Venezuelan men sue aviation firms who flew them to notorious Salvadorian jail

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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Trump’s new immigration strategy revealed in purchase of 2 ICE detention centers in California

As CA officials attempt to use the legal system to block the further building of ICE detention centers in the state, the federal government is attempting to buy multiple detention centers that are currently run by the private prison company CoreCivic. During the first Trump administration, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a law which aimed to phase out all for-profit, privately owned prisons and detention centers by 2028. Private prison operator GEO Group sued alongside the federal government and won, but since then CA lawmakers have done an end run around the private prison companies by using heavy taxes on them that make the prisons financially unviable to run in the state.

Currently the state is involved in a number of legal fights with the Trump Administration around both the purchasing of current ICE detention centers and the leasing of CA land in order to grow both its office capacity and detention facilities. Facilities that could potentially have less oversight than detention centers already have because they would be owned by the feds instead of private companies like CoreCivic and GEO Group. “If private prison investments become politically toxic on a national scale,” said R. Andrew Free, an immigration lawyer and writer, “federal purchases of the detention facilities safeguard the companies and the detention space itself from divestments and the kind of environmental reviews that have ended similar projects in other states.”
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A year of ICE raids in LA County has cost Latino businesses millions in revenue — and so much more

Researchers are calculating the cost that ICE raids have had on Latino businesses in LA County, which is the most populous county in the US. A partnership between UCLA’s Latino Policy and Politics Institute and a local Boyle Heights non-profit has gathered quantitative data from brick and mortar business of all kinds across the county in the wake of last summer’s militarized ICE raids. And the reports from business owners are dismal.

Researchers conducted both focus groups and used cell phone data in nine areas around LA County that were targeted by last summer’s raids. The cellphone data helped determine the loss in foot traffic after the ICE raids had taken place, while the focus groups talked to business owners who not only themselves have been impacted by the loss in income, but whose family and community members have also been impacted. One of the project’s findings concluded that 3.16 million dollars and 46,000 less people patronized these businesses in the first two weeks after the raids.

Think about that in terms of the loss to the community: how many relationships and opportunities for growth and connection have been lost to these horrific raids?
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DHS strips interview requirement for asylum seekers, expediting deportations

DHS announced it would be fast-tracking the asylum process, sending asylum seekers directly to immigration court without a formal interview to address credible fears of harm or persecution in their home countries. Such interviews have been a long-standing practice, although DHS now claims there was never a statutory right to an interview or a requirement to conduct one.

USCIS Director Joseph Edlow claims that the asylum system has been exploited for delay and work authorization. He says that this new policy will help ensure the timely adjudication of asylum-seekers’ claims of persecution.

However, immigration lawyers fear it will be used to speed up asylum rejections and subsequent deportations, raising due process concerns.

Action item: USCIS is accepting public, written comments on the new interim policy for 60 days from 7/28/2026. After that, it will issue a final rule. You may submit comments on the entirety of this rulemaking package, by going to the website http://www.regulations.gov. Type DHS Docket No. USCIS-2026-0199-0001 into the search bar and follow the directions to leave a comment. The summary of this rule may also be found at http://www.regulations.gov.
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Venezuelan men sue aviation firms who flew them to notorious Salvadorian jail

Amidst the continuing violation of human rights and legal standards by the Trump administration, a group of Venezuelan men deported to the notorious CECOT in El Salvador are suing the airlines that transported them there. CSI and GlobalX, which were hired by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), have “enjoyed unprecedented financial profits from the scheme”, while the Venezuelans “continue to experience severe emotional suffering from the humiliation, terror, and cruelty that they endured”, the lawsuit says.

As with the lawsuit levelled by Mahmoud Khalil against the Trump administration and pro-Israel groups for unlawfully targeting his freedom of expression, legal action by these men and their attorneys asserts confidence in the rule of law against a context of heightened totalitarian control of the courts. Their faith in finding justice reminds us all that being a “good citizen” or community member has nothing to do with paperwork or with borders.

Action item: Support the Kennedy Human Rights Center, which has provided legal representation for this suit: https://kennedyhumanrights.org/

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ICE is arresting relatives who come forward to take custody of migrant children in federal shelters

In a move that would make Ernst Blofeld proud, ICE is again using innocent children as bait. Migrant children - some too young even for kindergarten - are being held for months in detention centers. Relatives who try to come and get them now risk arrest themselves, preventing them from rescuing their relatives from essentially child prison. It should not require saying, but the use of children as tactical bait is explicitly forbidden by the Geneva Conventions.

This despicable practice is not new. During the family separation wave of the first Trump regime they used the same tactics to snare parents who tried to retrieve children the government had separated from them. As the case of Liam Ramos reminds us - remember him in the blue hat and Spider Man backpack? - this kind of cruelty leaves psychological scars that children may never recover from.

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Community activism forces ICE to abandon its brutal warehouse plans

Three excellent, interrelated stories from the last week highlight the role that community activism has to play in resisting fascism and keeping ourselves and our neighbors safe.

Truthout brings us the story of how community groups in several parts of the country successfully shut down ICE’s plans to take over massive abandoned warehouses and use them for the mass incarceration of immigrants under brutal conditions. Stories from Romulus, Michigan; Surprise, Arizona; Roxbury, New Jersey, and Social Circle, Georgia all feature community groups on the ground successfully frustrating ICE’s plans.

The Truthout article emphasizes: “It was not bipartisanship, lawsuits, or the wisdom of elected officials, but sustained community activism that forced the federal government to abandon the warehouses… John Fabbricatore, who has been a commentator on Fox News and worked as senior adviser to the Office of Refugee Resettlement, told The New York Times that the warehouses were a quick effort to ‘scale up’ mass deportations, but failed because ‘the left was able to throw up immediate roadblocks.’”

In These Times brings us a conversation with Sonali Kolhatkar, author of the book Breaking ICE, which details the ways that the Immigrant Defense Movement in Maine adapted practices from around the country to their own local conditions. Ruben Torres, an activist on the ground in Maine, says, “In Maine we saw the full force of our community. ​’Community’ is a strong and powerful word in our state because of our geographic makeup. We are very spread out and rural, and a lot of times your neighbor and your community are all you have to rely on.” Torres goes on to outline the ways that neighbors showed up for each other in large and small ways in the face of ICE terror: from monitoring ICE patrols, to clandestine childcare, to shoveling each other’s driveways.

Finally and most comprehensively, Mother Jones published this long but excellent article, essentially an oral history of the ways that neighbors showed up for each other during ICE surges in Chicago, Minneapolis, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. The article offers excellent object lessons in how to build on existing networks of solidarity and how to create new ones in the face of ICE terror. The stories of personal bravery and commitment are remarkable, from a pastor protecting her parishioner from ICE pepper balls, to a running club that converted itself into a rapid response network, and many others, the stories of resistance too numerous to even summarize here.
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Action Items:

Reminder: We are just 17 driver sign ups away from our goal! Sign up for NAA’s Membership Drive Aug 23 - Sept 6. Drivers will receive a short training, templates, and one of our new stickers as a thank you 🌠

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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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