Our neighbors are not strangers

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.

Check out Never Again’s Election Protective Presence Participation Guide to prepare you to help local groups build the skills to assist in protective presence operations around voting in the November 2026 midterm elections.
_

Trump is trying to criminalize solidarity: “Minnesota 15” defendants speak

Last week we featured a story about the Minnesota 15, the defendants in the federal regime’s retaliatory prosecution against community members who helped resist the Operation Metro Surge terror operation in the Twin Cities last winter. Real News Network and Workday Magazine have published an interview with three of the defendants, Treasure Thoreson, Alec Stewart, and Emmett Doyle.

Throughout the interview, these folks highlight the existential-level importance of solidarity. Doyle says, “An injury to one is an injury to all isn’t just a moral statement. It’s a hard reality of life.”

Thoreson concludes, “going after the 15 of us isn’t going to stop anything in Minneapolis or the Twin Cities because this is a place full of great organizers. We can’t let them bully us out of doing the right thing. We need to stand strong in our values and our morals and know that we are protecting our neighbors and that is the right thing to do. They’re afraid of us and that’s why we’re getting this response.”

For much more, including descriptions of the melodramatic and violent ways DHS chose to apprehend these defendants, the interview is well worth viewing in its entirety--video and transcript available at the above link.
_

First They Came for the Poll Worker

The Trump administration is quietly using DHS employees to interfere in whatever small ways they can with elections. Diverting employees from processing immigration applications to combing over voter registration data to check for non citizens. Threatening poll workers who criticize ICE on their personal social media accounts. Flagging thousands of potential non citizen voters in a state where it turns out they only found around 20 errors in the voting record.

The list goes on and on, and though a federal judge has stopped DHS and ICE from showing up at polling places (as a violation of the voting rights act), they continue to find small ways to try and chip away at voter rights or intimidate both poll workers and voters.

_

Mega master hearings: San Francisco group sues for records

We’ve talked about ‘mega masters’ before - a new tool that the regime thinks can speed up the deportation pipeline. These hearings target the most vulnerable - people with no legal representation, people with language barriers, and so on. Turns out, they also violate the Executive Office for Immigration Review’s (the Justice Department agency that runs immigration courts) own standards.

The regime has so far refused to explain its reasoning, to explain why people with ongoing asylum cases are being hauled into these things, to explain why they refuse to release records, and so on. So civil rights groups such as the National Immigration Project are suing to get records on just how the regime is denying people due process rights.
_

Trump's 18-Month Deportation Total Reaches 980,000

The federal government has spent billions of taxpayer dollars terrorizing American cities and beating, arresting, and sometimes murdering the people who live there. They have justified this regime of terror by claiming they were rooting out “criminal aliens,” a derogatory term the fascists themselves made up.

A recent Migration Policy Institute study found that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has deported 980,000 people since January 2025, falling far short of the administration’s terroristic threat to deport a million people each year. Most of the arrests occurred at or close to the US-Mexico border, with close to a third taking place in the interior of the country, far from the border.

Eighty percent of those deported had no criminal record other than the federal misdemeanor of crossing the border without papers. Many had lived in the United States for decades, becoming important members of their communities.

Political rhetoric about dangerous so-called “criminal aliens” has always been heavy on the emotional manipulation and light on the facts. In related developments, the DHS stopped releasing detailed monthly enforcement data in January 2025, ending a practice that had sustained public transparency under prior administrations. Wonder why?
_

'Our neighbors are not strangers': Vigil commemorates immigrants dead in I.C.E custody

In Concord, NH, people gathered at a multi-faith vigil called Refusing to Forget to honor immigrants who have died in the custody of ICE. Felt flags, most of them black, were raised at the New Hampshire State Arch as a symbol of loss, each bearing the name of the deceased person, along with their place of birth, age and date of death. A gong rang after each of 61 names was spoken aloud by participating members. The ceremony sought to share immigrant stories as more than a statistic or a headline, with the flags as a tangible symbol of remembrance.

Leaders of the Concord ceremony included the New Hampshire Immigrant Mutual Aid Fund, whose aim is to provide immigrant families who lost someone in detention or deportation.
_

Support Never Again Action’s organizing by making a donation today. You can make a tax deductible donation via our fiscal sponsor at this link, or you can donate directly to our 501(c)(4) organization at this link.
_

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