Immigration agents harm scores of kids with tear gas and pepper spray

Welcome to our news segment: TL;DR of Immigration News, for when the news is Too Long and you Didn’t Read it.

This is a weekly collection of immigration-related news stories. These bite-size summaries will keep you up to date without overwhelming your inbox.
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This edition of our newsletter has been quite delayed, as multiple members of the content team spent several days attending our leadership retreat to help determine our strategy for the next three years. Can you give $18 today to support this critical strategic work? If you would like to be part of this process in the future, we invite you to become a member!
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Hundreds of Incarcerated Migrants Go on Hunger Strike in Remote Michigan Prison

Hundreds of immigrant men at North Lake Processing Center, an ICE facility, began a hunger strike in April in an attempt to assert their legal and human rights to due process, edible food, and an end to sleep deprivation.

North Lake Processing Center is a privately run prison operated by the private company GEO Group on behalf of ICE. Closed by the Biden administration in 2022, it reopened in June 2025, and currently holds approximately 1,400 immigrants, making it one of the largest immigrant prisons in the country.

Details about the strike are difficult to confirm due to the monitoring of communications from imprisoned people and their credible fear of retaliation.

ICE issued a statement to news outlets denying the strike, concluding with the claim that “being in detention is a choice” and that those detained could self-deport. One of the strikers, Ahmad Alnajdawi, says that he has requested a final removal order and even offered to pay for his own flight, but is still imprisoned in the facility.

Outside the prison, advocates from across Michigan have converged in solidarity with those inside, and are working to share the strikers’ demands with the public. Groups like No Detention Centers in Michigan need our support.
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CBS News Correspondent Censored over CECOT segment

60 Minutes reporter Sharyn Alfonsi will leave CBS at the end of May. Last year, newly minted head of CBS news Bari Weiss pulled Alfonsi’s story about CECOT, the inhumane Salvadoran prison to which the Trump administration illegally deported asylum seekers and green card holders.

Alfonsi criticized Weiss for pulling the story mere hours before it was scheduled for broadcast. At an awards event at the National Press Club, Alfonsi said that “she found the ‘CECOT’ incident less of an ‘isolated editorial argument,’” but rather “the result of a more aggressive contagion: the toxic spread of corporate meddling and editorial fear.”
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Immigration agents harm scores of kids with tear gas and pepper spray

CW: linked article contains video and written depictions of physical harm to children

ProPublica has found that ICE and CBP’s use of tear gas, pepper spray, and other so-called “less lethal” measures have caused enormous harm to children. Documented cases come from Ohio, Illinois, Minnesota, Oregon, and other places across the country. The children in these cases were not committing crimes - they were sitting in strollers, riding home in minivans, or attempting to live in their own homes.

Tear gas harms children far more than it does adults, in both the short- and long-term. DHS spokespeople play the inevitable game of DARVO, blaming protestors for bringing children to events in the first place. As if we needed more evidence that ICE and CBP don’t care about the First Amendment.

Even this incoherent, bad-faith argument doesn’t account for children who happen to live near facilities that inevitably draw protests. ProPublica documents multiple cases of children with asthma being forced to wear gas masks or take similar measures in their own homes because DHS or ICE were using so much tear gas that it wafted through their neighborhood and through the walls of their homes. ProPublica was able to document 79 cases of children harmed by immigration agents’ use of tear gas or pepper spray, a number they say is probably a vast undercount.

There is no excuse for this. Abolish ICE. Abolish DHS.
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Stephen Miller Lied About Immigrant Jobs Going to American Workers

How do we know he’s lying? His lips are moving. An evergreen bit of snark that is especially applicable to the regime’s chief architect of the war on immigrants. The National Bureau of Economic Research has done the first study to determine the effects of taking out such a large chunk of the workforce.

As we would expect, the fields of agriculture, construction, and manufacturing, those hardest hit by the deportation machine, showed no job gains for US-born workers. In fact, the lack of improved opportunities stretches across the entire country, including industries that have lost the laborers who propped them up by taking low-wage, high-effort jobs. The data verifies what we already knew - that Stephen Miller and the regime have been exploiting the economic situation to scapegoat and vilify immigrants.
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Congrats to content team and NAA member Corey for continuing to hold MAGA politicians accountable in Florida. Read quotes from him in MAGA Republican Byron Donalds met by protesters at Orlando campaign stop.

Also excellent is content team member Rachel Ida Buff’s latest article in Jacobin, The Fight To Free Palestinian Organizer Salah Sarsour from ICE.
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Action items

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If you have questions, comments, or suggestions for next week’s roundup, drop us a line at neveragainaction@gmail.com.

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