📖 New report out today Deportations up 5x, ICE street arrests jump 11x in first year of Trump administration, according new data released last month We break down why below & in the report 👇 deportationdata.org/analysis/imm...

"His loss is felt deeply not only by those who knew him here at the University, but also everyone who understands his potential to have contributed to breakthroughs in science that would have positively impacted people around the world." -Dean of Engineering Karen Thole

ICE has detained over 6,200 children under Trump according to new data. That's up 10x Since Biden Left Office. “Every American should be shocked,” Leecia Welch, at Children's Rights, said. “It just adds up to an incredible amount of trauma.” www.themarshallproject.org/2026/04/06/i...

Mayor Karen Bass' Inside Safe program faces a troubling trajectory. The longer it exists, the greater the share of program participants who have returned to “unsheltered” homelessness, according to monthly dashboards posted by the L.A. Homeless Services Authority. www.latimes.com/california/s...

The Vice President’s parents-in-law came to the United States as foreign students, at the University of California.

New from me and @haleaziz.bsky.social: Months before the ICE arrest this week of a WI mosque leader, Secretary of State Marco Rubio found him to be a threat to the US foreign policy interest of combating antisemitism, according to federal officials and gov records. www.nytimes.com/2026/04/03/u...

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.”

Did you know that there is one group of Americans who are not entitled to birthright citizenship? People born American Samoa are classified instead simply as “U.S. nationals” — and as a result they cannot vote or run for office anywhere else in the country. Much more here, for anyone curious:

It's April, so it's time for @em-knepp.bsky.social to break down the last month in DHS spending.

"The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command."

NEW: Under AG Pam Bondi, the DOJ has dropped 23,000 criminal cases — including hundreds of investigations into terrorism, white-collar crime and drugs — while prosecuting 32,000 new immigration cases in just the first six months of Trump’s second term.

“The irony of using the IHRA definition is that faculty and students at UC Berkeley may freely criticize the United States, or any other nation-state in the world—including their foundational ideologies, and their implications today—but not Israel.” ucbfa.org/2026/03/bfa-...

“The data released March 30 is the most detailed look at the effect of the three-month enforcement surge that brought thousands of protesters into the streets and left two U.S. citizens dead.” www.startribune.com/ice-action-t...

Reminder: declaring an unlawful assembly requires, as a start, something *unlawful* to be taking place. Protest is not unlawful.

In case anyone is wondering how LAPD is doing tonight at following the injunction against arresting or detaining journalists. He was cut loose, I spoke with him after. He said he had asked multiple officers earlier for a supervisor and they refused — also a violation of injunction.

Trump’s outright bigotry against an entire ethnic minority continues to stain this country. It’s gutter racism with real consequences; the government itself has been ordered to target this minority group for special disfavor.

This is an absolute scandal; the United States government is deliberately consolidating all deportation cases of an ethnic minority that the President has called "garbage" in front of a handpicked group of judges and with dramatically accelerated timeline. A lawsuit was filed yesterday against it.

According to documents filed this morning by the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of NY, ICE has been lying for a year — not only to the public, but to the courts and to prosecutors — about being authorized to make arrests at 26 Federal Plaza and other immigration courts. (1/2)

Bear in mind: Airports have already been a way for DHS to conduct immigration enforcement. TSA has been sharing info with ICE so that they can arrest/detain people at airports when they wish to. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/12/u... ICE backfilling TSA doesn’t give them new capabilities there.

NEW: The Trump administraiton has lost more than 7,000 immigration detention cases in recent months. Increasingly, DOJ is telling judges they have no argument to present or couldn't get facts from ICE to present in court. A look at this emerging trend. www.politico.com/news/2026/03...

This cruelty is being done in our name. Shame on this administration. Shame. 13,000 third country deportees so far. Many were ordered deported decades or even generations earlier, but no admin previously would have considered something as inhumane as this as a means of carrying out a removal.

Wow, this is just straight out of the competitive authoritarian playbook! Chef's kiss.

Which state has adopted the strongest law restricting ICE activity? Can local officials block ICE from building more detention facilities—and do zoning rules matter? You asked, we answered nine questions on how localities are responding to ICE.

SCOOP: One of the nation's top "justice facility" architecture firms will no longer work on ICE detention centers or deportation facilities after its employees staged a revolt.

😲 HORRIFYING – A trans person who has a mismatch between their identifying documents and their "gender at birth" can be rejected for visas/green cards for FRAUD under 8 U.S.C. § 1182(a)(6)(C)(i) – which comes with a LIFETIME BAN against re-entry to 🇺🇸 ⤵️ transitics.substack.com/p/trump-admi...

This letter from 131 (and counting) Jewish faculty and staff tells the Trump Administration we oppose efforts to attack UCLA in our name. Text linked in comments.

Recently the DOJ sued UCLA, arguing that we are such a "hotbed of campus antisemitism"—primarily because of pro-Palestinian student protests—that it's a hostile work environment for Jewish faculty and staff. Well, many actual Jewish faculty and staff vehemently disagree and we wrote this letter:

Breaking News: A New Jersey woman who took part in pro-Palestinian demonstrations at Columbia University in 2024 has been released from a federal detention center in Texas, where she had been held for more than a year. She has not been charged with a crime. nyti.ms/4sJs8In

Sigh. Opposite our letter from *actual Jewish UCLA faculty and staff* opposing the Title VII lawsuit against UCLA (link ⬇️), today a petition landed on the UC Regents’ desks demanding a crackdown on *faculty* for “anti-Israel activism." There are several problems with this petition. A brief thread:

I have had COUNTLESS convos where reporters ask me “okay but Trump hasn’t actually deported as many people as Biden (or Obama), right?” and what I try to stress in response is “the real story is how hard it is, and getting harder, for us even to know.” Must-read. apnews.com/article/trum...

“legally evacuated to the U.S. after the fall of Kabul”

"Taken together, these scenarios show ICE is trying to build a fast-scaling monitoring apparatus for unaccompanied children while pushing much of the operational and ethical burden onto private contractors."

Letter from Colorado Senators and Representatives on ICE's increased use of holding cells for detention: "According to data obtained by the Deportation Data Project through the Freedom of Information Act, between January and October 2025, more than 3,000 individuals were held in these locations."

“Unconstitutional, abhorrent.” And done in collaboration with universities, who sold their students out for exercising their free speech and got them sent to detention centers

"So I carry you too, Leqaa. And I will carry you until you are free, and then I will carry the memory of this year alongside you, because we are bound now by what has been done to us and by what we refuse to let it make us become." www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

When Greg Bovino and his agents left Chicago, the reprieve came with a warning: They might return fourfold in March. It's March. And Trump has fired Kristi Noem, instead. On the lookout for a second surge, w/ @tinasfon.bsky.social and @sophiesherry.bsky.social: chicago.suntimes.com/the-watchdog...

New, with @jessicaschulberg.bsky.social: Immigration detention is not supposed to be punitive. But one man who spent 20 years in state prison told HuffPost the ICE detention facility he is currently in is worse. Inside Trump's plan to jail many, many more people: www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-...

NEW: ICE tackled + arrested Juanita Avila, an Oregon shop owner who is a legal permanent resident and had her green card in her pocket. When she asked through sobs why they didn't believe her, one masked agent replied: “Because they lie all the time.” Video + interview with her and her daughter:

The Deportation Data Project is hiring a fulltime senior research analyst to work with us on obtaining data on immigration enforcement in the US. Competitive salary, excellent University of California benefits, and work on a small, collaborative team. Join us! deportationdata.org/hiring.html

A reminder that ICE does not collect data on US citizens it detains, like it does for all other detainees, even when they are kept for hours or longer - so ProPublic had to collect the data themselves

The Massachusetts Department of Correction has been fighting me for months, trying to withhold data about its collaboration with ICE. Yesterday, I won that fight, and obtained records showing that the state has transferred more than 2,000 people into ICE custody since 2009. A quick thread:

The findings come from little-known documents called I-213 forms, obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed against the Department of Homeland Security, which are used in court to prove that a person is in the country illegally. Read the full investigation here:

Important story from @themarshallproject.org on what happens when families are released from DHS detention: “It boggles the mind why we're disrupting people from their immigration proceedings only to abduct them, incarcerate them at Dilley, and then just recycle them out the back door”

This is a practice and policy that came from local policing -- police and prosecutors can lie to people (witnesses, suspects, etc) and they can pretend to be anyone they want. They can recruit informants who are coerced into cooperating.

When the Supreme Court allowed immigration agents to consider race during sweeps, Justice Brett Kavanaugh said that citizens shouldn’t be concerned because agents will “promptly let the individual go.” For these Americans, that wasn’t true. (Published Oct. 2025)

Since 2020, ICE Flight Monitor has tracked 50K+ ICE flights. In Trump’s 2nd term alone: 2,253 deportation flights (46% ↑ from Biden’s last year) & 9,966 “shuffle” flights (132% ↑). These flights operate under an opaque system that rips families apart and endangers our democracy.

We obtained the Dilley detention center’s 911 call logs. Among them are pleas for help for toddlers having trouble breathing, a pregnant woman who passed out and an elementary-school-aged girl having seizures.

As of tonight, licenses of trans people across Kansas are being invalidated en masse, enabling the overnight criminalization of an entire group of people for going about our lives. It’s often said you never know when you’re living through history, so let me assure you: that’s what’s happening now.