“'...the majority has rendered the people actually detained in the facility and Florida’s cherished environment protected by no one, and vulnerable to the whims of anyone,' [Judge Nancy Abudu] wrote."
For @jewishcurrents.bsky.social I wrote about the decimation of the right to asylum. I went into the history of asylum, how it was formalized post the World Wars, how it was never properly implemented, and how its destruction paves the path for authoritarianism.
jewishcurrents.org/the-death-of...
...and the fiscal year isn't even halfway over!
The Mississippi Free Press got inundated with a raft of AI-generated opinion pieces—which we pay writers for—from people who don't exist pretending to be Mississippians.
One of those columns made it to publication before we caught the scam.
Kevin Edwards, editor for our Voices section, explains:
NEW from me for @immcouncil.org's blog. I dig into the Deportation Data Project's information and shed some light on Trump's mass deportation project, more than one year into his latest term in office. You'll want to check this one out! www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/blog/ice-arr...
Scammers have taken advantage of the desperate positions many immigrants find themselves in as the Trump administration ramps up deportation efforts.
In one New York case, scammers fabricated documents and even organized sham court hearings via videoconference with fraudsters impersonating judges.
cool. cool cool cool cool
www.niemanlab.org/2026/04/soci...
Right?! I mean, ICE detention standards for contract facilities are generally _higher_ than standards for prisons and jails, though enforcing those standards obviously has become less of a priority for the current administration.
NEW: A ProPublica and MLK50 analysis shows that just 17 of more than 800 immigration arrests made by Trump’s crime-fighting task force in and around Memphis were for violent crimes.
82% of the immigration arrests followed a traffic stop.
https://www.cato.org/blog/trump-has-cut-legal-immigration-more-illegal-immigration
Trump has cut legal immigration more than illegal immigration, as I predicted. While illegal entries have fallen, they continued a prior trend, falling more before he came back. Meanwhile, Trump has drastically cut legal entries, reversing the prior upward trend. www.cato.org/blog/trump-h...
ICE Reports 16th Detained Death of 2026 at Winn Correctional Center in Louisiana
Alejandro Cabrera Clemente, a 49-year-old man from Mexico, died on April 11 at a private prison in rural Louisiana. The pace of one death every 6 days continues to hold.
austinkocher.substack.com/p/ice-report...
Most people have no idea how much evidence you need to gather (and how much courage victims need to share the details) to get a story like this past a libel attorney. This graf in CNN's piece offers a glimpse of the effort involved.
Man, we have the same conversations every time a major story like this breaks. It’s exhausting. It is SO HARD to publish a story about gendered violence for a whole host of reasons, a main one being that victims (rightly so!) don’t want to talk.
A new law in Kansas has left a large number of trans people suddenly without a valid ID to use at the polls. The state has one of the narrowest voter ID laws in the U.S., and this recent legislation cancelled many trans Kansans’ licenses.
My colleague @stjbs.bsky.social and I spent months working on this new @sfchronicle.com investigation into each of the 48 deaths in ICE custody since the start of 2025. Powerful work as well by our data viz colleague Nami Sumida and
@santiagomejia.bsky.social www.sfchronicle.com/projects/202...
remember nathan hansen, the right-wing twitter guy and self-employed attorney who has amplified conspiracies — pizzagate, obama birtherism, hatians eating pets, etc. — and lost a district judge election in 2024?
he's the newest immigration judge in minnesota.
Before the pivot to warehouse purchasing, DHS was working with governors' offices to refurbish or reopen state correctional buildings and use them for civil immigration detention. All the places with terrible alliterative names? Those are state buildings used by ICE.
www.huffpost.com/entry/alliga...
Good soundtrack for reading about Artemis II www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8Ll...
AI can be a powerful tool for enabling better data analysis, research, and writing. It also comes with many risks--hallucinations, leaking sensitive info, etc. To use or not use isn't a simple binary question; _how_ it's used matters far more important than _whether_ it's used in the first place.
I agree that it's a critical skill, but there are other skills that make great reporters. I've edited nearly unreadable drafts that nonetheless exposed criminal wrongdoing by government officials. Many reporters with strong instincts for finding information have terrible instincts for presenting it.
Though it's complicated... He first appeared in the 1998 Rugrats movie as a newborn, but apparently in the Rugrats canon his birthday is August 28, 1991.
Dill Pickles _will_ be eligible to run in 2028 though!
Memento mori: Every character on Rugrats (except Dill) is now old enough to be president of the United States.
Resurfacing this:
“I don’t know if we can call it a ‘proposal’, because that implies actual thought was put into it,” Kendrick said. “It’s completely far-fetched and preposterous, and it would be impossible to reopen those ancient, crumbling buildings as anything resembling a functioning prison.”
ICE inspectors in February found 49 violations to detention standards at Camp East Montana, including failure from staff to"accurately document required checks to prevent significant self-harm and suicide." n.pr/4sa0F1S
Incredible
NEW: James Carver spent 36 years in prison after he was convicted of setting one of the deadliest fires in #Massachusetts history—but after reviewing new scientific evidence, a judge set him free.
However, Essex County prosecutors are appealing in an attempt to put Carver back in prison.
All but three (!) of the 1,651 refugees admitted into the United States in the three most recent months we have data are white South Africans.
For comparison, in 2024, the U.S. admitted 100,060 refugees. It's an explicit white supremacist project.
www.rpc.state.gov/documents/Re...
