Working Immigrants

An appeals court just ruled that pretty much every unauthorized person is subject to mandatory detention without bail. This severely cuts back the legal standing of unauthorized persons who have lived here are a long time

It has been settled practice for decades that a person who recently entered the U.S. without authorization was vulnerable to detention but not a person who entered illegally many years ago, as the latter person was nor “seeking entry.” In Buenrostro-Mendez v. Bondi, The Fifth U.S. Court of Appeals decided on February 6  that this is not the case, that almost anyone here illegally is subject to detention, and mandatory detention without chance of bail.

With very limited exceptions, this mandatory detention rule now applies  persons whose asylum applications are in the court backlog.

The dissent in this 2 – 1 decision argued that the law which applies for mandatory detention only applies to persons “seeking entry,” not to those here for years, and that the pertinent Immigration and Nationality Act sections (1225 and 1226) were used correctly in the past. The two-person majority threw that standing interpretation out.

Note: visa overstays are not per the decision subject to mandatory detention because they are not “applicants for admission.”

Arrests and deportations of unauthorized persons has gone up in 2025. How much has been a puzzle since DHS’s press releases don’t have much credibility. Deportation Data released estimates on January 27 which to me are credible.

The report explains the presence of ICE/DHS personnel on the streets. They arrest and they intimidate.  This in turn explains the surge of resistance on the streets, such as the highly coordinated resistance in Minneapolis.

Border enforcement (by Customs and Border Patrol) has largely shut down persons coming over the Mexican border for asylum. Interior immigration enforcement surged, measured in ICE arrests, detainment, and removal (deportation). Deportations following ICE arrests inside the United States rose more than fourfold over a comparable period in 2024. This is due to vastly expanded arrests, especially street arrests, on top of arrests of persons in prison.

Street arrests increased tenfold. For the two decades before 2025, ICE made very few such street arrests. Instead, ICE relied on transfers from jails and prisons for its interior enforcement.  These street arrests focus on persons without a criminal record. Arrests of individuals with no criminal record rose more than seven times. Detention capacity increased – compared to past detention populations of 40,000 or so the detention population today is around 70,000. Early release from detention has sharply declined, leading to expeditious deportation. Facing prolonged detention, many detainees gave up their cases, producing a vast increase in voluntary departures.

There has been a national bipartisan backlash against overt signs of ICE / CBP behavior. Republicans continue by a large majority support the Trump administration’s deportation program. But even they are upset about the buccaneering style, and this has much to do with the videos of Pretti’s shooting.

To simplify, the administration eroded about 5% of its support in the country. The administration, in my opinion, will no longer deploy agents in mass on the streets of cities.  They promote the spectacle aspects of enforcements. This post describes a brand new Quinnipiac Poll and a list of offensive deportation behavior.

The Quinnipiac poll

A February 4 Quinnipiac University national poll reveals widespread voter distrust of the Trump administration’s handling of immigration enforcement.  61% of registered voters say the administration has not given an honest account of the incident.

Republicans continue to support the President. Democrats (93%) and independents (65%) think the Trump administration has not given an honest account of the incident, but Republicans (60% think the Trump administration has given an honest account of the incident.

However, overwhelming majority of voters –80% –think there should be an independent investigation into the Pretti shooting, including 56% of Republicans, And, over 90% support mandatory body cameras for ICE agents (including 83% of Republicans).

The poll showed Trump’s support deteriorating on several fronts, such as the economy and foreign policy, but let’s focus on immigration: on Trump’s handling of immigration issues, 38% of voters approve, down from Quinnipiac December 17, 2025 poll when 44% approved.

The polling was performed January 29 – February 2. Renee Good was killed on January 7 by an ICE officer and Alex Pretti on January 24 by two CBP officers.

The Pretti shooting – 78% of respondents, including 74% of Republicans, have seen a video of the shooting.

Quinnioipiac Poll 2 4 26

Reforming ICE/CBP behavior

Darrett Graff puts his finger on what upsets people about ICE/CBP. In a Substack post he identified the needed reforms  (summarized):

1) Basic Uniform and Identification Standards

ICE and CBP officers must wear standardized civilian law enforcement uniforms with clear federal identification, not military camouflage or masks

2) Use of Force

Strict restrictions needed on chemical agents and less-lethal munitions, which are deployed too casually. Remove ICE/CBP from crowd control operations.

3) Enforcement Standards and Restrictions

Redefine Border Patrol’s “100-mile rule” to reasonable distances from actual borders. Restore “sensitive locations” protections for schools, churches, hospitals. Require judicial warrants for forced entry. Make officers personally liable for wrongfully detaining U.S. citizens. Eliminate arrest quotas and bonuses.

4) Hiring Standards and Training

Mandate that ICE/CBP meet the same hiring and training standards as other federal law enforcement agencies. DHS is cutting training while expanding operations, creating “a roving paramilitary force” rather than professional civilian law enforcement.

5) Technology Limits

Establish boundaries around DHS surveillance technology, particularly “Mobile Fortify” facial recognition app (claimed as “definitive” legal status source) and Palantir’s “ELITE” targeting application. These tools create mass surveillance infrastructure.

6) Detention Facilities

ICE plans doubling capacity to 107,000 beds with minimal judge increases, revealing no due process intent. Codify congressional on-demand facility access.

A 70 year old woman unable to join the resistance on the streets tells me:

The fact that this is terrorism and not law enforcement is proven by the numbers of legal residents who were picked up, detained overnight, and then let out in the bitter cold with nothing to protect them.

The spirit of people is incredible. It is about 10°, and resistance volunteers come in from the cold just to warm up before going out again. Many of them, my friends, show up at the Whipple Building where those arrested are detained. [More on the Whipple Building here.] They wait for persons who have been arrested to be let out. ICE lets them out without coats, without any transportation. So people bring them into their cars. But they do not necessarily go home because their phones are now being tracked by ICE.  It knows exactly where the person is.

I have given $2,000 to people who need it, as they are not showing up for work. We try to go to migrant restaurants. The doors are locked, we knock and are let in. Many restaurants are struggling because their kitchen staff may come from Ecuador and they’re not showing up. My sister is having a house built outside the city. ICE came and arrested two workers. They both had green cards. They were let out. One of them has washed his hands of the United States and is going back.

I came home from an out of state trip the other day. At the airport, everyone was carrying an extra 20 pounds of worry and grief. I have never seen this before.  I feel humiliated about how I am depleted, I cannot express myself, to face such destruction of this city.

Written by a Minneapolis resident, a political moderate, posted on Managed Care Matters, on January 30 (exerpts, go to the posting for the full report):

Our rights in Minnesota are being violated like nothing I ever imagined possible in the United States. First, the 4th Amendment is regularly violated. Masked men with no warrants are breaking in anywhere they want. They are setting a precedent, eroding our right to privacy. Politics swing back and forth. Right now, those with brown skin (black, Asian, Latino, Indian – all are fair game to ICE in Minnesota) – or those who support those with brown skin – are being abused, but the pendulum will likely swing the other way. If there is political backlash and the left wins overwhelmingly, which looks to be likely if there are still elections, the next administration will have precedent for breaking into any home with force and taking guns, persecuting certain Christian sects, etc

Here is the experience of a friend of mine who lives one mile away. She is Indian and her husband is white. Their son has brown skin. They can no longer let him outside to walk the dog. Maybe because it’s known that she works on DEI for a large company or posted something about ICE but a car followed her and her husband for miles the other day. They noticed a car following every turn they made when heading home, so they took a bunch of haphazard turns that the car followed. The driver eventually gave up. This is the United States. She and her husband are US citizens with good jobs. They are good, amazing people, and a US government employee intentionally created fear and stalked them.

A friend of a friend disappeared with his child home alone. He just disappeared. I don’t believe he’s a US citizen, but he’s a good dude with a good job. He’s gone, and his wife and child have no idea where he was taken.

A school near me with a significant Latino population had 3 out of 27 kindergarten children show up, because they are too scared to leave their homes. Many don’t have enough money for food, but going to school is unsafe. Many are US citizens, but ICE has snatched many US citizens around here.

ICE Watch is a coalition of decentralized rapid-response groups in Minneapolis that monitors the presence and actions of ICE in neighborhoods.

Defend 612 is the main coordinating organization. “We protect each other in Minneapolis, the Twin Cities, and across Minnesota by being present on our streets, in our neighborhoods, on our blocks – in our city which is our home. Our vision is a connected community working together to be safe from abductions and state terror. there are over 80,000 of our Minneapolis neighbors involved in Rapid Response groups and support networks across the entire city.”

The resistance relies on neighborhood-level coordination linked through encrypted messaging apps like Signal. When suspected ICE activity is reported, nearby volunteers converge within minutes. They bear witness, document on video, identify detainees, and alert families and legal networks.

Mother Jones in a January 21 article quotes participants: “What we’ve noticed in Minneapolis is that having people outside, having people ready to respond, having people connected and communicating about ICE activity has kept so many people safe—more than we’ll ever know, more than we’ll ever be able to track.”

​Also, “There’s this amazing group of people—I have no idea who they are—who are tracking all the [ICE] license plates. There’s this amazing group of people who are making maps about where people are being taken. There are school patrols, block patrols, neighborhood patrols, multi-neighborhood patrols.”

The shooting death of Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse by a U.S. Border Patrol agent in Minneapolis on January 24, 2026, was recorded on video. One photo, which may become one of the most prominent photos of a public event, showed Pretti being shot in the back as he leaned over with one hand holding his cell phone and the other on the ground. The White House was caught having lied about his death. Today (January 26) the Trump administration is racing to reverse the narration that it supports highly visible and dangerous sweeps by federal law enforcement against anyone who might plausibly be an unauthorized resident.

A Pretti-like event was predictable from the outset of this Administration, but perhaps not as shocking and galvanizing as this one.

Events which impaired presidencies

     The 2021 Afghanistan Withdrawal and Joe Biden’s Presidency

In August 2021, the chaotic U.S. evacuation from Afghanistan made a lasting impact on the public perception of the competency of the Biden administration. It raised doubts about his foreign policy judgment and crisis management. This provided fuel for Republican attacks.

     Hurricane Katrina and George W. Bush’s Presidency

Hurricane Katrina hit the Gulf Coast including New Orleans on August 29, 2005, devastating New Orleans and surrounding areas. The federal response by FEMA under the Bush administration—was widely seen as slow, disorganized, and inadequate. It created perceptions of cronyism (“Brownie, you’re doing a heckuva job”), insensitivity, and federal neglect.

     Iran Hostage Crisis (1979-1981) under Jimmy Carter

The prolonged captivity of 52 Americans and a failed rescue attempt, Operation Eagle Claw, symbolized weakness and incompetence. It contributed to his 1980 landslide defeat by Ronald Reagan and a legacy image as one of the weakest modern presidencies.

Events which drove popular movements

The civil rights movement  (a sample of two)

    The bus arrest in Montgomery, Alabama

Rosa Parks was arrested on December 1, 1955, for refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger on a Montgomery bus. Parks’ arrest became the catalyst for the Montgomery Bus Boycott, which lasted 381 days and helped launch the modern civil rights movement.

    The Birmingham Children’s Crusade

On May 2, 1963, more than one thousand students marched from the 16th Street Baptist Church to downtown Birmingham, Alabama, and hundreds were arrested. The following day, May 3, Commissioner Bull Connor ordered police to use high-pressure water hoses and police attack dogs against the children and bystanders.  The fire hoses were so powerful they ripped bark off trees and clothes off people, thrusting children against buildings and cars. These images helped galvanize support for federal civil rights legislation, contributing to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Vietnam and anti-war sentiment

After the Tet Offensive in early 1968, Walter Cronkite visited Vietnam and concluded his February 27, 1968 broadcast by saying the war was “mired in stalemate.” President Johnson reportedly said, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America.” This marked a turning point in elite and public opinion.

Life Magazine’s June 27, 1969 issue published photographs of all 242 Americans killed in one week in Vietnam. The visual impact of seeing so many young faces made the war’s human cost undeniable and contributed to growing anti-war sentiment.

On May 4, 1970, Ohio National Guard troops fired on unarmed student protesters at Kent State University, killing four and wounding nine, amid anti-Vietnam War demonstrations. An iconic photo of a young woman kneeling over a victim’s body circulated widely, intensifying nationwide campus strikes involving over 4 million students and eroding support for the Nixon administration’s war policies. (A friend of mine stood within a hundred feet of the incident.)

Black Lives Matter

On May 25, 2020, George Floyd died in Minneapolis after a police officer knelt on his neck for over nine minutes during an arrest, as captured in a bystander video that went viral. This incident ignited the largest wave of protests in U.S. history, with millions participating in Black Lives Matter demonstrations across the country and globally, demanding reforms to address systemic racism and police brutality. Public opinion shifted markedly: polls showed a surge in support for the BLM movement from about 43% in 2017 to over 60% in 2020.

Other

Challenger explosion (1986) – Live television coverage of the shuttle disaster profoundly affected public confidence in NASA.

Rodney King beating video (1991) – The first widely-seen amateur video of police brutality, though the officers’ acquittal then sparked the LA riots.

Abu Ghraib photos (2004) – Images of prisoner abuse undermined support for the Iraq War and damaged America’s moral standing.

A Chinese saying: “Lots of noise, no one coming downstairs.”

Asserting there is a problem

In March 2025, the Trump administration in an Executive Order put election integrity on the front burner.  True the Vote echoes the Executive Order without making any allegations of non-citizen voting. The Public Interest Legal Foundation claims that foreign national voting is a serious issue but does not provide any evidence that non-citizens are voting.

Asserting it is a vanishingly small problem

Two national organizations have systematically studied election fraud and in particular non-citizen voting and found negligable instances.

The Center for Election Innovation and Research found that even the largest claims never allege numbers that amount to more than a few tenths of a percent of the number of eligible voters in a state.

The Brennan Center, which studied and concluded that non-citizen voting is vanishingly scarce, has issued guidelines for ensuring to integrity of voting processes overall.

The campaign to root out non-citizen voting

DoJ  sent invites to state election officials that would allow them to upload voter data on a mass scale — including full name, date of birth and social security numbers — to check for anyone who was not a citizen on their voter rolls. The administration has also, for the first time, brought in data from the Social Security Administration that had previously been kept separate. (Go here.)

At least 14 states — all with Republican secretaries of state — publicly indicated in 2025 that they would use the revamped D.H.S. system to upload voter information, according to an analysis of public statements, records and interviews with people involved.

In September 2025 the DoJ sued six states for failing to hand over voter list.

Eleven Democratic secretaries of state wrote a letter to D.H.S. in December, raising alarms about the potential impact on eligible voters, warning that the expanded version of SAVE “will introduce unnecessary and unwarranted reliability, privacy and security issues into the sensitive voter information data we are entrusted to protect.”

Many Democratic states have also refused to provide similar information to the DoJ, which is suing at least 24 states that have refused to turn over data.

Florida

In Charlotte County, Fla., for instance, the elections supervisor Leah Valenti, an appointee of Ron DeSantis, the Republican governor, said she found that just 15 out of 176,000 names she uploaded to D.H.S. came back as noncitizens. Of those, she found that three were people mistakenly added to the rolls who never intended to register to vote; they have since been removed. Two others already sent in documentation to prove their naturalized citizenship, she said.

Louisiana

In Louisiana, the system found 403 noncitizens out of 3 million registered voters, or .01 percent, with 83 having voted, according to a November memo obtained by The Times through a public records request.

Georgia

The search found 1,634 individuals who had attempted to register to vote in Georgia despite not being citizens. None of these individuals have cast ballots in Georgia elections.

Assume that 85% of the non-naturalized foreign born are adults, or 510,000 persons, This means that 0.3% attempted to register to vote.  however, is it very likely that some of these persons had incorrectly labeled themselves as non-citizens in their drivers license forms. Databases do not match 100% each other and the facts in the ground.

Ohio

There are approximately 8 million registered voters in Ohio.  This means that one of out 13,000 registered voters were deemed by the state as being non-citizens.

Texas

David Simcox, former executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, released a study Tuesday afternoon that said an estimated 1.8 million to 2.7 million non-citizen immigrants in the Unites States may be illegally registered to vote, thereby potentially influencing the outcome of the upcoming presidential and congressional elections. The report also estimated that anywhere from 161,000 to 333,000 non-citizens may be registered to vote in Texas.

In August, 2024, Governor Greg Abbott announced that since 2021 the state has found on voter rolls 6,500 non-citizens, of whom 1,930 non-citizens had a voting history.  6.500 is of the current total of 18 million registered voters, three one hundredths of one percent, or one per 2800 registered voters. It is very unlikely that most of these 6,500 are in fact non-citizens, if the state’s earlier misadventure and that of other states are a guide.

Virginia

In August 2024, Gov. Glenn Youngkin issued an executive order directing state agencies to identify and cancel voter registrations of people flagged as non-citizens in DMV data. That effort led to about 6,303 registrations being canceled because those individuals were identified in DMV records as non-citizens. 6,370,342 people were registered to vote in Virginia as of December 1, 2025 .

Common finding: non-citizens mistakenly note on driver license applications that they are citizens and citizens fail to record that they are citizens.

Nevada

A statewide audit released in 2017 found that only three noncitizens had voted in Nevada’s 2016 election.

U.S. District Court, Minneapolis, CASE 0:25-cv-04669-KMM-DTS Doc. 107Filed 01/24/26

I am a resident of the Whittier neighborhood of Minneapolis, Minnesota. I am over 18 years of age. I am a children’s entertainer who specializes in face painting.

On Saturday, January 24, 2026, at about 8:50 am, I was getting ready to go to work when I heard whistles outside. I knew the whistles meant that ICE agents were in the area, so I decided to check it out on my way to work. I’ve been involved in observing in my community because it is so important to document what ICE is doing to my neighbors. Connecting to your local community and knowing who your neighbors are is something I profoundly value.

I drove to Nicollet Ave. and 26th where I could hear the whistles coming from. I turned south onto Nicollet. There were already several ICE agents there and they’d set up a sort of vehicle convoy on Nicollet and 28th. There were also about 15 observers there, recording and observing ICE.

I saw ICE agents surrounding cars and punching car windows. I also saw them stopping vehicles further down Nicollet, so I backed up because I didn’t feel safe continuing on.

I noticed a man sort of acting to help traffic move more smoothly. He helped me find a place to park. I got out with my whistle and my camera. I went over to him and said something like, “I’m going to film and use my whistle.”

It seemed like most ICE activity was happening a little farther down the street from us, near 27th. Someone was being thrown to the ground.

I started recording. There was an agent by a car across the street. Two observers were a few feet away from the agent, blowing their whistles. One was wearing a backpack.

I and the man who was observing and helping direct traffic were standing in the street. There was a phone in the man’s hand recording a video.

An agent approached and asked us to back up, so I moved slowly back onto the sidewalk.

The man stayed in the street, filming as the other observers I mentioned earlier were being forced backward by another ICE agent threatening them with pepper spray. The man went closer to support them as they got threatened, just with his camera out. I didn’t see him reach for or hold a gun.

Then the ICE agent shoved one of the other observers to the ground. Then he started pepper spraying all three of them directly in the face and all over. The man with the phone put his hands above his head and the agent sprayed him again and pushed him.

Then the man tried to help up the woman the ICE agent had shoved to the ground. The ICE agents just kept spraying. More agents came over and grabbed the man who was still trying to help the woman get up. All three of the observers looked to have been badly affected by the pepper spray. I could feel the pepper spray in my eyes.

The agents pulled the man on the ground. I didn’t see him touch any of them—he wasn’t even turned toward them. It didn’t look like he was trying to resist, just trying to help the woman up. I didn’t see him with a gun. They threw him to the ground. Four or five agents had him on the ground and they just started shooting him. They shot him so many times.

I don’t know why they shot him. He was only helping. I was five feet from him and they just shot him.

The video I recorded of what happened accurately depicts the events leading up to the agents shooting him and several minutes afterwards. The video is attached as Exhibit 1.

I have read the statement from DHS about what happened and it is wrong. The man did not approach the agents with a gun. He approached them with a camera. He was just trying to help a woman get up and they took him to the ground.

I feel afraid. Only hours have passed since they shot a man right in front me and I don’t feel like I can go home because I heard agents were looking for me. I don’t know what the agents will do when they find me. I do know that they’re not telling the truth about what happened. I’ve heard that other witnesses might have been arrested and taken to the Whipple Building.

I am disgusted and gutted at how they are treating my neighbors and my state. I keep alternating between crying and feeling determined—it is important to remember the value of documenting injustice. We show up for the people who need us to bear witness, because it can’t just be one group of people bearing the brunt of their tyranny. This is a struggle to protect our freedom and democracy, those things are on the line. He lost his life for those values.

I declare under penalty of perjury that everything I have stated in this document is true and correct.

Dated and signed on January 24, 2026 in Hennepin County, State of Minnesota.

[signature block redacted]