Tag: illegal immigration

Husband of Texas Mayor Arrested by ICE

The husband of a Texas mayor was arrested by ICE for overstaying his visa.

Armando Garza Lira, the husband of Crystal City, Texas, Mayor Jose Cerda, was arrested on Wednesday night for overstaying his visa.

According to NewsNation, the Zavala County Sheriff’s Department along with ICE took Lira into custody following complaints he was in the US illegally.

NewsNation reported:

The husband of Crystal City, Texas, Mayor Jose Cerda was arrested by ICE Wednesday night, law enforcement sources told NewsNation.

According to NewsNation sources, Armando Garza Lira overstayed his visa. NewsNation has reached out to the city and has not received a response.

In a statement, the Zavala County Sheriff’s Office said it took Lira into custody after conducting immigration enforcement action following complaints of an individual reportedly residing unlawfully in Crystal City, 115 miles southwest of San Antonio.

Lira was transported to the Zavala County Jail, where he was transferred to jail personnel pending further immigration enforcement action by federal authorities.

Cerda was released without further incident.

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Clinton-Appointed Judge Sides with Illegal Aliens Against Trump’s Civil Immigration Fines

A federal judge appointed by former President Bill Clinton sided with illegal aliens who were fined by President Donald Trump’s administration for civil immigration violations.

For more than a year, the Trump administration has used civil immigration fines to incentivize illegal aliens to self-deport from the United States. As of July of this year, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has levied more than $84 billion in fines against about 103,000 illegal aliens in the United States.

This week, Judge George A. O’Toole, appointed to the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts by Clinton, sided with a pair of illegal aliens the Trump administration fined, claiming that DHS violated federal law when issuing its final rule that permitted the use of the fines.

“The plaintiffs here face assessment and possible collection of enormous fines well beyond their capacity to pay,” O’Toole wrote of the two plaintiffs:

Maria L., a nail technician on a variable salary, was issued a significant fine in the hundreds of thousands. A victim of political violence in her home country, she reports that the fine has affected her health, increased her anxiety, caused depression, and led to her missing work for a month. [Emphasis added]

Nancy M. was fined over 1.8 million dollars. She is a laborer working over sixty hours a week with two jobs, and she reports feeling serious anxiety affecting her ability to sleep, eat, and live a normal life. Given the amount of the fines, the plaintiffs face the possibility of garnishment of wages and bank accounts, seized assets such as vehicles and homes, IRS reports, federal collections suits, and adverse future admissibility determinations. [Emphasis added]

O’Toole granted the motion to stay that was sought by the plaintiffs in the case, preventing the Trump administration from collecting such fines on illegal aliens.

Trump administration officials previously told Breitbart News that the fines are critical to getting illegal aliens to self-deport from the United States.

The case is Maria L. v. Noem, No. 1:25-cv-13471 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts.

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Karen Bass: Trump ‘Invaded’ L.A. to Intimidate Latino Immigrants

Tuesday on CNN’s “Anderson Cooper 360,” Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass said President Donald Trump “invaded last June with federal troops for no reason at all to intimidate a whole sector of our population, Latino immigrants.”

Bass said, “Well, first of all, I was horrified that the president would basically say that another country is perfectly fine to take out or to attack our city and our sister city two hours away. The role of the president is to protect and defend the American people. He went to war with Iran, and he basically said, it‘s okay, that it‘s a small price to pay to attack 3.8 million people in the nation‘s second largest city. I was horrified by those comments. But then again, we are the city that he invaded last June with federal troops for no reason at all to intimidate a whole sector of our population, Latino immigrants.”

She added, “I think that when our city was invaded by the Marines and and 4000 National Guard troops for no reason at all, that that’s all part of the plan to get the U.S. public to acclimate to military intervention in our cities. I said from day one, I thought L.A. was an experiment and this was going to spread around the country. We saw that that was the case. Now, maybe the next time it happens, Americans won’t be so outraged because they’ve seen so many cities have federal intervention from the military. It’s a misuse of the military and irresponsible words.”

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British Home Secretary: Nearly All Women Trying to Reach the UK by Boat Are Raped on the Journey

British Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood has made an extraordinary admission about Britain’s Channel migration system, saying “you can almost guarantee that every woman” waiting in northern France has “probably been raped along the journey,” according to reports from the British press.

Mahmood then delivered the line that will reverberate through Britain’s immigration debate: “We’re not in control of this border.” The Home Secretary admitted that criminal trafficking organizations effectively determine which migrants reach northern France and ultimately board dinghies for Britain.

“The sifting of the people that end up in the north of France and are about to get on a dinghy is done by criminal gangs who are also, by the way, people traffickers,” she said. Mahmood added that male migrants are also subjected to abuse, intimidation and threats along the journey.

Her description presents a brutal contradiction at the heart of the Channel system: Britain says it controls immigration, yet organized smugglers can still decide who boards boats and reaches British waters. For immigration restrictionists and sovereigntists, Mahmood’s own language amounts to unusually direct confirmation of their argument that border sovereignty remains compromised.

Mahmood herself argued that such a system cannot determine who eventually settles in Britain. “That is not the model that should decide whether somebody gets to come to the UK, make this their place of sanctuary and ultimately become one of us,” she said.

Her comments came as another large migrant boat reached British waters off Hampshire, bringing the border crisis to Gosport rather than the usual landing points farther east. French rescue vessels shadowed the dinghy before two RNLI boats met it in British waters and brought 149 migrants ashore.

The Home Office confirmed that those aboard would be transported to Kent for processing and undergo health, biometric and security checks. Government officials said contingency arrangements had been activated so the arrivals could be “securely disembarked, checked and processed.”

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British Government Caught Handing Out Thousands of Hijabs to Illegal Boat Migrants

The British government has handed out more than 1,000 taxpayer-funded hijabs to migrants arriving illegally across the English Channel.

According to internal Home Office figures reported by The Daily Mail, officials distributed 974 of the Islamic head coverings to small-boat migrants, an average of 162 every month between January and June.

At that rate, the total handed out at taxpayer expense is likely in the thousands

“The Government must stop handing out hijabs to illegal immigrants immediately,” Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp said.

“It’s an insult to hard-working British taxpayers that they’re funding religious items for people who have broken into our country. It should not be for us to fund someone else’s religious practices.”

Many are also wondering why British taxpayers are paying to promote a symbol of female subservience.

Shadow Education Secretary Laura Trott recently came out against hijabs forming part of school uniforms.

“I do not believe the state should be party to an instrument of female suppression,” she said.

The taxpayer-funded clothing is being distributed as Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s government refuses to stop the boats despite promises to do so.

More than 19,000 migrants have made the journey so far this year, with hundreds, if not thousands, more arriving every week.

Although overall crossings are down from 2025, boats have become increasingly crowded, carrying an average of 67 people per vessel.

The Home Office defended the practice by claiming it has obligations to provide appropriate basic clothing to migrants in short-term holding facilities.

“All arrivals receive a basic dry clothing pack where required,” a spokesman said. “The items available form part of standard welfare arrangements.”

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Clinton-Era Laws Passed 30 Years Ago Enabled Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Agenda. Here’s How We Turn the Page.

The more the American public sees of President Donald Trump’s hardline, anti-immigrant policies in action — the deaths, military-style invasions of neighborhoods, and mass detention and deportations — the more his approval on the issue drops.

If this trend sounds familiar, it’s because a similar wave of disapproval played out in Trump’s first term. Despite that backlash, Trump returned to office embracing even more extreme measures.

We must finally confront and uproot the core of the U.S.’s anti-immigrant underbelly, which is largely reflected in the racially motivated notion of criminalization.

Trump was not the first politician to exploit the concept of criminality, and he certainly won’t be the last. Criminalizing narratives are deeply planted in the American psyche, and they have commonly acted as the vessel through which white supremacist rhetoric and policy are ingrained into our culture and laws.

In the late 1980’s, criminalization went mainstream in the form of racist dog whistles, particularly those hinging on vile anti-Blackness deployed by politicians seeking to activate white voters. In the decades since, conservative and liberal leaders alike more purposefully extended this criminality framework to immigration — so much so that it’s now perhaps the primary driver of the public immigration debate.

Consider how Americans of all political stripes are often presented with the binary choice of supporting the “right” type of immigrant. In this oversimplification, immigrants fall into categories like “good” or “bad,” “legal” or “illegal,” “deserving” or “undeserving.”

Trump did not invent these narratives. They’ve underpinned both major parties’ politics of immigration for several decades, despite their basis in fiction and fear-mongering rather than evidence and compassion, or the fact these narratives are weaponized against non-white immigrants who for centuries have disproportionately faced restrictive and punitive policies for the act of seeking relief in this country.

But Trump’s partisan opposition, despite its massive opportunities in the face of unpopular, hardline policies, has repeatedly failed to capture the public’s long-term support on immigration. Too often, Democrats repackage the same old criminalizing narratives — often in softer terms, but always in line with the oversimplified good-or-bad thinking. This lack of imagination is reflected in the nearly annual bipartisan votes to increase funding for federal enforcement agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection, as well as Democratic leaders’ messaging and policies.

Take, for example, former President Barack Obama’s push to deport “felons, not families”; Joe Biden squandering his mandate to reverse the cruelty of Trump’s first term by continuing many Trump policies, like Title 42 and the backing of for-profit immigrant detention; or Kamala Harris, in her presidential bid, focusing much of her immigration rhetoric on “securing” the border.

It’s a toxic cycle: The public rightfully disapproves of the atrocities of anti-immigrant policies; in response, liberals roll out unimaginative plans hinged on outdated narratives; and finally, in the vacuum created by the lack of any tangible, pro-immigrant vision, the right recaptures the public’s attention with fear mongering and a sensationalist focus on crime and the border.

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Federal Judge Blocks Border Wall Construction in Big Bend Region in Texas

A federal judge on Friday blocked border wall construction in the Big Bend region in Texas.

US District Judge Kathleen Cardone, a George W. Bush appointee, issued a preliminary injunction blocking border wall construction in Texas’s Big Bend region and Big Bend National Park.

The scope of Judge Cardone’s order includes patrol roads, border barriers or related infrastructure.

Environmental advocacy group Center for Biological Diversity filed the lawsuit in April and argued that the border wall construction lacked approval from Congress.

Judge Cardone sided with the plaintiffs on Friday and stopped the bulldozing and road-clearing by contractors while the lawsuit makes its way through the courts.

The Texas Tribune reported:

A judge on Friday blocked further border barrier construction in the Big Bend region, approving an environmental group’s motion for a preliminary injunction.

At the end of Friday’s hearing, U.S. District Judge Kathleen Cardone asked the courtroom to remain calm while she read her order aloud from the bench.

She ruled that the plaintiffs’ constitutional claims to halt the construction were likely to succeed and her preliminary injunction against “ground-distrurbing activities” would remain in effect while the suit continued to play out in court.

The legal team at the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental advocacy group, filed the lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security and its secretary in April on behalf of the Friends of the Ruidosa Church, a nonprofit dedicated to preserving a historic church in Presidio County, and Danny William Miller, a Rio Grande river guide and landowner who stands to lose his property in Redford to the wall.

The lawsuit argues that the five contracted border wall projects in the region are unconstitutional for a range of reasons, including violating the constitutional separation of powers and depriving citizens of their land.

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DOJ Sues University for Penalizing Americans with High Tuition, Putting ‘Illegal Aliens Over U.S. Citizens’

The University of Delaware is being sued by the Department of Justice for giving illegal immigrants a tuition discount to which they are not entitled.

The school allows illegal immigrants to qualify for the lower tuition rate charged for Delaware residents, according to a Justice Department news release.

American citizens who do not live in Delaware do not qualify, the release said, leading to a situation where illegal immigrants are given preference over Americans.

The University of Delaware allows illegal immigrants to attend at a tuition rate of $15,740, the rate for state residents. The rate for students from outside of the state is $42,470.

“This Department of Justice’s efforts will not cease until we have challenged every state law or university policy that gives preferential treatment to illegal aliens over our Nation’s own citizens,” Associate Attorney General Stanley Woodward Jr. said in the release.

“Congress long ago made clear that states cannot give reduced tuition to illegal aliens not available to all Americans. When a state Attorney General allows her own state to violate federal law, this department must step in to enforce it,” he continued.

Assistant Attorney General Brett Shumate of the Justice Department’s Civil Division said that “this is a simple matter of federal law: colleges cannot provide benefits to illegal aliens that they do not provide to U.S. citizens.”

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Newsom Signs Laws Banning Shock Gloves And Taxing Immigration Detention Centers

California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed 21 bills on Sept. 29 aimed at limiting federal immigration enforcement in the state, including a ban on officers using shock gloves and a new 25 percent tax on private detention centers.

“California is taking action to strengthen transparency, accountability, and oversight around immigration enforcement in our state,” Newsom said in a statement.

“This is about stepping up where the federal government has failed our communities,” the Democratic governor said. “We will continue protecting our people, upholding the rule of law, and making clear that if the federal government operates in California, we will hold them accountable.“

The shock glove ban applies to all officers in California, including federal immigration agents. It takes effect next year, expires Jan. 1, 2030, and requires the state Department of Justice to complete a safety study on the devices by Jan. 1, 2029.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) awarded a $16.7 million no-bid contract last month for 6,000 pairs of the gloves, which deliver an electric shock at the push of a button. ICE said at the time that the devices would help officers control resisting detainees and protesters.

“Sanctuary politicians attempting to ban our federal law enforcement from any safety equipment is despicable and a deliberate attempt to undermine and endanger our officers,” the agency said in a statement at the time, responding to a group of Democratic lawmakers who urged the agency to abandon the plan.

California law enforcement groups broadly opposed the shock glove ban, including Sacramento Sheriff Jim Cooper, a Democrat and former state lawmaker.

“When the federal government does something, the state Legislature wants to ban it,” Cooper said at a news conference last month.

“For me, use of force is so important. We talk about it all the time. De-escalating [to] a lower level of force. What they’re doing by trying to ban this glove, and it conducts electricity – a much lower voltage than a taser – they’re making our job harder.”

Newsom also signed a revised ban on officers wearing masks. A federal judge blocked the state’s first mask ban in February, ruling that it unfairly targeted local and federal officers because it exempted state officers. The new law applies to all officers.

Other bills Newsom signed on Tuesday restrict the use of state-owned property for immigration enforcement staging, processing, or detention, and one allows people to sue federal officials accused of violating their constitutional rights.

Another law protects people traveling to and from courthouses from civil arrest, and another bars ICE officers who have committed serious misconduct from becoming police officers or public employees in California.

A fifth law requires rental vehicles that law enforcers use for arrests or transport to display a decal identifying the agency, with limited exceptions.

Detention center taxes will go to state immigration-related services. A separate bill ends a property tax exemption claimed by some detention facilities.

Newsom’s office acknowledged in its announcement that California “cannot dictate federal immigration policy.” It said the state can set requirements for state property, state resources, detention facilities, public records, and law enforcement practices where federal enforcement operates in California.

Courts have mostly sided with the Justice Department in challenges to state limits on federal agents. In April, an appeals court blocked California’s separate law requiring officers to wear identification, ruling that it violates the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution. Federal judges have since blocked mask bans in Virginia on June 30, Philadelphia on July 2, and New York on Aug. 3.

States have fared better on other measures. On Sept. 4, a federal judge dismissed a Justice Department lawsuit challenging an executive order by New Jersey Gov. Mikie Sherrill, a Democrat, that bars federal immigration officers from using state property for enforcement. California’s package includes a similar ban on state-owned property.

“To be crystal clear: we will not abide by unconstitutional mask bans,” a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said in an emailed response to an inquiry from The Epoch Times on Tuesday.

“The Supremacy Clause makes it clear that California’s sanctuary politicians do not control federal law enforcement. No tax will stop ICE from deporting criminal illegal aliens to make California safe again. We need California to cooperate with our officers and stop releasing criminals from their jails into California’s neighborhoods. Seven of the 10 safest cities in America cooperate with ICE.”

The spokesperson said that enforcing immigration law is a federal responsibility under the Constitution. Concerning the shock gloves, the spokesperson said that ICE reviews its equipment to make sure it is “consistent with all applicable law enforcement policies and standards,” and that officers are “highly trained in de-escalation tactics and regularly receive ongoing use of force training.”

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Virginia Releases Illegal Alien Accused of Unthinkable Crimes Against Children – ICE Catches Him Anyway

The Department of Homeland Security arrested an illegal alien earlier this month — a man the agency said had been released by local authorities in Virginia after sexually assaulting minors.

In a Wednesday news release, DHS stated that Democrat-dominated Fairfax County had refused to honor a detainer on Oscar Evaristo Nunez in 2025, despite his having been “charged with child sex crimes.”

Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials arrested Nunez, who is from Honduras, on Sept. 15 during a “targeted enforcement operation,” the release states.

Nunez was initially arrested and charged back in August 2025 with aggravated sexual battery, two counts of filming/videotaping of an undressed minor, and two counts of aggravated sexual battery of a victim under 13 years old, according to the release.

ICE logged a detainer for Nunez with the Fairfax County Adult Detention Center two days after his arrest. Fairfax County refused to honor the detainer and released Nunez back onto the streets without telling federal authorities, the release states.

Nunez is expected to remain in ICE custody until his immigration proceedings.

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