by Kori Skillman | Nov 24, 2025 | Article, baltimore, ICE, Politics and Movements: US, Prisons and Policing, Reprint
This story originally appeared in Baltimore Beat on Aug. 25, 2025. It is shared here with permission.
Immigration officials in Maryland are skirting scrutiny after a federal judge threw out a lawsuit challenging conditions inside Baltimore’s downtown ICE holding facility and lawmakers were initially denied entry to investigate reports of inhumane conditions.
Despite being allowed a one-hour visit into the holding facility in the George H. Fallon Federal Building weeks after they were first denied access, Maryland’s congressional members said they were left with more questions than answers about how detained people were being treated.
While lawmakers have focused the national spotlight on conditions in Baltimore’s downtown ICE holding facility, attorneys from the Amica Center for Immigration Rights — a nonprofit organization providing legal and social services to immigrants seeking status in the U.S. — filed a class-action suit in early May arguing that inhumane conditions were widespread among people detained there.
A late July hearing would have considered suspending use of the facility while the full case played out, but Maryland U.S. District Judge Julie Rubin denied the class certification and sent lawyers back to the drawing board.
“The hearing would have confirmed what we have known… which is that the conditions there are absolutely impermissible under the law and under the Constitution,” said Amelia Dagen, lead litigator in the class action suit. “There is a special weight to hearing it from people who have experienced those and endured those conditions.”
The lawsuit represents two immigrant women who were held in a freezing, windowless room without access to basic hygiene or medical care. The lawsuit had the support of Maryland Attorney General Anthony G. Brown, who wrote in a brief
by Brad Reed | Nov 21, 2025 | Border Patrol, CBP, Chicago, ICE, News, Policing
Federal prosecutors on Thursday moved to drop criminal charges against Marimar Martinez, a woman who was shot multiple times by a US Border Patrol agent last month in Chicago’s Brighton Park neighborhood. As reported by local news station WTTW, prosecutors filed a one-page motion asking the court to dismiss the indictment against both Martinez and Anthony Ian Santos Ruiz, who had been accused…
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by Tara Goodarzi | Nov 19, 2025 | Chicago, Children, ICE, immigration, Op-Ed, Trauma
Children at my son’s Spanish immersion preschool in Chicago bore witness to a teacher being violently assaulted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents who entered their school, armed with weapons, earlier this month. One of the school’s infant teachers, Diana Santillana Galeano — known to the students as “Miss Diana” — was abducted by ICE on the morning of November 5 as she…
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by Brad Reed | Nov 18, 2025 | Article, Fascism, ICE, Politics and Movements: US, Prisons and Policing, Reprint
This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on Nov. 18, 2025. It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.
Residents in Charlotte, North Carolina are expressing outrage after two local women were arrested for honking their car horn to alert others that US Border Patrol was in the area.
Local news station WCNC reported on Monday that the two women, who are US citizens, were taken into custody in the city’s Plaza Midwood neighborhood after Border Patrol agents pulled them over and accused them of interfering in operations by honking their horn.
Video of the incident shows masked federal agents yelling at the women and demanding that they roll down their car windows. When the women do not comply, one officer smashes through the window and then he and other officers pull them out of the vehicle.
The two women, who have not been identified, then spent several hours in an FBI facility before being released with citations.
Local resident Shea Watts, who took video of the encounter, told WCNC that he was feeling “somewhere between disbelief and just being really upset that this is our reality now” as he watched the incident unfold.
Watts also discussed his own interactions with the federal officers whom he was filming.
“I was already close to despair and feeling helpless and hopeless,” he said. “But I think just the reminder that if we see something, to document it. I tried to be respectful and ask questions and knowing my own rights, and I was told to back up a couple times, which, that’s fine, but at the end of the day, this all feels a little heavy handed.”
Charlotte has become the latest target of the
by Julia Conley | Nov 18, 2025 | ICE, immigration, News, North Carolina, Trump Administration, US Border Patrol
In Charlotte, North Carolina, the Trump administration’s latest anti-immigration crackdown garnered headlines over the weekend both for “how inhumane and aggressive” the operations by US Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement were, as one journalist said, and the action that local residents immediately took to protect their neighbors from arrests and raids.
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by Kate Morrissey | Nov 15, 2025 | Asylum Seekers, Border Patrol, Deportations, ICE, immigration, mexico, News, Title 42
On a hot, stormy Monday afternoon in September, a Mexican government van labeled Gobernación pulled up to a series of large tents set up in a parking lot in Tapachula, a city near the Guatemalan border. One by one, men, women and children, many wearing clothing received in U.S. government custody, stepped out of the van and followed Mexican immigration officials inside a tent with rows of…
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