Philadelphia local news, sports, jobs, cars, homes

Tag: Immigration

  • Philly lawmakers want to restrict cooperation with ICE and ban agents from wearing masks

    Philly lawmakers want to restrict cooperation with ICE and ban agents from wearing masks

    Philadelphia lawmakers are set to consider legislation that would make it harder for ICE to operate in the city, including limiting information sharing, restricting activity on city-owned property, and prohibiting agents from concealing their identities.

    Among the package of bills set to be introduced Thursday is an ordinance that effectively makes permanent Philadelphia’s status as a so-called “sanctuary city” by barring city officials from holding undocumented immigrants at ICE’s request without a court order. Another bans discrimination based on immigration status.

    Two City Council members are expected to introduce the legislation as U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is facing mounting national scrutiny over its tactics in Minneapolis, where federal agents fatally shot two U.S. citizens this month.

    Councilmembers Rue Landau, a Democrat, and Kendra Brooks, of the progressive Working Families Party, said in an interview that the violence in Minneapolis hardened their resolve to introduce legislation to protect a population that includes an estimated 76,000 undocumented immigrants in Philadelphia.

    “It’s been very disheartening and frightening to watch ICE act with such lawlessness,” Landau said. “When they rise to the level of killing innocent civilians, unprecedented murders … this is absolutely the time to stand up and act.”

    The package of a half-dozen bills is the most significant legislative effort that Council has undertaken to strengthen protections for immigrants since President Donald Trump took office last year on a promise to carry out a mass deportation campaign nationwide.

    Left: City Councilmember Rue Landau. Right: City Councilmember Kendra Brooks. Landau and Brooks are introducing legislation this week to make it harder for ICE to operate in Philadelphia, including by limiting city cooperation with the agency.

    ICE spokespeople did not immediately reply to a request for comment.

    Jasmine Rivera, executive director of the Pennsylvania Immigration Coalition, said it’s not the job nor the jurisdiction of the city to enforce federal law.

    The goal of the legislation, Rivera said, is ensuring that “not a single dime and single second of our local resources is being spent collaborating with agencies that are executing people.”

    Mayor Cherelle Parker won’t say how Philly is responding to President Donald Trump’s demands on ‘sanctuary’ policies

    Activists have for months urged Mayor Cherelle L. Parker to formally affirm her commitment to the city’s sanctuary status. Top city officials say an executive order signed by the former mayor to limit the city’s cooperation with ICE remains in place.

    But Parker, a centrist Democrat, has taken a quieter approach than her colleagues in Council, largely avoiding criticizing the Trump administration outwardly and saying often that she is focused on her own agenda.

    Now, the mayor could be forced to take a side. If City Council passes Landau and Brooks’ legislation this spring, Parker could either sign the bills into law, veto them, or take no action and allow them to lapse into law without her signature. She has never vetoed a bill.

    Joe Grace, a spokesperson for Parker, declined to comment on the legislation.

    Mayor Cherelle L. Parker speaks at a news conference earlier this month. It is unclear how she will act on upcoming legislation related to ICE operations in Philadelphia.

    It’s unclear what fate the ICE legislation could meet in Council. The 17-member body has just one Republican, but Parker holds influence with many of the Democrats in the chamber.

    City Council President Kenyatta Johnson, a Democrat who controls the flow of legislation, has not taken a position on the package proposed by Landau and Brooks.

    But he said in a statement that “Philadelphia has long positioned itself as a welcoming city that values the contributions of immigrants and strives to protect their rights and safety.”

    “I have deep concerns about federal ICE actions directed by President Donald Trump’s administration that sow fear and anxiety in immigrant communities,” Johnson said, “underscoring the belief that enforcement practices should be lawful, humane, and not undermine trust in public safety.”

    Making sanctuary status the law

    Border Patrol and ICE are both federal immigration agencies, which are legally allowed to operate in public places and subject to federal rules and regulations. Some cities and states — not including Pennsylvania and New Jersey — actively cooperate with ICE through written agreements.

    Since 2016, Philadelphia has operated under an executive order signed by former Mayor Jim Kenney, which prohibits city jails from honoring ICE “detainer requests,” in which federal agents ask the city to hold undocumented immigrants in jail for longer than they would have otherwise been in custody to facilitate their arrest by federal authorities.

    Undocumented immigrants are not shielded from federal immigration enforcement, nor from being arrested and charged by local police for local offenses.

    Some refer to the noncooperation arrangement as “sanctuary.” As the term “sanctuary cities” has become politically toxic, some local officials — including in Philadelphia — have backed away from it, instead declaring their jurisdictions to be “welcoming cities.”

    Philadelphia says it’s a ‘welcoming’ — not ‘sanctuary’ — city as the Trump administration threatens funding cuts

    Parker administration officials have said several times over the last year that Philadelphia remains a “welcoming city.”

    Protesters march up Eighth Street, toward the immigration offices, during the Philly stands with Minneapolis Ice Out For Good protest at Philadelphia’s City Hall on Jan. 23.

    But advocates for immigrants have said they want an ironclad city policy that can’t be rescinded by a mayor.

    Landau and Brooks’ legislation would be that, codifying the executive order into law and adding new prohibitions on information sharing. The package includes legislation to:

    • Strengthen restrictions on city workers, including banning local police from carrying out federal immigration enforcement and prohibiting city workers from assisting in enforcement operations.
    • Prohibiting law enforcement officers from concealing their identities, including by wearing masks or covering up badges with identifying information.
    • Banning ICE from staging raids on city-owned property and designated community spaces such as schools, parks, libraries, and homeless shelters. (It would not apply to the Criminal Justice Center, where ICE has had a presence. The courthouse is overseen by both city and state agencies.)
    • Prohibiting city agencies and contractors from providing ICE access to data sets to assist in immigration enforcement.
    • Restricting city employees from inquiring about individuals’ immigration status unless required by a court order, or state or federal law.

    Peter Pedemonti, co-director of New Sanctuary Movement of Philadelphia, an advocacy organization that partnered with the Council members to craft the package of bills, compared ICE to an octopus that has multiple arms reaching into different facets of American life.

    The proposed legislation, he said, is a means to bind a few of those arms.

    “The whole world can see the violence and brutality,” Pedemonti said. “This is a moment where all of us need to stand up, and Philadelphia can stand up and speak out loud and clear that we don’t want ICE here to pull our families apart, the families that make Philadelphia Philadelphia.”

    An impending showdown that Parker hoped to avoid

    Homeland Security officials claim that sanctuary jurisdictions protect criminal, undocumented immigrants from facing consequences while putting U.S. citizens and law enforcement officers in peril.

    Last year, the Trump administration named Philadelphia as among the jurisdictions impeding federal immigration enforcement. The White House has said the federal government will cut off funding to sanctuary cities by Feb. 1.

    However, the president has made no explicit threat to ramp up ICE activities in Philadelphia.

    Some of Parker’s supporters say the mayor’s conflict-averse strategy has spared Philadelphia as other cities such as Washington, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Minneapolis have seen National Guard troops or waves of ICE agents arrive in force.

    Why hasn’t Trump sent troops to Philly, the city where ‘bad things happen’? Everyone has a theory.
    Residents near the scene of a shooting by a federal law enforcement agent in Minneapolis on Saturday.

    Critics, including the backers of the new legislation, have for months pressed Parker to take a stronger stand.

    Brooks said she “would love to have the support of the administration.”

    “This should be something that we should be working collaboratively on,” she said. “Philadelphia residents are demanding us do something as elected officials, and this is our time to lead.”

    But Parker has not been eager to speak about Philadelphia’s immigration policies.

    For example, the city is refusing to release a September letter it sent to the U.S. Department of Justice regarding its immigration-related policies, even after the Pennsylvania Office of Open Records ruled its reasoning for keeping the document secret was invalid. The Inquirer has requested a copy of the letter under the state Right-to-Know Law.

    The new Council legislation and the increasing tension over Trump’s deportation push may force Parker to take a clearer position.

    Notably, the city sued the federal government last week over its removal of exhibits related to slavery from the President’s House at Independence National Historical Park, potentially signaling a new willingness by Parker to push back against the White House.

    But even then, Parker declined to take a jab at Trump.

    “In moments like this,” she said last week, “it requires that I be the leader that I need to be for our city, and I can’t allow my pride, ego, or emotions to dictate what my actions will be.”

  • Judge orders ICE chief to appear in court to explain why detainees have been denied due process

    Judge orders ICE chief to appear in court to explain why detainees have been denied due process

    MINNEAPOLIS, Minn. — Federal immigration authorities have released an Ecuadorian man whose detention led the chief federal judge in Minnesota to order the head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement to appear in his courtroom, the man’s attorney said Tuesday.

    Attorney Graham Ojala-Barbour said the man, who is identified in court documents as “Juan T.R.,” was released in Texas. The lawyer said in an email to The Associated Press that he was notified in an email from the U.S. attorneys office in Minneapolis shortly after 1 p.m. CT that his client had been freed.

    In an order dated Monday, Chief Judge Patrick J. Schiltz expressed frustration with the Trump administration’s handling of Juan’s and other immigration cases. He took the extraordinary step of ordering Todd Lyons, the acting director of ICE, to personally appear in his courtroom Friday.

    Schiltz had said in his order that he would cancel Lyons’ appearance if the man was released from custody.

    “This Court has been extremely patient with respondents, even though respondents decided to send thousands of agents to Minnesota to detain aliens without making any provision for dealing with the hundreds of habeas petitions and other lawsuits that were sure to result,” he wrote.

    The order comes a day after President Donald Trump ordered border czar Tom Homan to take over his administration’s immigration crackdown in Minnesota following the second death this month of a person at the hands of an immigration law enforcement officer.

    Trump said in an interview broadcast Tuesday that he had “great calls” with Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey on Monday, mirroring comments he made immediately after the calls.

    As he left the White House, the president was asked whether Alex Pretti’s killing by a Border Patrol officer Saturday was justified. He responded by saying that a “big investigation” was underway. In the hours after Pretti’s death, some administration officials sought to blame the shooting on the 37-year-old intensive care nurse.

    The seemingly softer tone emerged as immigration agents were still active across the Twin Cities region, and it was unclear if officials had changed tactics following the shift by the White House.

    Walz’s office said Tuesday that the Democratic governor met with Homan and called for impartial investigations into the shootings involving federal officers. They agreed on the need to continue to talk, according to the governor.

    Frey and Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara said they also met with Homan and had a “productive conversation.” The mayor added that city leaders would stay in discussion with the border czar.

    The White House had tried to blame Democratic leaders for the protests of immigration raids. But after the killing of Pretti on Saturday and videos suggesting he was not an active threat, the administration tapped Homan to take charge of the Minnesota operation from Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino.

    The streets appeared largely quiet in many south Minneapolis neighborhoods where unmarked convoys of immigration agents have been sighted regularly in recent weeks, including the neighborhoods where the two deaths occurred. But Associated Press staff saw carloads of agents in northeast Minneapolis, as well as the northern suburb of Little Canada.

    Schiltz’s order also follows a federal court hearing Monday on a request by the state and the mayors of Minneapolis and St. Paul for a judge to halt the immigration enforcement surge. The judge in that case said she would prioritize the ruling but did not give a timeline for a decision.

    Schiltz wrote that he recognizes ordering the head of a federal agency to appear personally is extraordinary. “But the extent of ICE’s violation of court orders is likewise extraordinary, and lesser measures have been tried and failed,” he said.

    “Respondents have continually assured the Court that they recognize their obligation to comply with Court orders, and that they have taken steps to ensure that those orders will be honored going forward,” he wrote. “Unfortunately, though, the violations continue.”

    The Associated Press left messages Tuesday with ICE and a DHS spokesperson seeking a response.

  • Trump softens tone as some federal agents expected to leave Minneapolis

    Trump softens tone as some federal agents expected to leave Minneapolis

    MINNEAPOLIS — President Donald Trump softened his tone Monday on the immigration crackdown in Minnesota, touting productive conversations with the governor and Minneapolis mayor as he sent the border czar to take charge of much of the enforcement effort. Some federal agents were expected to leave as soon as today.

    Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said he spoke by phone with Trump, who praised the discussion and declared that “lots of progress is being made.” Frey said he asked Trump in a phone call to end the immigration enforcement surge and that Trump agreed the present situation cannot continue.

    The mayor said some agents would soon leave and that he would keep pushing for others involved in Operation Metro Surge to go.

    Among those who are expected to depart was senior Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino, a person familiar with the matter told the Associated Press. The person was not authorized to publicly discuss details of the operation and spoke to AP on condition of anonymity.

    Bovino has been at the center of the administration’s aggressive enforcement surge in cities nationwide. His departure marks a significant public shift in federal law enforcement posture amid mounting outrage over the fatal shooting of 37-year-old ICU nurse Alex Pretti by Border Patrol agents.

    Bovino’s leadership of highly visible federal crackdowns, including operations that sparked mass demonstrations in Los Angeles, Chicago, Charlotte, and Minneapolis, has drawn fierce criticism from local officials, civil rights advocates, and congressional Democrats.

    Criticism has increased around Bovino in the last few days after his public defense of the Pretti shooting and disputed claims about the confrontation that led to his death.

    The border czar, Tom Homan, will take charge of Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations in Minnesota.

    Judge hears arguments on crackdown

    A federal judge heard arguments Monday over Minnesota’s challenge to the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement crackdown, posing skeptical questions to both sides about the effort that has led to two fatal shootings by federal officers.

    U.S. District Judge Katherine Menendez is considering whether to grant requests by the state and the cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul to temporarily halt the immigration operation. She said the case was a priority, though she issued no immediate ruling.

    Menendez questioned the government’s motivation behind the crackdown and expressed skepticism about a letter recently sent by Attorney General Pam Bondi to Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. The letter asked the state to give the federal government access to voter rolls, to turn over state Medicaid and food assistance records, and to repeal sanctuary policies.

    “I mean, is there no limit to what the executive can do under the guise of enforcing immigration law?” Menendez asked. She noted that the federal requests are the subject of litigation.

    Lawyers for the state and the Twin Cities argued that the situation on the street is so dire as to require the court to halt the federal government’s enforcement actions.

    “If this is not stopped right here, right now, I don’t think anybody who is seriously looking at this problem can have much faith in how our republic is going to go in the future,” Minnesota Assistant Attorney General Brian Carter said.

    Brantley Mayers, counsel to the Justice Department’s assistant attorney general, said the government’s goal is to enforce federal law. Mayers said one lawful action should not be used to discredit another lawful action.

    “I don’t see how the fact that we’re also doing additional things that we are allowed to do, that the Constitution has vested us with doing, would in any way negate another piece of the same operation, the same surge,” Mayers said.

    Menendez questioned where the line was between violating the Constitution and the executive’s power to enforce the law. She also asked whether she was being asked to decide between state and federal policies.

    “That begins to feel very much like I am deciding which policy approach is best,” she said.

    At one point, while discussing the prospect of federal officers entering residences without a warrant, the judge expressed reluctance to decide issues not yet raised in a lawsuit before her.

    “I can’t be the global keeper of all things here. Like, presumably that will be litigated,” she said to the state’s attorney.

    The state of Minnesota and the cities sued the Department of Homeland Security earlier this month, five days after Renee Good was shot by an Immigration and Customs officer. The shooting of Alex Pretti by a Border Patrol officer on Saturday added urgency to the case.

    Border czar to Minnesota

    In other developments, Trump said he had a “very good” call with Gov. Tim Walz about the latest shooting and that they are now on a “similar wavelength.” It was an abrupt shift from Trump, who frequently derides Walz for his actions on immigration issues in Minnesota.

    Trump also said he would send border czar Tom Homan to Minnesota. The president’s statement comes after Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Bovino, who has become the public face of the crackdown, answered questions at news conferences over the weekend about Pretti’s shooting. Trump posted on social media that Homan will report directly to him.

    Since the original court filing, the state and cities have substantially added to their request in an effort to restore the conditions that existed before the administration launched Operation Metro Surge on Dec. 1.

    The lawsuit asks the judge to order a reduction in the number of federal law enforcement officers and agents in Minnesota back to the level before the surge and to limit the scope of the enforcement operation.

    Justice Department attorneys have called the lawsuit “legally frivolous” and said Minnesota “wants a veto over federal law enforcement.” They asked the judge to reject the request or to at least stay her order pending an anticipated appeal.

    Democratic Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison said Sunday that the lawsuit is needed because of “the unprecedented nature of this surge. It is a novel abuse of the Constitution that we’re looking at right now. No one can remember a time when we’ve seen something like this.”

    During a briefing on Monday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that a trio of “active investigations” and internal probes of the shooting were underway by federal agencies.

    Leavitt said that the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI were investigating the shooting and that U.S. Customs and Border Protection was “conducting their own internal review.”

    Leavitt said at the briefing that she has not heard Trump commit to release body camera footage from federal immigration officers involved in the shooting and killing of Alex Pretti.

    Leavitt later said that the administration is talking with members of Congress about requirements to have federal immigration officers wear body cameras.

    Leavitt said the shooting and killing of Pretti by a federal immigration officer “occurred as a result of a deliberate and hostile resistance by Democrat leaders in Minnesota.”

    Walz, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, and other elected Democrats “were spreading lies about federal law enforcement officers,” Leavitt said at the White House briefing.

    Other state implications

    The case has implications for other states that have been or could become targets of ramped-up federal immigration enforcement operations. Attorneys general from 19 states plus the District of Columbia, led by California, filed a friend-of-the-court brief supporting Minnesota.

    “If left unchecked, the federal government will no doubt be emboldened to continue its unlawful conduct in Minnesota and to repeat it elsewhere,” the attorneys general wrote.

    Menendez ruled in a separate case on Jan. 16 that federal officers in Minnesota cannot detain or tear gas peaceful protesters who are not obstructing authorities, including people who follow and observe agents.

    An appeals court temporarily suspended that ruling three days before Saturday’s shooting. But the plaintiffs in that case, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union of Minnesota, asked the appeals court late Saturday for an emergency order lifting the stay in light of Pretti’s killing.

    The Justice Department argued in a reply filed Sunday that the stay should remain in place, calling the injunction unworkable and overly broad.

    In yet another case, a different federal judge, Eric Tostrud, issued an order late Saturday blocking the Trump administration from “destroying or altering evidence” related to Saturday’s shooting. Ellison and Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty asked for the order to try to preserve evidence collected by federal officials that state authorities have not yet been able to inspect.

    A hearing in that case was scheduled for Monday afternoon in federal court in St. Paul.

    “The fact that anyone would ever think that an agent of the federal government might even think about doing such a thing was completely unforeseeable only a few weeks ago,” Ellison told reporters. “But now, this is what we have to do.”

  • Trump can try to hide it, but slavery is part of America’s story

    Trump can try to hide it, but slavery is part of America’s story

    It hurts my soul that the Trump administration has made good on the president’s threats to destroy the President’s House slavery exhibit at Independence National Historical Park, something Philadelphians fought long and hard to get. It would hurt President Donald Trump’s soul, too, if only he had one.

    None of this makes America great again. It doesn’t bring down the cost of groceries. It doesn’t help Americans whose healthcare premiums have skyrocketed. It doesn’t make our streets safer. It doesn’t do anything but rile up Confederate flag-waving racists in Trump’s base. They had an awful lot to say about preserving history when monuments honoring traitorous soldiers who fought for the Confederacy and the right to own Black folks were torn down. But not so much when it comes to the destruction that happened at Sixth and Market Streets Thursday afternoon.

    National Park Service workers remove the displays at the President’s House site in Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia on Thursday.

    I hope the spirits of the enslaved Africans whose stories had been immortalized in that display adjacent to the Liberty Bell will forever haunt Trump. It is my sincere wish that he and the henchmen who took down signs and dismantled the panels documenting the sad history of the nine enslaved Black people owned by our nation’s first president will never forget what they’ve done.

    From this day forward, may they toss and turn each night as they remember the destruction they have wrought, as well as the names of the enslaved whose memorial they defiled: Austin, Paris, Hercules, Christopher Sheels, Richmond, Giles, Oney Judge, Moll, and Joe.

    Trump and his enablers can try to hide the facts, but chattel slavery is an undeniable part of America’s founding. This nation wouldn’t be what it is now without the free labor of Africans dragged to these shores against their will and forced to toil for free in brutally inhumane conditions. It’s our story and one that should be acknowledged — not played down because Trump says so.

    What will he do next? Take a sledgehammer to the Martin Luther King Jr. statue in Washington, D.C.? Empty out the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture? Burn the books about slavery and Black codes that have been for sale in museum gift shops and national parks?

    The exhibit at the President’s House was the first I’d ever seen that, instead of glorifying the nation’s first president, humanized the poor people Washington held in the worst kind of bondage. The offices of The Inquirer are right across the street, and I’ve walked through the free outdoor exhibit many times. I used to enjoy seeing the expressions of tourists as they learned about the side of Washington that’s left out of most history books.

    Workers remove display panels about slavery at the President’s House site in Independence National Historical Park on Thursday, leaving only empty spaces where history has been redacted by President Donald Trump.

    Now all that’s left are the empty spaces where the various signs used to be. These sudden omissions at Independence Park make it feel like the historical account now being told at the site is a lie — not unlike the foundational lie of white supremacy that was used to justify the sin of slavery in the first place.

    The removals are just another step in Trump’s brutal agenda to take things in America back to how they used to be when white men had everything and Black people had nothing.

    Since his return to power, it has been one thing after another: his attempts to destroy all vestiges of diversity, equity, and inclusion, including his decision to no longer allow free admission to national parks on the federal holidays celebrating the late Rev. Dr. King and Juneteenth. Instead, parkgoers can enjoy free admission on Trump’s birthday, as if that’s really a thing.

    The president would destroy Black History Month, too, if he could, and I don’t put it past him to try. He’s been clear about his racial animus, restoring the names of Army bases to those of Confederate military figures and using U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to inflict a reign of terror on Black and brown people.

    I’m proud Philadelphia has filed suit to take back what was removed from the President’s House. This is the beginning of the City of Brotherly Love, showing the Trump administration that, in the words of Sheriff Rochelle Bilal, “You don’t want this smoke.”

  • ‘He reached his limit.’ Immigrant father of 5-year-old with brain cancer accepts deportation to Bolivia after months in ICE detention.

    ‘He reached his limit.’ Immigrant father of 5-year-old with brain cancer accepts deportation to Bolivia after months in ICE detention.

    In the end, the pressure on the family simply became too great.

    Johny Merida Aguilara, the detained immigrant father of a 5-year-old son with brain cancer, has decided to drop efforts to stay in the United States and accept deportation to Bolivia.

    His wife and three American-citizen children will also leave the country, though they are not required to do so, departing their Northeast Philadelphia home to reunite with their husband and father in the central Bolivian city of Cochabamba.

    The decision to go comes as Merida Aguilara, 48, approaches his fifth month in immigration detention ― with no end in sight. The family’s forced separation has been emotionally devastating, friends and supporters said. And with Merida Aguilara in custody and unable to work, the financial situation for his wife and children was growing desperate.

    He was caring for his 5-year-old son with brain cancer. Then he was detained by ICE.

    Merida Aguilara had been a main caregiver for his son, Jair, who has been treated at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, and whose future is now deeply uncertain. Quality healthcare can be lacking in Bolivia, where the U.S. State Department warns that “hospitals cannot handle serious conditions.”

    Jair has autism and a severe eating disorder, surviving on PediaSure nutrition drink delivered through a plastic syringe. He generally would accept food only from his father, and Merida Aguilara would leave work during the day to feed his son.

    The father was arrested by ICE for an immigration violation during a September traffic stop on Roosevelt Boulevard near Hunting Park Avenue, having lived in the United States without official permission for nearly 20 years.

    “I am tired,” Gimena Morales Antezana, his wife, said in an interview with The Inquirer. “We have been trying to survive, but it is difficult with the children because they miss their dad so much.”

    U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials did not reply to a request for comment on Thursday.

    The family has received strong community support, Morales Antezana said, but that could not continue indefinitely, and at this point she can no longer afford rent, water, or heat,

    Son Matias, 7, cries himself to sleep most nights, calling out for his father to come home. His sadness deepened after Christmas, turning into anger when Morales Antezana finally revealed that his father was not away on an extended work trip, but was being held by immigration authorities at the Moshannon Valley Processing Center, an ICE facility in central Pennsylvania.

    Gimena Morales Antezana and Johny Merida Aguilar’s wedding photos hang on the wall at their home in Northeast Philadelphia.

    Daughter Melany, 13, now feels unsafe in the U.S., her mother said. Teenage insecurities have bloomed into a persistent sense of danger, and she told her mom that leaving might be the only way to feel comfortable again.

    Jair cries inconsolably every time he sees or hears his father on the phone, asking why his dad can’t be home, Morales Antezana said.

    All three children were born in this country and are U.S. citizens by law.

    Some good news came this month. Doctors told Morales Antezana that Jair’s brain tumor had not grown, allowing time to try to find care in Bolivia.

    “This is going to be a constant struggle every day until God decides,” Morales Antezana said. “It’s scary to think that if something happens we don’t have a hospital to take him to, but knowing his dad will be there makes it a little lighter to bear.”

    Morales Antezana, 49, had to stop working in 2020 to handle the nearly full-time demands of Jair’s health, taking him to see specialists and undergo treatments while also caring for Melany and Matias.

    Jair Merida, 5, posed for a portrait at home in October. His father, Johny Merida Aguilar, was stopped and arrested by ICE in September.

    She has not been ordered deported while she has pursued legal means to stay in the country. Mother and children plan to voluntarily depart this month, while the precise timing of Merida Aguilara’s deportation is uncertain.

    “He couldn’t do it anymore; he reached his limit,” said Philadelphia immigration attorney John Vandenberg, who represents the family. “It’s a tough environment in the jail.”

    Vandenberg won relief in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, which issued a Sept. 30 order to temporarily block Merida Aguilar’s deportation. The lawyer also applied on Morales Antezana’s behalf for a T visa, which can bestow a path to citizenship on victims of human trafficking and their families.

    But time has gone on with no sign from the government as to when that visa application might be considered.

    Merida Aguilar and his wife were given permission to legally work in the U.S. under her 2024 claim for asylum, which could enable both to live here permanently if granted. The Trump administration, however, has made it increasingly difficult for people to succeed on those claims.

    Vandenberg said Merida Aguilar has no criminal record in the U.S., and Bolivian authorities provided documentation showing he had committed no offenses in that country.

    His efforts to remain in the U.S. have been complicated by a previous deportation, when he tried to enter the U.S. east of San Diego in 2008. Immigration officials sent him to Mexico, but Merida Aguilar secretly crossed back into the U.S. almost immediately.

    Now he and his wife want their children to be in Bolivia in time for the new school year, which starts in February.

    “I want to make sure our kids can study,” Morales Antezana said, “so they can decide who they want to be in the future, and come back [to the U.S.] as professionals with a different story than us.”

    Her parents, and a son from a previous relationship, are eager to see them in Bolivia.

    She said she is looking forward to what many people might take for granted ― hugging her partner, watching him play with their children, enjoying a meal as a family. That helps ease the pain of saying goodbye to a city she sees as home and to the friends who tried to help.

    “They kept me strong and helped me not get more depressed,” Morales Antezana said. “I’m going to miss everything about Philadelphia. It hurts a lot to have to leave because there are good people here.”

  • People are dying in Trump’s squalid concentration camps

    People are dying in Trump’s squalid concentration camps

    In the sweltering August heat of the West Texas desert, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement — through a $1.2 billion private contract that was awarded under some strange circumstances — in 2025 opened up a large tent city detention camp near El Paso to take some of the thousands swept up in Donald Trump’s mass deportation raids.

    It took just a matter of days for horror stories to begin leaking out of the sprawling camp on the grounds of Fort Bliss.

    A Cuban refugee identified as Isaac, a pseudonym, told investigators from a coalition of human rights groups that guards had violently assaulted him as part of a campaign to convince him and other detainees to be dumped in Mexico rather than to contest their deportation.

    Isaac told the groups’ lawyers in a sworn declaration that “the guards hit my head” and “slammed it against the wall approximately ten times” before grabbing and crushing his testicles, then handcuffing him and putting him on a bus with 20 other detainees that was driven to the border. They were told, according to Isaac, “If we don’t want to go to Mexico, then we would either be sent to a jail cell in El Salvador or Africa.”

    Isaac’s complaints echoed other nightmarish tales that attorneys for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and a web of immigrant rights groups gleaned in 45 interviews with detainees that were cited in a December letter pleading with ICE to shut down what has become the largest internment camp in the United States.

    This undated photo provided by Jeanette Pagan-Lopez shows Geraldo Lunas Campos with his three children. Lunas Campos died Jan. 3 at an ICE detention facility in El Paso, Texas.

    The implication was that if the Trump regime did not act, things at Camp East Montana would get worse.

    They did.

    Over a 33-day stretch that straddled the arrival of the new year, three ICE detainees at the Texas camp died under murky circumstances. One of the cases — the Jan. 3 death of 55-year-old Geraldo Lunas Campos, also a Cuban immigrant — was on Wednesday ruled a homicide by the county medical examiner, citing efforts by camp guards to restrain him. The medical examiner wrote in his report that Campos died from “asphyxia due to neck and torso compression.”

    The U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, has continued to maintain that Campos’ death was “a suicide,” and that any encounter he had with guards was an effort to prevent him from taking his own life. Two fellow detainees who reported seeing guards choking Campos have now received deportation notices. The mother of two of Campos’ children told the New York Times, “He was being abused and beaten and choked to death.”

    The alleged killing of Campos is arguably the worst example of what many critics predicted when Trump won the presidency in 2024, behind supporters waving placards, “Mass Deportation Now.” The squalid, hastily erected tent city in the Texas desert is the flagship of what experts describe as a growing network of concentration camps. And now, one year into Trump’s second term, people are dying in them.

    “It’s everything that we warned it would be, even before it opened,” Haddy Gassama, a senior policy counsel at the ACLU who’s been working on the issues around Camp East Montana, told me this week. “I think their goal is still to put 5,000 people in this space with inadequate healthcare, inadequate food, and inadequate recreation.”

    The high-profile, increasingly violent immigration raids that have been taking place in Minneapolis, Chicago, and other U.S. cities have swelled the number of detainees in ICE custody to more than 73,000, an all-time record. DHS is currently planning a large-scale 2026 expansion of its gulag archipelago that would even include repurposing remote rural warehouses for holding human beings.

    In such a large population of detainees, some deaths would be inevitable, but the current ongoing spike in fatalities has shocked and alarmed experts. The sixth ICE detainee death of 2026 took place on Sunday, which is a rate of one every three days. That extrapolates to more than 120 deaths over a year, which would be more than 10 times the rate in the last year of the Biden administration, when only 11 detainees perished.

    That Jan. 18 fatality also occurred at Camp East Montana, when Victor Manuel Diaz, 36, of Nicaragua, died of what government officials called a “presumed suicide.” Unlike Campos, the autopsy on Diaz will not be done by the county medical examiner, but by government doctors at an Army medical center. Diaz was one of many migrants swept up in the current ICE operation in Minnesota.

    The third recent death tied to the Texas concentration camp — Francisco Gaspar-Andres, 48, of Guatemala, who was taken to an El Paso hospital — was determined by an autopsy to have been caused by complications of alcohol-related liver disease.

    That the majority of ICE custody deaths are linked to medical causes doesn’t necessarily exonerate either the agency or its private contractors. A 2024 report by Physicians for Human Rights that looked at 52 deaths in ICE custody from 2017 to 2021, or during Trump’s first term, found that 95% were preventable, or possibly preventable, if appropriate medical care had been provided.

    This column on U.S. concentration camps is the one I hoped I’d never write | Will Bunch

    One such medical death occurred here in Philadelphia earlier this month when Parady La, a 46-year-old Cambodian refugee who lived in Upper Darby, died after he was taken from the city’s federal detention center to Thomas Jefferson University Hospital. ICE said La was suffering from severe drug withdrawal symptoms, but family members are questioning whether the feds paid enough attention to his illness, or even administered the right treatment.

    Human rights watchers insist that the spike in ICE detention deaths cannot be viewed as a coincidence, but as an outgrowth of problems that include not only medical neglect but also squalid conditions, substandard food, rancid water, and patterns of physical and sexual abuse by guards. They say the problems are not new, but have substantially worsened as the Trump regime hastily expands its networks of detention centers and camps.

    In December, another Camp East Montana detainee — Thomas, also a pseudonym — told human rights lawyers that “he was beaten by officers so severely he sustained injuries across his body, lost consciousness, and had to be taken to a hospital in an ambulance.” Like his fellow detainee Isaac, he alleged guards grabbed his testicles and crushed them.

    Gassama, the ACLU attorney, said the horrific track record of ICE detention raises all kinds of red flags about its current plans, aided by its $175 billion windfall in Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” that was signed last year, to house as many as 80,000 detainees in a new network of revamped warehouses. “You can only imagine what a remodeled warehouse would be like to detain people, human beings, long term,” she said.

    It’s true that — as right-wing pundits are always quick to point out — the U.S. mass deportation regime offers nothing that comes close to the death camps Nazi Germany established at the end of the Holocaust. But experts like author Andrea Pitzer say the similarities to concentration camps that Adolf Hitler set up for his political enemies after taking power in 1933 are too many to ignore.

    History has shown again and again that rounding up masses of people based on their identity strips them of their basic humanity. And that becomes the sick justification for violent abuse, neglect, endemic disease, and, ultimately, death.

    The most famous victim of the Nazi Holocaust, the teenage diarist Anne Frank, wasn’t killed in a gas chamber, but died from typhus at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, which was the result of unsanitary conditions and medical neglect.

    Now, people are dying in record numbers in “the camps” on sunbaked U.S. soil. This is shameful beyond words.

    In this photo provided by the National Archives, Japanese Americans, including American Legion members and Boy Scouts, participate in Memorial Day services at the Manzanar Relocation Center, an internment camp in Manzanar, Calif., in May 1942.

    These human rights abuses now occurring at Camp East Montana are also a tragic echo of the longer arc of history of its Fort Bliss location. In 1942, thousands of detainees — mostly Japanese Americans, with some people of German or Italian descent — were shipped from the West Coast to be held in a barbed-wire camp under constant watch by armed guards. Over the course of World War II, some 1,862 Japanese Americans died in the broader network of internment camps, many from harsh conditions.

    More than four decades later, America formally apologized for this gross injustice. This time, we need to stop it before it comes to that.

  • ICE, housing, and ‘resign to run’: What’s on Philadelphia City Council’s 2026 agenda

    ICE, housing, and ‘resign to run’: What’s on Philadelphia City Council’s 2026 agenda

    Philadelphia City Council’s first meeting of 2026 on Thursday comes as tensions rise over President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown and as Mayor Cherelle L. Parker continues to sidestep that conversation while focusing on advancing her signature housing initiative.

    During the first half of the year, city lawmakers are expected to have a hand both in shaping the city’s response to Trump and in advancing Parker’s Housing Opportunities Made Easy, or H.O.M.E., initiative.

    They will also tackle the city’s waste-disposal practices, a long-standing law requiring Council members to resign before campaigning for higher office, and the city budget.

    Meanwhile, events largely outside Council’s control, including potential school closings and Philly’s role in the nation’s 250th birthday, are also expected to prompt responses from lawmakers.

    Here’s what you need to know about Council’s 2026 agenda.

    ‘Stop Trashing Our Air’ bill up for vote

    The first meeting of a new Council session rarely features high-profile votes, but this year could be different.

    Council on Thursday is expected to take up a bill by Councilmember Jamie Gauthier that would ban Philadelphia from incinerating its trash.

    Currently, the city government sends about a third of the trash it collects to the Reworld trash incinerator in Chester, with the rest going to landfills. Those waste-disposal contracts expire June 30, and Gauthier is hoping to take incineration off the table when new deals are reached.

    Philly sends a third of its trash to a Chester incinerator. Council members took a ‘Toxic Tour’ to get a closer look.
    The Reworld incinerator in Chester, Pa., on Friday, Nov. 7, 2025.

    “Burning Philadelphia’s trash is making Chester, Philadelphia, and other communities around our region sick,” Gauthier has said, pointing to elevated rates of asthma and other ailments and a legacy of “environmental racism” in Chester. The low-income and majority-Black city downriver from Philly has been home to numerous heavy industrial facilities.

    Reworld has said its waste-to-energy facility, which produces some electricity from burning trash, is a “more sustainable alternative to landfilling.”

    At a hearing last year, Parker administration officials said the city is including language in its request for proposals for the next contracts that will allow the city to consider environmental impacts. But they asked lawmakers not to vote for a blanket ban on incineration to allow the city to study the issue further.

    Parker waiting for Council to reapprove $800 million in bonds for her H.O.M.E. plan

    The biggest agenda item left hanging last month when lawmakers adjourned for the winter break was a bill to authorize the Parker administration to issue $800 million in city bonds to fund her H.O.M.E. initiative.

    Parker had hoped to sell the bonds last fall, and Council in June initially authorized the administration to take out new debt. But lawmakers made significant changes to the initiative’s first-year budget, especially by lowering income thresholds for some programs funded by the H.O.M.E. bonds to prioritize the lowest-income residents.

    Philly Council votes against Mayor Parker’s vision for her signature housing plan, signaling a win for progressives
    Mayor Cherelle L. Parker speaks to the crowd at The Church of Christian Compassion in the Cobbs Creek neighborhood of West Philadelphia on Sunday, Dec. 7, 2025. Parker visited 10 churches in Philadelphia on Sunday to share details about her H.O.M.E. housing plan.

    That move, which Parker opposed and which sparked Council’s most significant clash with her administration to date, required a redo of the bond authorization. Lawmakers ran out of time to approve a new version of the measure in December, but Council President Kenyatta Johnson said it could come up for a final vote Thursday.

    “Council members have always been supportive of the H.O.M.E. initiative,” Johnson said. “H.O.M.E. advances City Council’s goals to expand access to affordable homeownership for Philadelphians … and to ensure that city housing investments deliver long-term benefits for families and neighborhoods alike.”

    Council aims to limit ‘resign to run’ … again

    Council is also expected to vote this spring on legislation that would change Philadelphia’s 74-year-old “resign to run” law and allow city officeholders to keep their jobs while campaigning for other offices.

    Currently, Council members and other city employees are required to quit their jobs to run for higher office. Lawmakers have tried several times over the last 20 years to repeal the law, but they have been unsuccessful. Changing the rule requires amending the city’s Home Rule Charter, which a majority of voters would have to approve through a ballot question.

    Philly City Council is advancing legislation to let members keep their jobs while running for Congress
    Council President Kenyatta Johnson talks with Councilmember Isaiah Thomas at City Hall on Wednesday, Dec. 11, 2024 in Philadelphia.

    The latest attempt, spearheaded by Councilmember Isaiah Thomas, would not entirely repeal the resign-to-run law, but instead would narrow it to allow elected officials to keep their seats only if they are seeking state or federal office, such as in Congress or the state General Assembly. Council members who want to run for mayor would still have to resign.

    Thomas, a Democrat who represents the city at-large and is rumored to have ambitions of running for higher office, plans to make minor amendments to the legislation this spring, a spokesperson said, before calling it up for a final vote. The goal, Thomas has said, is to pass the legislation in time for a question to appear on the May primary election ballot.

    Incoming clash over immigration?

    Parker has spent the last year avoiding direct confrontation with the Trump administration, a strategy that supporters say has helped keep Philadelphia out of the president’s crosshairs.

    The mayor, however, cannot control what other local elected officials say about national politics, and Trump’s immigration crackdown appears to be stirring stronger local reaction heading into his second year in office.

    After an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent fatally shot Renee Good in Minneapolis this month, Sheriff Rochelle Bilal went viral for saying federal agents “will not be able to hide” in Philly. (Bilal, however, does not control the Philadelphia Police Department, which is under Parker’s purview.)

    Meanwhile, progressive Councilmembers Rue Landau and Kendra Brooks this year are expected to introduce legislation aimed at constricting ICE operations in Philadelphia.

    Demonstrators from No ICE Philly gathered to protests outside the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, office at 8th and Cherry Street, Philadelphia, Tuesday, Jan. 20, 2026.

    It is not yet clear what the lawmakers will propose. But Brooks, who has called on Parker to take a firmer stand against Trump, recently criticized the Philadelphia courts for allowing agents to seize suspects leaving the Criminal Justice Center. She said officials who in her view have failed to stand up to ICE are engaged in “complicity disguised as strategic silence,” and she vowed to force those who “cooperate with ICE in any way” to testify in Council.

    “Cities across the country are stepping up and looking at every available option they have to get ICE out,” Brooks said at a news conference earlier this month. “In the coming days, you will hear about what my office is doing about city policy. These demands must be met or face the consequences in Council.”

    Landau added Philly cannot allow “some masked, unnamed hooligans from out of town [to] come in here and attack Philadelphians.”

    “We are saying, ‘ICE out of Philadelphia,’” she said.

    Parker has said her administration has made no changes to the city’s immigrant-friendly policies, but she continues to be tight-lipped about the issue.

    Mayor Cherelle Parker won’t say how Philly is responding to President Donald Trump’s demands on ‘sanctuary’ policies

    The Pennsylvania Office of Open Records last week ruled in favor of an Inquirer appeal seeking to force Parker’s administration to disclose a September letter it sent the U.S. Department of Justice regarding local policies related to immigration.

    The administration still has not released the document. It has three more weeks to respond or appeal the decision in court.

    South Philly arena proposal still in the works

    After the 76ers abandoned their plan to build a new arena in Center City a year ago, the team announced it would partner with Comcast Spectacor, which owns the Flyers, to build a new home for both teams in the South Philadelphia stadium complex.

    The teams announced last fall they have selected an architect for the new arena, which is scheduled to replace the Spectacor-owned Xfinity Mobile Arena, formerly the Wells Fargo Center, in 2031.

    If the teams are still planning to open the new arena on their previously announced timeline, legislation to green-light the project could surface as soon as this spring. But so far, there has been no sign of movement on that front.

    “There is currently no timeline for introducing legislation to build a new Sixers arena in South Philadelphia,” said Johnson, whose 2nd District includes the stadium complex. “At the appropriate time, my legislative team and I will actively collaborate with Mayor Cherelle L. Parker’s administration on drafting any legislation related to the Sixers arena before it is introduced in City Council.”

    School closings and 2026 celebrations also on the horizon

    In addition to its legislative agenda, Council this year will likely be drawn into discussions over school closings and the high-profile gatherings expected to bring international attention to Philly this summer.

    The Philadelphia School District is soon expected to release its much-anticipated facilities plan, including which school buildings are proposed for closure, consolidation, or disposition. The always-controversial process is sure to generate buzz in Council.

    “We will do our due diligence on the District’s Facilities Plan,” Johnson said in a statement.

    Additionally, the city is preparing for the nation’s Semiquincentennial, FIFA World Cup games, and the MLB All-Star Game. While the administration is largely responsible for managing those events, some Council members have said ensuring the city is prepared for them is a major priority.

    Johnson said his agenda includes “making sure Philadelphia has a very successful celebration of America’s 250th Birthday that results in short and long-term benefits for Philadelphia.”

    Staff writers Jake Blumgart, Jeff Gammage, and Kristen A. Graham contributed to this article.

  • Disabled Delaware immigrant ordered back to Ecuador at climactic hearing on Tuesday

    Disabled Delaware immigrant ordered back to Ecuador at climactic hearing on Tuesday

    A disabled Ecuadorian immigrant who was arrested and detained by ICE after he flagged down an officer in September was ordered back to his homeland on Tuesday.

    Victor Acurio Suarez, who is 52 but childlike and unable to live on his own, was issued an order of voluntary departure by Immigration Judge Dennis Ryan.

    That is not the same as an order of deportation, but for migrants in detention it has the same practical effect. If Acurio Suarez were to refuse to leave voluntarily, the order would convert to a deportation order, which carries consequences including fines and a bar on reentry.

    “It’s not good news,” his attorney, Kaley Miller-Schaeffer, said shortly after the video hearing concluded.

    She plans to quickly appeal to the Board of Immigration Appeals, which can review decisions by immigration judges. It is uncertain if an appeal would be successful.

    The judge denied her client’s request for asylum, which can be granted to migrants who could face persecution in their home countries because of their race, religion, nationality, politics, or membership in a particular social group. Acurio Suarez was beaten by gangs who preyed upon his disabilities, his attorney said.

    Miller-Schaeffer said she was not able to speak with her client after the ruling. His brother, Lenin Acurio Suarez, was still processing the decision, she said.

    Lenin Acurio Suarez holds a photograph of his brother, Victor, at his home on Wednesday, Dec. 10, 2025 in Seaford. Victor was arrested by ICE in Seaford, De.

    Victor Acurio Suarez’s case drew support from Delaware Gov. Matt Meyer, who wrote to the judge that it would be “cruel” and “egregious” to deliver the Seaford resident to gang violence. Meyer also advocated for Acurio Suarez in social media posts, calling his arrest and detention “deeply disturbing” and arguing that with no criminal history, not even a traffic violation, Acurio Suarez “poses no threat to public safety.”

    The governor’s office did not immediately reply to a request for comment on Tuesday.

    Acurio Suarez has long been cared for by his brother, Lenin Acurio Suarez, who said in an interview last month that Victor Acurio Suarez did not realize he was in immigration custody when he was taken to the Moshannon Valley Processing Center in Pennsylvania. He thought he was on vacation, provided with three free meals a day and allowed to buy snacks and kick a soccer ball.

    He was arrested on Sept. 22 in a Lowe’s parking lot near the brothers’ home in Seaford when he tried to flag down a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent, apparently thinking the officer could help him find work.

    In the past, someone with Acurio Suarez’s profile might have been allowed to live at home as the case moved forward in immigration court. That has changed as President Donald Trump has pressed his mass-deportation agenda, and mandatory detention policies have swelled the number of people in custody.

    His case, Miller-Schaeffer said earlier, is a prime example of how Trump administration policy shifts have encouraged ICE to detain even the most vulnerable and to treat potential discretionary relief as irrelevant in a bid to boost deportations. Her Sept. 30 request to have Acurio Suarez released to the care of his brother while his immigration case went forward was denied.

    A medical assessment submitted for his asylum application said Acurio Suarez has autism and aphasia, a language disorder that affects his ability to produce or understand speech.

    David W. Baron, the doctor who did the assessment, said Acurio Suarez cannot safely live on his own. He requires supervision to perform daily hygiene activities or cook and has a hard time communicating his needs to others, a condition made worse by being in an unfamiliar setting while in detention, where he does not have access to the support needed for his neurocognitive disabilities.

    At an earlier court hearing, Miller-Schaeffer said, she watched as Acurio Suarez struggled to answer basic questions. He told the judge he didn’t know if he had an attorney or know what an attorney does.

    His ability to testify was so limited, she said, that the judge allowed his brother to take the stand to explain his sibling’s experience and situation.

    Acurio Suarez can recall big events in his life, she said. He remembers being beaten by gangs, but he couldn’t tell you exactly when that occurred.

    He worked at odd jobs in Ecuador before coming to this country.

    Records show that on Aug. 2, 2021, the brothers were stopped by the U.S. Border Patrol as they tried to enter the United States near Eagle Pass, Texas.

    Lenin Acurio Suarez was issued a notice to appear in court and released, and his immigration case was later dismissed.

    Victor Acurio Suarez was ordered deported and subsequently returned to Ecuador on Sept. 24. Three days later, for reasons that are unclear, the deportation order was found to have been issued incorrectly, and Acurio Suarez was brought back by authorities to the U.S.

    In October 2021, he was granted temporary permission to stay in the country. He had filed his asylum case by the time that permission expired a year later.

    Last year, according to an ICE report, on Sept. 22 an ICE team was conducting operations in Seaford, a southern Delaware city of 9,000 where 13% of the population is foreign-born.

    The ICE officer wrote that he was looking for a place to park in the Lowe’s lot when a man in paint-stained clothing, Acurio Suarez, approached him. Acurio Suarez waved his hand, signaling the officer to come to him, according to the ICE report.

    The officer kept going, then stopped his car and watched Acurio Suarez from another lot. Acurio Suarez tried to hail other cars, and could be seen talking to people who were loading lumber onto a trailer in the parking lot, he said.

    It looked as if Acurio Suarez was trying to find daily work, which is why he tried to get the ICE officer to stop his vehicle, the report said.

    It is common for undocumented immigrants seeking a day’s pay to wait in the parking lots of big home-improvement stores like Lowe’s and Home Depot, hoping to connect with building contractors who need laborers.

    Lenin Acurio Suarez said his brother cannot hold a full-time job, and is able only to handle small tasks, provided someone is beside him giving directions.

    A second ICE officer arrived, and both parked their cars near where Acurio Suarez had left his lunch box. Acurio Suarez walked back toward the officers, and one of the agents approached and questioned him.

    Acurio Suarez told the agents he had no identification or immigration documents and was placed in handcuffs.

  • Philly demonstrators block ICE garage at agency’s Center City headquarters

    Philly demonstrators block ICE garage at agency’s Center City headquarters

    About 30 demonstrators blocked the garage doors at the Philadelphia ICE office Tuesday morning, saying they intended to stop agency vehicles from going to “terrorize” local residents.

    Only one car attempted to leave, and Philadelphia police moved demonstrators aside so it could depart.

    No one was arrested.

    Organizers with No ICE Philly had pledged to block the garage until they were forcibly removed or arrested, but halted the protest after about two hours. They said that they had accomplished their goal, and that the bitterly cold weather was too harsh on demonstrators who are older or who have medical conditions.

    Demonstrators with No ICE Philly block the garage at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement at 8th and Cherry Street, Philadelphia, Tuesday, Jan. 20, 2026.

    The temperature was about 15 degrees when the protest began shortly before 8 a.m.

    “All of us here have proven in our song and our prayer that we can slow down the machine of authoritarianism, of fascism, that we can delay the operations that will detain and kidnap and destroy our neighbors, our families, our community,” said the Rev. Jay Bergen, a leader of No ICE Philly and pastor of the Germantown Mennonite Church.

    The protest was the latest in a string of anti-ICE demonstrations and vigils in the Philadelphia region; another was planned in Norristown on Tuesday evening. In October, a No ICE Philly protest outside the agency headquarters erupted into physical confrontations with police, with several people knocked to the ground and four arrested.

    Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials did not reply to a request for comment Tuesday.

    The clergy-led protest was boosted by City Councilmember Nicolas O’Rourke, who is a pastor of the Living Water United Church of Christ in Oxford Circle.

    O’Rourke said that it was natural for him to join fellow clergy, that Tuesday’s action was part of a long tradition of faith leaders being at the forefront of the “struggle against oppression,” as led by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and others.

    Philadelphia Police and Department of Homeland Security officers block demonstrators from No ICE Philly as they attempt to block vehicles from leaving the garage at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement at 8th and Cherry Street, Philadelphia, Tuesday, Jan. 20, 2026.

    “We are a day after King’s day, and it’s important that we don’t just wax eloquent about the nice things that King said or the image that he’s been painted of now,” he said, “but we continue in that tradition of resisting the oppression as he saw it, we’re doing in our own time.”

    The group locked arms and sang, offering prayers and songs of peace and affirmation.

    The Rev. Hannah Capaldi, minister at the Unitarian Society of Germantown, noted that all around her were clergy of different faiths wearing collars, tallits, and stoles.

    “We’re saying, listen, we have some level of moral authority in this city, and we’re trying to tell you where to look and what to pay attention to,” she said.

    The Rev. Jonny Rashid, a protest organizer, outside of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement at 8th and Cherry Street, Philadelphia, Tuesday, Jan. 20, 2026.

    Capaldi hoped to plant “seeds of resistance” in the broader public, encouraging people to get involved.

    “We need more people every day willing to do this,” she said, “to stand between the vehicles and the work that they’re doing to kidnap our neighbors.”

  • We’d be so much better off if Kamala Harris had been elected president

    We’d be so much better off if Kamala Harris had been elected president

    My late father was a high school teacher and basketball coach who learned a lot about the world around him during his 81 years. I’ll never forget how, when he’d hear me grousing about what could have been, he would always give me a look and sternly warn, “Don’t look back.”

    I’ve come to appreciate how wise his words were, but let’s face it, sometimes we don’t need wisdom — we need relief.

    Barely a few weeks into Year Two of Donald Trump’s second term, I can’t help but shake my head when I think about how much better off America (and the world) would be if Kamala Harris had won the presidency.

    She wasn’t a perfect candidate. Far from it. But once in the White House, I have no doubt she would have led the country with dignity and integrity, values currently in short supply inside the Oval Office.

    Under President Harris, the U.S. would not have invaded Venezuela and kidnapped its president, threatened to annex Greenland “the hard way,” or alienated our Canadian neighbors into boycotting American products and selling their Florida vacation homes. Rather than flirting with blowing up NATO, we would be working with our European allies to pressure Russia into ending its war with Ukraine.

    Instead of bringing back American imperialism — something nobody voted for — Harris would be focused on improving the lives of everyday Americans.

    Dear Santa, Trump has been very naughty. Don’t give him anything. Not even coal. | Jenice Armstrong

    She would be implementing policies such as allowing Medicare to better cover the cost of home care, and working with Congress to extend insurance subsidies to help keep healthcare affordable for millions of people. Meanwhile, the inflation that bedeviled her predecessor would continue to ease, untroubled by haphazard tariffs that are no less than a tax on every U.S. family.

    Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency would be a ketamine-fueled figment of the tech billionaire’s imagination instead of the cause of almost 750,000 deaths — most of them children — due to the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development. At home, the roughly 300,000 federal workers who left or lost their jobs because of DOGE would be serving the public, instead of leaving gaps in crucial agencies such as Social Security, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, and the Federal Aviation Administration.

    You know who wouldn’t have a job under a Harris administration? The thousands of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents who will be hired, to the tune of $30 billion, over the next few years. ICE would be targeting criminals in the country illegally, not inflicting a reign of terror on the American people. Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mother of three and U.S. citizen, would still be alive instead of gunned down by an ICE agent in Minneapolis.

    FBI agents across the country would be focused on solving and preventing crimes, instead of thousands being reassigned to immigration enforcement. National Guard members would be with their families, not picking up trash in Washington, D.C., or standing around Portland, Ore., waiting for something to happen.

    Kamala Harris during an interview while shopping at Penzeys Spices on Market Street in September.

    Harris, a former California attorney general, would have kept the long-standing tradition of an independent U.S. Department of Justice, instead of turning it into the president’s law firm and using it to go after political enemies. She would have assembled a cabinet stocked with competent and experienced members, one likely as diverse as America. People like Kash Patel and Pete Hegseth would be far away from power, hawking “vaccine reversal” pills and defending war criminals on Fox News, respectively.

    Where would Trump himself be under a Harris presidency? In the same mess of trouble he had gotten himself into.

    Special counsel Jack Smith would be zealously pursuing the case against Trump for illegally retaining classified documents and plotting to overturn the 2020 election. Charges that Smith has said he could prove beyond a reasonable doubt.

    The once and forever former president would not be $3 billion richer thanks to shady crypto deals and other business ventures he has undertaken since returning to Washington. Neither would he be absentmindedly staring out where the East Wing of the White House once stood and imagining his sprawling ballroom, plastering his name on the Kennedy Center, nor costing taxpayers millions to outfit the $400 million luxury jetliner Qatar gave him.

    If anything, he might have found himself with new indictments if he had tried to steal the 2024 election, and the MAGA crowd staged another Jan. 6, 2021-style revolt in protest of a Harris victory. No doubt Harris’ attorney general would have learned a lesson from the previous administration and would not drag his feet, as former Attorney General Merrick Garland did in holding Trump accountable.

    You may not have healthcare but you can get into a national park for free on Trump’s birthday | Jenice Armstrong

    Eventually, though, I’m convinced things would have settled down, and American politics would have gone back to being boring again — like they used to be. Fox News commentators would shift back to their old ways of complaining about Harris’ laugh and occasional lapses into word salad.

    As things calmed down, so, too, would the excitement surrounding her historic win as the realities of governance asserted themselves.

    Signing a bill to restore abortion rights nationwide would have been high on Harris’ agenda, reviving the issue that long fueled a part of the electorate. The culture war over GOP-manufactured concerns about men taking over women’s sports would rage on, never mind that trans people make up only about 1% of the population. So would the debate over the merits of diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts.

    On immigration, Harris would be caught between her party’s activist base and trying to limit people from seeking asylum at the southern border. It’s one thing for Harris to have issued her famous edict telling immigrants, “Don’t come,” and a whole other thing to take substantive steps to stem the flow of people desperate to enter the U.S.

    With Trump out of office, America would continue to be a bulwark for democracy, but the threats of authoritarianism, antisemitism, and racism would not go away. Neither would the voter malaise and congressional dysfunction that have given rise to people like Trump and his supporters. But Harris would fight the good fight for everyday Americans.

    President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris wave to the audience after addressing the DNC Winter Meeting at the Sheraton Downtown in Philadelphia in 2023.

    For a few days last month, I’d allowed myself to feel a tad bit optimistic, sensing that America had turned a corner. Maybe it was the eggnog, but the upcoming midterm elections had me feeling a little hopeful. So did the public opinion and court decisions pushing back against Trump’s excess and overreach. And Congress showing a spine and demanding accountability in releasing the Jeffrey Epstein files. If ever there were a year Rep. Jasmine Crockett could win a U.S. Senate race in Texas, 2026 felt like it could be it.

    But then, Trump dropped bombs on an Islamic group in Nigeria on Christmas Day and followed that up by sending troops into Venezuela. Now, he’s staking claims to that country’s oil reserves while looking around to see which nation he can storm next. Will it be Mexico? Colombia? Iran? Greenland? I don’t think even he knows.

    Trump isn’t bound by conventional mores or the Constitution. He’s not restrained by Congress or the U.S. Supreme Court. As he told the New York Times recently, the only thing that can stop him is his own mind. His “own morality,” which is downright scary considering his track record.

    And yet, even as I am knocked down by the reality we’re facing. I can’t help but stand up. My dad was right to warn about not looking back, but in imagining the leadership of someone who is more than worthy of the office of the presidency, I like to think I’m looking forward.

    And maybe I am.