All posts tagged: Immigration and Customs Enforcement

Faith leaders keep ministering at Delaney Hall

Faith leaders keep ministering at Delaney Hall

Published by Sam Flores

(RNS) — Moments before Department of Homeland Security agents fired a hail of pepper balls at the feet of demonstrators outside the Delaney Hall detention center in Newark, New Jersey, last Monday (May 25), faith leaders say they were frantically working to calm things down. Kathy O’Leary, coordinator of the Catholic group Pax Christi New Jersey, said she was helping to push the crowd back. Rabbi Rachel Kahn-Troster, executive vice president of the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, said she and a Christian pastor had placed themselves between agents and demonstrators, raising their hands aloft. And the Rev. Robin Tanner, a Unitarian Universalist minister in Summit, New Jersey, said she was conversing with DHS agents as she stood beside U.S. Sen. Andy Kim, who had come to visit Delaney amid reports of a hunger and labor strike staged by detainees alleging inhumane conditions inside.  Then, unexpectedly, DHS agents unleashed the volley of pepper balls. All three faith leaders — along with Kim — were exposed, some left coughing and sputtering as bystanders rushed to help. “We got …

Republicans strip Trump ballroom money from immigration bill

Republicans strip Trump ballroom money from immigration bill

Published by Sam Flores

US President Donald Trump speaks to the press near the construction site of his proposed ballroom at the White House in Washington, DC, on May 19, 2026. Kent Nishimura | Afp | Getty Images Senate Republicans on Wednesday stripped up to $1 billion in security funding for President Donald Trump’s proposed White House ballroom and the Secret Service from a revised immigration enforcement bill. GOP leaders privately concluded that the funding proposal risked derailing the broader immigration bill, both politically and procedurally, according to several media reports. The provision also sparked political concerns among some Senate Republicans, who worried the funding could make the party appear out of touch as voters struggle with high costs ahead of the midterm elections in November. Trump had personally pushed lawmakers to authorize the funding for the controversial ballroom project and the Secret Service. Trump administration officials argued the money was necessary in light of the alleged April 25 assassination attempt against Trump at the White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner at the Washington Hilton. Administration officials have said only …

The White House’s Aliens.gov Site Brags That ICE Arrested More Than 700 US Citizens

The White House’s Aliens.gov Site Brags That ICE Arrested More Than 700 US Citizens

Published by skeptic

A space-themed White House website that mocks immigrants and compares them to extraterrestrials claims Immigration and Customs Enforcement has arrested almost half a million people in nearly 12,000 cities and towns in the United States. In 715 of the locations listed, the site identifies at least one of the people arrested as being born in the United States. In 83 of the locations, every single arrestee is reported to be an American. The White House unveiled the website, Aliens.gov, on Thursday after teasing the launch on X with a 10-second video captioned “They walk among us,” leading many users to suspect an announcement about UFOs—the subject of an ongoing Trump administration disclosure effort that produced two releases of declassified files earlier in May. The site turned out instead to be a piece of political theater aimed at dehumanizing immigrants and casting those the Trump administration has arrested as the secret extraterrestrial visitors of UFO conspiracy lore. The site includes information about arrestees’ alleged criminal offenses for each location. People in 3,159 locations are accused of …

Palantir Held a Hack Week to Add New Controls to Software Used by ICE

Palantir Held a Hack Week to Add New Controls to Software Used by ICE

Published by skeptic

Palantir hosted a hack week this spring to try to turn internal consternation over the company’s work with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) into clearer oversight tools for products used in the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, according to material reviewed by WIRED. The new tools provide organizations, including DHS and ICE, more information on how their workers use Palantir software. Organizations can set up alerts for “concerning behavior,” like exfiltrating datasets, and search the session logs of individual users. They also allow organizations to see which users have viewed specific sets of information. Palantir declined to comment. Palantir regularly holds hack weeks, challenging engineers from across the company to experiment with and solve problems in its products. This hack week focused on Palantir’s work with DHS and ICE, which has come under fire from both external critics and workers who fear the company’s tools are empowering the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown. “This effort embodies the culture of the Palantir that I choose to work at,” Ted Mabrey, head …

Election Officials Are Getting Ready for ICE to Show Up at the Polls

Election Officials Are Getting Ready for ICE to Show Up at the Polls

Published by skeptic

A week later, during the Conservative Political Action Conference meeting, now acting attorney general Todd Blanche endorsed the idea of ICE at the polls and repeated the conspiracy theory about noncitizens voting as an excuse to deploy ICE. “Why is there objection to sending ICE officers to polling places?” he asked. “Illegals can’t vote. It doesn’t make any sense.” When asked for comment regarding ICE being deployed to the polls, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said, “President Trump has been clear: Securing our elections and ensuring only American citizens vote in American elections is a top priority.” Similarly, a DHS spokesperson referred WIRED to Mullin’s comments, adding, “Elections exist for the American people, not illegal aliens, to choose their leaders.” Elections have, as specified by the US Constitution, always been run by the states, and despite Trump and his allies calling for elections to be “nationalized,” that will remain the case for the 2026 midterms. Deploying ICE, the National Guard, or any other armed federal agents to polling locations is illegal under US law. Political …

An ICE Firearms Trainer Was Involved in At Least 4 Deadly Shootings

An ICE Firearms Trainer Was Involved in At Least 4 Deadly Shootings

Published by skeptic

The owner of a company that trained paramilitary Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents testified that he was involved in at least four lethal shootings, according to a 2021 deposition related to a lawsuit reviewed by WIRED. David S. Norman, the founder and proprietor of law enforcement training firm TruKinetics LLC, served as a Phoenix Police officer from the late 1990s until his retirement in 2020. Prior to founding TruKinetics the same year, according to records reviewed by WIRED, Norman was involved in six shootings while on duty that left four people dead and two more wounded. In every instance, the Phoenix Police Department said Norman fired on an armed suspect and exchanged volleys of gunfire in at least two of the shootings. Based in Gilbert, Arizona, TruKinetics offers training on small-team tactics, hostage rescues, close-quarters combat, building searches, night-vision firearms proficiency, pistol and rifle courses, “vehicle interdiction,” breaching with explosives, and sniper tactics, according to the company’s website. TruKinetics received $27,748 for a year-long contract to run a mandatory 40-hour training course that certain members …

Jesus’ Great Commission is a rebuttal to the Christian nationalism of Rededicate 250

Jesus’ Great Commission is a rebuttal to the Christian nationalism of Rededicate 250

Published by Sam Flores

(RNS) — Forty days after Easter, Christians observe Ascension Day (May 14), celebrating the bodily ascension of Jesus into heaven. After many post-Easter appearances and conversations with his disciples, this was the last time they would see the earthly Jesus, marking the conclusion of his earthly ministry. Just before his ascension, in what is now often called the Great Commission, Jesus gave his final commandment to his disciples. The Bible says: “Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. When they saw him they worshiped him and some doubted, And Jesus came and said to them, ‘All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.” (Matthew 28:16-20) Growing up in a conservative evangelical church, I …

A Woman Was in the US Legally. She Was Deported Anyways

A Woman Was in the US Legally. She Was Deported Anyways

Published by skeptic

That was Thursday, February 19, around 8:30 am. I was detained on February 18, around 11:30, so it took less than 24 hours for me to be deported. My daughter had been trying to search for me in the [US Citizenship and Immigration Services] tracker, the ICE tracker, and she could not find me there the whole time that I was moving down to San Ysidro. What happened when you got to Mexico? When I got to Tijuana, they turned us in to [the Mexican government] and they took us to a shelter where the Mexican government took us in.They helped figure out how we were going to get back to our hometowns. But I do have a friend that has a house in Tijuana, and she has family there, so I didn’t have to stay in the shelter until I got to my hometown, which is in Puebla, Mexico. How long were you in Mexico before you were able to return to the US? Forty days. What did your life look like coming back? …

DHS Demanded Google Surrender Data on Canadian’s Activity, Location Over Anti-ICE Posts

DHS Demanded Google Surrender Data on Canadian’s Activity, Location Over Anti-ICE Posts

Published by skeptic

The Department of Homeland Security tried to obtain a Canadian man’s location information, activity logs, and other identifying information from Google after he criticized the Trump administration online following the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis early this year. Lawyers for the man, who has not been named, are alarmed in part because they say that the man has not entered the United States in more than a decade. “I don’t know what the government knows about our client’s residence, but it’s clear that the government isn’t stopping to find out,” says Michael Perloff, a senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of the District of Columbia who is representing the man in a lawsuit against Markwayne Mullin, the secretary of DHS, over the summons. The lawsuit alleges that DHS violated the customs law that gives the agency the power to request records from businesses and other parties. Perloff argues that the government is using the fact that big tech companies are based in the US …

Palantir Employees Are Starting to Wonder if They’re the Bad Guys

Palantir Employees Are Starting to Wonder if They’re the Bad Guys

Published by skeptic

It took just a few months of President Donald Trump’s second term for Palantir employees to question their company’s commitments to civil liberties. Last fall, Palantir seemed to become the technological backbone of Trump’s immigration enforcement machinery, providing software identifying, tracking, and helping deport immigrants on behalf of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), when current and former employees started ringing the alarm. Around that time, two former employees reconnected by phone. Right as they picked up the call, one of them asked, “Are you tracking Palantir’s descent into fascism?” “That was their greeting,” the other former employee says. “There’s this feeling not of ‘Oh, this is unpopular and hard,’ but, ‘This feels wrong.’” Palantir was founded—with initial venture capital investment from the CIA—at a moment of national consensus following the September 11, 2001 attacks, when many saw fighting terrorism abroad as the most critical mission facing the US. The company, which was cofounded by tech billionaire Peter Thiel, sells software that acts as a high-powered data aggregation and analysis tool powering everything from private …