Three years ago, in El Salvador, after the MS-13 gang killed eighty-seven people in a span of seventy-two hours, President Nayib Bukele called on his loyalists in the legislature to declare a “state of exception.” The government could arrest anyone it deemed suspicious, and those taken into custody lost their right to a legal defense. … Read more
Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University graduate student who was arrested and detained because of his pro-Palestinian activism, is scheduled to return to court next month in his battle with the Department of Justice over his possible deportation. His case has become a test of the Trump administration’s pledge to combat antisemitism and deport noncitizen college … Read more
We are witnessing a constitutional system on the brink. The crisis started on Saturday, when James E. Boasberg, the chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, issued an order that could hardly have been clearer: he told the Trump Administration to halt the imminent deportation of immigrants alleged to be … Read more
Nearly forty years ago, immigration officials in Los Angeles arrested eight young immigrants—seven Palestinian men and the wife of one of them, a Kenyan. The immigrants were mostly students. Two were permanent residents; the others were on student visas. They had been involved in pro-Palestinian activism. The government charged them all with being associated with … Read more
Estrella Santos-Zacaría says there’s one thought that often terrifies her, whether she’s at home, at work or with her friends: being deported to her native country of Guatemala. “I told my lawyer: ‘You know what I think most? I’d rather die than go back there. I don’t want to leave,’” the transgender woman said in … Read more
Last Sunday, at a Spanish-language mass at St. Paul’s Catholic Church in Pilsen, on the Lower West Side of Chicago, Father Arturo Pérez spoke of our moment. “Nobody is more important than anyone else,” he said. “What happens to one happens to all of us. What one suffers we all suffer.” Outside, ICE raids had … Read more
