How ICE Picks Its Targets in the Surveillance Age.
In this New York Times Magazine story, reporter McKenzie Funk sifted through thousands of documents to reconstruct how Immigration and Customs Enforcement uses recorded calls from detention facilities and driver’s license information from state DMV databases to target immigrants. Among the most surprising details: dispatch recordings of ICE agents calling the local sheriff’s office to inform them of their surveillance stops. From the story:
For most of the next few hours, according to the sheriff’s dispatch records, Miller and Dietz kept sitting there. At 9:57 a.m., Miller called in to say they were clearing out. As apparently happened in April and again earlier in June, they were leaving empty-handed. But then, 18 minutes later, he called back. “Sorry to keep bothering you guys,” he said, chuckling apologetically.
“That’s O.K.,” the dispatcher replied.
“We’re headed back up to Ocean Park,” he said. “We think our person is going to be heading over to the Bank of the Pacific.”
‘Everybody cries here’: Hope and despair in Mexican shelter.
Reporters at The Associated Press embedded in a Juarez shelter called El Buen Pastor to tell the stories of its inhabitants. The shelter with four toilets, a chapel and spotty Wi-Fi is a temporary respite for migrants holding out for a chance at U.S. asylum in the midst of President Trump’s crackdown. From the story:
The shelter ripples with often-unspoken bigotries, with ribbons of race and class and education in nearly every interaction. Daily life is marked by brutal summer heat, occasional dust storms, crushing boredom and the guilt of mothers who can’t afford dinner for their children.
But occasionally, it’s also a place of muchene enkoko (Ugandan-style chicken and rice) and arroz a la Valenciano (Nicaraguan-style chicken and rice). It’s a place of children’s games, young romance and Scrabble matches that seem to stretch into eternity. Anything to make the time pass.
Immigrant kids fill this town’s schools. Their bus driver is leading the backlash.
Worthington, Minnesota, population 13,000, has received more unaccompanied children per capita than almost anywhere in the country. Their presence has fueled resentment from longtime locals, reports Michael E. Miller for The Washington Post. The story begins with school bus driver Don Brink:
At the corner of Dover Street and Douglas Avenue, a handful of Hispanic children were waiting. At Milton Avenue, there were a few more. And at Omaha Avenue, a dozen students climbed aboard — none of them white.
Brink said nothing.“I say ‘good morning’ to the kids who’ll respond to me,” he said later. “But this year there are a lot of strange kids I’ve never seen before.”
Immigration Officials Use Secretive Gang Databases to Deny Migrant Asylum Claims.
In this ProPublica story, reporter Melissa del Bosque uncovers the Trump administration’s practice of using gang intelligence databases containing information from foreign authorities to background check asylum-seekers. Lawyers and advocates say the database has been kept mostly secret, making it difficult to verify its reliability. Yet the government is still using the database as a basis to separate children from parents with uncorroborated gang affiliations. From the story:
Carlos, now reunited with his two children, said he wants to clear his record, but he doesn’t know how, and he can’t return to El Salvador because it would be a death sentence. “I came here seeking protection and because I had no other choice,” he said. “And I was accused of being in a gang, when I was fleeing the gangs, all based on evidence I’ve never seen.”
Being An Immigration Judge Was Their Dream. Under Trump, It Became Untenable.
BuzzFeed News reporter Hamed Aleaziz has been relentless in his weekly coverage of the Trump administration’s policies, from his stories on the conditions at border facilities to restrictions on asylum officers. In February, Aleaziz exposed, through interviews and leaked emails, the low morale among immigration judges under the current administration. From the story:
Jamil, a mother of two young daughters, had been shaken by the images and sounds that came as a result of the Trump administration’s policy to separate families at the border. As a judge who oversaw primarily cases of women and children fleeing abuse and dangers abroad, this was the last straw.
Soon after, she stepped down from the court.
“I can’t do this anymore,” she told friends. “I felt that I couldn’t be ‘Rebecca Jamil, representative of the attorney general’ while these things were going on.”
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