Immigration rights activist Ravi Ragbir — who is being threatened with deportation — urged churchgoers Sunday to speak up against the anti-immigration wave sweeping the country.

“There are many people with green cards who are facing deportation,” he told a packed Judson Memorial Church in the West Village.[…]

Read the full article:

Labor historian Fred Glass, looking at the impact of immigration on California's labor movement, notes that many immigrants have arrived in the state with a long history of labor and left-wing activism. Unions have then called on that history and consciousness to aid in organizing drives among janitors, farm workers, hotel housekeepers, and others. "Because the labor movement has understood this fact and designed its efforts around it," he argues, "California's unionization rate remains at 16 percent while the national average is 11 percent." The state has 2.55 million union members, far more than any other.[…]

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Worried about federal immigration policies, a New York labor organization is taking steps to protect its own.

Across Long Island and throughout the city, some 120,000 Teamsters are getting prepped to become a “sanctuary union.”

In 27 shops, business agents, supervisors and front-line workers are getting schooled on their rights under U.S. law — and when and how to challenge federal immigration agents who show up to search their work sites.[…]

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A crowd of immigrant rights advocates blocked a Homeland Security van late Thursday from accessing the Metropolitan Detention Center in downtown Los Angeles.

Video footage showed dozens of people standing in the street, in front of a marked van, chanting, "Drive out ICE!" and "Stop the deportations!" Some held signs.[…]

Read the full article:

View a video:

HOUSTON - During their lunch break Wednesday, Students from Stephen F. Austin High School walked out school around noon for a march and rally outside to show support for a student detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

By the hundreds, classmates of the 19-year-old-detained student, identified as Dennis Rivera-Sarmiento, displayed signs to show solidarity.[…]

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More than 100 New York City public defenders have walked out in protest of their clients getting detained at the courthouse by federal immigration officials.

The Thursday protest took place outside a Bronx courthouse, where attorneys say Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (Ice) officers are arresting their clients with no distinct pattern. WABC-TV reports the protest was sparked after Ice arrested Aboubacar Dembele Lanier, who was leaving the courthouse.[…]

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TAMPA — Two little girls stood under a blazing sun holding a mock check made out to Hillsborough Sheriff Chad Chronister.

The payor: U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement. The amount: $50.

That’s the sum that ICE will pay the Sheriff’s Office under a recently-announced contract to hold undocumented immigrants for up to 48 hours in the county jail until federal agents can pick them up.[...]

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Dozens protested Monday in front of the U.S. Customs and Immigration Services office in Phoenix, calling for change nearly a year after Guadalupe Garcia de Rayos of Mesa was deportedafter she went for a routine check-in with the federal agency.

The arrest and deportation of Garcia de Rayos was a catalyst that stirred protests across the state, said Maria Castro, a community organizer with Puente, a human-rights advocacy group.[…]

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After today’s impasse in the Senate it seems unlikely that the political class will produce any legislation to protect the Dreamers from deportation, much less any rational reform of the immigration system.

Earlier in the day the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) made an unusual move for a government agency: it issued a press release ferociously attacking the Schumer-Rounds-Collins amendment.

“The DHS press release is over the top,” Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) responded. “It’s poisonous. I think it’s ridiculous, and I’ve long since stopped paying attention to them.” But we should pay attention, because the DHS release shows a lot about the dishonest and authoritarian thinking of the people who enforce U.S. immigration laws.

Here is a sampling of what makes the release “poisonous” and “ridiculous.”

DHS misrepresents provisions on enforcement. DHS claims the amendment has a “ ‘priorities’ scheme that ensures that DHS can only remove criminal aliens, national security threats and those who arrive AFTER June 30, 2018 creating a massive surge at the border for the next four months” [punctuation in the original].

In reality, the text of the compromise amendment requires the DHS to “prioritize available enforcement resources” to immigrants convicted of several categories of crimes and to undocumented immigrants who arrive here after June 2018. In other words, it doesn’t stop detentions and deportations of non-criminal immigrants; it just deprioritizes them, codifying the policy in place during the last years of the Obama administration. Thousands of non-criminal immigrants were deported then—and no, there wasn’t “a massive surge at the border.”

The claim here is that since naturalized citizens sponsor an average of 3.5 relatives for immigration visas, 2 or 3 million newly legalized Dreamers would eventually sponsor another 7 to 10 million relatives. But what relatives would they sponsor? The amendment bars Dreamers from sponsoring their parents for citizenship. Couldn’t they sponsor their children or siblings? Of course, but remember that by definition the Dreamers have lived here since childhood. Their siblings would probably be either citizens or Dreamers themselves, and the Dreamers’ own children would almost all be natural-born U.S. citizens. So the Dreamers would have very few relatives they could sponsor, certainly not 7 to 10 million.

When the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) analyzed a more generous DREAM Act in December, it estimatedthat the legalized Dreamers would only end up sponsoring about 80,000 relatives by the end of the first 10 years.

These aren’t “loopholes,” and there’s no evidence they produce a significant pull factor. One is the bipartisan William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Reauthorization Act of 2008. It is true that tens of thousands of unaccompanied children fleeing violence in Central America have used protections from this legislation to enter the U.S. as asylum seekers, but these numbers are hardly dramatic, at least compared to the levels of undocumented immigration in the 1990s and early 2000s, or to the 300,000 U.S. citizens who migrated from Puerto Rico to Florida—one state—after Hurricane Maria struck the island last fall.

Ironically, immigration officials claimed in the past that Obama’s Deferred Arrival for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) was the “pull factor” behind the surge of unaccompanied minors in 2014; as recently as last September Attorney General Jeff Sessions used this claim as one of the pretextsfor ending DACA. Now that DACA is ending, the administration finally admits that the cause was actually the 2008 child trafficking law.

Another “loophole,” according to DHS, is actually a Supreme Court decision from 2001. The DHS didn’t explain how it expected Congress to overturn a ruling by the country’s highest court.

The decision is Zadvydas v. Davis. The Court ruled that the government couldn’t hold deportable immigrants in indefinite administrative detention just because the government couldn’t find a country to deport them to. The government was instructed to release the detainees after six months if it hadn’t made reasonable progress in efforts to deport them; there was an exception for especially dangerous detainees.

The DHS claim about Zadvydas is actually rather frightening. The decision was based on what the Court called “serious constitutional questions” about indefinite detention for administrative purposes. The Court had ruled in 1987 that “government detention violates [the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause] unless the detention is ordered in a criminal proceeding with adequate procedural protections.”

So our current DHS officials are seeking to change a ruling based on the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause? And if they could detain immigrants indefinitely without criminal charges, couldn’t they do that to citizens as well?

Mitch McConnell is taking the reins of an immigration debate that may prompt a fix for “Dreamers” — or quickly spiral out of control.[…]

Read the full article:

February 9, 2018

For a year, immigration agents have been enforcing the Trump administration’s orders to deport noncitizens at full speed with but one roadblock: the federal courts.[…]

Read the full article:

                       

On Friday, a federal judge stayed the deportation of New York City immigrant rights leader Ravi Ragbir, after he filed a free speech lawsuit arguing immigration officials unconstitutionally used their power to suppress political dissent by targeting outspoken activists for surveillance and deportation. The judge stayed the deportation only one day before Ravi Ragbir was scheduled to be deported. He has now been ordered to check in with Immigration and Customs Enforcement on March 15. For more, we speak with Ravi Ragbir, executive director of the New Sanctuary Coalition.[…]

Watch the segment or read the transcript

February 9, 2018

A federal judge in Los Angeles has ruled that police departments violate the Constitution if they detain inmates at the request of immigration agents, marking the latest legal setback for the Trump administration's plans to identify and deport immigrants in the country illegally.[…]

Despite the many objections, including the Chief Justice of California, state courthouses remain targets for immigration enforcement.[...]

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At last mainstream reporters have started reporting about the real General John Kelly.

What finally did Trump’s chief of staff in was the revelationthat he'd shielded former White House staff secretary Rob Porter despite credible allegations of domestic violence from Porter’s two ex-wives. This followed bizarre episodes like Kelly’s rewriting of U.S. history and his lies about an African-American Congress member. But his record during the half-year he headed the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) should have alerted observers to the man’s true character long before he moved to the White House.

Wasn’t it a problem that as DHS secretary he floated ideas for systematically separating child asylum seekers from their parents, and for deploying the National Guard in immigration raids? In March the administration suggested funding expanded immigration enforcement by gutting the Coast Guard, FEMA and the TSA, parts of the government that sometimes may actually help protect people. If Kelly objected to this bizarre plan, he didn’t say so. In April he suggested that Congress members who criticized his department’s immigration raids should change the immigration laws or else “shut up.” And why did reporters and editorial writers think the Trump team chose Kelly for the post? A general headed immigration operations in the 1950s, and the result was “Operation Wetback.” (See this,along with a correction.)

With all this information against Kelly, media like the New York Times still managed to write that the man was “sensible.” Now that we know otherwise, the Times still isn’t quite admitting to a mistake. In an articlenoting that “Mr. Kelly has drawn a string of unwelcome headlines,” Timesreporters Peter Baker and Maggie Haberman explain that “[w]hen he took the White House job last summer, [Kelly] was seen by many as a mature figure who could impose order on a chaotic building.”

Who were the “many” who saw Kelly this way? Not the immigrants who'd been swept up in his immigration raids.

The Trump administration is targeting people who speak out and organize against its policies. I know. Members of my organization are being targeted. Members of my family could be next.

I am an immigrant rights organizer with temporary legal status under Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), and I have been tracking how the federal government has been targeting my peers across the country. As I prepare to defend myself and my family against potential prosecution and deportation, I see this increasingly overt retribution as a warning sign that the right to political dissent is under threat for every person in the United States.[…]

Read the full article:

Ravi Ragbir is coming home—for now. 

On Monday, United States District Judge Katherine Forrest ruled that the “the government has acted wrongly” and with “unnecessary cruelty” in detaining the well-known immigrant advocate during a routine check-in earlier this month, and ordered his immediate release from a correctional facility in Orange County, New York. Noting that, “there is, and ought to be in this great country, the freedom to say goodbye,” Forrest repeatedly condemned the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency’s actions. “This abrupt and by all accounts unnecessary detention, a step in the direction of deportation, was wrong,” she declared.[…]

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In an impassioned rebuke of the Trump administration’s immigration practices, a Federal District Court judge in Manhattan Monday ordered the immediate release of the immigrant rights activist Ravi Ragbir, calling his abrupt detention on Jan. 11 unconstitutional and cruel.

Mr. Ragbir, a native of Trinidad and Tobago who has been ordered to leave the country by immigration officials, should have been entitled to “the freedom to say goodbye,” as Judge Katherine B. Forrest, of the United States District Court of the Southern District of New York, put it in her opinion.[…]

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A video of Border Patrol agents boarding a Greyhound bus asking people to show them their papers has garnered over 2.5 million views on Facebook according to the Florida Immigration Coalition (FLIC).

Last Friday, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agents boarded a Greyhound bus in Fort Lauderdale to question passengers about their immigration papers. “They asked for documentation and it had to be specifically U.S. identification or a passport with a stamp of entrance,” passenger Raquel Quesada told a local CBS affiliate.

Passengers were shocked that their citizenship would be questioned and proof of citizenship was being asked during a routine trip between Florida cities. FLIC shared a video on Twitter (provided by an anonymous passenger) of a Jamaican woman in her 60s, later identified as “Beverly,” who was removed from the bus by Border Patrol agents. She had come to the country legally with a visitor’s visa and had just met her granddaughter for the first time, said her daughter-in-law in a posted statement by FLIC. Additional video here and here shows the grandmother being detained by CBP.[…]

Read the full article:

Community Organizations Across the U.S. Join Together To Condemn the Recent Actions of ICE and Demand the Department of Homeland Security Reverse the Agency’s Unlawful Operations

New York, NY:  Over 1,800 community organizations, immigrant rights groups, faith-based organizations, immigrant rights lawyers, professors, and community supporters from 50 states have submitted a letter to the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielsen condemning the targeting of leaders in the movement for immigrant rights in the United States. The letter calls for the immediate release of Ravi Ragbir and Eliseo Jurado Fernandez from immigration detention, the return of Jean Montrevil from Haiti, and a halt to the effort to deport Maru Mora-Villalpando, all immigrant rights leaders who have been targeted for deportation in recent weeks.[…]

Read the full posting”

Read the letter:

When I imagined U.S. immigration authorities coming for me, I never thought it would be by certified mail. And yet this is how it happened—a few days before Christmas, a knock on my door led to the delivery of a letter, informing me that I was being placed in deportation proceedings.

My daughter, who opened the letter, started to cry. I immediately saw this for what it was: their way of trying to intimidate me. I felt a mix of emotions, but mostly I felt angry.[…]

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When word came down from the upper floors of Federal Plaza in Lower Manhattan that Immigration and Customs Enforcement was taking custody of Ravidath Ragbir and intended to deport him, hundreds of his supporters, standing outside on the cold sidewalk, raised up their hands to the monolithic building and screamed.

Ragbir had entered the building willingly, on his own steam, accompanied by his wife and family, his legal team, and a handful of elected officials. Now, his friends outside learned, Ravi — as everyone knows him — wouldn’t be coming back to them. They had planned for this possibility even as they hoped it wouldn’t come, but the plans soon gave way to a spontaneous gesture of resistance. As the ambulance carrying a handcuffed Ragbir — he had briefly fainted when he was taken into custody — pulled out of the Federal Plaza garage, supporters attempted to stop its progress. Friends, colleagues, clergy, and city council members put their bodies in front of the vehicle, blocking it with their lives.[…]

Read the full article:

There can now be little doubt that Immigration and Customs Enforcement is targeting immigration activists and their families for detention and deportation. Today's Democracy Now! program, linked to below, devoted much of its time to coverage of these cases. We are also providing links to other coverage.

On Tuesday, immigrant rights leader Jean Montrevil was deported to Haiti after residing in the United States for over three decades. He came to the U.S. from Haiti with a green card in 1986 at the age of 17. During the height of the crack epidemic, he was convicted of possession of cocaine and sentenced to 11 years in prison. He served that time. Upon his release, he married a U.S. citizen, had four children, became a successful small businessman, as well as an immigrant rights activist. He has had no further interaction with the criminal justice system. Joining us from Haiti is Jean Montrevil, who was deported to Haiti on Tuesday. We are also joined by Jani Cauthen, Jean’s former wife and the mother of three of his children.[…]

View this and subsequent segments, or read the transcripts, starting here:

A man who recounted his longtime girlfriend’s arrest in a Seattle Times story about ramped-up immigration enforcement in Pacific County last month has now been detained, and says U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents told him the arrest was because he was in the newspaper.[…]

Read the full article:

January 11, 2018

When Ingrid Encalada Latorre’s husband, Eliseo Jurado, stopped by a Westminster Safeway on Thursday to pick up some items for his 9-year-old stepson, Bryant, and 2-year-old son, Anibal, she didn’t anticipate that six agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement would snatch him.

“This is an attack on me,” Encalada Latorre said through an interpreter inside the Boulder Unitarian Universalist Church, where she has taken sanctuary for less than a month to avoid deportation to her native Peru.[…]

Read the full article:

In the spirit of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., faith leaders, elected officials, and immigration and legal advocates will come together to condemn the institutional oppression of marginalized communities and hold a "Jericho Walk" in Washington Square Park, around Ai Wei Wei's “Arch” migration sculpture. A press conference will be held following the vigil to call for Mr. Montrevil and Mr. Ragbir’s release, and to honor the 18 people who were arrested putting their bodies on the line in the tradition of peaceful civil disobedience in defense of Mr. Ragbir.

In the face of Trump’s unprecedented assault on immigrant communities and blatant racism, the fight for the rights and dignity of immigrants is more important than ever. Trump’s recent disparaging remarks about Caribbean and African countries, like Mr. Ragbir and Mr. Montrevil’s homelands of Trinidad and Haiti, respectively, highlight the critical need for continued resistance and unity.

President Trump's racism was on display yet again this week with his hateful comments about Haitian and African immigrants. We will not let bigotry divide us, and we will welcome and defend all immigrants! WE ARE AMERICA!

 By Nicole Brown and Lauren Cook, AM New York

Hundreds of protesters gathered outside of an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center on the Lower West Side Thursday, chanting "ICE out now" and demanding to know the whereabouts of a prominent immigrant rights leader, just hours after two city councilmen were arrested during a similar protest in Foley Square.

City councilmen Ydanis Rodriguez and Jumaane Williams were among 18 people who were arrested during the Foley Square protest sparked by the arrest of Ravi Ragbir, the executive director of faith-based immigrant rights group New Sanctuary Coalition of New York City. Ragbir was detained when he showed up for a check-in with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, organizers of the rally said.[…]

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With the piercing sounds of sirens and traffic, immigration activists, local politicians, and clergy braved bitter weather at the prayer vigil and rally protesting the detention of Jean Montrevil.

Montrevil was picked up during his lunch break — van transport entrepreneur — outside his home near Far Rockaway. He was on a deportation order.

Demonstrators prayed and then spoke. They held placards that read: “Free Jean Montrevil Now and Let Haitians Stay.”[...]

Read the full article:

Please, make phone calls NOW to ICE and to your elected officials to demand Ravi’s freedom. Click here for a PDF with names, numbers and instruction for making these calls. When you make these phone calls, please be respectful, not confrontational.

CALL the following:

NYC ICE Field Office Director: 212-238-4530

NYC ICE Field Office: 212-264-4213

ICE Office of Policy: 202-732-4292

CALL KIRSTEN GILLIBRAND: 212-688-6262

D.O. Berndt 3525

D.O. Attanasio 3569

D.O. So 3536 D.O. Folajaiye 3452

D.O. Kow 3582

D.O. Williams 3540

D.O. De Leon 3447

D.O. Syed 3566

D.O. Shnider 3456

D.O. Paoli 3586 Supervising

D.O. 212-863-3438

Congress failed to pass a clean DREAM Act in 2017. 

Thousands of young immigrants have already lost their status and thousands more will lose their protection in 2018. 

We need a clean DREAM Act NOW!

Co-sponsors (list in formation): Asian American Federation, Arab American Association of New York, Chayya Community Development Corporation, CUNY DREAMers, Indivisible Nation BK, MASA, New York DREAMers, New Immigrant Community Empowerment, New York State Immigrant Action Fund, SUNY DREAMers, 32BJ SEIU

New York City families deserve dignity and respect. Each day, dozens of New Yorkers facing deportation must check-in with ICE Officers at 26 Federal Plaza. When they enter the building, they don’t know if they will be able to see their families again. Now more than ever it is important to show solidarity in the face of policies that threaten our communities.

Join us for a Jericho Walk to stand with individuals and families facing deportation. This interfaith act of solidarity will bring together advocates and supporters to show immigrants that they are not alone.

At 9 am, we will begin the Jericho Walk, circling the building in silence and thoughtful prayer. Though we walk in silence, our actions speak to the injustices that our communities face.

Sponsoring organizations: American Friends Service Committee, Brooklyn Defender Services, Center for Constitutional Rights, Detention Watch Network, Immigrant Defense Project, LatinoJustice, Make the Road New York, MinKwon Center for Community Action, National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Project, the New York Civil Liberties Union, Northern Manhattan Coalition for Immigrant Rights, UnLocal, Inc. and a growing list of others!

Below are links to The Intercept covering internal ICE emails about the nationwide raids last February, the American-Statesmanreporting on the murder of a Mexican immigrant detained in March, Splinter News giving examples of the calls received by Trump’s Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement (VOICE) hotline, and a report from Human Rights First showing how the administration has increased the detention of asylum seekers—and that as of April an average of 40,000 immigrants (both asylum seekers and others) were being held in detention each night.—TPOI editor

As hundreds of undocumented immigrants were rounded up across the country last February in the first mass raids of the Trump administration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials went out of their way to portray the people they detained as hardened criminals, instructing field offices to highlight the worst cases for the media and attempting to distract attention from the dozens of individuals who were apprehended despite having no criminal background at all.[…]

Read the full article:

Juan Coronilla-Guerrero’s wife warned a federal judge this spring that her husband would be killed if the U.S. government followed through with his deportation.

Her prediction came true last week. Three months after the former Austin resident was taken back to central Mexico by federal authorities, his body was found on the side of a road in San Luis de la Paz, Guanajuato, near where he had been living with his wife’s family.[…]

Read the full article:

In April, the Trump Administration launched what it called the Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement (VOICE) hotline, with a stated mission to “provide proactive, timely, adequate, and prfessional services to victims of crimes committed by removable aliens.” But internal logs of calls to VOICE obtained by Splinter show that hundreds of Americans seized on the hotline to lodge secret accusations against acquaintances, neighbors, or even their own family members, often to advance petty personal grievances.[…]

Read the full article:

On January 25, 2017, President Donald Trump issued an executive order directing the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to allocate “all legally available resources” to construct and operate immigration detention facilities and hold immigrants there for the duration of their court proceedings. In the eight months since, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has largely refused to release asylum seekers from detention on parole, leaving many locked up in immigration detention facilities and jails.[…]

Download the report: 

When President Donald Trump announced the end of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program in September, he said he was giving Congress six months to find a legislative solution that would allow the 690,000 young unauthorized immigrants currently protected from deportation under DACA to stay in the country legally.

It turns out his White House has very specific ideas about what they want that solution to be.[…]

Read the full article:

President Donald Trump’s renewed demands for a border wall and dramatic changes to immigration laws in exchange for deportation protections for young undocumented immigrants may help Democrats by keeping the issue alive in the 2018 election year.

Polls show voters side with Democrats on shielding the immigrants, known as Dreamers. By adopting a hard line, Trump is setting the stage for a prolonged fight in Congress that could help Democrats gain seats in the House and Senate.[…]

Read the full article:

BALTIMORE (October 9, 2017) – The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), America’s oldest social justice organization, released the following statement in response to the immigration principles proposed by the Trump Administration yesterday.

“Despite his insistence on preserving the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, the immigration reforms proposed by President Trump last night prove once again that we cannot trust his hollow assertions.”[…]

Read the full press release:

This is an urgent call to help save historic Tule Lake.

Tule Lake is where more than 24,000 Japanese Americans were imprisoned during World War II. The proposed three-mile-long, eight-feet-high, barbed-wire fence would cut off Japanese American access to the site upon which they and their families were incarcerated. They say a fence is necessary to protect the site from wildlife, but birds are the major form of wildlife at the airport and a fence is ineffective in preventing bird strikes.

#SaveTuleLake

We have until 5 p.m. on Tuesday, October 10 to write to Modoc County and tell them we oppose the construction of a three-mile-long fence that will close off an airport that sits on two-thirds of the former concentration camp site.

Immigration officials on Thursday announced hundreds of arrests in an operation targeting communities where police and elected officials have refused to fully cooperate on enforcing federal immigration laws.

ICE said it arrested 167 people in and around Los Angeles, a region in which several cities and counties have been tagged by justice officials as being so-called sanctuaries — a loosely defined term used to describe local governments that restrict police from assisting immigration authorities identify and detain people suspected of being in the country illegally.

Arrests were also made in San Francisco and San Jose. Overall, ICE said it arrested nearly 500 people across the country over the last few days.[...]

Read the full article: