• IMMIGRATIONThe Real Story Behind the Midnight Immigration Raid on a Chicago Apartment Building

    By Melissa Sanchez and Jodi S. Cohen

    The Trump administration has claimed the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua had taken over the building. But new documents make no mention of the gang and reveal federal agents had information about “illegal aliens unlawfully occupying apartments.”

  • THE ICE PROBLEMICE Not Only Looks and Acts Like a Paramilitary Force – It Is One, and That Makes It Harder to Curb

    By Erica De Bruin

    ICE and CBP meet many but not all of the most salient definitions of a “paramilitary force.” Both are also not subject to the same constitutional restrictions that apply to other law enforcement agencies. ICE and CBP thus bear some resemblance to the informal paramilitaries used in many countries for “regime maintenance,” carrying out political repression along partisan and ethnic lines, even though they are official agents of the state.

  • THE ICE PROBLEMLicense to Kill? The Legal Black Hole of Federal Misconduct

    By Mike Fox

    The killing of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by ICE agents reveals a disturbing reality: everyday Americans falling victim to a system that enables—or even encourages—gross misconduct. To understand how we got here, we have to look at the bolted-shut doors of the American courthouse—a legal regime designed to ensure federal agents remain untouchable.

  • THE ICE PROBLEMDemocratic AGs Stress Importance of Citizen-Generated Evidence in Challenging ICE

    By Erika Bolstad

    Cellphone video has emerged as a powerful rebuttal to Trump’s – and Trump officials’ — version of events, at a time when the federal government has restricted state and local investigators from accessing potential evidence to pursue their own investigations into excessive force and fatal shootings by immigration agents in their jurisdictions.

  • THE ICE MESSFootage, Documents at Odds with DHS Accounts of Immigration Enforcement Incidents

    By Amanda Watford

    As a growing number of encounters between civilians and DHS agents are scrutinized in court records and on social media, federal officials are returning to a familiar response: self-defense. Often, this line of defense is contradicted by the evidence. Still, as Trump’s crackdown intensifies, people face steep barriers to holding federal agents accountable.

  • ICE’S TACTICSStates, Cities Are Hard-Pressed to Fight Violent ICE Arrest Tactics

    By Tim Henderson

    State leaders who want to curb the increasingly violent arrest tactics of immigration enforcement agents in Minneapolis and elsewhere are struggling to push back. Potential approaches include state civil rights laws and a refusal to cooperate.

  • QUICK TAKES // By Ben FrankelICE Is Pushing the Legal Envelope

    ICE’s legal advisory – asserting that ICE agents may enter private homes with an administrative, rather than a judicial, warrant — rests on arguable, but exceedingly fragile, legal foundations. Administrative warrants, consent, and exigent circumstances can justify certain actions, but none supports a general authority to enter homes without a judicial warrant. The legal debate is not about immigration policy but about whether the executive branch can erode one of the Constitution’s most settled protections.

  • DEPORTATIONSICE Is Using Medicaid Data to Find Out Where Immigrants Live

    By Anna Claire Vollers

    A recent court ruling has cleared the way for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to resume using states’ Medicaid data to find people who are in the country illegally. States fear immigrants will shy away from seeking health care.

  • DEPORTATIONS“Construction Can’t Continue": South Texas Builders Say ICE Arrests Have Upended Industry

    By Berenice Garcia

    More than 300 people attended an impromptu meeting that industry leaders in the Rio Grande Valley hosted to draw attention to the chilling effect ICE arrests have had on construction.

  • DEPORTATIONSAn Ever Larger Share of ICE’s Arrested Immigrants Have No Criminal Record

    By Tim Henderson

    Immigration arrests under the Trump administration continued to increase, but rather than the convicted criminals the administration has said it’s focused on, an ever-larger share of those arrests were for solely immigration violations.

  • IMMIGRTIONTrump Administration’s Immigrant Detention Policy Broadly Rejected by Federal Judges

    By Cassandra Burke Robertson

    In response to the Trump administration’s practice of rounding up and jailing immigrants without a hearing — a departure from fundamental constitutional protections — federal judges have systematically rejected the administration’s attempt to drastically expand who can be locked up without a hearing while awaiting deportation proceedings.

  • IMMIGRATIONMore Industries Want Trump’s Help Hiring Immigrant Labor After Farms Get a Break

    By Tim Henderson

    Restaurants, construction and landscaping businesses have lost the most workers, a Stateline analysis found. Now, industries with large immigrant workforces are asking for relief as they combat labor shortages and raids.

  • DEPORTATIONS5% of People Detained by ICE Have Violent Convictions, 73% No Convictions

    By David J. Bier

    President Trump’s deportation agenda does not match the campaign promises that he made – he said he would focus on deporting “the worst of the worse” – nor the rhetoric from his officials. The opposite is the case: for example, 73 percent of people booked into ICE custody this fiscal year had no criminal conviction. Of the small number of those convicted of a crime, the majority had vice, immigration, or traffic convictions. The problem: the diversion of effort and resources to find and deport noncriminal undocumented migrants has reduced the ability of DHS and the FBI to pursue investigations into terrorist financing; child exploitation and human trafficking; and drug and gun crimes.

  • COST OF EXCLUSION The Effects of the 1942 Japanese Exclusion on US Agriculture

    By Peter Zhixian Lin and Giovanni Peri

    The U.S. government’s 1942 Japanese relocation program removed the advantage that high-skilled Japanese farmers had given to local agriculture on the West Coast. Whether the forced evacuation contributed to national security is open to question, but it was certainly costly.

  • DEMOCRACY WATCHTrump’s National Guard Deployments Reignite 200-Year-Old Legal Debate Over State vs. Federal Power

    By Andrea Katz

    If you’re confused about what the law does and doesn’t allow the president to do with the National Guard, that’s understandable. The conflict between the Trump administration and states such as Oregon and Illinois throws into relief a question as old as the Constitution itself: Where does federal power end and state authority begin?