ICE RELEASES SOME DETAINEES HELD IN LOUISIANA FACILITIES
Since April 4, ICE has released 38 detainees on parole from several Louisiana detention centers, according to court records filed by the government in response to a federal judge’s ruling.
Four of those detainees were released from the Pine Prairie ICE Processing Center, where asylum seekers spoke to me recently about their fears of a COVID-19 outbreak inside the facility. Fifteen detainees at Pine Prairie had tested positive for the virus as of April 23, according to ICE.
Under the Trump administration, ICE has regularly denied asylum seekers parole, a mechanism through which they can be released while awaiting a decision on their case.
The Southern Poverty Law Center sued the Department of Homeland Security after it discovered that the New Orleans ICE office, which handles parole requests for Louisiana and four other states, had granted parole in just two of the 130 requests it received in 2018. This wasn’t always the case. A decade ago, ICE granted about 90% of requests.
After the Southern Poverty Law Center filed an emergency motion March 31 seeking the release of asylum seekers, U.S. District Judge James E. Boasberg ruled that immigration officials must disclose the number of parole requests they have granted or denied since the start of the pandemic.
The court filings submitted in the case this week were meant to comply with that ruling. In a court declaration, John Hartnett, deputy field office director for the New Orleans ICE office, said his office has no way of tracking how many detainees it has reviewed for release. “There is no reliable method for tracking all the cases,” he wrote. The 38 detainees released as of April 4 were class members under the Southern Poverty Law Center lawsuit.
At the 12 detention centers under the New Orleans office’s jurisdiction, Hartnett wrote, about 5,500 immigrants remain in custody.
Read my story here.
NEWS BREAK: A BUNGLED BURGLARY
Whenever I’m struggling with writer’s block, I always go back to the Crime Scene columns written by New York Times reporter Michael Wilson. The story I’m sharing with you this week is one of my favorites.
In the spring of 2013, a burglar snuck into a New York apartment building and walked out with two packages. One box contained Crate & Barrel wine glasses and the other two brick-shaped items wrapped in aluminum foil.
From The New York Times story:
Mr. Purdy has heard all the jokes. He laughed along with the police later that day, Feb. 19, when he met officers at his apartment and showed them the fruitcake. He laughed days later with the grand jurors who heard evidence in the case. A fruitcake, I know, right? Ha, ha, ha!
But he was not amused. The very night of the burglary, when the officers left his apartment, he opened one of the foil bricks and cut off a slab. The outer crust gave way to a moist blonde interior, shot through with red and green maraschino cherries that glistened so brightly it seemed he could turn off the lights and read by them. An invisible mushroom cloud of rum fumes rose from the cake.
He ate. And thought of his mother. She had sent the fruitcake from her kitchen in Mountain View, Calif., as she does every year. She makes fruitcakes for everyone she knows.
“Hundreds,” Mr. Purdy said. “Church groups. Her choir. Her college roommate.”
And her son. “My mom makes a really great fruitcake,” he said. He was not just saying that. The package arrived almost two months after the holidays. He asks for a second batch. Every year.
Mr. Purdy, the director of digital products at Sports Illustrated, is married. He was asked, delicately, if he was perhaps the primary fruitcake enthusiast in the home. “That would be a giant understatement,” he said.
Read the story here.
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– Laura C. Morel
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