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COMMENTARY: Immigration Police Spread Dragnets Across U.S.

A searing first-hand account of how immigration courts — once seen as safe — are becoming flashpoints for fear and quiet arrests. The line between legal process and targeted intimidation is vanishing

Poster shared by the Nevada Immigrant Coalition on Instagram warns that ICE agents may operate in plain clothes and be mistaken for other law enforcement.

By Peter Costantini
SEATTLE. US, May 26 2025 – On May 21, I was in the Seattle immigration court accompanying a young mother from a South American country who was applying for asylum to a routine hearing. Local media had reported that Immigration and Customs Enforcement had arrested several people there the previous day.

Immigration courts have long seemed to be relatively safe places where immigrants were unlikely to be arrested, because they were already in the immigration legal system. [EOIR] [ICE]

While we were waiting, a group of four Haitians with a four-month-old baby sat down across from us. When I heard them speaking Kreyol and French, I introduced myself as someone who had lived in Haiti. We chatted briefly about their country and the immigration situation here, and smiled at the baby. Then they were called into court before us, and when they emerged, they seemed unperturbed by whatever was the outcome of their hearing.

This infernal Catch-22 is showing immigrants who have escaped from dangerous places that they have mistakenly entrusted their hopes to yet another gratuitously cruel police state for migrants. It is falsely branding all of them as criminals and dumping them into a rent-a-gulag of private for-profit prisons

However, when they walked out of the waiting room, they were surrounded by a group of burly men in Northwest-style outdoor wear and ball caps who proved to be agents of ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations. The officers wore nothing that identified them as ICE or police, and I did not see them display any badges or warrants. They operated quietly, apparently trying not to attract public attention. They did not arrest the baby and its father, but took the mother and the two other men.

The arrestees looked stricken but did not resist, and I don’t believe the police handcuffed them. The father was left holding the baby in a basket, stunned and unbelieving. Further down the hall, another group of officers arrested a man who spoke to them in Spanish, asking them not to arrest him and crying. They put handcuffs and leg shackles on him and wrestled him onto an elevator.

This brought the young woman I was accompanying and myself to tears, as it was designed to do. Fortunately, though, her case was not dismissed. She was granted a future court hearing and was not detained by ICE.

As they were designed to do, the arrests left other witnesses, many with children, fearing that they could be next. Remember, this is not a court where people had to go because they were accused of crimes; they were there to make their cases for asylum or other protections, or to change their address. They were following authorized paths of immigration.

Staff from the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project, a Seattle non-profit law office, circulated through the Federal Building explaining the new situation: the courts are now dismissing some immigrants’ cases at the request of the government. This might seem like a good thing for the immigrants, but it’s not: without an active case, most of these immigrants have no immigration status.

They are now vulnerable to being grabbed by ICE and placed in expedited removal, a form of rapid deportation without recourse to a judge. This provides la migra, as they are known in Spanish, with a new, unforeseen way to terrorize immigrants. [NWIRP]

The strategy of the Trump administration for immigrants with pending cases requesting authorized statuses such as asylum seems to be to deploy a variety of ways of questionable legality to summarily reject and remove them, or to make life so miserable here that the immigrants “self-deport”.

National and international media have reported similar arrests of immigrants after dismissing their cases across the country. [Anguiano & Singh 5/22/2025] As CBS News pointed out, expedited removal can be used to summarily deport immigrants “who entered the U.S. with the government’s permission at legal entry points”.

So it could possibly be applied to the nearly one million immigrants who entered the U.S. using a cell-phone app introduced by the Biden administration, which allowed them to enter with authorization. [Montoya-Galvez & Cavazos 5/23/2025] Hundreds of thousands who entered under the auspices of other government programs may also be at risk.

This is not an immigration policy; it is the business end of an ethnic cleansing policy. It dovetails nicely with the long-term imperative of white sado-nationalists such as Trump’s Make America Great Again movement to try to reverse what they call “The Great Replacement” of white U.S.-born citizens by immigrants of color from Latin America, Africa and Asia.

As historian Mae Ngai of Columbia University told me in an interview, “I think there’s too many brown people in this country for [the Trump administration’s] tastes — that’s what it all comes down to.” [Costantini 1/16/2019]

The Department of Homeland Security has introduced other new operations to threaten immigrants as well. In Nashville, Tennessee, the state Highway Patrol is reportedly running joint operations with ICE officers on the streets of immigrant neighborhoods.

According to New York Times columnist Margaret Renkle, ICE has been throwing “a wide, seemingly race-based net” to catch people who might appear to be immigrants with flurries of traffic stops for minor infractions by the state patrol. These stops allow ICE to check the immigration status of large numbers of local residents and detain some of them. [Renkl 5/22/2025]

Nashville is a city with a two-thirds Democratic electorate in a heavily Republican state. State Senator Jeff Yarbro told Renkle: “They were basically pulling someone new over every two minutes. That’s not a ‘public safety operation.’” And Nashville Mayor Freddie O’Connell commented: “What’s clear today is that people who do not share our values of safety and community have the authority to cause deep community harm.”

On top of other forms of arbitrary deprivation of immigrants’ rights, these new attacks are destroying any sense of safety for people who are trying to follow the rules. They already seem to be resulting in more fearful immigrants skipping appointments, and then being subject to even more certain arrest and removal.

This infernal Catch-22 is showing immigrants who have escaped from dangerous places that they have mistakenly entrusted their hopes to yet another gratuitously cruel police state for migrants. It is falsely branding all of them as criminals and dumping them into a rent-a-gulag of private for-profit prisons. More detainees will likely be rendered to El Salvador, Libya, South Sudan, and other human-rights-free zones and held without due process or habeas corpus.

The Statue of Liberty wept.

* * *

Notes

For the past 40 years, I have volunteered with immigrants. Since the first Trump administration, I have accompanied them to court and other official appointments. Accompaniment is organized by local immigrant justice and human rights groups, and usually entails working with attorneys (which I am not) to support and inform immigrants, and interpreting between English and their languages (in my case, Spanish and French).

Immigration courts are run by the Executive Office for Immigration Review in the Department of Justice. They are administrative courts and not part of the judiciary branch. [EOIR]

Immigration and Customs Enforcement is the police agency within the Department of Homeland Security that enforces immigration laws in the interior of the country, while Customs and Border Protection (which includes the Border Patrol) handles enforcement from the border up to 100 miles inland. [ICE]

 

References

Dani Anguiano & Maanvi Singh. “Ice arrests at immigration courts across the US stirring panic: ‘It’s terrifying’”. London: The Guardian, May 22, 2025.
https://theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/22/ice-arrests-immigration-courts

Peter Costantini. “Manufacturing illegality: An Interview with Mae Ngai”. Foreign Policy In Focus, January 16, 2019.
https://fpif.org/manufacturing-illegality-an-interview-with-mae-ngai

Legal Information Institute. “habeas corpus”. Cornell Law School, no date
https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/habeas_corpus

Camilo Montoya-Galvez & Nidia Cavazos. “ICE ending migrants’ court cases in order to arrest and move to deport them”. CBS News, May 23, 2025.
https://cbsnews.com/news/ice-ending-migrants-court-cases-arrest-move-to-deport-them

Margaret Renkl. “The ICE Raids in Nashville Aren’t About Public Safety”. New York Times, May 22, 2025.
https://nytimes.com/2025/05/22/opinion/ice-raids-nashville-immigrants.html

Palestinians Call Out Israel’s Mission To Destroy Their History and Cultural Heritage in Gaza

A brutal military onslaught by Israel since October 2023 has destroyed hospitals, homes, food, water, and sanitation in the Palestinian territory of Gaza, with an estimated death toll of more than 53,000 people. Credit: Hosny Salah

A brutal military onslaught by Israel since October 2023 has destroyed hospitals, homes, food, water, and sanitation in the Palestinian territory of Gaza, with an estimated death toll of more than 53,000 people. Credit: Hosny Salah

By Catherine Wilson
LONDON, May 26 2025 – Israel’s ongoing war of annihilation in Gaza has wiped out hospitals, schools, homes, water, and food, reducing the Palestinian territory to a wasteland and leaving a death toll of more than 53,000 people. But an equally lethal campaign has been unleashed against the foundations of Palestinian society and identity.

The Israeli Defense Force (IDF) has targeted libraries, repositories, and institutions of Palestinian culture and heritage in a mission to eradicate the history, literary accomplishments, and political and social existence of Palestine as a place and people.

“The losses in Gaza are vast, incalculable, as we are still in the throes of a genocidal war that has already destroyed 70 percent of the Gaza Strip and killed or maimed 10 percent of its embattled population,” Raja Khalidi, Co-Administrator of the Khalidi Library, an Arab public library founded by the Khalidi family in East Jerusalem more than a century ago, told IPS. “So has the Israeli war machine in Gaza and the West Bank wrought indiscriminate destruction that threatens erasure of Palestinian written, architectural, and archaeological cultural heritage.”

In a recent report on the destruction of libraries, archives, and museums in Gaza since the conflict erupted in 2023, the solidarity organization Librarians and Archivists with Palestine (LAP) stated that “the destruction of cultural heritage in Gaza impoverishes the collective identity of the Palestinian people, irrevocably denies them their history, and violates their sovereignty.”

“The greatest loss remains the normalization of the daily massacres of Gazans, including children. Every Palestinian life is a record, a history. The Zionist war machine realises this and the targeting of children, in particular, is an attempt at destroying the future narrative of Palestine,” Ahmad Almallah, a Palestinian poet who grew up in Bethlehem and now lives in Philadelphia in the United States, told IPS.

Palestinian children live their lives under Israeli siege in Gaza, December 2024. Credit: Hosny Salah

Palestinian children live their lives under Israeli siege in Gaza, December 2024. Credit: Hosny Salah

Bordered by Israel to the east and the Mediterranean Sea to the west, Gaza comprises 365 square kilometers of land that is home to about 2.1 million Muslim and Christian Palestinians who have lived under siege for more than half a century. Many Palestinians fled to Gaza following Israeli dispossession of their villages and homes during the Al-Nakba, or the ‘Catastrophe,’ in 1948. Then the territory was part of Egypt. Israel subsequently seized Gaza during the Six-Day War of 1967 until 1993, when the Oslo Accords made way for it to be administered by the Palestinian Authority.

The Islamic resistance organization, Hamas, then took power in 2005. Its launching of a raid and attack within Israel in October 2023, which resulted in the death of 1,200 Israelis with 251 taken hostage, triggered the current Gaza war. Since then, the IDF has sustained a relentless military onslaught leading to the obliteration of every facility for human habitation in Gaza and the escalation of a humanitarian crisis due to lack of food, water, shelter, and medical services.

While a ceasefire began on 19 January, disputes between Israel and Hamas about progress in hostage and prisoner exchanges led to the ceasefire fracturing on 18 March. The IDF resumed its offensive with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu further threatening to annex parts of Gaza.

This month UNESCO reported that Israel had destroyed 107 important cultural sites in the Palestinian enclave, including historic buildings, mosques, churches, and museums. And last year, LAP detailed the damage and destruction of 22 libraries and archives, including Gaza’s Central Archives, which contained valuable documentation of the enclave’s 150-year history. The Diana Tamari Sabbagh Library, which held tens of thousands of books, was also destroyed, as was the Omari Mosque and Library, which was built in the 7th century and held a major collection of rare books dating to the 14th century. Four university libraries in Gaza also suffered damage, including the Al-Quds Open University Library and the Jawaharlal Nehru Library of Gaza’s Al-Azhar University. Historical records destroyed in Gaza include those that proved Palestinian land and property ownership.

“Several years ago, the occupation destroyed the National Library in Gaza, razing its towering structure to the ground. With its destruction, the dream of creating a repository for both ancient and modern Palestinian works was obliterated. The site that once promised to preserve a rich cultural heritage became little more than a platform for displaying political party flags and leaders’ portraits,” Palestinian novelist Yousri al-Ghoul wrote in January.

The Omari Mosque in Gaza, portrayed in 2022, before its destruction by an Israeli attack in December 2023. Credit: Dan Palraz

The Omari Mosque in Gaza, portrayed in 2022, before its destruction by an Israeli attack in December 2023. Credit: Dan Palraz

The current conflict continues attempts to erase Palestinian history and identity that began during the Al-Nakba when Palestinian homes and their contents were looted and destroyed.

“As a child of the first intifada in Palestine, even words, the raw material for books, were very dangerous toys to play with. The Israeli occupation banned using the word ‘Palestine,’ and children and teenagers caught inscribing the word on a wall were either shot dead or arrested and subjected to torture. But that didn’t stop Palestinians from writing the word and piling on it poems, literature, and personal and natural history,” Almallah said.

Together with this loss, Palestinian writers, intellectuals, artists, and journalists have been killed, putting in jeopardy the continuity of knowledge and culture within society and its transmission to the next generation. Those who have lost their lives since 2023 include the writer Abdul Karim Hashash, who has written many books on Palestinian poetry and culture, and Doaa Al-Masri, Librarian at Gaza’s Edward Said Library.

In 2016 the International Criminal Court identified the desecration of a people’s cultural heritage as a war crime in a case about Islamist attacks on UNESCO-protected monuments in Timbuktu in Mali. Subsequently, in 1954, the Hague Convention, an international treaty stipulating the protection of cultural property in armed conflicts, was established and has now been signed by 136 countries.

More recently, South Africa included allegations of cultural dispossession in the case it launched in 2023 of genocide by Israel in Gaza in the International Court of Justice (ICJ). It will likely take the court years to reach a ruling. But in January last year, it issued initial orders to Israel to prevent and punish acts and public incitement to commit genocide by its military, an order that Israel continues to ignore.

“The international community has failed Palestinians; it has failed Gaza now! It has not done anything to stop the genocide and the massacring of children. I don’t expect they will do anything to save our books. But despite all Zionist attempts to silence them, we are witnessing Palestine becoming part of world heritage; Palestine is now everywhere!” Almallah declared.

In the meantime, there are important institutions in the region taking action to ensure the tactics of erasure will not succeed.  In Jerusalem, the Khalidi Library, which is home to a rich collection of thousands of books and Islamic manuscripts representing an Arab literary heritage over many centuries, is a testament to cultural resilience. It also conducts extensive manuscript conservation, restoration, and digitization work and has been a pillar of vibrant Palestinian scholarship, thought, and writing since the early twentieth century.

Khalidi emphasized that, looking ahead, in any reconstruction plan for post-war Gaza, “the first task will be for competent organizations, such as UNESCO, to launch a proper survey of the destruction of cultural heritage in Gaza… then ensure the future preservation and restoration or digitization of salvaged collections.”

IPS UN Bureau Report

 


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