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  • ‘People are hiding in their apartments’: Inside Trump’s assault on universities

    International students are being abducted and disappeared by ICE in broad daylight. Life-saving research projects across the academy are being halted or thrown into disarray by seismic cuts to federal grants. Dozens of universities are under federal investigation for their Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion programs, their allowance of trans athletes to compete in college sports, and their tolerance of constitutionally protected Palestine solidarity protests. In today’s urgent episode of Working People, we get a harrowing, on-the-ground view of the Trump administration’s all-out assault on institutions of higher education and the people who live, learn, and work there. TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez speaks with Todd Wolfson, President of the American Association of University Professors, Associate Professor of Journalism and Media Studies at Rutgers University, and co-director of the Media, Inequality and Change Center; and Chenjerai Kumanyika, Assistant Professor at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University, AAUP Council Member, and Peabody-award winning host of Empire City: The Untold Origin Story of the NYPD.

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    Studio Production: Maximillian Alvarez
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    Transcript

    The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    Alright. Welcome everyone to Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today. Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast Network and is brought to you in partnership within these Times Magazine and the Real News Network. This show is produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like you. My name is Maximillian Alvarez and today we are taking an urgent look at the Trump Administration’s all out assault on institutions of higher education and the people who live, learn, and work there. As we’ve been covering here on the show and across the Real News Network, the Trump Musk administration’s attacks on workers, workers’ rights, and on democracy as such are frankly so broad, wide ranging and destructive that it’s hard to really sum it all up here. But colleges and universities have become a key target of Trump’s administration and a key battlefront for enacting his agenda.

    The world of higher ed looks and feels a lot different today than it did when I was a graduate student at the University of Michigan and then an editor at the Chronicle of Higher Education just a few short years ago. International students like Mahmoud Khalil at Columbia University and Rumeysa Ozturk at Tufts are being hunted, abducted, and disappeared by ice for speaking out against Israel’s US backed genocide of Palestinians, hundreds of international students have had their visas and their ability to stay in the country abruptly revoked. Dozens of investigations into different universities have been launched by the administration because of their diversity, equity and inclusion programs, their allowance of trans athletes to compete in college sports and their tolerance of constitutionally protected Palestine solidarity protests, which the administration has dangerously deemed antisemitic and grounds for denial of federal funding. And the administration has indeed frozen federal funding as a means to bend universities to Trump’s will.

    So far. Alan Blinder reports this week at the New York Times “seven universities have been singled out for punitive funding cuts or have been explicitly notified that their funding is in serious jeopardy. They are Brown University, which the Trump administration said stood to lose 510 million Columbia, which is hoping to regain about $400 million in canceled grants and contracts after it bowed to a list of demands from the federal government, Cornell University, the target of a cut of at least 1 billion Harvard University, which has approximately 9 billion at stake. Northwestern University, which Trump administration officials said would be stripped of $790 million. The University of Pennsylvania, which saw $175 million in federal funding suspended because of its approach to a transgender athlete’s participation in 2022 and Princeton University, which said dozens of grants have been suspended. The White House indicated that $210 million was at risk.”

    The battle on and over our institutions of higher education have been and will continue to be a critical front where the future of democracy and the Trump Administration’s agenda will be decided. And it will be decided not just by what Trump does and how university administrators and boards of regents respond. It will be decided by how faculty respond, how students and grad students respond, staff campus communities, and you in the public writ large. We’re going to be covering that fight continuously here on working people and at the Real News Network in the coming months and years. And we’re taking it head on in today’s episode with two guests who are on the front lines of that fight.

    I’m honored to have them joining us together. Returning to the podcast, we’ve got Todd Wolfson, who currently serves as president of the American Association of University Professors. Todd is associate professor of Journalism and Media Studies at Rutgers University and he’s the co-director of the Media, Inequality, and Change Center, a collaboration between the University of Pennsylvania’s Anenberg School of Communication and Rutgers University’s School of Communication and Information.

    We are also joined today by Chenjerai Kumanyika, assistant professor at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University, who serves as a council member for the AAUP. You likely already know Chenjerai’s voice. I mean, the man is a radio and podcast legend. He’s a Peabody award-winning host of Empire City: The Untold Origin Story of the NYPD. He’s the co-creator, co-executive producer and co-host of Uncivil, Gimlet Media’s podcast on the Civil War, and so much more. Brother Todd, brother Chenj, thank you both so much for joining us on the show today. I really appreciate it and I want to just dive right in. And I want to start by just asking you both to keep pulling on the thread from my introduction to the show just now. I tried to pack in as much information as I could, but really this is just scratching the surface of things. So can you both help our listeners better understand the full scope of what is actually happening across higher ed in the United States right now? So Todd, let’s start with you and then Chenj, please hop in after

    Todd Wolfson:

    You did a pretty good job packing in a lot of information in the short bit Max and yeah, it’s like drinking from a fire hose right now. I characterize the main attacks as there’s about five streams of main frontal assaults on higher ed. One is an absolute attempt at the destruction of our biomedical research infrastructure and then a broader research infrastructure from there. And National Endowments of the Humanities just announced a 70% cancellation of all their grants. But the biggest funding agency that’s taken the biggest hit is the NIH, which is the biggest biomedical research funding organization in the world. In the world. And at this point in 2024, they’d given out 6 billion in grants to do research on cancer and to do research on the Alzheimer’s and strokes and pediatric oncology and diabetes and all the things we all need so that when we go to the doctor, they have cutting edge therapies to save the lives of ourselves and our parents.

    Now that 6 billion is 2.7 billion, that’s how much they’ve given out in 2025, less than half. So if we project that out, the NIH gives out 40 billion in funding for research on issues, biomedical health research, we expect something like 20 billion. So a $20 billion cut in research is what we’re looking at. And again, it’s primarily targeted at the biomedical infrastructure, but this is also National Science Foundation grants, it’s National Endowment of Humanities grants. It’s all the critical things that we need. So that’s one bucket. The second bucket is extreme attacks on our students. You flagged it, right? Abductions of students in broad daylight, Mahmud, Khalil, who you mentioned, I think there’s about eight or nine students now that have been just abducted in broad daylight and whisked into an ice underground prison system, usually hundreds of miles from their home, often with no charge, maybe the slightest charge of some pro-Palestinian in organizing or protest work or even editorial work, which is their right of freedom of speech absolute and getting whisked off.

    But those folks who they’ve abducted are just scratching the surface over the weekend. Over this past weekend, the numbers something like 600 visas were revoked across the country. We think at least a hundred of them were college, graduate and undergraduate students. So not all that’s hitting our colleges and universities. It’s bigger than that, but it’s probably the largest sector taking this hit and we’re trying to figure it out at Rutgers, my home institution 1212 students got their visas revoked and the folks who got their visas revoked this past weekend, they’re not on record for anything. We think it’s country of origin and connected to the Muslim Ban 2.0, but we’re not even sure. So that’s a second. And just to be clear about these attacks on our students, the goal is to outlaw protest, right? This is the first step in the strategy. They’re weaponizing antisemitism to go after pro-Palestinian protestors.

    This is a first step and they want to see they’re testing the water and they want to see how far they can take this. Just yesterday they floated deporting US citizens, so they’re going to keep pushing this and the goal is to shut us up. The other things I’ll just flag really quickly that it should be on folks’ Radar is also happening. As we know. They’re also attacking universities for DEI related grants and programs, and that’s been a massive attack. It was one of the first executive orders. So for instance, we have a researcher who is doing research on the diversity of wheat crops, the genome and wheat crops. That research canceled because the word diversity is in it and they don’t want diversity any sort of DEI. And so plant genome diversity is part of DEI now and it’s of the keystone cops, and they’re doing this through keyword searches, but it gets more serious than that.

    They’re also canceling research on infant mortality rates. We want to understand why they’re differing infant mortality rates in urban or suburban or rural settings in black communities and white communities and Latinx communities. They won’t allow that research anymore or literacy rates. They don’t allow differing literacy rates in urban, suburban rural communities, diversity research. So there’s DEI attacks, and then the last attack I’ll flag, and I’ll let Chenjerai come in is that the attack on our institutions writ large, and that’s the stuff that we’re seeing at Columbia and we’re seeing at all these other universities that you laid out. It’s not simply to weaponize antisemitism, to threaten cuts in the biomedical research and weaponize antisemitism. It’s bigger than that. They want to be able to control these institutions and the first step is Columbia bowing. And so now they expect these next six bow and on and on from there. And the goal is for them to come in and tell us what we can research, what we can teach, what our students can say and learn. So it’s a real attempt at massive control. And again, they’re looking at hungry in Europe and they’re getting much of their strategy here. So those are four major buckets of attacks going on. I’m sorry, get in there, Chenj.

    Chenjerai Kumanyika:

    First of all, I think you laid it out real well. And also I’ll just say much respect to you Max, to working people pod. I’ve been a long time fan, real excited to be here. So I just want to step back a little bit and talk about, we have to really look at why this is happening and if you look at these cuts, it points to a little bit about why they’re doing this, right? First of all, they’re lying about what higher education is and I think that’s really important. They want to cast higher education as a place that is only for a certain kind of elites, but that’s not true. Higher education is where so many families in America, across America, different communities, not just in rural community cities where people are sending their kids because they want to have a fair shot, whether family members because they want to have a fair shot.

    So that’s one component. They also want to actually restrict higher education to maybe people just imagine a certain kind of classes that they think don’t matter. But we have to understand is higher education is a lot of things. Higher education are healthcare facilities, not just places where health research is being done, but also where health workers are working in places where people are nurses, doctors, people who are nurses, aides and doctor aides. All those kinds are working at healthcare facilities that are a part of higher education. And in some communities, those are the only healthcare facilities and they reach out into the community.

    Universities are, and like I said, speaking of labor universities are places where people of all kinds of different folks work. They want you to think about this caricature of the woke student and then the woke out of touch elite professor. But of course a lot of people working in universities are contingent, contingent faculty, people who are teaching an incredible load and do not have the kind of job security that we would like them to have. You have staff, you have people who, there’s food facilities, cafeteria workers. So in many places, universities are public, universities are huge employer for the state, a huge amount of that is happening. So they are really central. And this is not to say at all that higher education doesn’t have problems, but I think with everything with this administration, and if you look at the A UP and some of the incredible exciting coalitions we’ve been building around labor and higher education, we were already trying to address some of these changes that these outside agitators would like to do to control our institutions and make them places cases with administrators being complicit with that.

    So that’s just one thing, but I want to say that they’re lying about what it is, but it’s also like they’re lying when you look at what they’re attacking. So for example, if you look at these cuts to the NIH, right? This is not some kind of austerity where they’re doing this because they want to help taxpayers. This is ideological. They want to replace public science with corporate science and they want to defund fields that they can’t control, especially ones that address systemic health disparities or things like the social determinants of health, reproductive research, things like gun violence, climate health, mental health. I mean, look at these cuts that happened yesterday when you, I think Cornell and Northwestern are not verifying everything. They’re still trying to figure out what’s going on in this cuts that happen, but you just look at it and go, some of the stuff that’s being cut, cancer research, I mean they receive stop work orders to stop cancer research.

    So when we say these cuts kill, it’s serious. It’s not hyperbole. And I think that that’s really important for folks to understand. And just one other thing I’ll say is, but not only in the STEM fields, why are they so obsessed with, for example, gender and queer studies in the humanities? Partially because they understand that when people study those fields, they expose how gender gets used as a political category to maintain state control using sexuality and kinship and labor. They understand that in the humanities, the research around race and around the real history of America. They understand that when people understand that, when people understand history, they’re like, oh, then they’re less vulnerable to some of the moves that they want to make and the ways that they want to, their policies harm people both here and abroad. And so I just think disabilities, they don’t want people studying disability studies and really understand how some of these market logics harm people who are disabled or people who are chronically ill. And then what that has to mean for health infrastructure because again, they want to reformulate this society and according to what profits, billionaires. So I think that when we look at these cuts, part of our battle is that, and I think what’s happening now in an unfortunate way is we’re seeing people come together around a real understanding of why it’s important for this research to continue, why it’s important for it to be protected from Elon Musk or people like RFK or whatever and what higher education really is.

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    Todd, Chenjerai, I want to ask if you could take us even further into your lifeworld and your experience of all this chaos that’s happening in higher ed right now at the hands of the Trump administration. We were talking in that first section about the scope of this attack. I want to ask if you could tell us about the experience of the attacks. How have you both personally been processing this as it’s been unfolding in your capacities as professors, but also as representatives and leaders of the AAUP? What are you hearing from your colleagues in the faculty? How are students responding to this and other members of the community?

    Chenjerai Kumanyika:

    Well, I guess I’ll jump in. There’s so much. One thing I’ll say is that there are Todd and a number of other leaders in organizations like Higher Ed, labor United, some people in a UP who are not necessarily positioned in the leadership in the way that we are now and and other folks who are working in a coalition which we now have called Labor for Higher Education. So many people and people at different AAUP locals were already in a fight about the direction higher education is going in. I mean, as someone who just kind of came into the academy around two, I mean as a professor, I started my first appointment around 2013. What I saw was I worked at universities where the whole faculty had been kind of casualized and really didn’t have the ability to speak up. And I saw what the effects of that were.

    I saw what they were living in fear because the way the contract structure had been set up, they kind of had to beg for their jobs every year. They didn’t have protections, they didn’t have the benefits they needed, and in the southern states, they really had real obstacles to really organizing around collective bargaining. So I saw what that meant for people though I saw what that meant. For example, what the custodial workers in university, they didn’t have a place they could really go to appeal and push back on things that the administration might be doing with them. And then I moved through to different institutions. I was at Rutgers for full disclosure briefly, and I saw kind of the opposite of what it means when you have a wall to wall union and what it means actually to go through those struggles and all those other kinds of things.

    So I just want to say that it was really interesting that so many of us were kind of in this battle. I was still kind of learning and getting involved with it when these cuts hit, what you saw was everything that we had already been talking about just kind of escalate to a whole new level and then with these new pieces involved. And for me, it looks like talking to colleagues who were doing HIV research or cancer research, I mean seeing them at an informal event and they’re just almost in tears because their whole research infrastructure, they have to figure out if they’re going to fire people. There’s a diverse array of postdoc students who’s not only their education but their jobs are in flux. They’re thinking about the people that they serve and they’re just in a panic state. And then I’m seeing people who put it is not easy to get an NEH grant or an NIH grant.

    You put a lot of work into doing that, and that work sustains both the communities and some of those institutions. And I’m just seeing people, some of these grants, for example, are grants that function at multiple institutions, you know what I’m saying? So they kind of helped to really create an infrastructure for people to do powerful, important research. A lot of research by the way, and this is I think also if you look at it is one way people tend to think about a place like Cornell, but you got to understand some of that research was in innovation. Some of it was even in national security stuff. So that’s the kind of stuff that I was seeing be people say, oh my God, how do I keep this work going? What do I do? Scrambling, panicking. And the idea that the Trump administration is doing this to somehow make America more competitive to protect working class vulnerable people is absurd.

    And then to talk about the DEI stuff that was coming down, I mean we’re kind of in the discussion now about the cuts. I would say. I mean it’s just fascinating and very clarifying to watch these folks try to just roll back a hundred years of civil rights progress in the most flagrant and obvious ways. No way I can say it. How as a journalist, your job usually is to try to translate something that’s not quite clear. This is so crystal clear. People see it. They see what you’re not allowed to talk about. They see who’s getting fired. And then the final thing I’ll say is that when it comes to the issue of the free to protest students who stood up on the issue of Palestine, I mean, I’ve been in meetings with colleagues who are talking about students and colleagues hiding in their apartment.

    People are being advised by their lawyers in to hide in their apartment because they’re not sure what’s going to happen if they come out. If there’s every time on the street I’m at NYU. But anytime those ice vehicles or certain kinds of police vehicles pull up, you just see a wave of terror go across the company snatching people off the street. And so to sort of try to function in every day in that kind of context and do the work that we want to do as a faculty member, I want to tell my colleagues and my students that it’s going to be okay, but the way that we can actually make it is to really organize. And it’s good we are organizing, but it’s horrifying.

    Todd Wolfson:

    Thank you. Change. I mean, I want to start where you have tough, and it doesn’t perfectly answer your question Max, but it just needs to be said here, which is the 60 to 70 years of divestment from higher ed and the fascist threats to higher ed in this moment are deeply entangled, and that’s something that needs to be clearly understood and discussed more. So divestment started at the moment when schools like the University of California system and CUNY were free. They were free in the seventies, in the sixties into the early seventies, and people of color were getting access to free higher ed for the first time or a highly subsidized higher ed for the first time in this country’s history. And in the same moment, those same universities around the country were the backbone of the sixties in the protests, whether it’s the protests against Vietnam or for the Civil Rights Movement, black Panther party, each one of these had the Berkeley free speech movement was deeply, universities were critical to them.

    And so at first it was a racialized and political attack on our universities that started in the sixties and seventies. Reagan was governor of California, and he said quite directly, we can’t let the working class get educated for free. That was said, and that led to divest from our institutions first in California. Again, Reagan was like, we got to do something about those radicals, radical hippies in Berkeley. And so they divested and they forced students to start paying for their higher ed. So that happened. And lo and behold, the right-wing attack on higher ed led to a full scale like neoliberal corporate kind of ideology within higher ed, where our institutions became more and more dependent on a corporate logic, a neoliberal logic to run themselves, which meant Chen drive’s point more contingent faculty, higher tuition rates higher and higher and higher tuition rates, 2 trillion student debt bureaucrats running our institutions, and importantly, mission drift.

    They don’t remember what the institution is for because they’re so tied to corporate America ideology. And so no longer are these institutions, the bedrock of a public system, a common good system. And so fast forward to the fascist attacks on our institution, which we’re outlining right now. They had already hollowed out the core. They had already hollowed out the cord. And that’s why Columbia bows and knee in one second flat. That’s why our presidents go down to Washington DC when they’re called by the Educational Workforce Committee, and they cannot respond with a clear vision of what higher ed is about, and they get end run by right-wing ideologues in the Senate and in Congress. And so it’s really important to just flag that there’s a deeply entwined relationship between fascism, right-wing ideology, authoritarianism and neoliberalism, which isn’t really well talked about, which is what has put us in this situation.

    I’m sorry, I just want to go into that. It’s got to be flagged. Note to your question. It’s like I have never seen a climate of fear like this in my life anywhere, anywhere in my experience, we’re getting hundreds of emails every single day from faculty, from staff, from students. I need a safe place to say to Chen’s point, I need a safe place to stay. That’s on half of our discussions right now is people need safe places to stay. I don’t know if my research project is going to be cut. I’m not going to get tenure. I’m going to have to change careers because a loss of funding, I’m going to be set home and I’m not going to be able to come back and finish my degree. These are the kind of discussions we’re having, and it’s not like once in a while.

    It’s every single day, multiple times a day. The fear is palpable and it’s purposeful. It’s purposeful, right? They’re trying to destabilize us, they’re trying to make us fearful, and they’re trying to get us all to bow down to what is a fascist threat to our institutions. So I mean, that’s the situation we’re in, but I’m seeing something else too, and this is what gives me a lot of hope, is that fear is turning into anger and that anger is turning into action and we need more of that. And we need the people who are the least vulnerable, US-born citizens, people with tenure to stand up and step into this battle full throated not only for ourselves but for all of us, for higher education, for democracy, but also for the vulnerable students who dared to speak out for a free Palestine and now are getting dragged away in handcuffs by ice agents. It’s on us to do that and continue building that power.

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    Guys, we were just talking about how the sort of long path to turning universities into their kind of contemporary neoliberal corporate ties, versions of themselves like that all predated these attacks. And it has, as you both pointed out, made institutions of higher ed, especially vulnerable to these sorts of attacks from the Trump administration. I wanted to kind of just tug on that thread a bit more by asking about the workforce and what the campus community looks like after decades of neoliberal reforms because this was something that I dealt with as a graduate student and political organizer at the University of Michigan during the first Trump administration. We are trying to rally members of the campus community and in so doing had to come up against the fact that you have students who, unlike the student activists of the 1960s, who now having to make the calculation of whether or not they could afford to get suspended or even miss a class because they are paying tens of thousands of dollars for this tuition.

    So that right there is already a complicating factor in the political minds of people on campus, especially students. But you also have—Chenjerai mentioned the ways that faculty in higher ed over the past 40 years, we used to have around 75% of the faculty be tenured or tenure track and only 25% being non-tenure track and contingent faculty, adjuncts, lecturers, so on and so forth. That ratio is completely flipped and the vast bulk of the teaching workforce in higher ed is made up of so-called contingent faculty, and that puts a lot more pressure on those faculty members to not get involved in political activity for fear that their paychecks and livelihoods and professional reputations will be tarnished and they’ll be out of a job. So these are sort of just some of the realities that one has to deal with trying to organize on a campus in the 21st century. I wanted to ask if you could just for folks listening talk about that more and what it looks like from the faculty side. So as you all on your campuses are trying to respond to this moment, what role is the AAUP playing in that? For folks listening, could you just say what the AAUP is, but also what the differences between say a tenured professor and an adjunct professor and their involvement in this fight right now?

    Todd Wolfson:

    So I’ll just lay out what the AAUP is a real brief. So AAUP is over a hundred years old. John Dewey, one of the great US scholars was one of the founders of it. And when it was first, and this is why it’s a complicated organization, when it was first established, it was a professional association for faculty, and it probably was like that for its first 50 years. But in 1970 or about that time, it also started unionizing and building collective bargaining units. And so it is been a layered history of first a professional association layered on top of that a union, a national union for faculty in particular. And so today it is both of those things. But from my vantage as the president who comes out of a strong union at Rutgers, I think in this moment in time, it needs to act less like a professional association and more like a union.

    It needs to build power, it needs to organize and it needs to fight, fight not only up against the threats we face right now with the Trump administration, but also fight to reimagine what higher education is for and about, which I’d love to get to, but I’ll say one other thing about this and then quickly talk about faculty and then kick it to Chen, which is we have 500 chapters across this country on every type of university in community colleges, two year institutions at four year publics, four year privates in Ivy League institutions, every type of institution, out of those 500, about 400 of our chapters are called advocacy chapters. They don’t have collective bargaining rights. And about 100 are unions. And an important thing for your listeners to know is private. In private universities, faculty, tenured faculty do not have the right to unionize, but in public universities they do.

    So it’s a strange bifurcation. And so there are a few places where faculty have unions in private institutions, but almost the entirety of tenure stream faculty that are unionized are unionized our public institutions. And so then I’ll just say one other thing for folks to know, which is, and unfortunately a UP used to primarily cater to tenure stream faculty, our leadership, we do not believe in that. We believe in, everyone fights together, wall to wall, coast to coast. And so we’re really fighting to reframe that. And it’s not just about faculty. We need to build with faculty. We need to build with our postdocs, our grad workers. We need to build with our undergrads, we need to build with our custodial staff, professional staff, tech across the board, our medical workers. That’s the only way forward. That’s the only way we build the power necessary to fight back.

    And the last thing I’ll say is that the professor, the faculty in this country, you flagged it and it’s important to know it is not what they say it is. The majority, at least the plurality of faculty are contingent. Most of them are adjunct faculty, which means part-time. And most of them are applying for their jobs semester after semester every semester with no benefits, no zero benefits. And so we have adjunct faculty that are teaching six classes in a semester at six different institutions up and down the eastern seaboard. So the teacher is one day in a school in upstate New York and the next day teaching in Philadelphia. That’s the situation. And they’re lucky to scrape by with 60 grand a year and no benefits. So the story they tell about what the professoriate is and the reality of the professoriate couldn’t be more different. And it’s important to understand that when we think about our institutions today. But I’ll let Chenjerai get in there and talk a little bit more about that.

    Chenjerai Kumanyika:

    Yeah, I just think I want to go back to something Todd says, we have to, I can’t help, but we make this a little historical. This is not actually not unprecedented. And it’s really important for people to understand that this is part of a historical trajectory that has to do with neoliberalism. I was reading recently and talking actually with Ryan Leventhal incredible book called Burdened. One of the things that lays out is that in 1979, some conservatives got together at the Heritage Foundation and were like, we’re going to start to lay out a plan. And they laid out a plan called a series what ultimately became a series of publications called Mandate for Leadership. They launched the first one in 1980. And that did a lot of things. Mandate for leadership was broad, it didn’t just focus on higher education. But actually the first thing you got to understand is Project 2025 was a part in that series.

    So people talk about project 25, like 2025, it came out of nowhere. No, it was a part of things that started, and it’s not like they never had a chance to implement it. The sort of attacks cuts, similar types of things that were implemented that were sort of planned out in this kind of early eighties version of the project 2025 were actually implemented other Reagan administration. Now, one of the many things that did was it really gutted federal support for higher education, including things like student loans and actually transformed a lot of, I mean I would say including student support. Because one of the things that happened during that period was that a lot of the federal grants, I think in the early, if you would’ve looked going back to the forties, only like 20% of the federal money that came in was targeted toward a loan structure where people would have to repay it right after the eighties where they realized that they could actually turn student debt into a product.

    It became like a centerpiece. But that was just one of many ways in which you started to see this divestment of states of the federal government from public education support. And so yes, to your point, that has meant that all these people, that has meant that our faculty, so many of the faculty are insecure. And I want to be clear, the reason, part of why I bring that up is that they were very intentional about the idea that people who are insecure are going to be less political. People who are in debt are going to be less political. They’re not going to be sure, and they’re going to have to make very careful decisions about how they can fight if they can fight. And some of it is even just being overloaded with work. And as you try to pay back this debt as you try to do it, you might not even have time to get your mind around it, if that sounds familiar to anybody.

    And for this reason, this is one of the ways I just want to be clear, that these attacks don’t just touch people currently in the academy, they touch both the cuts to funding. I mean, I’m hearing from parents who are unsure what disciplines their folks should go into. So they’re actually trying to shape it where at a time when we need massive amount of doctors, we have emerging health threats that are happening. People are like, I don’t know if I want to go be a doctor because I’m seeing the funding being cut at the elite places where I would’ve done that. So it affects things that level. And then the funding available affects families who have to say, am I going to be able to get that support I need? So how do we fight? So that’s more and more people are being drawn into this fight. In this way, you’re seeing all these people being attacked and in a way they are kind of taking a step toward building our coalition for us because I think they’re overreaching. When you hear all about all these people being affected, all these people feeling insecure.

    For me, that’s the coalition that we want to organize. Now, on a note of organizing, let me say a few things. Higher education is, on the one hand, higher education is any other kind of workplace. You have some people who are very engaged who’ve been pulling their weight, who’ve been leading the fight, and you have some people who maybe are just focused on their jobs and haven’t yet seen themselves as organizers. But I would say in this situation, what we’re trying to do across workplaces, including, and what our organizations are doing is inviting people in and saying, Hey, see how these battles that you’re fighting at an individual level, at a department level, you know what I mean? Whether you’re a parent, whether you’re a community member who doesn’t want to see that medical research cut, see how this is part of a larger fight?

    And where I think higher education interestingly, isn’t a place to lead is that the way I’ve been learning from leaders like Todd, leaders from Labor for higher ed, Hulu, even leaders at a FT, right? People who have a long history of organizing labor has a set of strategies that we can use that is not just the same as people coming out into the street. I was excited to see people at our days of action all over the country. I was excited to see people at the hands-off protests, hundreds of thousands of people in the street, but coming out into the street is not enough. We need a repertoire of strategies which include things that can create real leverage, things people cannot ignore. And so in a way, what the a UP is leading is we’re actually showing people that repertoire of strategies. We have a legal strategy, incredible legal counsel has been rolling out lawsuits that are moving through the system.

    We know that the legal strategy by itself is not going to be the thing that does it, but it buys us time. It slows things down and it shows people that we know how to throw a punch. And at the same time where we’re building the power that we need to take real labor action, we’re doing educations and teachings. So in that way, what I’ve seen is that there’s times when people don’t necessarily know really what I do as a professor or they’re like, oh, you offering a professor in the books? Now I’m seeing people who are outside of the academy saying, we love the way that higher education is leading at a time when folks don’t know what to do, or maybe they don’t know what to do beyond just simply coming out into the street. Which again, I encourage you ain’t going to hear me be one of these people talking about people.

    Well, I don’t. The demands weren’t clear enough. No, listen, this is a time honestly, to think like an organizer, not like, I’m just going to say it, not like a social media influencer. Social media influencers build currency because you just point out, you dunk on people. Look, if there’s somebody who voted for Trump and they see it’s wrong now and they’re like, I want to get involved in changing it. I don’t like what I’m seeing. I want to welcome that person in. I’m not here to dunk on you. I don’t get nothing but dunking on you on clicks and likes, but if you join our coalition and become part of it and spread the move to your people, we get stronger and we can fight this. And that’s what we’re trying to show people our version of that with the way that we’re organizing. And again, I’m learning this in a way, I’m newer to this than other people, but it’s really exciting to me to feel like there’s something we can do.

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    Todd, Chenjerai, I have so much more I want to talk to you about, but I know we only have a few more minutes here before we have to wrap up. And so I want to make them count. I wanted to, in this last 10 minutes or so, focus in on three key questions. One, if the Trump administration is not stopped, thwarted, frustrated in its efforts to remake higher education in this country, what is the end game there? What are our colleges and universities and our higher ed system going to look like if they get what they want? The next question is, and then on top of that, the situation that people are in is needing to defend institutions that already had deep problems with them as we’ve been talking about here. And you can’t just galvanize by saying, we got to defend the norms and institutions that were already in place. That’s the same university system that saddled people like me with hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt that we’re not exactly chomping at the bit to save that system in its current form. So what is the alternate vision? What is the future of higher education that y’all are fighting for in rallying people around? Then the last question is how do we get there? What can folks listening do to be part of this and why should they get involved before it’s too late?

    Todd Wolfson:

    Look, I mean, I think it’s really clear what the Trump administration’s goals are here. And they’ve taken this out of hundreds of years, a hundred years of history, of authoritarian and fascist regimes. And one of the key sectors that these regimes always target is higher education, always. I think most recently it is Victor Orban and Hungary. But you can peel back our history and you’ll see it has happened before in many different moments when fascist forces are on the march. And so the reason why higher ed is targeted is because it’s an independent formation that can offer not always an imperfect, but can offer a counter political ideology and it needs to come under control of the state because otherwise it is a danger to the state’s ability to push forward. Fascism in particular an educated populace. And so there is a real goal here at the biggest level to slow down enrollment numbers take over the way a higher education is done so that we are not a counterforce to fascism in this country.

    And so it is a clear path towards that. This is not the only institution that they’re going to target and go after, but it’s one of the key institutions that they will go after and target labor’s another, which is why labor unions in higher ed are at such a critical cross hair. Another is college students and protests from college students who have always led this country have always been the mirror of showing a mirror to us and showing us what we look like and been a moral beacon for us. And so there are real aspects of higher ed that are really, really dangerous or threatening to a Trump administration and what they want to achieve. And so if they get rid of higher ed or they take control of it, I think it is a step towards, it’s not the entirety of, but a critical step towards authoritarianism.

    We could call it fascism, we could call it post fascism, we could call it an I liberal democracy. There’s a lot of ideas going around about what exactly we’re in, and I think it’s a complex merger of a host of things, but I think wherever they’re trying to go, it means less voice, less power for all working people and getting rid of the higher ed is a way to get there. And so I’ll just say two other things in this short time to you, which is one, higher ed has never been perfect, right? Let’s just be clear about some of its worst moments in history. Our great land grant institutions, which are great, one of the great things about America, American higher ed system, which Lincoln dubbed the people’s colleges or along those lines we’re all based on taking off stolen land from indigenous people.

    That’s clear. That happened. And those same indigenous native folks didn’t get to enjoy and use those universities to advance their lives. So they merely were extractive from the people who are here first, but then also post World War ii, the GI program, black people didn’t get access to it the same way white soldiers coming back did. And so always at the heart of this institution has been racism and classism and sexism has been coded into our higher ed. So we should be clear about that. And we don’t want to build a new higher ed that replicates those problems. We need to reimagine it, but we need to reimagine it building off what we have now. We can’t just say tomorrow we want something wholly new. We have to take steps. People are getting their livelihoods from these institutions. They’re finding ways to have social mobility through these institutions.

    So we need to build through them. And what our vision is is a fully funded public higher education system fully funded. Nobody should be going to college and coming out in debt, nobody. And there needs to be an end to student debt. We need to end the debt that has already been accrued. That’s better for all the people who have that debt, but it’s also better for our economy writ large for you, max. We got to get rid of your debt too. And then we have to make sure that people who work on our campuses work with dignity. Right now, that is not the case. Too many people, as we already discussed, are working across six institutions, scraping together a living, and we have to end that. We have to make sure everyone who works can have long-term dignified employment. And we have to make sure that we fully fund and increase our funding to our HBCUs, our minority serving institutions, our tribal colleges and universities.

    And we forgot to say this, the attack on the Department of Education defund those institutions. So that also is another line of attack that I forgot to mention. So we want more funding for those groups and we want more funding for science, more funding for arts. And so that’s the kind of higher ed we want to build. We want to build that higher ed as one which has shared governance so that the students and the faculty and the staff of our institutions govern our institutions, not business bureaucrats that now control them. So that’s a vision we want to put forward. And the last thing I want to say is we have a way to get there, but the first step has got to be responding to Trump. We can’t build the vision of higher ed that we all want without first standing up to fascism.

    And so Chenjerai said this, and my heart sings when he says this because we’re on the same page. Protests are great. They are not going to stop fascism. They will not stop fascism. The courts are great. Thank God they’ve done a good job for us so far in holding up some of the worst aspects of Trump’s illegal moves. They will not stop fascism. We are going to have to scale up Our organizing higher ed is going to have to build with other sectors, federal workers, K 12 workers, healthcare workers, immigrant workers, all under attack in different ways. And we’re going to have to figure out the demands we need to make and the militancy we’re going to have to take the militant moves we’re going to have to take to force them to stop. And that’s going to mean risk, but there is no other way forward. And so that’s what a U p’s committed to. That’s what labor for higher ed’s committed to, and that’s where we’re trying to go and we need other sectors to join us to get there.

    Chenjerai Kumanyika:

    Yeah, I mean Todd really said it. I would just add two points to that. I mean, when you see what’s being cut and what’s being attacked, you’re getting a glimpse of the future of what it is. And you could go to places like Hungary, you could go to a lot of places where these things are a little bit more developed and see what this looks like there. And I guarantee it’s not something that we want. But there’s two points I want to make, which is that one of the things about worker power right across sectors is that workers when they’re in control can say, this is what we want the institutions that we work in to do, and this is what we don’t want them to do. Workers can govern the direction of institutions. When you see Amazon workers and tech workers who are stepping up saying, we don’t want to be involved in making technology that’s supporting genocide, or that’s just supporting oppression or data extraction here at home, like that’s worker power workers saying, let’s get together and dictate what happens as opposed to administrator or I would just say sort of like billionaire executive power, which is organized around a completely different set of priorities.

    And the same is true in the academy. One of the dangers is that if you look at the various org parts of labor at the university, I mean folks are also saying, this is what we want our universities to be on the right side of history, doing powerful, important work. We do not want them to be involved in suppression. And if you don’t like what you see at Columbia where you see them bending the knee and then you see them actually becoming complicit in a way teaching the Trump administration what they can do, what they’re allowed to do, that’s a consequence of not having sufficient worker power.

    And you’re going to see more of that. So you’re imagining not just what’s going to get removed, but now imagine that universities are really deployed as an arm of fascism and in all its different formation. So that’s one thing that I think is at stake. The second thing I would really bring up is that higher education battles are so important because everything that we really want to try to make this world a better place is interwoven with higher education. So if we want to defeat the urgent threat of climate change, that takes research people who are finding the solutions, right? Precisely the kind of research that’s being taken. So that’s not just about what’s happening at universities, it’s about the climate stakes for everybody. And most of the people that affects are not in the university, but the university research and making sure you’re having real research on that is central to that.

    When it talks about when you talk about healthcare, fighting for a world where we do have healthcare for all and understanding what that healthcare needs to look like, the university is crucial for that. Todd already mentioned the NIH was responsible for almost, I think basically all the therapies that came out that were useful in the last decade, really, right? So you can’t talk about healthcare without talking about it when you talk about labor and this emerging regime where labor protections and technology trying to understand what is this actually going to look like? People producing real research like our colleague Vina Dubal, who’s looking at what actually is happening with these algorithms for real and how are those algorithms going to affect things as these people try to uberize the entire planet and subject them people and create a situation where people don’t have benefits and all that, that research is also being done at the university.

    So working, I just laid out three right there. Working conditions, healthcare, climate change, and we could go on, what about art? What about the things that bring us joy in life? You know what I’m saying? Where people have the room outside of the corporate factory to actually explore and produce wonderful things, art and music and culture, all those things. So to me, what’s at stake is literally that future and as higher education workers, it’s up to us to make sure that as Todd is saying, we want to fight for the conditions of education, that it really is working for the common good, but also we have to fight back this monster. And I’m terrified right now. I got to say, it is okay to say you’re scared by what I’m seeing, but I’m also encouraged. And when you’re scared, you got to lock arms with your people and walk forward anyway. And that’s what I’m seeing people stepping up and doing.

    Todd Wolfson:

    We have actions on April 17th throughout the countries, I think over about a hundred institutions across the country are taking part in our April 17th actions. So please come out or organize your own action. It’s being driven by the Coalition for Action in Higher ed, which is a lot of amazing A UP leaders. We will also be engaging in mayday organizing. And then this summer we want you to come to your a UP chapter, your UAW local, your CWA local, your A FT local, your NEA local, your SEIU local, whatever it is. However you can plug in. And then you need to reach out to us. We’re going to do a summer of training that’s going to prepare us for what needs to get done in the fall and we need every single higher ed worker. And one other thing, if you aren’t member of a UP, now is the time to become a member and join us in this fight. And if you don’t have a chapter, you need to build a chapter on your campus and we will be there with you every step of the way. We have a campaign called Organize Every Campus, and we will help you build your campus chapter and build your power so you can fight back at the campus level while we collectively fight back at the state and national level together. So join AAUP today. If you’re already in a union, get involved in your union and we’ll see you on the front lines.

    Maximillian Alvarez:

    Alright, gang. That’s going to wrap things up for us this week. Once again, I want to thank our guests, professors, Todd Wolfson and Chenjerai Kumanyika of the American Association of University Professors, and I want to thank you all for listening and I want to thank you for caring. We’ll see you all back here next week for another episode of Working People. And if you cannot wait that long, then please go explore all the great work we’re doing at the Real News Network where we do grassroots journalism that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Sign up for the Real News newsletter so you never miss a story and help us do more work like this by going to the real news.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. I promise you it really makes a difference. I’m Maximillian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other, solidarity forever.

    This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

  • Dara Lind on Criminalizing Immigrants

     


    Right-click here to download this episode (“Save link as…”).

     

    Intercept: Support Us Search for: Politics Justice War on Gaza Technology Environment Immigration Support Us Special Investigations Voices Podcasts Videos Documents About Contact Us More Ways to Donate Impact & Reports Join Newsletter Jobs Become a Source © THE INTERCEPT ALL RIGHTS RESERVED Terms of Use Privacy Politics Justice War on Gaza Technology Environment Immigration About Support Us Trump Appears to Be Targeting Muslim and “Non-White” Students for Deportation

    Intercept (4/8/25)

    This week on CounterSpin: We’re learning from Jonah Valdez at the Intercept that the Trump administration is now revoking visas and immigration statuses of hundreds of international students under the Student Exchange and Visitor Program—not just those active in pro-Palestinian advocacy, or those with criminal records of any sort. It is, says one immigration attorney, “a concerted effort to go after people who are from countries and religions that the Trump administration wants to get out of the country.”

    It is disheartening to see a report like one in Newsweek, about how Trump “loves the idea” of sending US citizens to prisons outside of US jurisdiction, that feels it has to start by explaining “Why It Matters.” But things as they are, we have to be grateful for what straight reporting we get—at a time when some outlets are signing on to shut up if it buys them a moment of peace, which it won’t—and a moment in which staying informed, paying attention, learning what’s happening and how we can stop it, is what we have to work with.

    Dara Lind is senior fellow at the American Immigration Council. She joins us this week on the show.

     

    Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at coverage of the Hands Off! protests.

  • Trump Admin Lists Many Living Immigrants as Dead in Social Security Database

    The Trump administration this week reportedly classified thousands of immigrants living in the United States as dead in a Social Security database in an effort to force them out of the country, a scheme that was met with furious uproar from advocates and lawmakers. By entering the names and Social Security numbers of roughly 6,000 immigrants into Social Security’s “death master file…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • SCOTUS Orders Trump Admin to Return Man Wrongfully Deported to Salvadoran Prison

    The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday issued a ruling with no noted dissents affirming a federal judge’s order compelling President Donald Trump’s administration to enable the stateside return of Kilmar Abrego García, a Salvadoran man wrongfully deported to a notorious prison in his native country. “The rule of law won today,” said Andrew Rossman, one of Abrego García’s lawyers.

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • From Lollapalooza to Detention Camps: Meet the Tent Company Making a Fortune Off Trump’s Deportation Plans

    by Jeff Ernsthausen, Mica Rosenberg and Avi Asher-Schapiro

    ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

    In June 2005, a former employee from the Federal Emergency Management Agency toured the grounds of the Bonnaroo music festival in rural Tennessee. He wasn’t there to see the headliners, which included Dave Matthews Band and the lead singer of the popular jam band Phish. He was there to meet the guys setting up the toilets for the throng of psychedelics-infused campers in attendance: Richard Stapleton, a construction industry veteran, and his business partner Robert Napior, a onetime convicted pot grower, who specialized in setting up music festivals.

    The meeting, described in court documents, offered the pair’s fledgling company, Deployed Resources, a key introduction to players doing government contract work for the Department of Homeland Security, the agency that oversees not only the nation’s disaster responses but also its immigration system. Over the next two decades, Stapleton and Napior hired more than a dozen former agency insiders as they turned their small-time logistics business, which had helped support outdoor festivals like Lollapalooza, into a contracting giant by building camps for a completely different use: detaining immigrants arriving at the U.S.-Mexico border.

    Now, as the government races to carry out President Donald Trump’s campaign promise of mass deportations, Deployed is shifting its business once more — from holding people who are trying to enter the country to detaining those the government is seeking to ship out.

    In Trump’s second term in office, the government is poised to spend tens of billions of dollars on immigration detention, including unprecedented plans to hold immigrants arrested in the U.S. in massive tent camps on military bases. One recently published request for contract proposals said the Department of Homeland Security could spend up to $45 billion over the next several years on immigrant detention. The plans have set off a gold rush among contractors. All this spending is unfolding at the same time the government has made sweeping cuts to federal agencies and shed other contracts.

    Among those seeking a windfall is Deployed Resources, which, along with its sister company, Deployed Services, has adapted to shifting government policies and priorities in immigration enforcement.

    Starting in 2016, to help respond to spikes in immigrant crossings that had periodically overwhelmed border stations, Deployed began setting up tent encampments to ease the overcrowding. These temporary structures served as short-term emergency waystations, which several former officials said provided flexibility that the U.S. needed. Many of those arriving — including families and unaccompanied children — were turning themselves in, hoping to be released into the U.S. to apply for asylum. In all, the company has been awarded more than $4 billion in government contracts building and operating border tents, according to an analysis of contracting data by ProPublica.

    Since taking office in January, Trump has cracked down on asylum, pushing border crossings to record lows. Last month, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection said it no longer needed the tent facilities run by Deployed.

    Instead, ProPublica found, the military will now be contracting with Deployed to use one of those border facilities to house people arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

    In March, one of the company’s tent complexes in El Paso, Texas, was handed over to ICE, CBP and ICE spokespeople said. In an unusual move, the Trump administration tapped funds from the Department of Defense to pay Deployed for the facility, citing the president’s declaration of an emergency at the southern border, a DOD spokesperson said. The nearly $140 million contract wasn’t posted publicly and was given to Deployed as the “incumbent contractor,” the spokesperson said, without further explaining why ICE would use military funds. ICE said it started transferring detainees to the site — which currently has the capacity to house 1,000 adults — on March 10.

    As immigration raids escalate, detention space in the country’s existing network of permanent ICE prisons is filling up. There are currently around 48,000 immigrants locked up across the country, levels not seen since 2019. Deportations are happening at a slower pace than ICE arrests, according to data shared with ProPublica, so the administration is turning to companies that can quickly set up facilities.

    As it looks to expand its capacity, the agency “is exploring all options to meet its current and future detention requirements,” said ICE spokesman Miguel Alvarez.

    Yet using tents to house thousands of people arrested by ICE is fundamentally different from using them to house recent border crossers, many of whom weren’t supposed to be held for more than a few days, seven current and former DHS officials who served in both Republican and Democratic administrations told ProPublica.

    They said it would be the first time these tent camps would be used for ICE detainees in the U.S. and that it was unclear how they could be constructed to meet the agency’s basic health and safety requirements. These include separate areas for men and women and dedicated zones for families, as well as space to segregate those who are potentially violent, and private meeting areas for lawyers and their clients. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not directly involved in the contracts.

    “People that you’ve ripped out of the community, people you’ve arrested, people who want to get back to their children, people who are scared, are going to behave differently than the border crossing population,” said one former ICE official. “You have a lot more fear in the population.”

    “It would take a remarkable degree of innovation from a contractor,” said another former DHS official, adding, “It would also be incredibly expensive.”

    At a border security conference this week, ICE Acting Assistant Director for Operations Support Ralph Ferguson said that Deployed Resources was modifying the CBP tents in El Paso by adding more rigid structures inside, which he said would make them more secure. Deployed got an additional contract for up to $5 million to provide unarmed guards at the El Paso facility, according to a public notice posted in late March.

    The company did not respond to requests for comment. On its website, Deployed says it is “dedicated to safely and efficiently providing transparent facility support and logistical services, anytime, anywhere” and describes itself as “the first-choice provider” for government contracts.

    Deployed was also one of the companies interested in operating an immigrant detention camp on the nearby Fort Bliss military base, according to government documents obtained by ProPublica and interviews with people familiar with the contracting process. ICE was seeking proposals from vendors last month for a 1,000-bed camp that could grow to 5,000 beds, housing women and men, including those deemed high security risks, as well as families with small children. The contractor would be responsible for separating those groups and preventing escapes, documents reviewed by ProPublica show.

    The plans are “a recipe for disaster,” said Eunice Hyunhye Cho, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Prison Project.

    “All of the problems that we see with ICE detention writ large, like the abuse of force, the sexual assault, medical neglect, the lack of food, lack of access to counsel, lack of due process rights, lack of access to telephones — the list goes on — all of those things are going to be vastly more complicated in a system where you are literally setting up people in tents that are surrounded by barbed wire and armed military personnel,” Cho said.

    Connections and Contracts

    Since 2016, Deployed Resources has enjoyed a virtual monopoly on providing CBP with immigration tent structures to help with sudden influxes of immigrants. During the first Trump administration, the contractor set up temporary tent courts for people forced to wait in Mexico for their asylum hearings under a policy known as the Migrant Protection Protocols. The company also earned hundreds of millions of dollars during the Biden years operating emergency detention facilities for unaccompanied minors that were funded by the Department of Health and Human Services.

    Though the value of Deployed Resources isn’t publicly known, county real estate records attest to the wealth its owners, Stapleton and Napior, have amassed in the detention business.

    In the spring of 2019, shortly after the company landed what was then its biggest immigration contract — a $92 million no-bid award to run two tent facilities in Texas — Stapleton purchased a $5.7 million condo in Naples, Florida. Nearly three years and more than $1 billion in contracts later, he upgraded to a $15 million home a block away from the shore. Napior snapped up a $9 million beachside property near Sarasota, Florida, in 2023. Stapleton did not respond to requests for comment. Reached by phone, Napior said he did not comment to the press and then hung up.

    After the meeting at Bonnaroo in 2005, Deployed later hired the former FEMA employee who had checked out its facilities there and to win emergency management contracting work at the agency before moving into immigration detention. In court filings, Deployed said that the meeting did not lead to its FEMA work.

    Deployed went on to hire additional former DHS officials over the years, expanding its connections to the federal agencies with which it does business. With a second Trump administration poised to crack down further on the flow of immigrants to the southern border — a potential threat to Deployed’s core business — the company hired several former ICE leaders, according to online searches and current and former officials.

    A month after Trump’s victory, former ICE field office director Sean Ervin announced he was joining Deployed as a senior adviser for strategic initiatives. He had previously overseen removal operations across Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina. The head of field operations for ICE Miami, Michael Meade — an 18-year agency veteran — also joined Deployed that month, according to their profiles on LinkedIn. Meade and Ervin did not respond to requests for comment.

    Deployed has continued to win federal business even after the spending on the company’s contracts was criticized by government watchdogs and a whistleblower.

    A review by Congress’ Government Accountability Office of one no-bid CBP contract that the first Trump administration awarded to Deployed found that the company’s 2,500-person facility in Tornillo, Texas, averaged just 30 detainees a night in the fall of 2019 and never held more than 68 during the five-month period it was open. It also found that CBP paid Deployed millions for meals it didn’t need to feed people it wasn’t holding. Deployed agreed to reimburse $250,000 for meals not delivered, the GAO said.

    A separate whistleblower lawsuit in New Hampshire brought by a former DHS official who worked for Deployed accuses the company of cutting corners on training its staff to detect and report sexual abuse of children in facilities it set up to house unaccompanied minors during the Biden administration. In court filings, Deployed said it “vigorously disputes the allegations” and has moved to dismiss the suit.

    Construction crews work on an immigrant holding facility in Tornillo, Texas, in 2019. Deployed Resources was contracted to build and provide support services for the 2,500-person detention center, but it closed in 2020 after months of low occupancy. (Jose Luis Gonzalez/Reuters)

    Last year, Dan Bishop, a former Republican congressman from North Carolina, held up a Deployed Services contract in Greensboro, North Carolina, as an example of waste during a hearing on unaccompanied migrant children. The company was paid nearly $40 million to help operate a facility for immigrant children, Bishop said, but it stood empty for over two years.

    Deployed nonetheless had workers there full time, according to interviews with three former employees familiar with the facility, tasking them with playacting as if they were providing care. Case managers invented case details and Deployed workers would role-play as students in classrooms, even asking for permission to go to the bathroom, according to the former Deployed workers and social media posts of former workers describing the surreal situation.

    “I have no idea why they were doing that with government money,” said one former case manager, who recalled inventing elaborate backstories for fictional children, filling out make-believe statements and other paperwork for hours each day. The case manager spent about a year in Greensboro, living in housing paid for by Deployed from its government contract. Deployed did not respond to requests for comment about its Greensboro contract.

    Now, with even more money to be spent on immigration detention, Deployed is just one of the companies hoping to benefit. In addition to Fort Bliss more than 10 military sites around the country are being considered for ICE detention facilities, according to a DHS document shared with ProPublica. The New York Times previously reported on elements of the plan.

    The Fort Bliss contracting process has proceeded mostly out of public view, and it’s not clear if the project would go forward or fall under the larger $45 billion plan to expand immigration detention. In March, representatives from at least 10 companies, including Deployed Resources, toured Fort Bliss with DHS officials to survey the site, said two people familiar with the visit. Also there were private prison giants The GEO Group and CoreCivic, the sources said.

    The GEO Group’s leadership and allied political action groups donated more than $1 million to Trump’s reelection effort, according to a review by the Project on Government Oversight, a nonpartisan Washington watchdog group. On its most recent earnings call, GEO’s CEO said Trump’s immigration agenda was an “unprecedented opportunity” for the firm. CoreCivic — which donated $500,000 to Trump’s inauguration committee — has also spoken about the business opportunities. After Trump’s election, stock prices for both companies jumped.

    CoreCivic said it is in “regular contact” with government agencies “to understand their changing needs” but said that it does not comment on contracts it is seeking. Its contribution to inauguration events was “consistent with our past practice of civic participation” supporting both parties. The GEO Group did not respond to a request for comment.

    Deployed Services has largely eschewed political donations, sticking to its strategy — also used by GEO and CoreCivic — of hiring former high-ranking government officials.

    A few weeks ago Deployed scored another high-profile ICE hire: Marlen Pineiro joined Deployed after 40 years in government, including more than a decade in ICE’s Senior Executive Service, according to her LinkedIn profile. At a border security conference this week, where several former high-ranking DHS employees hired by Deployed were gathered among industry vets and Trump immigration officials, Pineiro declined an interview request from a ProPublica reporter.

    But on LinkedIn, the congratulations rolled in. The acting head of ICE under Trump, Todd Lyons, posted: “Great news.” Two other senior ICE officials who had also recently joined Deployed commented: “Welcome aboard.”

    “Let’s sail away,” Pineiro replied. “Woohooo see you soon.”

    Note: ProPublica analyzed transaction-level contract data from usaspending.gov for this story. Contract amounts reported are federal obligations over the life of a contract or group of contracts. In the case of the recently announced Department of Defense award to Deployed Resources, the contract is new and worth up to $140 million.

    Perla Trevizo contributed reporting and Kirsten Berg contributed research.

    This post was originally published on ProPublica.

  • Mahmoud Khalil’s Immigration Status Will Be Determined Friday

    Mahmoud Khalil’s immigration hearings began in Louisiana on April 8. Supporters who tried to observe the proceedings virtually were not allowed in.

    ABC News reported that during this hearing, Judge Jamee Comans determined that the Trump administration has 24 hours to provide evidence of allegations they’ve made to justify Khalil’s deportation. The administration has made bogus claims that Khalil poses a threat to national security. Once Khalil’s team has reviewed and responded to whatever information the Trump administration provides, Comans will decide at another hearing this Friday if Khalil can stay in the United States.

    The post Mahmoud Khalil’s Immigration Status Will Be Determined Friday appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Trump Border Czar: ICE’s Word Is Enough to Prove Someone’s a Gang Member

    Tom Homan, President Donald Trump’s so-called “border czar,” has said that nothing more than the word of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent is needed to prove that a noncitizen living in the U.S. is a gang member, and thus subject to deportation. Trump signed an executive order earlier this year asserting his right to use the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport immigrants…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • DHS Announces It’s Surveilling Immigrants’ Social Media for “Antisemitism”

    The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has announced that it is monitoring immigrants’ social media accounts for supposed “antisemitism” — a seeming code word for speech criticizing Israel’s U.S.-backed occupation of Palestine and genocide of Palestinians. The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced the initiative in a press release on Wednesday, saying that it is…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Acting IRS Chief Will Reportedly Resign Over Taxpayer Data Sharing Deal With ICE

    The acting commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service is reportedly expected to resign over a new agreement that would allow the tax agency to give immigration authorities access to highly sensitive data to aid U.S. President Donald Trump’s lawless mass deportation campaign. Numerous outlets reported late Tuesday that Acting IRS Commissioner Melanie Krause and other top agency officials…

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    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Supreme Court Lets Trump Continue Using Alien Enemies Act for Deportations

    On Monday evening, the U.S Supreme Court ruled that, at least for now, the Trump administration can continue invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport migrants. The ruling comes after President Donald Trump issued an executive order last month asserting his right to use the law. The ruling wasn’t a total win for Trump, however, as judges included in their order stipulations on the…

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    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • “They Don’t Care About Civil Rights”: Trump’s Shuttering of DHS Oversight Arm Freezes 600 Cases, Imperils Human Rights

    by J. David McSwane and Hannah Allam

    ProPublica is a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up to receive our biggest stories as soon as they’re published.

    On Feb. 10, more than a dozen Department of Homeland Security officials joined a video conference to discuss an obscure, sparsely funded program overseen by its Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. The office, charged with investigating when the national security agency is accused of violating the rights of both immigrants and U.S. citizens, had found itself in the crosshairs of Elon Musk’s secretive Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE.

    It began as a typical briefing, with Homeland Security officials explaining to DOGE a program many describe as a win-win. It had provided some $20 million in recent years to local organizations that provide case workers to keep people in immigration proceedings showing up to court, staff explained, without expensive detentions and ankle monitors.

    DOGE leader Kyle Schutt, a technology executive who developed a GOP online fundraising platform, interrupted. He wanted Joseph Mazzara, DHS’s acting general counsel, to weigh in. Mazzara was recently appointed to the post after working for Ken Paxton as both an assistant solicitor general and member of the Texas attorney general’s defense team that beat back public corruption charges.

    Schutt had a different interpretation of the program, according to people who attended or were briefed on the meeting.

    “This whole program sounds like money laundering,” he said.

    Mazzara went further. His facial expressions, his use of profanity and the way he combed his fingers through his hair made clear he was annoyed.

    “We should look into civil RICO charges,” Mazzara said.

    DHS staff was stunned. The program had been mandated by Congress, yet Homeland Security’s top lawyer was saying it could be investigated under a law reserved for organized crime syndicates.

    “I took it as a threat,” one attendee said. “It was traumatizing.”

    For many in the office, known internally as CRCL, that moment was a dark forecast of the future. Several said they scrambled to try to fend off the mass firings they were seeing across the rest of President Donald Trump’s administration. They policed language that Trump’s appointees might not like. They hesitated to open complaints on hot-button cases. They reframed their work as less about protecting civil rights and more about keeping the department out of legal trouble.

    None of it worked. On March 21, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem shut down the office and fired most of the 150-person staff. As a result, about 600 civil rights abuse investigations were frozen.

    “All the oversight in DHS was eliminated today,” one worker texted after the announcement that they’d been fired.

    Eight former CRCL officials spoke with ProPublica about the dismantling of the office on the condition of anonymity because they feared retribution. Their accounts come at a time when the new administration’s move to weaken oversight of federal agencies has faced legal challenges in the federal courts. In defending its move to shut CRCL, the administration said it was streamlining operations, as it has done elsewhere. “DHS remains committed to civil rights protections but must streamline oversight to remove roadblocks to enforcement,” said DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin.

    CRCL staff “often functioned as internal adversaries to slow down operations,” McLaughlin added. She did not address questions from ProPublica about the February meeting. Mazzara and Schutt did not reply to requests for comment.

    The office’s closure strips Homeland Security of a key internal check and balance, analysts and former staff say, as the Trump administration morphs the agency into a mass-deportation machine. The civil rights team served as a deterrent to border patrol and immigration agents who didn’t want the hassle and paperwork of an investigation, staff said, and its closure signals that rights violations, including those against U.S. citizens, could go unchecked.

    The office processed more than 3,000 complaints in fiscal year 2023 — on everything from disabled detainees being unable to access medical care to abuses of power at Immigration and Customs Enforcement and reports of rape at its detention centers. For instance, following reports that ICE had performed facial recognition searches on millions of Maryland drivers, a CRCL investigation led the agency to agree to new oversight; case details have been removed from the DHS website but are available in the internet archive. The office also reported to Congress that it had investigated and confirmed allegations that a child, a U.S. citizen traveling without her parents between Mexico and California, had been sexually abused by Customs and Border Protection agents during a strip search.

    Those cases would have gone nowhere without CRCL, its former staffers said.

    “Nobody knows where to go without CRCL, and that’s the point,” a senior official said. Speaking of the administration, the official went on, “They don’t want oversight. They don’t care about civil rights and civil liberties.”

    The CRCL staff, most of them lawyers, emphasized that their work is not politically motivated, nor is it limited to immigration issues. For instance, sources said the office was investigating allegations that disaster aid workers with the Federal Emergency Management Agency had skipped over houses that displayed signs supporting Trump during the 2024 election.

    “The Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties touches on everyone,” one fired employee said. “There’s this perception that we’re only focused on immigrants, and that’s just not true.”

    Uncertainty and Panic

    The final days of the civil rights office unfolded in a cloud of uncertainty and panic, as with other federal offices getting “RIF’d,” the Beltway verb for the government’s “reduction in force.”

    Staff members described the weeks before the shutdown as a whittling away of their work. Dozens of investigative memos posted online in a transparency initiative? Deleted from the site. The eight-person team on racial equity issues? Immediately placed on leave. Travel funds to check conditions at detention centers? Reduced to $1.

    As fear intensified that the civil rights office would be dismantled, staff tried to lie low. Leaders told staff to stop launching investigations that came from media reports, previously a common avenue for inquiries. Now, only official complaints from the public would be considered.

    Staff was particularly frustrated that under this new mandate it couldn’t open an official investigation into the case of Mahmoud Khalil, a Columbia University graduate student and legal resident who was arrested for participating in protests against Israel’s war in Gaza.

    CRCL staff was unable to open an investigation into Mahmoud Khalil’s arrest after they were told to stop launching investigations that came from media reports. (Bing Guan/The New York Times/Redux)

    With dozens of employees spread across branches or working remotely, many civil rights staffers had never met their colleagues — until the Trump administration’s return-to-office order forced them to come in five days a week. By early March, when reality had sunk in that their jobs were likely to be eliminated, they began quietly organizing, setting up encrypted Signal chat groups and sharing updates on lawsuits filed by government workers in other agencies.

    “It’s inspiring how federal employees are pushing back and connecting,” one worker said.

    Beyond Trump’s mandate to remove all references to diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, leaders told staff to omit from memos words such as “however,” which might sound combative, or “stakeholders,” which came across as too warm and fuzzy.

    “Daily life was one miserable assignment after the next,” a staffer said. The orders coming down from Trump appointees were intended to “basically tell us how to undo your office.”

    In what would be the last days of the office, the atmosphere was “chilling” and “intimidating.” Some personnel froze, too afraid to make recommendations, while others risked filing new investigations in final acts of defiance.

    When the news came on a Friday that they were all being fired, civil rights staff were told they couldn’t issue any out-of-office reply, one former senior official said.

    They are still technically employees, on paid leave until May 23. Many have banded together and are exploring legal remedies to get their jobs back. In the interim, if complaints are coming in, none of the professionals trained to receive them are around.

    What’s Been Lost

    Days after the meeting in which allegations of money laundering and organized crime were loosely thrown at CRCL employees, the program in question was shut down. That effort had essentially earmarked money to local charities to provide nonviolent immigrants with case workers who connect them to services such as human trafficking screening and information on U.S. law. Created by Congress in 2021, the goal was to keep immigrants showing up to court.

    Now, Trump’s DHS is suggesting the case worker program is somehow involved in human smuggling. Erol Kekic, a spokesperson for the charity the federal government hired to administer funds in that program, said Church World Services received a “weirdly worded letter” that baffled the organization’s attorneys.

    “They said there could be potential human trafficking,” he said, referring to DHS. “But they didn’t accuse us directly of it.”

    The nonprofit is working on its response, he said.

    Elsewhere, the absence of Homeland Security’s civil rights oversight is already reverberating.

    With their office closed, CRCL staff now fear the hypotheticals: At ports of entry, Americans’ Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizure are relaxed; if CBP abuses its power to root through phones and laptops, who will investigate? And if DHS began arresting U.S. citizens for First Amendment protected speech? Their office would have been the first line of defense.

    As an example of cases falling through the cracks, CRCL staff told ProPublica they had recommended an investigation into the deportation of a Lebanese professor at Brown University who was in the country on a valid work visa. Federal prosecutors said in court she was detained at an airport in Boston in connection with “sympathetic photos and videos” on her phone of leaders of the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah. Reuters reported she told border authorities she did not support Hezbollah but admired the group’s deceased leader Hassan Nasrallah for religious reasons.

    Staff also wanted to look into the case of a 10-year-old girl recovering from brain cancer who, despite being a U.S. citizen, was deported to Mexico along with her parents when they hit an immigration checkpoint as they rushed to an emergency medical visit.

    In Colorado, immigration attorney Laura Lunn routinely filed complaints with CRCL, saying pleas with ICE officials at its Aurora detention center were often ignored. Those complaints to CRCL have stopped her clients from being illegally deported, she said, or gotten emergency gynecological care for a woman who had been raped just before being detained.

    But now, she asks, “Who do I even go to when there are illegal things happening?”

    Lunn’s group, the Rocky Mountain Immigration Advocacy Network, has also joined in large group complaints about inadequate medical care, COVID-19 isolation policies and access to medical care for a pod of transgender inmates.

    She’s among those trying to find clients who were housed in the Aurora facility but have mysteriously disappeared. Her clients had pending proceedings, she said, yet were summarily removed, something she’d never seen in 15 years of immigration law.

    “Ordinarily, I would file a CRCL complaint. At this moment, we don’t have anyone to file a complaint to,” Lunn said.

    That sort of mass deportation is something CRCL would have inspected. In fact, staff members said they had just launched a review into Trump’s increased use of Guantanamo Bay to detain migrants, an inquiry which now appears to have vanished.

    A new camp site where the Trump administration plans to house thousands of undocumented migrants at Guantánamo Bay, seen in February 2025. A recent CRCL review of the administration’s use of Guantanamo Bay has vanished. (Doug Mills/The New York Times/Redux)

    In New Mexico, immigration lawyer Sophia Genovese said she’s filed more than 100 CRCL complaints, helping her secure medical care and other services for sick and disabled people.

    She said she has several pending complaints, including one about a detainee who has stomach cancer but can’t get medication stronger than ibuprofen and another involving an HIV-positive patient who hasn’t been able to see a doctor.

    “CRCL was one of the very few tools we had to check ICE, to hold ICE accountable,” Genovese said. “Now you see them speeding to complete authoritarianism.”

    This post was originally published on ProPublica.

  • Legal US Resident Languishes in El Salvador Prison After SCOTUS Ruling

    The Supreme Court has paused a lower court order that instructed the Trump administration to immediately bring back a U.S. legal resident who was “mistakenly” sent to El Salvador, giving the court more time to deliberate on the case. Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was expelled from the U.S. on March 15 despite holding protected status, will continue to languish under dangerous conditions in a…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Trump Administration Has Detained Citizens as Part of Mass Deportation Actions

    A new report highlights how at least seven U.S. citizens — but likely far more — have been detained, deported or otherwise targeted by the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign. According to the report from The Washington Post, at least seven U.S. citizens across the country, including children, have been detained by the federal government’s anti-immigrant operations since Trump…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • “Hands Off!”: 1 Million Protest Trump’s Cuts, Attacks on Education, Immigration, War on Gaza & More


    This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • US Judge Orders Return of Man Deported to El Salvador Prison. Will Trump Comply?

    A U.S. judge on Friday ordered the return of a Maryland resident who the Trump administration mistakenly deported to a prison in El Salvador last month, according to The Associated Press. Prior to issuing the ruling, U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis called the deportation of Kilmar Abrego Garcia “an illegal act.” The judge, an appointee of former President Barack Obama…

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    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Over 500K Refugees Could Face Deportation to Haiti, Which Is Gripped by Violence

    The Trump administration’s immigration crackdown will soon leave more than 500,000 Haitian refugees vulnerable to deportation back to a country facing a spiraling political and security crisis as armed gangs and police continue to fight for control of the streets of Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s embattled capital city. Both Haiti’s national police and a United Nations-backed security force have…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Washington Farmworker Organizer Detained in Trump Immigration Crackdown


    This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • With detention of beloved farmworker organizer, ICE comes for the labor movement

    This story originally appeared in Truthout on Apr. 01, 2025. It is shared here with permission.

    On the morning of March 25, farmworker organizer Alfredo “Lelo” Juarez was forcibly detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents who stopped his car while he was driving his wife to work in Skagit County, Washington. People to whom Juarez has spoken say he requested to see a warrant, and when he attempted to get his ID after being asked, the ICE agents smashed his car window and detained him.

    Twenty-five-year-old Juarez helped found Familias Unidas Por La Justicia, an independent farmworker union in Washington State, in 2013, when he was just a young teenager. He has advocated around issues like overtime pay, heat protections for farmworkers and the exploitative nature of the H-2A guest worker program. Juarez is a beloved member of the Indigenous Mixteco farmworker community, and there’s been an outpouring of support for him across Washington State and the entire country.

    Juarez is currently being imprisoned at the Northwest ICE Processing Center in Tacoma. His detention comes as the Trump administration escalates its assault against immigrants and workers. Union members and immigrant rights activists have been detained. The administration has also intensified its attacks on foreign-born students who have spoken up for Palestinian rights, such as Mahmoud Khalil and Rumeysa Ozturk.

    To learn more about Juarez’s situation, Truthout spoke with Edgar Franks, the political director of Familias Unidas, about the farmworker organizer and his detention, the outpouring of support for him, and more. Franks, who also spoke to Truthout last November about the challenges facing farmworkers after Trump’s reelection, has worked closely with Juarez — who goes by “Lelo” — for over a decade.

    Derek Seidman: To start, what’s important for readers to know about Lelo?

    Edgar Franks: The most important thing is how much he cares about farmworker issues and how much he has advocated for farmworkers, especially the Indigenous Mixteco farmworker community that he’s from. One reason he organizes is because there are so few organizers in the state that speak to the issues of Indigenous Mexicans from his community. He’s very committed to his community and all the issues that affect farmworkers and immigrants. He’s always available, anytime people call him, because he believes so much in the cause.

    He was one of the main people who helped start our union. When we first began, it was hard to communicate with some of the workers who still used their native language and didn’t speak Spanish well. Alfredo was key to bridging that communication gap because he spoke English, Spanish and Mixteco. With him, we were able to really get information from the workers about what they wanted and help them organize.

    He also helped us lobby for the overtime rules for farmworkers and the rules on climate around heat and smoke. All our recommendations came straight from workers that Alfredo spoke with. He was always talking to workers. He’s also been calling attention to how exploitative the H-2A guest worker program is and how growers use the H-2A program as a tool to take power away from farmworkers. He’s also been lobbying on issues like housing and rent stabilization.

    He’s a member of our union who’s been around since the beginning. He’s sort of like a shop steward. Everything that the union has done has Alfredo’s fingerprints all over it.

    How do you understand his detention? What’s your analysis of what happened?

    ICE is harassing and intimidating people and not even showing warrants.

    We believe his detention is politically motivated because of his organizing in the farmworker and immigrant community. We believe he was targeted. The way that ICE detained him was meant to intimidate. They hardly gave him any chance to defend himself or explain. He wasn’t resisting, and he just asked to see the warrant. They asked to see his ID, and right when he was reaching for it, they broke his car window. The ICE agents escalated really fast. From what we heard, it was less than a minute from the time he was pulled over to him being in handcuffs.

    I think the intent was to strike fear and intimidate Alfredo, but also to send a message to others who are speaking out against ICE and for immigrant rights, that this is what happens when you try to fight back.

    In past years, we’ve seen people getting pulled over and asked for their documents, but now it’s becoming more aggressive. ICE is harassing and intimidating people and not even showing warrants. It’s free rein for ICE to do whatever they want. When you have federal agents with no real oversight, it empowers them to be violent and coercive over everybody. The tone being set by the Trump administration gives ICE agents and Border Patrol the feeling that they’re unstoppable. That’s really concerning.

    Can you talk about the outpouring of support for Lelo?

    It’s been great to see the huge support for Alfredo. It speaks to how much of an impact he’s had in the state and all over the nation. It’s been really nice to see the solidarity from people that probably never even met him or knew anything about the farmworker struggle, but who know an injustice has happened.

    There was a rally on March 27 organized by the Washington State Labor Council, which represents all the unions in Washington. They showed up at the detention center calling for Alfredo and another union member, Lewelyn Dixon, to be freed. For us as a union, it’s most important to see our labor family stepping up. During the presidential campaign we saw how workers and unions were being used by Trump, but now all of our labor folks are seeing what’s really happening here, which is that Trump is using immigrants to attack workers and unions. It’s been great to see labor really stepping up on the side of immigrant workers.

    What affects everybody else affects immigrants. At the end of the day, we all want food and housing and good schools. Immigrants have nothing to do with the rising costs of housing, or gas or eggs. The difficulties that are really affecting people’s lives are not caused by immigrants. They’re caused by the system and by billionaires like Elon Musk. The frustrations that people feel are real, but their anger is being pointed at immigrants, and that’s not where the anger needs to go.

    How is Lelo doing? What have you heard?

    He’s obviously upset. He misses his family and friends. He’s also been very moved by all the actions that are happening. But when some of his supporters went to go see him last week, you know what his message was? To keep fighting and keep organizing. That gives us strength and confidence to move forward. Lelo wants us to fight, so we’ll fight. If he’s fighting on the inside, we’ll keep fighting for him on the outside.

    He now has legal representation, which was also a big concern for us. We can fight as much as we want on the outside, but we really need fighters in the legal system to help Alfredo. We’ll be there for whatever the legal team needs to uplift his fight, including creating pressure in the streets.

    Lelo’s detention is coming amid a larger crackdown in the U.S. Do you see connections?

    Lelo is concerned about others who are being detained. Lewelyn Dixon is a University of Washington lab technician and a SEIU 925 member. She has a green card and has been living in the U.S. for 50 years. She’s at the Tacoma detention center.

    From the beginning, we thought Project 2025 and its plan for mass deportations was meant to get rid of all the immigrant workers who are organizing and fighting back for better conditions, and to bring in a workforce that’s under the complete control of their employer.

    There’s the case of immigrant rights activists Jeannette Vizguerra in Denver. There’s the case of Mahmoud Khalil at Columbia University and other students being detained who speak out about Palestine. It’s not a coincidence anymore. This is the trend now, and it’s really concerning. The U.S. talks a lot about repressive governments in Venezuela or Cuba, but we have political prisoners right now in the U.S.

    Do you think Lelo’s detention is part of a larger plan to attack farmworker organizing?

    From the beginning, we thought Project 2025 and its plan for mass deportations was meant to send a chill among farmworker organizations that had been gaining momentum. It was meant to silence the organizing, deport as many people as possible, and to bring in a captive workforce through the H-2A program.

    We think that might be the ultimate plan: to get rid of all the immigrant workers who are organizing and fighting back for better conditions, and to bring in a workforce that’s under the complete control of their employer with basically no rights. It’ll make it even harder to organize with farmworkers if more H-2A workers come. It wouldn’t be impossible, but it’ll be more difficult. All the gains that have been made in the last couple of years for farmworkers are at risk.

    What are you asking supporters to do?

    Alfredo’s big on organizing. Wherever you are, there are similar struggles that are happening. Whether you’re in New York, Florida, Texas or California, there’s organizing for immigrant rights and workers that needs just as much support as he does. We should go into our local communities and support those organizing campaigns.

    We should see Alfredo’s case as an example of how effective he is and how much that threatens the establishment. But at the same time, he wouldn’t want people to stop organizing because he’s detained. He would want people to organize even more.

    You’ve worked closely with Lelo for over a decade. What are some memories that come to mind that tell us more about who he is?

    When we first started organizing in 2013, he was only around 14 years old. A lot of farmworkers didn’t know how to speak English, and so these workers, who were grown adults, would ask Alfredo to present their case. He was just a young teenager, basically a kid, and he was given the responsibility to represent farmworkers at speaking engagements with hundreds of people. And when he went, he spoke eloquently for over an hour about the life of being a young farmworker and why farmworkers needed a union. The campaign was maybe two months old, but he had already captured the idea of why unions were important at such a young age.

    I remember all this because I would have to drive him around since he was too young to drive! So I would take him to talk to churches, or unions, or other groups around the community. He was doing all this when he was 14 years old. I was amazed. I couldn’t speak for two minutes without getting nervous, but here was this 14-year-old who could talk for an hour!

    He was also asked to go to the 2022 Labor Notes Conference to present on the work of the union, and I just remember how excited he was that Bernie Sanders was going to be there. He got the opportunity to give Bernie a letter about our campaign to oppose the Farm Workforce Modernization Act. He was so excited about meeting Bernie Sanders.

    He’s still like a little kid (laughter). He likes Baby Yoda and likes to watch animated cartoons. He tries to enjoy being young. He’s really humble. He’s 25 now, so almost half of his life has been toward organizing. It’s amazing just how much he’s been able to accomplish even as just a young man.

    This post was originally published on The Real News Network.

  • Trump’s immigration crackdown pulls resources from child abuse investigations, tax fraud & more


    This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Mahmoud Khalil’s Attorney: “This Is the McCarthy Era All Over Again”

    A federal judge in New Jersey will soon issue a ruling on where the deportation case of Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian student who led the student encampment at Columbia University last year, can be litigated. On March 8, Khalil was abducted in New York by agents from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) who told him his lawful permanent residency status had been “revoked.

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • With Detention of Beloved Farmworker Organizer, ICE Comes for the Labor Movement

    On the morning of March 25, farmworker organizer Alfredo “Lelo” Juarez was forcibly detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents who stopped his car while he was driving his wife to work in Skagit County, Washington. People to whom Juarez has spoken say he requested to see a warrant, and when he attempted to get his ID after being asked, the ICE agents smashed his car window and…

    Source

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Disaster Is “Only a Matter of Time,” Say Flight Attendants on Deportation Planes

    The deportation flight was in the air over Mexico when chaos erupted in the back of the plane, the flight attendant recalled. A little girl had collapsed. She had a high fever and was taking ragged, frantic breaths. The flight attendant, a young woman who went by the nickname Lala, said she grabbed the plane’s emergency oxygen bottle and rushed past rows of migrants chained at the wrists and…

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    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Judge Blocks Trump Admin From Ending Deportation Protections of Venezuelans

    An effort by the Trump administration to unilaterally strip the temporary protected status (TPS) of approximately 350,000 Venezuelan refugees living in the United States was blocked Monday night by a federal court judge who described the order by Secretary of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem as being “motivated by unconstitutional animus.” In a 78-page ruling, U.S.

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  • Inside ICE Air: Flight Attendants on Deportation Planes Say Disaster Is “Only a Matter of Time”

    by McKenzie Funk

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    The deportation flight was in the air over Mexico when chaos erupted in the back of the plane, the flight attendant recalled. A little girl had collapsed. She had a high fever and was taking ragged, frantic breaths.

    The flight attendant, a young woman who went by the nickname Lala, said she grabbed the plane’s emergency oxygen bottle and rushed past rows of migrants chained at the wrists and ankles to reach the girl and her parents.

    By then, Lala was accustomed to the hard realities of working charter flights for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. She’d learned to obey instructions not to look the passengers in the eyes, not to greet them or ask about their well-being. But until the girl collapsed, Lala had managed to escape an emergency.

    Lala worked for Global Crossing Airlines, the dominant player in the loose network of deportation contractors known as ICE Air. GlobalX, as the charter company is also called, is lately in the news. Two weeks ago, it helped the Trump administration fly hundreds of Venezuelans to El Salvador despite a federal court order blocking the deportations, triggering a showdown that experts fear could become a full-blown constitutional crisis.

    In interviews with ProPublica, Lala and six other current and former GlobalX flight attendants provided a window into a part of the deportation process that is rarely seen and little understood. For migrants who have spent months or years trying to reach this country and live here, it is the last act, the final bit of America they may experience.

    An ICE detainee waves from inside a bus that transported passengers to the airport before departing from Seattle’s Boeing Field on a GlobalX deportation flight in February. (Emily Schultz)

    All but one of the flight attendants requested anonymity or asked that only a nickname be used, fearing retribution or black marks as they looked for new jobs in an insular industry.

    Because ICE, GlobalX and other charter carriers did not respond to questions after being provided with detailed lists of this story’s findings, the flight attendants’ individual accounts are hard to verify. But their stories are consistent with one another. They are also generally consistent with what has been said about ICE Air in legal filings, news accounts, academic research and publicly released copies of the ICE Air Operations Handbook.

    That morning over Mexico, Lala said, the girl’s oxygen saturation level was 70% — perilously low compared with a healthy person’s 95% or higher. Her temperature was 102.3 degrees. The flight had a nurse on contract who worked alongside its security guards. But beyond giving the girl Tylenol, the nurse left the situation in Lala’s hands, she recalled.

    Lala broke the rule about talking to detainees. The parents told Lala their daughter had a history of asthma. The mom, who Lala said had epilepsy, seemed on the verge of her own medical crisis.

    Lala placed the oxygen mask on the girl’s face. The nurse removed her socks to keep her from further overheating. Lala counted down the minutes, praying for the girl to keep breathing.

    The stories shared by ICE Air flight attendants paint a different picture of deportations from the one presented to the public, especially under President Donald Trump. On social media, the White House has depicted a military operation carried out with ruthless efficiency, using Air Force C-17s, ICE agents in tactical vests and soldiers in camo.

    The reality is that 85% of the administration’s “removal” flights — 254 flights as of March 21, according to the advocacy group Witness at the Border — have been on charter planes. Military flights have now all but ceased. While there are ICE officers and hired security guards on the charters, the crew members on board are civilians, ordinary people swept up in something most didn’t knowingly sign up for.

    When the flight attendants joined GlobalX, it was a startup with big plans. It sold investors and new hires alike on a vision of VIP clients, including musicians and sports teams, and luxury destinations, especially in the Caribbean. “You can’t beat the eXperience,” read a company tagline.

    A GlobalX post on Facebook recruiting flight attendants in March. Alexandria, Louisiana, is a hub for ICE Air. (Screenshot by ProPublica. Redacted by ProPublica.)

    But as the airline grew, more and more of its planes were filled with migrants in chains. Some flight attendants were livid about it.

    Last year, an anonymous GlobalX employee sent an all-caps, all-staff screed that ricocheted around the startup. “WHERE IS THE COMPANY GOING?” the email asked. “YOU SIGNED A 5 YEAR CONTRACT WITH ICE? … WHAT HAPPENED TO THIS BECOMING A PRESTIGE CHARTER AIRLINE?”

    One flight attendant said he kept waiting for the sports teams his new bosses had talked about as he flew deportation routes. “You know, the NFL charters, the NBA charters, whatever the hockey one is …” he said.

    A second said his planes’ air conditioning kept breaking — an experience consistent with at least two publicly reported onboard incidents — and their lavatories kept breaking, something another flight attendant reported as well. But the planes kept flying. “They made us flush with water bottles,” he said.

    But the flight attendants were most concerned about their inability to treat their passengers humanely — and to keep them safe. (In 2021, an ICE spokesperson told the publication Capital & Main that the agency “follows best practices when it comes to the security, safety and welfare of the individuals returned to their countries of origin.”)

    They worried about what would happen in an emergency. Could they really get over a hundred chained passengers off the plane in time?

    “They never taught us anything regarding the immigration flights,” one said. “They didn’t tell us these people were going to be shackled, wrists to fucking ankles.”

    “We have never gotten a clear answer on what we do in an ICE Air evacuation,” another said. “They will not give us an answer.”

    “It’s only a matter of time,” a third said, before a deportation flight ends in disaster.

    Lala didn’t think she had a chance at a flight attendant job. She hadn’t, in truth, remembered applying to GlobalX until a recruiter called to say the startup was coming to her city. “But I guess I did apply through LinkedIn?” she said. She’d been working an office job — long hours, little flexibility — and was looking for something new.

    The job interviews were held at a resort hotel. The room was packed with dozens of aspirants when Lala showed up. After the first round, only about 20 were asked to stay. She couldn’t believe she was one of them. After the second round came a job offer: $26 an hour plus a daily expense allowance. Soon Lala got a uniform: a blue cardigan, a white polo shirt and an eye-catching scarf in cyan and light green.

    For part of her Federal Aviation Administration-mandated four-week training, her class stayed in a motel with a pool at the edge of Miami International Airport. Just across the street, on the fourth floor of a concrete-clad office building ringed by palm trees, was GlobalX’s headquarters.

    “In the beginning, we were told that because it’s a charter, it’s only gonna be elites, celebrities,” Lala said. “Everybody was really excited.”

    But flying was not going to be all glitz. The real reason for having flight attendants is safety. GlobalX was certified by the FAA as a Part 121 scheduled air carrier, the same as United or Delta, and it and its crew members were subject to the same strict standards.

    “We’re there to evacuate you,” one recruit told ProPublica. “Yes, we make good drinks, but we evacuate you.”

    Lala’s class practiced water landings in the pool at the nearby Pan Am Flight Academy. They practiced door drills — yelling out commands, shoving open heavy exit doors — in a replica Airbus A320 cabin. They learned CPR and how to put out fires. They took written and physical tests, and if they didn’t score at least 90%, they had to retake them.

    They were reminded, over and over, that their job was a vocation, one with a professional code: No matter who the passengers were, flight attendants were in charge of the cabin, responsible for safety in the air.

    Lala’s official “airman” certificate arrived from the FAA a few weeks after training was done. She was cleared to fly, ready to see the world.

    But what she would see wasn’t what she signed up for. The company was growing beyond glamorous charters. GlobalX was moving into the deportation business.

    Her bosses delivered the news casually, she recalled: “It was like, ‘Oh yeah, we got a government contract.’”

    The new graduates were offered a single posting: Harlingen, Texas. Deportation flights were five days a week, sometimes late into the night. Lala went to Guatemala, Honduras, Colombia and, for refueling, Panama.

    A standard flight had more than a dozen private security guards — contractors working for the firm Akima — along with a single ICE officer, two nurses, and a hundred or more detainees. (Akima did not respond to a request for comment.) The guards were in charge of delivering food and water to the detainees and taking them to the lavatories. This left the flight attendants, whose presence was required by the FAA, with little to do.

    “Arm and disarm doors, that was our duty,” Lala said.

    The flights had their own set of rules, which the crew members said they learned from a company policy manual or from chief flight attendants. Don’t talk to the detainees. Don’t feed them. Don’t make eye contact. Don’t walk down the aisles without a guard escorting you. Don’t sit in aisle seats, where detainees could get close to you. Don’t wear your company-issued scarf because of “safety concerns that a detainee might grab it and use it against us,” Lala said.

    “You don’t do nothing,” said a member of another GlobalX class. “Just sit down in your seats and be quiet.” If a detainee looked at him, he was supposed to look out the window.

    A chained detainee boards a GlobalX flight at Seattle’s Boeing Field in February. (Emily Schultz)

    A rare public statement from the company about life aboard ICE Air came in a 2023 earnings call with GlobalX founder and then-CEO Ed Wegel, when he discussed the company’s work for federal agencies like ICE. GlobalX employees “essentially don’t do much on the airplane,” Wegel said. “Our flight attendants are there in case of an emergency. The passengers are monitored by guards that are placed on board the airplane by one of those agencies.”

    Fielding a question about how GlobalX ensures passengers are treated humanely, Wegel continued: “There have been threats made to our crew members, and they’re especially trained to deal with those. But we haven’t seen any mistreatment at all.”

    Flight attendants said they had little to do but sit in their jumpseats after delivering the preflight safety briefing in English to the mostly Spanish-speaking passengers. Above 10,000 feet, the two in the rear usually moved to passenger rows near the cockpit, then sat again. Some did crosswords. Others took photos out the window. On a deportation to Guatemala, one saw his first erupting volcano.

    Lala had been scared before her first deportation flight, worried that violence might break out. But fear soon gave way to discomfort at how detainees were treated. “Not being able to serve them, not being able to look at them, I didn’t think that was right,” she said.

    Some flight attendants, drawn to the profession because they liked taking care of people, couldn’t help but break protocol with passengers. “If they said ‘hola’ or something,” one said, “I’d say ‘hola’ back. We’re not jerks.”

    Another recalled taking a planeload of children and their escorts on a domestic transfer from the southern border to an airport in New York. He tried to slip snacks to the kids. “Even the chaperones were like, ‘Don’t give them any food,’” he said. “And I’m like, ‘Where is your humanity?’” (A second flight attendant said that children on a New York flight were fed by their escorts.)

    While flight attendants were allowed to interact with the guards, the dynamic was uncomfortable. It came down to a question of who was in charge — and which agency, ICE or the FAA, ultimately held sway. (The FAA declined to comment on this story and directed questions to ICE.)

    The guards often asked flight attendants to heat up the food they brought from home. They asked for drinks, for ice. “They treated us like we were their maids,” said Akilah Sisk, a former flight attendant from Texas.

    “In their eyes, the detainees are not the passengers,” another flight attendant said. “The passengers are the guards. And we’re there for the guards.”

    Some guards thumbed their noses at the FAA safety rules that flight attendants were supposed to enforce while airborne, multiple flight attendants recalled. “One reported me because I asked him to sit down in the last 10 minutes,” Sisk said. “But you’re still on a freaking plane. You gotta listen to our words.”

    Flight attendants said that if they told guards to fasten seatbelts during takeoff or stow carry-ons under a seat, they risked getting reported to their bosses at GlobalX, who they said wanted to keep ICE happy. The guards would complain to the in-flight supervisor, Sisk said, and eventually it would get back to the flight attendant.

    “We’d get an email from somebody in management: ‘Why are you guys causing problems?’” another flight attendant recalled. “They were more worried about losing the contract than about anything else.”

    Nothing bothered flight attendants more than the fact that most of their passengers were in chains. What would happen if a flight had to be evacuated?

    Most of the migrants crowding the back seats of ICE Air’s planes have not been, historically, convicted criminals. ICE makes restraints mandatory nonetheless. “Detainees transported by ICE Air aircraft will be fully restrained by the use of handcuffs, waist chains, and leg irons,“ reads an unredacted version of the 2015 ICE Air Operations Handbook, which was obtained by the Center for Constitutional Rights, a legal advocacy group.

    The handbook allows for other equipment “in special circumstances, i.e., spit masks, mittens, leg braces, cargo straps, humane restraint blanket, etc.” Multiple lawsuits on behalf of African asylum-seekers concern the use of one such item, known as the Wrap, a cross between a straight jacket and a sleeping bag. A flight attendant said detainees restrained in the device are strapped upright in their seats or, if less compliant, lengthwise across a row of seats. Getting “burritoed, I call it,” the person said.

    The Department of Homeland Security’s Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties investigated the asylum-seekers’ complaints and found ICE lacked “sufficient policies” on the Wrap, but how the immigration agency addressed the finding is not publicly known. ICE responded to one lawsuit by saying detainees were not abused; it said another should be dismissed, in part because it was filed in the wrong place. The cases are pending.

    Use of the Wrap continues. A video from Seattle’s Boeing Field taken in February shows officers and guards carrying a wrapped migrant into the cabin of a deportation plane.

    A choppy video feed shows ICE officers and guards carrying a migrant in a full-body restraint into a GlobalX deportation plane at Seattle’s Boeing Field in February. (Obtained by ProPublica via a public records request)

    Watch video ➜

    Neither the ICE Air handbook, nor FAA regulations, nor flight attendant training in Miami explained how to empty a plane full of people whose movements were, by design, so severely hampered. Shackled detainees didn’t even qualify as “able-bodied” enough to sit in exit rows.

    To flight attendants, the restraints seemed at odds with the FAA’s “90-second rule,” a decades-old manufacturing standard that says an aircraft must be built for full evacuation in 90 seconds even with half the exits blocked.

    Lala and others said no one told them how to evacuate passengers in chains. “Honestly, I don’t know what we would do,” she said.

    The flight attendants are not alone in voicing concerns.

    In an interview with ProPublica, Bobby Laurie, an airline safety expert and former flight attendant, called the arrangement on ICE Air flights “disturbing.”

    “Part of flight attendant training is locating those passengers who can help you in an evacuation,” Laurie told ProPublica. That would have to be the guards. “But if they have to help you,” who is helping the detainees, Laurie wondered.

    According to formal ICE Air incident reports reviewed by Capital & Main, the deportation network had at least six accidents requiring evacuations between 2014 and 2019. In at least two cases, both on a carrier called World Atlantic, the evacuations were led not by flight attendants but by untrained guards. Both took longer than 90 seconds, though not by much: two-and-a-half minutes for the first, “less than 2 minutes” for the next. But in a third case, it took seven minutes for 115 shackled detainees to escape a smoke-filled jet.

    In one of the World Atlantic incidents, part of the landing gear broke, a wing caught fire and the smell of burning rubber seeped in, according to investigative records obtained by the University of Washington Center for Human Rights. In an email to ICE Air officials, an agency employee aboard the plane later wrote that flight attendants made no emergency announcements for passengers. The flight attendants simply got themselves out.

    The ICE officer, guards and nurse were “confused on what to do and in which direction to exit during distress,” the officer wrote. He said that other than the flight crew, “no one has received any training on emergency evacuation situations.”

    The University of Washington’s collection does not include findings or recommendations from ICE based on what happened, and ICE did not say what they were when asked by ProPublica. The National Transportation Safety Board said that after the accident, World Atlantic launched a campaign to reinspect landing gear, gave employees and contractors further training, and revised its procedures for inspections. The airline did not respond to questions from ProPublica.

    An ICE Air flight was evacuated in Alexandria, Louisiana, in April 2018 after a piece of the landing gear failed upon touchdown. All detainees were helped off the plane by guards, according to emails to ICE officials from an agency employee who was on board. (Courtesy of the University of Washington Center for Human Rights)

    Other reports obtained by the University of Washington mention fuel spills, loss of cabin air pressure and a “large altercation” on ICE Air after 2019 but no more evacuations, at least as of June 2022. More recent incidents that have been mentioned in the press include an engine fire last summer on World Atlantic and a failed GlobalX air conditioning unit that sent 11 detainees to the hospital with “heat-related injuries.”

    The rare guidance some flight attendants said they received on carrying out ICE Air evacuations came during briefings from pilots. What they heard, they said, was chilling and went against their training.

    “Just get up and leave,” one recalled a GlobalX pilot telling him. “That’s it. … Save your life first.”

    He understood the instructions to mean that evacuating detainees was not a priority, or even the flight attendants’ responsibility. The detainees were in other people’s hands, or in no one’s.

    When asked if they got similar guidance from pilots, three flight attendants said they did not, and one did not answer. Two more, like the first, said pilots gave them instructions that they took to mean they shouldn’t help detainees after opening the exit doors.

    “That was the normal briefing,” said a flight attendant from Lala’s class. “‘If a fire occurs in the cabin, if we land on water, don’t check on the immigrants. Just make sure that you and the guards and the people that work for the government get off.’”

    “It was as if the detainees’ lives were worthless,” said the other.

    The day the girl collapsed on Lala’s flight, the pilot turned the plane around and they crossed back into the United States.

    The flight landed in Arizona. Paramedics rushed on board and connected the girl to their own oxygen bottle. They began shuttling her off the plane. Her parents tried to join. But the guards stopped the father.

    Shocked, Lala approached the ICE officer in charge. “This is not OK!” she yelled. The mom had seizures. The family needed to stay together.

    But the officer said it was impossible. Only one parent could go to the hospital. The other, as Lala understood it, “was going to get deported.”

    Most of the flight attendants who spoke with ProPublica are now gone from GlobalX. Some left because they found other jobs. Some left even though they hadn’t. Some left because the charter company, as it focused more and more on deportations, shut down the hub in their city.

    Lala eventually left because of the little girl and her family, because she couldn’t do the deportation flights anymore. Her GlobalX uniform hung in her closet for a time, a reminder of her career as a flight attendant. Recently, she said, she threw it away.

    She never learned whether the little girl lived or died. Lala just watched her mom follow her off the plane, then watched the dad return to his seat.

    “I cried after that,” she said. She bought her own ticket home.

    This post was originally published on ProPublica.

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    BANGKOK – Thailand said Thursday there are no longer any Uyghurs stranded in its immigration facilities following the internationally criticized repatriation of 40 Uyghur men to China in late February, in an apparent move to put an end to the confusion over the total number of detainees.

    Thailand put the men on a plane to Xinjiang on Feb. 27, saying China had given assurances that they would not be mistreated and no third country had committed to take them. They were part of a larger group who had been held at an immigration detention center in Bangkok since escaping China’s persecution in 2014.

    “40 [Uyghurs] had been sent to China, while three had died, one in 2018 and two in 2023, leaving no Uyghurs remaining in immigration detention,” Thailand’s Police Col. Watcharaphon Kanchanakan, told a court hearing, without elaborating.

    Separately, the Bangkok court on the same day dismissed a petition that sought the release of “43 Uyghur” detainees who had been held by Thailand’s Immigration Bureau, saying: “all the Uyghurs had already been sent back [to China].”

    Confusion over numbers

    The 40 deportees were among more than 300 Uyghurs who fled China and were apprehended in Thailand in 2014. Thailand deported 109 Uyghurs to China in 2015 and allowed around 170 Uyghurs to be resettled in Turkey.

    However, the exact number of Uyghurs remaining in detention in Thailand has been controversial and uncertain, with recent reports stating that 48 men were still detained before the February 2025 deportation of 40 of them.

    Human rights advocates argue that at least five are still detained in Thailand.

    Bangkok-based human rights group, the People’s Empowerment Foundation reported that seven Uyghurs remained in Thailand – five in Klong Prem Prison for breaking out of Mukdahan Immigration detention in January 2020 and two defendants in the 2015 Ratchaprasong bombing case.

    Thai authorities have denied prison visits to human rights groups and restricted access to proper legal consultation with lawyers, while allowing Chinese officials to conduct monthly headcounts of the detainees, according to Chalida Tajaroensuk, director of the foundation, who has been assisting the Uyghurs.

    Chalida Tajaroensuk, director of the People’s Empowerment Foundation, speaks to BenarNews outside Bangkok South Criminal Court, on Mar. 27, 2025.
    Chalida Tajaroensuk, director of the People’s Empowerment Foundation, speaks to BenarNews outside Bangkok South Criminal Court, on Mar. 27, 2025.
    (Lukeit Kusumarn/BenarNews)

    Krittaporn Semsantad, Project Director of the Peace Rights Foundation, said they have taken steps to appoint legal representatives for five Uyghurs detained at Klong Prem Prison to ensure they have proper legal representation. But these efforts proved futile, as access to the detainees remains restricted and legal consultations have been largely ineffective.

    “We have made arrangements to appoint lawyers for all inmates so they can express their concerns about being returned to their country of origin [China] or the risk of persecution by their home country, indicating that this is not voluntary repatriation,” Krittaporn told BenarNews, a sister publication of Radio Free Asia.

    “The detained group could not meet with lawyers because they were classified as a ‘special security group,’ but for those with the Department of Corrections, appointing lawyers can ensure their rights are protected because Justice Minister Tawee has stated that China wants these people back to their country,” she said.

    Previously, the Thai government said it would also deport the five Uyghurs detained in Klong Prem Prison to China once they complete their prison terms.

    Thailand’s deportation of 40 Uyghurs was heavily criticized by Western governments and human rights organizations, with the United States restricting visas for unnamed Thai officials involved in the deportation.

    Twelve members of the U.S. House of Representatives introduced a bipartisan bill on Wednesday that would expedite the ability of Uyghurs and other ethnic minorities facing persecution in China to seek asylum in the United States.

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    Amid mounting criticism, China invited Thai Deputy Prime Minister Phumtham Wechayachai, accompanied by journalists, for a three-day visit to Kashgar, Xinjiang, last week. The trip was intended to demonstrate the well-being of the recent deportees as well as those deported in 2015.

    However, a Thai journalist who participated in the delegation reported being closely monitored by Chinese security officials throughout the visit. Observers also criticized the event as being “staged” and lacking transparency.

    Since 2017, China has rounded up an estimated 1.8 million Uyghurs in concentration camps and subjected many to forced labor, forced sterilization and torture, based on the accounts of Uyghurs who have escaped and investigations by the United Nations.

    Beijing denies committing human rights abuses against the Uyghurs and says the camps are vocational training centers that have mostly been closed.

    Edited by Taejun Kang and Stephen Wright.

    BenarNews is an online news outlet affiliated with Radio Free Asia.


    This content originally appeared on Radio Free Asia and was authored by Kunnawut Boonreak for BenarNews.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

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