Nineteen-year-old Any Lucía López Belloza was detained and deported, despite a lack of removal order, when attempting to head home from Babson College in Boston to surprise her family in Texas for Thanksgiving. “This is the first arrest of its kind I’ve seen,” says her attorney, Todd C. Pomerleau, who says the student has been the victim of “character assassination.” After López Belloza “was taken down near the border on a bus, had shackles around her ankles, chain around her waist, shackles around her wrist,” her family attempted to speak out to the press about the rights violations she suffered. They are now being harassed by law enforcement, as well.
Bruna Ferreira, a DACA recipient and mother of White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s nephew, has lived in the United States since she was 6 years old, but was recently arrested by ICE in her own driveway in what her attorney, Todd Pomerleau, calls a “brazen, unconstitutional arrest, a clear violation of her rights.” Ferreira was transported to a remote detention center in Louisiana following her arrest in Massachusetts, and just released Tuesday. “All of a sudden, now the Leavitts have a problem with 'criminal illegal aliens.' Yet one of them was about to marry one of their loved ones, and there was no problem,” says Pomerleau.
District courts have dismissed the administration’s efforts to detain virtually all undocumented immigrants without a bond hearing while they await deportation proceedings.
Some 1 million Syrians were welcomed in Germany after fleeing civil war. They are increasingly unwelcome in a country where politics have swung sharply right.
Lights on 24/7. Overflowing toilets and lack of access to showers. Solitary confinement in a 2×2-foot box. These are some of the torturous conditions documented in a new report from Amnesty International investigating human rights violations at two ICE detention centers in Florida: the Krome North Service Processing Center and the Everglades Detention Facility, dubbed “Alligator Alcatraz” by Trump and his supporters. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis is denying the report’s findings, calling them fabricated and politically motivated. We speak to the report’s lead researcher, Amy Fischer, about the “intentional development within immigration detention that is aiming to make it increasingly cruel, increasingly abusive, so that people are forced to give up their immigration claims [because] the conditions are so cruel that they can’t handle it anymore.”
The world’s largest conflict by scale is in Sudan, where tens of thousands have been killed and millions displaced since fighting broke out between the UAE-backed paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and the Sudanese military (SAF) in April 2023. Last week, the RSF attacked a kindergarten, killing over 40 children. “Almost every part of Sudan is somehow impacted by this war,” which has been rife with reports of child killings and widespread sexual violence, says Sudanese political analyst Kholood Khair. Satellite imagery reviewed by researcher Nathaniel Raymond of the Yale School of Public Health depicts the RSF-captured city of El Fasher as a “ghost town,” indicating a major civilian massacre carried out by the UAE-supported paramilitary group. Khair draws attention to the shortfall in humanitarian funding being directed to Sudan, and urges international actors to financially support civil society groups and the U.N. crisis response fund. “Nobody is helping them. No one is putting money and resources to them to enable them to save lives.”