At least 15 arrested at ICE protest on Roebling Bridge. What we know
Covington police said the arrests came after people "obstructed traffic and created safety concerns for both demonstrators and the public" when they crossed the Ohio River bridge July 17. The group was calling for the release of Ayman Soliman, an imam and former Cincinnati Children's chaplain detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement earlier this month.
Videos circulating on social media show officers forcing multiple people to the ground during the protest.
'We respect everyone's right to protest, but when demonstrations jeopardize public safety and violate the law, our officers must take appropriate action,' Police Chief Brian Valenti said in a news release.
Here's what we know about the protest and the arrests:
What led to the arrests on the Roebling Bridge?
The arrests by the Covington Police Department came during a rally held in support of Imam Ayman Soliman, an Egyptian immigrant and former Cincinnati Children's chaplain, whom ICE detained July 9.
After the rally, which began in Cincinnati, about 100 people crossed the Roebling Bridge shortly after 8 p.m., heading toward Covington, according to estimates by attendees and an officer on the scene.
"My understanding is that there was a plan to have people walk on the bridge as a symbolic action," said the Rev. Nelson Pierce Jr., senior pastor of Beloved Community Church in Mount Airy.
As marchers approached the bridge, he said, they asked motorists to divert to other locations. When police approached from Covington, the "overwhelming majority" complied with directions to move from the bridge to sidewalks, he said.
Covington police said in a news release that officers initially attempted to connect with the protest organizer but were "met with open hostility and threatening behavior."
Police said that after warnings were issued to the group to disperse, several people were taken into custody.
Who was arrested during the ICE protest?
The 15 people arrested were charged with felony rioting and various misdemeanors, including unlawful assembly, failure to disperse, obstructing a highway, obstructing emergency responders, criminal mischief, disorderly conduct and resisting arrest. The felony carries a maximum penalty of up to five years in prison.
On July 18, Kenton County District Court Judge Douglas Grothaus set bonds at $2,500 and has ordered them to return to their next hearing on July 23. He has also ordered all of them not to be on the Roebling Bridge.
Among those was CityBeat reporter Madeline Fening, who posted about the protest on her Instagram page Thursday evening. It's unclear what led to her arrest, but she was charged with failure to disperse, obstructing a highway, obstructing emergency response violations, disorderly conduct and unlawful assembly.
A photojournalism intern for the publication was also arrested, publisher Tony Frank confirmed Friday morning.
Ignite Peace, one of three organizers of the rally, condemned the police response. "The violence that was committed against the people is indicative of the violent systems we seek to challenge," the Cincinnati group, previously known as Intercommunity Justice and Peace Center, said in a press release June 18. The Ohio Poor People's Campaign and SURJ (Showing Up For Racial Justice) Cincinnati were also listed as co-organizers.
Cincinnati police issued citations to three people for disorderly conduct, Enquirer media partner Fox19 reported, but no one was taken to jail.
"What took place in Cincinnati was relatively peaceful with the exception of a few people who were issued citations," police spokesman Lt. Jonathan Cunningham said.
Who is Imam Ayman Soliman?
Ayman Soliman, an Egyptian immigrant who worked for several years as a Muslim chaplain at Children's and a volunteer imam at Clifton Mosque, was detained by ICE after an immigration hearing in Blue Ash on July 9.
Soliman, 51, was granted asylum in the United States in 2018 after fleeing his home country, where he said he endured torture and threats on his life because of his work as a freelance journalist.
Immigration officials decided in June to revoke his asylum, claiming he'd worked for a charity in Egypt with ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.
Soliman and his lawyers have said that claim is false and that the charity is not associated with the Brotherhood, an Islamic group that some accuse of involvement in terrorism. Egypt considers the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization, but the United States does not.
Secrecy and 'watch lists': Was chaplain's arrest based on murky anti-terror measures?
"During his years in Ohio, Ayman became known as the 'interfaith imam,' beloved for his steady presence at the side of ill children, parents and other caregivers," the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio said in announcing a federal court order barring immigration officials from removing Soliman from the jurisdiction of the Cleveland Immigration Court, which handles cases from the Cincinnati area.
Soliman, who remains confined at the Butler County Jail, is scheduled for a bond hearing July 23, after which he could be released from detention.
Demonstration moved to the bridge
The protest started at the "Sing the Queen City" sign at The Banks before the crowd moved across the Roebling Bridge toward Covington around 8 p.m., according to web camera footage of the bridge.
At approximately 8:15 p.m., nine Covington police squad cars drove onto the bridge and confronted the crowd.
Gracie Shanklin, who was on the bridge, said she thought the organizers had a permit to march on the roadway. Within seconds of police arriving and ordering the crowd to disperse onto the sidewalks, she realized that was not the case.
Covington police said officers initially attempted to connect with the protest's organizer, but were "met with open hostility and threatening behavior."
"While the department supports the public's right to peaceful assembly and expression, threatening officers and blocking critical infrastructure, such as a major bridge, presents a danger to all involved," the release said.
Shanklin, 23, of Norwood, said she saw Covington officers deploy Tasers on people who were making their way toward the sidewalk.
"We were peacefully marching," Shanklin said. "The police started the violence."
Dozens of officers from agencies across Kenton and Campbell counties responded.
By 8:30 p.m., there were 15 squad cars and the crowd had largely dispersed onto the Ohio side of the bridge. Officers cleared the bridge around 8:45 p.m. The bridge was temporarily closed during the incident but has since been reopened.
A small group of about a dozen protesters later assembled outside the Covington Police Department and the Kenton County jail. The groups were mostly quiet, at times chanting for police to drop the charges.
Did protesters have permits?
Protest organizers did not have a permit on the Ohio side of the bridge, according to Cincinnati city and Hamilton County officials.
A city spokeswoman said protesters do not need a permit to gather and a Hamilton County spokeswoman said they did not receive any requests for a permit.
No permits were issued in Covington. The Enquirer also reached the Kentucky Transportation Department to check if they issued any permits for a gathering or to close the bridge.
What's next for those arrested at ICE protest?
Grothaus scheduled a next hearing for July 23.
Attorney Brian Davis, of the Department of Public Advocacy, said he's currently representing two people who were arrested July 17, though, he declined to say who his clients are.
"As with any case, I'm going to try to gather all the information I possibly can to support my clients in any way I can," he said. "In this case a lot of it seems to be caught on video."
He asked that anyone with video or photos of the arrests email him at brianr.davis@ky.gov.
Reporter Erin Glynn contributed.
This story was updated to add a gallery.
This article originally appeared on Cincinnati Enquirer: What we know about ICE protest, arrests on Roebling Bridge
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San Francisco Chronicle
24 minutes ago
- San Francisco Chronicle
This man is a U.S. citizen by birth. Why did ICE mark him for deportation — again?
As Miguel Silvestre stared at the government document he'd been emailed, he couldn't believe what he was reading. His full name was atop the 'Record of Deportable/Inadmissible Alien' form from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, but just about everything else on the page was false. Silvestre, a 47-year-old construction worker, was born in Stockton, but the document listed his birthplace and country of citizenship as Mexico. At the bottom were words that Silvestre didn't understand completely, though well enough: 'Received … on June 26, 2025 at 11:31. Disposition: Expedited Removal.' 'Now I have to be looking over my shoulder,' he said in a recent interview. 'It's hurtful.' Despite being a U.S. citizen by birth, Silvestre had reason to be paranoid about his status. Remarkably, this was not the first time the government had targeted him for deportation. After Stockton police arrested him for public drunkenness in 1999, Silvestre, then 21, was deported to Nogales, Mexico — twice — under an erroneous removal order. U.S. citizens cannot legally be deported. An immigration judge finally overturned the removal order in 2004, ruling Silvestre was indeed an American. It remains unclear why federal authorities created the new expedited removal paperwork. Known as an I-213, it's an internal record of people believed to be deportable created before the government initiates the deportation process. A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson, Tricia McLaughlin, said Silvestre was deported in 1999, under President Bill Clinton's administration, because he 'claimed to be a Mexican citizen without any legal status to remain in the U.S.,' an assertion Silvestre denies. 'This individual has no active immigration case and is not a target of ICE,' McLaughlin said. She did not deny that the agency had created the new expedited removal paperwork. Asked if it was created by mistake and whether it had been withdrawn, she did not immediately respond. 'ICE does NOT deport U.S. citizens,' McLaughlin said. 'We know who we are targeting ahead of time. If and when we do encounter individuals subject to arrest, our law enforcement are trained to ask a series of well-determined questions to determine status and removability.' When the Chronicle told Silvestre on Thursday about DHS' statement, he said he was relieved to learn he is not an ICE target. But he said he wanted to be certain that the removal paperwork had been or will be withdrawn. 'What they did to me was kidnapping,' he said of the 1999 deportations. 'The biggest thing is they humiliated me.' He said he wants the government to tell him, 'We've corrected it, you're an American and we apologize.' The latest threat of removal for Silvestre came as the Trump administration ramped up its mass deportation campaign of undocumented immigrants and asylum seekers, widening the net to include green card holders and floating the idea of shipping U.S. citizens convicted of crimes to Salvadoran prisons. But Silvestre's saga — propelled by government failures and complicated by his own struggles with the law — spans across administrations, exemplifying what experts say are due process violations in a deportation system that can ensnare vulnerable people with little understanding of what's happening to them. Although the immigration detention and deportation of U.S. citizens is illegal, it does happen, according to research, media reports, first person accounts and the U.S. government's federal watchdog agency. The Government Accountability Office said in a 2021 report that ICE safeguards against wrongfully deporting U.S. citizens are 'inconsistent,' resulting in the agency not knowing the extent to which its officers are arresting, detaining or deporting such people. Moreover, deportation can create a permanent stain, given that a person who is removed can be barred from entering the U.S. again for 10 years. A 2011 study by Jacqueline Stevens, director of Northwestern University's Deportation Research Clinic, estimated that 1% of people in ICE detention and 0.05% of those deported are U.S. citizens. ICE's own data, which Stevens said is probably an undercount, indicates the agency arrested 674 U.S. citizens from mid-2014 to mid-2020, removing 70. Most of the wrongfully deported weren't born in the U.S. but obtained citizenship through citizen parents — either at birth or because children under 18 generally become citizens when a parent naturalizes. Many don't have passports. Proving their citizenship in immigration court can involve tracking down their parents' or even grandparents' birth certificates. The deportation of American-born citizens like Silvestre is more uncommon. 'At best, the case is one of gross incompetence,' said Kevin Johnson, a UC Davis immigration law expert. 'The U.S. authorities were not careful with Silvestre's case and still are not being careful.' Catherine Seitz, legal director of the Immigration Institute of the Bay Area, said she'd heard of cases in which the government deemed birth certificates fraudulent because their holders were delivered by midwives. But to learn of a case with a hospital birth surprised her. It is concerning that the DHS created new removal paperwork, Seitz said: 'You would think they'd check with the court records. They should be able to see the termination. It could be an indication that they're going too fast and they're not doing their due diligence.' It was Northwestern's Stevens who unearthed the latest removal paperwork. In 2021, Silvestre had contacted her for help. She filed Freedom of Information Act requests with three Homeland Security agencies on his behalf. Last month, on June 30, she was checking her inbox when she found that Customs and Border Protection had finally responded to her inquiry. The records, shared with the Chronicle, reveal that immigration officials created the new paperwork for Silvestre's expedited removal, or deportation without a hearing, effective June 26. Stevens called Silvestre immediately, unsure whether he'd already been picked up. On July 4, he returned her call, and that's when she emailed him the deportation record. 'If U.S. citizens, who under the U.S. Constitution have full due process protections, are being detained and deported, that tells us an awful lot about the treatment of other people,' Stevens said, referring to immigrants seeking legal status. Silvestre's case, she said, is like a '900-pound gorilla in a coal mine.' A minor arrest goes wrong Silvestre was born on Feb. 16, 1978, at Dameron Hospital in Stockton. His parents, Ernestina and Raul, were working-class immigrants from Mexico. Raul, also a construction worker, was a U.S. citizen through his own father. By his own admission, Silvestre ran afoul of the law. Coming of age on Stockton's south side during a time of rampant gang violence, Silvestre said he grew up too fast. The baby of the family, he followed his two older brothers to car shows and hung out with the wrong crowd. He started drinking and smoking marijuana at around 11, tried methamphetamine soon after and was expelled from Franklin High School in 12th grade. He recalled his brothers warning him, 'You're not going to live to see 21.' At 18, with his father's help, he joined the local laborers union and started working. But before long he got into trouble, drawing a 1998 conviction for possessing meth and carrying a concealed gun without a permit. He was released on probation. On Super Bowl Sunday in 1999, Silvestre's dad kicked him out and told him he needed to get his life together. He sent the 21-year-old man to stay with his mother — the couple had separated — but on his way, Silvestre recalled, he ran into friends who invited him drinking. By the time he showed up at his mom's house, it was late, he was intoxicated and his family wasn't having it. His mom called the cops, telling him, 'Don't run.' Police officers took him to San Joaquin County jail, where he was stripped to his boxers and sent to the drunk tank. (He was not charged.) As he was trying to sober up, he said, three men in green uniforms came in and started questioning him in Spanish. ' De donde eres?' they asked. Where are you from? He said he replied in English that he was from Stockton. 'They're like, 'That's not what our paperwork says.'' The men loaded him onto a bus and drove to what Silvestre recognized as the Port of Stockton, the shipping hub on an eastern finger of the delta. Silvestre assumed he was being transferred to prison for violating the terms of his probation. He didn't know it at the time, but the men in green were from the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the agency known as INS that handled immigration before being split into three departments in 2003, including ICE. In a holding cell, he was surrounded by people speaking many languages. A man handed him a Bible and asked whether he was scared. 'We're being deported,' he told Silvestre, who didn't know what the word meant. 'I ain't scared of nothing,' he recalled saying. He was hotheaded. He'd always been scared of God, but not prison. Hours later, for reasons neither the Chronicle nor Silvestre nor Stevens could determine, the San Joaquin County Sheriff's Office released Silvestre to Border Patrol, which placed him in deportation proceedings, INS records show. 'The subject was interviewed at the San Joaquin County Jail after his arrest for DUI,' a Border Patrol agent wrote in a document dated Feb. 1, 1999. 'The subject said that he was a citizen of Mexico without immigration documents to enter or remain in the United States. He also said that he entered the United States at a place other than a port of entry to avoid immigration inspection.' Stevens called the record a 'fiction' contradicted by Silvestre's U.S. birth certificate. In a warrant for Silvestre's arrest, a Border Patrol agent claimed he was a Mexican national who entered the U.S. illegally near Nogales, Ariz., two weeks earlier — even though a litany of public records showed him to reside in California. Silvestre remembered a terrible journey south. After he and other men were loaded onto a bus, his stomach started hurting. He needed to use the bathroom badly but couldn't. As the sun rose, they arrived somewhere in Los Angeles. Shackled, he and the others were ordered onto a plane and flown to Arizona, where Silvestre was placed in a two-man cell with seven other men. His stomach still hurt. He recalled telling a guard he desperately needed to use the bathroom. His hands were in zip ties, so he had no choice but to defecate in his pants. When a guard returned to his cell and opened the food tray slot, Silvestre spat at him, he said. Soon, he heard the slot open again and felt something hit him in the eye that burned like mace. The door opened and he felt two to three men grabbing him. He was sprayed again, he said, burning his genitals. He felt like he was going to pass out. Silvestre's next memory is of being at a court hearing, though he remembers little of what happened. According to records, he told the judge he was a U.S. citizen, but the judge deferred to INS. The judge ordered him deported on Feb. 5, 1999. He was bused to the Arizona-Mexico border, where he was instructed to get out and continue on foot. He said he walked into Nogales, Sonora, hungry, thirsty and cold. Using the phone at a church, he called his parents and told them he was in Mexico. They were incredulous. His mom asked whether he was really out partying with his friends. 'I'm not lying to you,' he recalled saying. His father drove to Mexico armed with his son's birth certificate. Rescuing him took two tries: During the first attempt, Silvestre was stopped at the border, detained and swiftly deported. When he tried again, he showed his birth certificate and an officer admitted him. Detained again Silvestre found that the ordeal did not end with his return. Often, he said, he woke up terrified in the middle of the night, not knowing where he was. He felt nobody believed his account of what had happened. He was left with almost no proof except for a flimsy wristband that immigration officers put on him in detention. He began to feel suicidal and used drugs heavily. As years passed, he kept working, but also partying and getting into trouble. In 2004, his mother told him he needed to change his life. He decided to move to Arizona, where he found a job packing vegetables. One weekend that year, believing he was safe because five years had passed, he joined a friend from work on a weekend trip to Mexico, where they had pizza and beers. Upon trying to reenter the U.S. with his birth certificate and California ID, he was once again detained and held in Yuma, Ariz. 'Silvestre is a citizen and national of Mexico and of no other country,' ICE records from the time state. 'He does not have nor has he ever had documents with which to enter, live, work or stay in the United States.' ICE moved to deport him, alleging he was falsely claiming to be a U.S. citizen. ICE made the claim even though, two years earlier, the agency had run Silvestre's fingerprints after an arrest and correctly determined that Silvestre was who he said he was, records show. From detention in Yuma, Silvestre called his mother, who rushed to free him. She handwrote and notarized an affidavit in Spanish, stating, 'I am sending the evidence proving that my son Miguel Silvestre was born in the United States, in the city of Stockton, California.' Silvestre spent two weeks in detention before an immigration judge ruled on March 24, 2004, that he was indeed a U.S. citizen — and ordered him released. Homeland Security terminated deportation proceedings the same day. Back in California, Silvestre returned to more familiar problems. Later in 2004, he was convicted of carjacking with a gun and went to prison for three months. He bounced in and out of jail, as well as addiction treatment. Last year, his older brother accused him of threatening him, resulting in criminal charges. Silvestre maintains he's innocent. 'The truth is, it doesn't matter if this guy was a mass murderer,' said Johnson, the UC Davis law professor. 'He could go to prison and be punished but you couldn't deport him, as long as he's a citizen.' Though there is no evidence, Johnson said it's likely that racial and class profiling played a role in Silvestre's deportation. 'It's hard to imagine,' he said, 'the same kind of mix-up with a John Smith who goes to Pacific University.' In 2021, the Government Accountability Office reported that ICE policy did not require officers to update the citizenship field in their data systems after identifying evidence that a person could be a U.S. citizen. In Silvestre's case, the original 1999 mistake that seeded his long predicament was apparently unremedied in immigration records. In 2015, Silvestre said, he sobered up and devoted himself to God. But his mother's death in 2023 plunged him into grief that he hasn't recovered from. When he learned about the latest deportation paperwork, he said he felt suicidal. He got into his car and started driving recklessly, hoping police would pull him over. But then he sensed his mom was watching over him. 'Calm down, go back to your room, and go to sleep,' he heard her say. So he did. For 21 years, Silvestre hasn't left the country, fearful of being barred again. A drawstring bag that he carries everywhere contains his birth certificate, along with the immigration judge's order affirming his citizenship.
CNN
an hour ago
- CNN
A US war forced her parents to flee. Now, a Wisconsin mother has been deported back to the country she never called home
Ma Yang arrived at the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) office in late February with a sinking feeling in her stomach. Several days earlier, she had received a call from ICE asking her to report to her local field office in Milwaukee, Wisconsin – more than six months before she was due for her annual check-in. President Donald Trump had been inaugurated for a second time and his administration had already moved ahead with its promise to deport millions of immigrants from the US. 'In my gut, I already knew something was off,' Yang told CNN. Yang, a 37-year-old mother of five, was detained that day and deported two weeks later to Laos – a small country in Southeast Asia that her parents had fled four decades earlier. Yang had never been to Laos, is not a Laos citizen and does not speak Lao. Born in a refugee camp in Thailand, Yang resettled in the US with her parents and older siblings when she was 8 months old. She is Hmong, an ethnic minority group in Southeast Asia who helped the CIA during its so-called Secret War which ran parallel to the Vietnam War. Many Hmong, including Yang's parents, fled Laos after the fall of Saigon. Yang lived for decades in the US legally as a permanent resident until she pleaded guilty to marijuana-related charges in 2022. Under US law, non-citizens can lose their visas if convicted of certain crimes. After serving her sentence, Yang was transferred to an ICE detention facility and released in 2023 with a removal order from the US. Yang said her lawyer at the time assured her the removal order would not be acted upon – deportations to Southeast Asia were exceedingly rare. But that appears to be changing. Months into Trump's second term, as his administration ramps up its immigration crackdown, hundreds of people have been quietly deported to Laos and Vietnam, immigrant rights advocates say, in a stark departure from decades of US immigration policy in the region. The reported uptick in deportations to Southeast Asia comes as the Trump administration ramps up pressure on countries, including some with poor human rights records, to accept US deportees, alongside sweeping policy changes that include punishing tariffs and travel bans. Yang's deportation to Laos – a country her parents were forced to flee following US military intervention – underscores the sweeping and aggressive tactics Trump's White House is using to expel immigrants. Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary for public affairs at the Department of Homeland Security, confirmed Yang's deportation in a statement to CNN. 'Under President Trump and Secretary (Kristi) Noem, if you break the law, you will face the consequences,' McLaughlin said. 'Criminal aliens are not welcome in the US.' Between 1964 and 1973, the US dropped more than 2 million tons of bombs on Laos to destroy North Vietnamese supply lines that ran through the country, which is roughly the size of Oregon. The CIA recruited the Hmong to help them carry out their covert war against communist forces in Laos and Vietnam. The war decimated Laos and the Hmong. More cluster munitions were dropped on Laos during the Secret War than on Germany and Japan combined during World War II, making Laos the most heavily bombed country per capita in history. An estimated 30,000 to 40,000 Hmong civilians and soldiers were killed – a tenth of the Hmong population in Laos. Following the US withdrawal, the Laos communist regime declared the Hmong enemies of the state. Roughly 150,000 fled to neighboring Thailand, and later the US, mainly settling in California, Minnesota and Wisconsin. Yang, her parents and her older siblings arrived in Milwaukee, sponsored by a church as part of a mass refugee resettlement program that brought more than one million people from Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia to the US in the decades after the war. Growing up, Yang was one of 13 siblings, and her parents worked from sunrise to sundown to provide for their children. 'Life in America was tough for us,' Yang said. 'We were really poor.' Yang had her first child at 14 and married an abusive man who struggled with drug addiction. Eventually, after another baby and a divorce, she settled into a calmer life with her long-term partner Michael Bub, and they went on to have three more children. Yang's life was not easy, and she worked hard to be present for her kids. Yang and Bub gave their kids a slice of American life, with trips to the McDonald's playground and shopping at Walmart. The family would frequently gather around her table for warm bowls of khao poon, a curried noodle soup from Laos – her kids' favorite. For years, Yang worked as a nail technician in a salon in Milwaukee, but it closed during the pandemic and money was tight. One of Yang's family members asked if she and Bub wanted to make a few extra bucks by helping to fill marijuana vape cartridges and allowing packages to be shipped to their house. 'That one decision made our lives change tremendously,' Yang said. Yang said she was given poor legal advice, and if she had known a guilty plea would threaten her immigration status, she would have fought the charges. Instead, Yang pleaded guilty to conspiracy to possess with intent to distribute 100 kilograms or more of marijuana, was sentenced to two and a half years in prison. Bub was also sentenced to two years in prison but is a US citizen. Yang and Bub were in the process of rebuilding their lives before she was deported. They had recently bought a house in a better neighborhood. 'We got out, and we said we wanted to do better for ourselves and for our children,' Yang said. 'I never in a million years thought this would happen.' Yang is now living more than 8,100 miles away from Milwaukee in the Laotian capital of Vientiane, and facing down her future in an unfamiliar place, separated from her five children and partner. 'For me to get ripped away from my children is the most shocking,' Yang said, adding that her children are struggling to cope with her sudden disappearance. 'I was there, and then I wasn't.' Over Memorial Day weekend in May, as Americans mourned veterans who died in combat, a flight carrying more than 150 people who were once displaced by US wars left on a one-way flight from Dallas, Texas. Since Trump returned to office in January, advocates say his administration has deported hundreds of people to Vietnam and Laos. ICE does not have up-to-date data on deportations to specific countries, so immigrant rights groups have stepped in to fill the void. Vo Danh, a collective of organizers which advocates on behalf of immigrants and refugees from Southeast Asia, reported 65 people were deported to Laos and 93 to Vietnam on the Memorial Day weekend flight. In the days leading up to the flight's departure, advocates had noticed dozens of immigrants from Southeast Asia being transferred from detention centers across the US to a facility in Dallas. Immigration advocate Tom Cartright, who tracks chartered ICE flights, noted that in May, Laos accepted its largest flight of US deportees since he started tracking in January 2020 – a flight which then carried on to Vietnam. A spokesperson for Vo Danh, which has been tracking deportations on a case-by-case basis through its network of family members, estimates almost 300 people have been deported to Vietnam and 80 have been deported to Laos in the few months since Trump returned to power. By comparison, between fiscal years 2021 and 2024, 145 people considered by ICE to be nationals of Vietnam and just six considered to be nationals of Laos were deported, according to ICE. The DHS, ICE and the White House did not answer questions from CNN about how many people have been deported to Laos and Vietnam since Trump returned to office. A consular officer at the Lao Embassy in Washington, DC, told the Minnesota Star Tribune in July it has issued travel documents for 145 people to be deported in 2025, compared to about 10 in a typical year. Advocates predict another wave of people will be deported soon. Last month, the Homeland Security Investigations field office in St. Paul – which boasts a large Hmong population – announced on X a slew of arrests of 'illegal aliens' from Laos. Many of the people deported from the US to Southeast Asia in recent months are former refugees who committed crimes, some decades ago, and pleaded guilty without realizing they were risking their right to remain in the US, said Connie Chung Joe, the CEO of Asian Americans Advancing Justice Southern California, the US's largest legal and civil rights organization for Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. 'They came here as war-torn refugees, very poor, limited English proficiency, without any cultural ties, and then the community did not have safety net support,' Joe said. 'So, you saw a lot of trouble that came out, including the proliferation of things like gangs, young people getting into trouble, and they would end up with some sort of criminal background.' Because of the risks these refugees faced if they returned home, and the refusal of some Southeast Asian countries to accept deportees from the US, relatively few people with removal orders – legal directives ordering a non-US citizen to leave the country – were deported. Instead, after making their way through the US criminal justice system, many Southeast Asians were told to report to ICE for annual check-ins while they continued their life in the US. As of May, 4,749 people considered by ICE to be nationals of Laos had removal orders from the US, according to Syracuse University's Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), which tracks immigration court data. There were 10,745 Vietnamese nationals with removal orders, according to TRAC. 'The majority of individuals (who have been deported) are American in everything except for their green card,' said Quyen Dinh, Executive Director of the Southeast Asia Resource Action Center. 'They are spouses to US partners, they have US children, they are taking care of elders who also fled as refugees of war and genocide.' During his first term, Trump struck a new deal with Vietnam to accept immigrants who came to the US before 1995, including war refugees, superseding a 2008 agreement not to deport them. The US also introduced new visa sanctions on Laotian government officials to push the country to accept deportees. But Trump left office before these plans could materialize, and the Biden administration lifted the Laos visa sanctions. Since returning to office, Trump has increased pressure on countries to accept deportees from the US – even deportees who are not citizens of those countries. After a court challenge, the Supreme Court ruled that Trump could deport migrants to countries other than their homeland, including South Sudan and Libya, with minimal notice. Last month, the Trump administration introduced full and partial travel bans on citizens from 19 countries, including Laos, citing the country's visa overstay rate and historic refusal to 'accept back its removable nationals.' McLaughlin, the DHS spokesperson, said Yang was released from ICE custody in 2023 'because at the time ICE could not remove aliens to Laos due to the country's refusal to issue travel documents. Now, under President Trump's leadership, Laos is issuing travel documents and Yang was able to be returned.' However, because Yang was born in a refugee camp, she is not a citizen of Laos and is considered stateless – a precarious legal status whereby someone is not considered a national of any state. Yang currently has a temporary ID card in Laos and was told by authorities that she will be eligible for citizenship, but it could take one year or more. Bub, Yang's partner, has undergone several brain surgeries and receives disability payments from the government. He is now struggling to support five children as a single father. Before Yang was deported, the couple were also caring for Yang's mother, who had suffered two strokes. But Bub found it too difficult to care for her and five children, so she's had to find alternative care. The couple say the family is serving a second sentence for their crime. 'We paid for what we did,' Bub told CNN. When Yang was deported, he said 'I wanted to trade places with her if they'd let me.' Dinh, from the Southeast Asia Resource Action Center, said the American government should be accountable for the fate of refugees from US wars. She and other advocacy groups are fighting to enshrine the status of Southeast Asian immigrants in the US and protect them against deportation. 'Our communities lost our entire homelands and livelihoods because of the destruction of our home countries, because of US decisions and US hands and US forces,' she said. 'When you accept a refugee, it is for the duration and the lifetime of the harm that you have done and have created.' Yang's family has created a GoFundMe to raise money to hire a lawyer to help reunite her with her kids in the US. 'I don't want to be forgotten,' Yang said. 'I want to fight to the very end for my case.' Each month she is away, she faces painful reminders of what she is missing out on. Last month, she missed her youngest daughter's graduation from kindergarten. Her eldest child, who was born when Yang was just 14, is taking the separation particularly hard. 'We raised each other,' Yang said. Yang's 12-year-old daughter recently told her she wanted to attend an anti-Trump rally to protest the immigration policies that had taken her mother away from her. 'This is not right,' Yang said. 'No kid should fear that this is what they have to do in order for their family to stay.'
Yahoo
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ICE moves to shackle some 180,000 immigrants with GPS ankle monitors
ICE moves to shackle some 180,000 immigrants with GPS ankle monitors U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has directed personnel to sharply increase the number of immigrants they shackle with GPS-enabled ankle monitors, as the Trump administration widens surveillance of people it is targeting for deportation, according to an internal ICE document reviewed by The Washington Post. In a June 9 memo, ICE ordered staff to place ankle monitors on all people enrolled in the agency's Alternatives to Detention program 'whenever possible.' About 183,000 adult migrants are enrolled in ATD and had previously consented to some form of tracking or mandatory check-ins while they waited for their immigration cases to be resolved. Currently, just 24,000 of these individuals wear ankle monitors. Subscribe to The Post Most newsletter for the most important and interesting stories from The Washington Post. One exception would be pregnant women, who would be required to wear wrist-worn tracking devices, Dawnisha M. Helland, an acting assistant director in the management of non-detained immigrants, wrote in the letter. 'If the alien is not being arrested at the time of reporting, escalate their supervision level to GPS ankle monitors whenever possible and increase reporting requirements,' Helland wrote. The new ankle monitor guidance, which has not been previously reported, marks a significant expansion of a 20-year-old surveillance practice steeped in controversy. While tracking devices are cheaper and arguably more humane than detention, immigrants and their advocates have long criticized the government's use of the bulky black ankle bands, which they say are physically uncomfortable, impose a social stigma and invade the privacy of the people wearing them, many of whom have no criminal record or history of missed court appointments. 'This will be a tool used to extend the reach of the government from just the folks it can manage to put in physical detention to an additional hundreds of thousands more that it can surveil,' said Laura Rivera, a senior staff attorney at Just Futures, a nonprofit group that has done research on ICE tracking technologies. 'It's designed to turn their own communities and homes into digital cages.' In an interview, ICE spokeswoman Emily Covington did not comment on the memo but said that the administration is using ankle monitors as an 'enforcement tool' to ensure compliance with immigration laws and that 'more accountability shouldn't come as a surprise.' She said ICE still makes decisions on a case-by-case basis and officers still have discretion over which participants require tracking technology. The expansion will drive business to Geo Group, the Boca Raton, Florida-based private prison conglomerate that previously employed at least two of Trump's top immigration officials and donated over $1.5 million to the president's 2024 campaign and inaugural committee. The tracking program is entirely run by BI Inc., a subsidiary of Geo that got its start in the 1970s by selling a device farmers used to monitor their cattle. However, in one sign of ICE's widening ambitions, agency officials recently began looking for additional technology vendors because BI's capacity may not be able to meet the agency's full needs, said a person briefed on the plans who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to disclose them. Geo did not respond to numerous requests for comment. An ICE spokesperson said in an emailed statement that the agency has a long-standing relationship with Geo and is 'leveraging existing vendors who have proven track records.' The new policy has taken many by surprise. One day last week, about 50 migrants huddled in a room at an ICE field office in Chantilly, Virginia, waiting to be outfitted with tracking devices. 'Everybody in here needs to either wear hardware or be detained,' one ICE official said, according to Megan Brody, an immigration attorney who was there with her client. Paola, 29, was told to report to BI's office in Manassas, Virginia, last month, where one of the contractor's employees told her she had to wear an ankle monitor due to 'new laws,' she said. Paola, a mother of two who said she fled Honduras four years ago because of an abusive husband, said she has attended all of her court appearances and complied with her mandatory mobile app check-ins for the time she's spent waiting for her asylum case to be processed. 'Maybe they've taken these drastic steps because many people don't show up to court or change addresses without reporting,' said Paola, who spoke to The Post on the condition that only her middle name be used because she is afraid of retribution by government officials. 'But some of us do everything right and still get treated the same.' ICE requires most undocumented immigrants to attend court hearings or periodically check in at field offices while their cases are being processed, though the frequency varies depending on a range of factors. An analysis of federal data by the American Immigration Council, an immigrant rights group, found that 83 percent of non-detained immigrants with completed or pending removal cases attended all of their court hearings from 2008 to 2018. A small portion of immigrants who are awaiting final resolution on their immigration proceedings are enrolled in ATD, which requires them to wear a tracking device or perform virtual check-ins using an app, as well as meeting in person with case managers in their home or a BI office. Enrollments in ATD peaked at 378,000 during the surge in border crossings under President Joe Biden and have declined since then. ICE says it considers a range of factors when deciding whether and how to track each immigrant - including criminal history, compliance history, caregiver concerns and medical concerns - but usually does not explain why any individual is put into ATD. Since the program launched in 2004, some participants have claimed they were unfairly subjected to surveillance despite complying diligently with the terms of their release and posing no threat to their communities. 'There were individuals that should have not been in the program and should have been released on their own recognizance,' said Hector Equihua, who worked as a San Diego-based case manager at BI for two years ending in 2018 and learned about the lives of the participants he oversaw from their case files, phone calls and in-person visits with them. Of the people the government monitors under ADT, the vast majority, or 84 percent, are required only to check in virtually to a mobile app called SmartLINK, which uses facial recognition to confirm their identity and GPS to confirm their location at the time of their check-in, according to BI's website and ICE data as of July 12. Ankle bracelets are used on just 13 percent of ATD participants but have been the only immigrant-monitoring technology to grow in use under the Trump administration, adding 4,165 new people since January. Wearing one of the devices, which are made at BI's factory in Boulder, Colorado, is like having a deck of playing cards strapped to your ankle. At six ounces, it's about the same weight as an iPhone. The devices are prone to glitches, have poor battery life, and sometimes leave bruises or rashes on the people who wear them, according to interviews with former BI employees and ATD participants. Michael Langa, a South African immigrant who had to wear an ankle bracelet for eight months in 2019 after he overstayed his visa, said the metal band also came with a psychological burden. 'It makes you feel like you are really a bad person,' Langa said. 'It really gets into your psyche and really damages your soul.' He said his case is still active but he no longer wears a tracking device. All of the people wearing ankle monitors are assigned a BI case manager and given a geographic area they cannot leave, which could be as small as a few-mile radius or as wide as several states. Case managers get an alert any time the person leaves this area, if the device is tampered with or if its battery runs out, at which point the case managers typically call the participant and warn them they may be violating the terms of their release. They may also escalate the matter to ICE. In the past, people who complied with the program were generally moved to less restrictive tracking and less frequent check-ins, a federal watchdog found in 2022. Now, according to interviews with some immigrants and their lawyers, the Trump administration appears to be reversing that policy: Participants who are fully compliant are being moved to more restrictive forms of tracking with little explanation. 'Why are people any more of a flight risk now?' asked Annelise Araujo, a Boston immigration attorney who says she represents several people who were outfitted with ankle monitors. 'People who have lived in the same community, in the same home, in the same job for 20 years?' Geo Group, ICE's largest contractor, is already benefiting from Trump's immigration crackdown. ICE has signed contracts to expand or reopen several Geo detention centers and to fund deportation flights on Geo's air carrier. This month, the agency issued BI a one-year extension on its immigrant-monitoring contract - bypassing a planned competitive bidding process that was expected to open the program to multiple new vendors. Tom Homan, Trump's border czar, previously earned consulting fees working for the division of Geo that oversees immigrant monitoring, part of a pattern of revolving-door arrangements that includes several former ICE officials who obtained jobs in the detention industry, The Post reported earlier this year. A White House spokeswoman said Homan recuses himself from all discussions of government contracts. Geo told investors it has ramped up production of ankle monitors and is prepared to potentially track millions of immigrants. 'We have taken several important steps to be prepared to meet that opportunity, and we are very well positioned,' David Donahue, Geo's chief executive, said on a call with analysts in May. Because each ATD participant generates about $3.70 in revenue per day, a rapid expansion could amount to hundreds of millions of dollars in new revenue per year, said Joe Gomes, a financial analyst at Noble Capital Markets. An ICE spokeswoman said Congress did not allocate any money for ATD in Trump's One Big Beautiful Bill, though the text of the bill says it does include funding for 'information technology investments to support enforcement and removal operations.' Despite Geo's preparations, there are questions about whether the company can meet the ballooning demand. For years, BI has limited its need for manufacturing by recycling old ankle monitors from one participant to the next, according to former employees. Much of its supply of the devices is old and in poor condition. In addition to rapidly producing new devices, BI would have to quickly increase its staff of case managers, or employees tasked with ensuring immigrants are complying with ATD. With each case manager already overseeing as many as 300 participants at once, they are already stretched thin, with little time to attend to individual requests, according to a 2022 investigation by the Guardian. Perhaps because of these constraints, ICE recently asked Geo to hire one or more subcontractors to help scale up the monitoring program, according to the person briefed on the agency's discussions. ATD may grow to include a variety of tracking devices and software tools other than ankle monitors, depending on what technologies ICE can purchase in a short time frame, the person said. Covington, the ICE spokeswoman, declined to comment on any plans to expand the program. When Paola, the Honduran mother of two, got home from the BI office in June, her 6-year-old son asked her about the black box he noticed strapped around her ankle. She told him it was nothing serious - knowing she couldn't tell him the truth. If she loses her asylum case, she knows, the ankle monitor 'makes it easier for them to find me and deport me.' - - - Marianne LeVine, Ence Morse and Aaron Schaffer contributed to this report. Related Content Hulk Hogan was a well-known Trump supporter. Their ties go back 40 years. Mendelson reaches deal with Commanders on RFK site amid growing pressure Amy Sherald cancels major Smithsonian show over 'censorship' Solve the daily Crossword
