten named immigration as the country’s top issue. Cost of living drew 34% and the economy drew 14%. ICE is not going to decide this election alone. It is one grievance among several, and it points the same direction as the others: toward a White House that went too far and is not listening.

Abolition: not the center, but growing

Consider the phrase Republicans most want Democrats to say out loud, “abolish ICE.” In the fall of 2024 it was a fringe position. That is no longer true.

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WASHINGTON — The first time I went to a CHCI gala, I wore a suit my mother bought me at Sears when I was in high school. I didn’t own a tuxedo, and I didn’t need one. I was a nobody in Washington, and ‘Latino Prom’ was one of the best parties in town.

I came to this city in 2009. Some of the first friends I made here were CHCI fellows: young people, many from humble backgrounds, doing entry-level work in congressional offices.

Over the years I’ve had more CHCI friends, sources, and contacts than I can count, from every background you can imagine. Some went on to impressive careers. Some left town because the nasty business of politics and policy turned out not to be for them. Either way, CHCI was part of their origin story in this town that we all shared.

I went to the gala nearly every year for the better part of a decade. Once, when President Obama spoke, I heckled and turned my back on him in protest of the mass deportations carried out on his watch. Nobody threw me out. That was the room back then. You could love the institution and still stand against what power was doing to our people.

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WASHINGTON — A year before Palantir tried to put its name on CHCI’s gala, the company had already reached the organization’s board.

On Sept. 15, 2025, the first day of Hispanic Heritage Month, House Democratic Caucus Chairman Pete Aguilar, D-Calif., received a $1,000 contribution from, Migrant Insider has learned. The donation has not been previously reported.

Aguilar sits on the board of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute. CHCI is the Latino advocacy organization now reeling from a Palantir sponsorship deal brokered by Palantir lobbyist Cristina Antelo and CHCI President and CEO Marco Davis. If CHCI’s board votes on whether to remove Davis, Aguilar gets a vote.

I met Davis last night at a gala afterparty. He told me, “you can’t be here.”

For everyone at home keeping score, that’s

• Palantir: Welcome.

• Migrant Insider: Nope.

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On Thursday, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that was illegal — and warned that the Trump administration’s reading of immigration law would mean Congress had quietly ordered “the single largest mass detention of human beings in our nation’s history.”

The 2-1 decision in Lopez Garcia v. Guadian is the administration’s ninth consecutive loss in the federal appeals courts since the 8th Circuit sided with it in March. It also completes the map. All 11 numbered circuits have now answered whether ICE can jail longtime residents without bond simply because they entered the country without inspection, however long ago. Nine said no. Two said yes.

Garcia V Guadian

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In Houston, the answer is no. In Baltimore, it is yes. Until …

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A Marine. A combat veteran. A U.S. citizen born in Michigan, held three days for possible deportation before federal authorities figured out what his passport already said. Kent County changed its jail policy in January 2019 to make sure it didn’t happen again: no more holds for ICE without a warrant signed by a judge.

That May, a state senator from Potterville named Tom Barrett moved to make counties pay for exactly that kind of decision.

Barrett, now the freshman Republican congressman from Michigan’s 7th District, chaired the Michigan Senate’s corrections budget subcommittee in 2019. Under his gavel, the panel advanced budget language withholding jail reimbursement funding from any county that limited communication or cooperation with federal immigration authorities. Democrats objected. So did the Michigan Department of Corrections.

Barrett defended it as routine.

“I think this is good to require, good to maintain…

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Two hundred seventeen members have now done that on Discharge Petition No. 25, Migrant Insider has learned. One more name and the American Dream and Promise Act gets a vote on the floor of the House of Representatives, and Speaker Mike Johnson can do nothing about it but watch.

The petition belongs to Rep. Sylvia Garcia, D-Texas. The bill is H.R. 1414. It would keep some undocumented people from being deported and give others a way to adjust their status — the kind of legislation that polls well in every district in this country and yet has died unceremoniously in every Congress that touches it.

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WASHINGTON — The last confirmed sighting of the woman who called herself the abogada de los milagros was on a screen.

It was June 10, the day Luz Legal shut down for good, and according to three former staffers who spoke to The Seattle Times, Alexandra Lozano — who had surrendered her Washington law license two weeks earlier and was therefore supposed to have nothing to do with the firm — was on the company chat, on the email chain, and helping lead a virtual meeting. Then the offices in Tukwila and Yakima and Fresno and Berwyn went dark, the signage came off the glass, and the woman went with them.

Eleven weeks later, nobody in the American legal system can say where Alexandra Lozano is.

Not her own attorney, Angelo Calfo, who according to the Latin Times did not respond to requests for comment on the newest allegations against his client. Not the plaintiffs’ lawyers, whose amended com…

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Here is a summary of my responses in the video:

• No Kings Marches: The next march is slated for October, with more details expected to roll out this month.

• Prison Divestment Efforts: Organizations like the National Prison Divestment Campaign, the Prison Industry Divestment Movement, and the Divest/Invest toolkit are actively targeting institutional and Wall Street capital tied to for-profit detention operators.

• DC Photography & Hypothetical Brunch: If down to the last frame on a 35mm roll, the shot would be a black-and-white frame of Trump resigning; at a South Bend brunch with Amy Coney Barrett and Pete Buttigieg, the icebreaker would be asking them to pose for a campus photo shoot to be commissione…

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That case is one of five decisions and rules issued out of Falls Church between Aug. 14 and Aug. 28 that, taken together, rewrote the practical rules of deportation defense — who gets a bond hearing, how long you get to find a lawyer, how many times you can ask a court to look again, and what it costs to try. None of it required a vote in Congress. Almost none of it was covered outside practitioner listservs. Here are the five, in the order they will hurt:

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Roll Call 14 would have shielded Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals recipients from detention and deportation, with exceptions. Ciscomani, R-Ariz., voted before it. He voted after it. On the DACA amendment itself, he simply didn’t show up on the board — a silence that, bracketed by two clean voting records, reads less like an accident than a decision.

It’s a decision Ciscomani has now made twice. First on the floor of the House. Then, according to the Arizona Daily Star, at least five more times (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) — in response to five separate news inquiries asking a single question: does he still support a pathway to citizenship for DACA recipients?

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That’s not a metaphor. On August 18, USCIS’s benefits-verification system flipped a switch and declared thousands of Temporary Protected Status work cards “no longer valid” — effective immediately, no transition window, no public announcement beyond an agency alert most Americans will never see.

It’s one of five immigration actions taken by federal agencies in the last seven days that have drawn real estate in law-firm newsletters and trade publications, and essentially nothing from the outlets people actually read. Here’s what happened, and what it means for the people it hits.

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A Ninth Circuit panel — Judges Margaret McKeown, Michelle Friedland and Eric Miller — unanimously denied the government’s emergency motion to stay a preliminary injunction over conditions at the Adelanto ICE Processing Center in California’s High Desert, lifting the administrative pause it had granted while it considered the case. The order was first flagged Thursday by POLITICO’s ace courts reporter Kyle Cheney.

The government’s core argument was simple: don’t blame us, blame GEO Group, the private prison company that runs the infamously foul Adelanto day to day. The panel wasn’t having it.

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As many of you know, I’ve begun embracing a lot of the old ways of doing things this year, mostly in an effort to reduce my screen time. I bought some fully restored typewriters for correspondence and dispatches. I also began shooting 35mm film photography.

For those of you who don’t know, a little over a decade ago I was a professional photographer for a hot minute.

Anyway, the mailbag post is just to ask any question you want. It can be about immigration, Congress, politics, art … whatever’s on your mind. I’ll pick some of the best questions and answer them in a subsequent post. How’s that sound?

To ask your questions, just drop them in the comments below or hit me on Signal at pab.202. And as always, stay safe out there, fam.

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WASHINGTON — Six members of Congress want the FBI to explain, in writing, why federal agents are allowed to draw a loaded gun on a U.S. citizen sitting in her own car and then lie about why they did it.

That’s the blunt ask behind a letter sent Wednesday to Attorney General Todd Blanche, FBI Director Kash Patel, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin and Acting ICE Director David Venturella — demanding an immediate FBI investigation and a DOJ Civil Rights Division review into the ICE agents who boxed in Carolina Molina’s car in Falls Church, Virginia, on Aug. 10 and pointed a firearm at her head.

Reps. Don Beyer, Suhas Subramanyam and James Walkinshaw of Virginia signed the letter. So did Rep. Robert Garcia, ranking member of the House Oversight Committee; Rep. Bennie Thompson, ranking member of Homeland Security; and Rep. Jamie Raskin, ranking member of Judiciary — the three committees with jurisdiction over ICE. They gave DOJ and DHS…

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OPT has been in the crosshairs of conservatives for years. They claim the program takes jobs away from American workers and allows unfettered legal immigration. Support for the program, by contrast, brings together progressives, businesses, and industry, who argue that it’s a lifeline for top talent to stay in America and support cutting-edge innovation.

As MAGA fights against all forms of immigration, mass deportation raids by ICE and the deaths of migrants in custody are getting the most attention. But the challenge to OPT is an underrated threat to documented law-abiding immigrants. If successful, the assault could have massiv…

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