In late September, Washington, D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) stopped Jose Bonilla Lopez, a gardener who lived in the city’s northwest. According to a police report, it was a case of mistaken identity. Instead of releasing him, they turned him over to masked federal agents from the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI, who seized him as neighbors chanted for his freedom.
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Border Patrol’s high-profile immigration crackdowns in North Carolina and Louisiana over the last two months have brought fresh scrutiny to the hundreds of billions of dollars being spent on immigration raids and arrests under the Trump administration. The massive spending bill pushed by Trump and passed by Congress this summer increased immigration enforcement by $170 billion…
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On December 16, 2025, the Dublin City Council in California unanimously passed a resolution formally opposing reopening or reusing the notorious FCI Dublin prison for detention of any kind, including as an immigration jail. The resolution also urged the relevant federal agencies to “engage in open and transparent communication with the City regarding any decisions affecting the site.
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As immigrants in southeastern Louisiana and Mississippi braced for this month’s U.S. Homeland Security operation, Cristiane Rosales-Fajardo received a panicked phone call from a friend. The friend’s Guatemalan tenant, who didn’t know she was pregnant, had just delivered a premature baby in the New Orleans house. The parents lacked legal residency, and the mother refused to go to a hospital…
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As a “chilling” report in the New York Times revealed that the Transportation Security Administration is providing the names of all airline passengers to immigration officials, President Donald Trump’s administration on Friday also openly continued its war on immigrants by announcing an end to allowing relatives of citizens or lawful permanent residents to enter the United States while awaiting…
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This story originally appeared in Common Dreams on Dec. 11, 2025. It is shared here under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.
A federal judge on Thursday ordered the immediate release of Kilmar Ábrego García—who was wrongfully deported to El Salvador by the Trump administration earlier this year—from US Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody.
“Since Ábrego García’s return from wrongful detention in El Salvador, he has been redetained, again without lawful authority,” US District Judge Paula Xinis wrote in her ruling. “For this reason, the court will grant Ábrego García’s petition for immediate release from ICE custody.”
In early April, Xinis—an appointee of former President Barack Obama—ordered the Trump administration to facilitate Ábrego García’s return to the United States after he was deported in March to the abuse-plagued Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) maximum security prison in El Salvador. This, after the US Department of Justice (DOJ) admitted in a court filing that Ábrego García was wrongfully deported due to what it called an “administrative error.”
The US Supreme Court also weighed in on the case in favor of Xinis’ ruling. However, the Trump administration refused to comply with the judge’s order, arguing that it had no legal obligation to return Ábrego García to the US and could not force El Salvador’s government to free him.
The DOJ dubiously contended that Ábrego García—a 30-year-old Salvadoran father of three who entered the US without authorization when he was a teenager—was a member of the gang MS-13, an allegation based on a statement from an anonymous police informant. The Trump administration deported him despite a judge’s 2019 ruling that he could not be removed to El Salvador because he could be tortured there.
An attorney representing Ábrego García said at the time that his client suffered beatings and “psychological torture” while imprisoned