On Tuesday, ICE was allowed to continue using Medicaid data in deportation cases.

"We cannot, for example, receive essential evidence for our defense within the proper timeframes, nor can we send important and vital documents such as appeals, habeas corpus petitions, and others ," 50 ICE detainees in Estancia told Source in a letter. buff.ly/ufJso8J

Beyond “Shock & Awe”: Immigration Actions in the 1st Year under Trump 2.0 >>> Join @colleenputzelkav.bsky.social, @migrationpolicy.bsky.social colleagues & me for a free webinar reviewing Trump's immigration policies this past year. It will be at 1pm ET on Tuesday, January 13.

As people are working on reviews of Trump's immigration record one year in, you may want to compare to Biden, so I'm resharing our comprehensive overview here: Biden’s Mixed Immigration Legacy: Border Challenges Overshadowed Modernization Advances www.migrationpolicy.org/article/bide...

There have been at least 22 incidents of federal agents shooting someone or holding them at gunpoint during Trump's immigration crackdown, including 9 shootings, and 13 in which less-lethal munitions were fired From 12/12 www.thetrace.org/2025/12/immi...

Customs and Border Protection (CBP) is training the highest number of recruits since 2009, with new vehicle pursuit and weapons training From 12/18 www.cnn.com/2025/12/18/u...

From 12/18: JD Vance’s immigration two-step Rapidly proliferating public conflicts within MAGA present a distinct danger for the man whose political future depends on holding the coalition together. But Vance appears to have settled on a strategy for bridging these divides: Blame immigration

Happy new year, all! 🎆

A commission formed to document alleged harassment and abuse by federal agents during an immigration crackdown in the Chicago area reviewed the wide use of chemical agents in its first public hearing apnews.com/article/immi...

The Young People Fixated on Who Gets to Work in America For some Gen Z conservatives, H-1B visas are a hot new topic. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/13/s...

Are Refugees Good or Bad for the Economy? Here’s What the Numbers Say Refugees have high rates of entrepreneurship and over time produce more in tax revenues than they receive in government benefits, a number of studies of census data show. www.wsj.com/economy/immi...

Trump Isn’t Interested in Fighting a New Cold War. He Wants a New Civilizational War. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/11/o...

The rise in judicial threats is being fueled by the political rhetoric of the Trump administration, argues the judge Esther Salas. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/18/o...

Who knew Northern Virginia has the largest concentration of data centers in the world. How rising energy bills and AI demand are fueling local data center debates wamu.org/story/25/12/...

I hope everyone has a nice holiday season! 🎄 ❄️ I'm taking time off the rest of this week & the following. I've scheduled some posts so the algorithms don't punish me too much (I find this only works on X & Bluesky) But I won't be back in earnest till the new year. See you all on the other side

Thinking about this decision, important context is that the militarization of immigration enforcement had already been happening at the US-Mexico border Trump tried to bring that into the US interior, but was rejected, for now

BREAKING: The Supreme Court rejects the Trump administration’s request to deploy National Guard troops in Illinois at this time, over the dissenting votes of Justices Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch. Background: www.lawdork.com/p/trump-admi...

The USCIS Ombudsman 2025 annual report calls for increasing coordination with CBP & ICE to identify unfiled notices to appear in immigration court Also calls for digitizing case records www.dhs.gov/publication/...

An immigration bill passed in the House recently:

Last April, I left @uscisgov.bsky.social heartbroken by how career civil servants were treated — and honestly terrified for what that meant for America’s legal immigration system. What I saw inside wasn’t normal — and I couldn’t unsee it.

Sharing a thank you & happy holidays www.tiktok.com/@kathleen_bu...

The number of people not showing up to court + being ordered deported skyrocketed, according to our early analysis of the data. Lawyers cite a few reasons: fear of being detained, DOJ sending notices to wrong places, other hiccups in delivery. My latest: www.npr.org/2025/12/22/n...

The Trump administration released a rule replacing the annual lottery for H-1B visas with a process it says will favor higher-skilled, higher-paid workers.

Still waiting for a decision in the Trump v Illinois SCOTUS case about the use of the National Guard www.scotusblog.com/cases/case-f...

In an internal memo, seen by CNN, Sharyn Alfonsi predicted that "the public will correctly identify this" as corporate censorship. WaPo has more from Alfonsi here >>>

Alan Dershowitz muses over the constitutionality of a third Trump term The president’s former legal adviser reportedly met with Trump about his new book, which considers hypotheticals for the possibility of him holding office past 2028. www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

At Many Top Law Schools, Black Student Enrollment Continues to Drop The New York Times examined data from 18 of the nation’s top law schools and found that first-year Black enrollment had increased at only four, including at Harvard. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/16/u...

By way of comparison, a total of 26 people died in ICE detention during the four years of the Biden administration.

Today I received FOUR death notifications for people in ICE custody. That's 30 deaths since Trump took office. It's appalling & unacceptable.   ICE is required—by law—to ensure detainees are safe & their basic needs are met. It's clear this isn't the case. We NEED answers.

Meeting, getting to know, and working work with Diversity Visa selectee clients has been one of the highlights of my career. Unsurprisingly, Trump/Miller hate this law and tried to shut it down in Trump 1.0 with COVID as their excuse. Now they’ve found their pretext for Trump 2.0. Sickening.

To state the obvious, Congress didn’t make its annual worldwide visa allocation system for a country which self-identifies as a Nation of Immigrants contingent on not one bad thing ever happening.

Project 2025 called on Congress to repeal the Diversity Visa Short of that, it called on the administration to "evaluate" the visa for national security concerns static.heritage.org/project2025/...

I love that @51st.news does a weekly civics roundup for those looking to get involved in the DC area: 51st.news/dc-civic-eng...

The Dept. of Homeland Security has a rule pending review & issuance called "Clarification of Discretionary Employment Authorization for Certain Alien Populations" Do others have intel on this? My pure speculation is that it limits or rescinds work eligibility, a la Project 2025

So much of Trump's speech last night on affordability was actually about immigration. He talked repeatedly about an immigrant "invasion" & blamed immigrants for housing costs, among others. I went through the speech transcript and highlighted the immigration points www.instagram.com/p/DSaDN0jgL8...

Faith leaders have chained themselves to the doors of San Francisco's immigration courthouse, blockading the building in the predawn hours. missionlocal.org/2025/12/fait...

ICE Accidentally Publishes A ‘Watch List’ Of Immigration Lawyers, Which Is Definitely A Normal Thing For The Government To Do https://abovethelaw.com/2025/12/ice-accidentally-publishes-a-watch-list-of-immigration-lawyers-which-is-definitely-a-normal-thing-for-the-government-to-do/

BREAKING: The Trump administration expands travel ban to include Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, South Sudan and Syria.

I'm hopeful there will be more coverage of what's happening in immigration courts People's asylum cases are being closed out without hearings via motions for "pretermission" for a variety of reasons, including the US' agreements w/ Honduras, Guatemala & Uganda

I was in a tribunal a week ago where DHS moved to pretermit every single asylum case on "safe third country grounds." Every. single. one. At one point, a judge scheduled a second master for a man to prove he would be in danger in Honduras. Confused, he said "No, Peru. I'm from Peru."

Would really love for more immigration news and policy people to join me on TikTok and Instagram! Making videos and picture based posts takes a lot of time and effort but my friends & family are not here or on X, they're on those other platforms, like most Americans

i have said this before but if you are actually interested in influencing people beyond a narrow circle of too-online journalists you will be making direct to camera videos on tiktok, instagram and youtube. if you primarily post on text-based social media then you're just dicking around.

Some Republican lawmakers call for mass expulsion of American Muslims Comments from Rep. Randy Fine and Sen. Tommy Tuberville reflect a brazen Islamophobic sentiment being voiced by some in the party www.washingtonpost.com/politics/202...

Observers of the program though are projecting a dramatic drop off in entries for the annual H-1B lottery next year as a result of the fee and Trump’s proposed weighted selection process for the visas.

Almost 90% of new H-1B workers for those companies between 2020 to 2024 were approved through consular processing. Recent college grads who switch status from F-1 visas in the US by contrast wouldn’t be subject to the fee.

Major IT consulting firms like Tata, Cognizant and Infosys will absorb the most pain from the $100,000 Trump H-1B fee, a @bloomberg.com analysis found.

'Hero' who wrestled gun from Bondi shooter named as Ahmed al Ahmed www.bbc.com/news/article...

I am wondering what the state of the ICE non-detained docket is these days If anyone has seen how many people are on it, please flag! In 2024, it was 7+ million

Federal forces are installing hundreds of miles of concertina wire along the Southwest border with Mexico in a “historic” & large scale operation The project mirrors placement of concertina wire first started by Texas in 2022 www.borderreport.com/immigration/...

Feds unveil new Homeland Security Task Force to fight crime in New York despite record-low shootings and murders Officials said the task force was created to combat drug trafficking, money laundering, weapons trafficking, human trafficking, alien smuggling, homicide, extortion, kidnapping, and more