The attorney representing Wilber Rafael Garces Perez said Tuesday that a federal judge had granted her emergency request to block the Trump administration from deporting the 28-year-old delivery driver, who was shot by an immigration agent Sunday and has since been transferred multiple times between hospitals and a detention center — all while the officer’s bullet reportedly remains lodged in his…
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Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is removing the names of its detainees who are facing final deportation orders from its public online database. The move will disrupt detainees’ legal challenges to deportation and leave their whereabouts unknown to their lawyers and loved ones. The agency quietly removed thousands of people from its online detainee locator on September 15…
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Two men deported from the United States to Equatorial Guinea were arrested by local police forces and transferred to a prison earlier this month, in apparent retaliation for speaking out about conditions they faced in the Central African country. Samson Birhane, who is from Eritrea, and Ahmed Soliman, a gay asylum seeker from Egypt, were both deported by the Trump administration despite U.S.
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This is an adapted excerpt from the Sept. 19 episode of “Connect with Jacob Soboroff.”
In Trump-era politics, there’s the rhetoric, then there’s the reality — and sometimes those two worlds collide.
I’ve seen it firsthand while reporting on U.S. immigration policy. Contradiction comes up constantly between the hard-line anti-immigrant talk and the industries that privately benefit from undocumented labor.
Take, for example, Republican Gov. Jim Pillen of Nebraska, a politician who has positioned himself as a champion of President Donald Trump’s deportation push. His words have been pretty clear-cut when it comes to immigration. In a December post on X, Pillen wrote, “The criminal illegal aliens who have invaded our country must be removed so they no longer pose a threat to our people. I will do everything in my power to ensure Nebraska continues to stand strong with President Trump to get the job done.”
Not all heroes wear capes, but many wear badges. And these six Omaha Police Officers are heroes. The criminal illegal aliens who have invaded our country must be removed so they no longer pose a threat to our people. I will do everything in my power to ensure Nebraska continues… https://t.co/i9kYL7Pi8t— Governor Jim Pillen (@TeamPillen) December 5, 2025
And Pillen has seemingly acted on that: He has dispatched state troopers to partner directly with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement on arrests, and he’s converted a shuttered state prison into a mass detention facility, grossly referred to as “Cornhusker Clink.”
But there’s another side of the story.
Three decades ago, the governor founded Pillen Family Farms, a massive hog enterprise that now has about 100 farms across Nebraska. Since taking office,
An immigration enforcement agent shot and injured a man in Austin on Sunday, city officials said. Police nor the U.S. Department of Homeland Security identified the man. But Kate Lincoln-Goldfinch, an Austin immigration lawyer, said she was hired to represent the man and that he was released from the hospital and into federal custody Sunday evening. She identified him as Wilber Rafael…
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In fall 2025, I began volunteering with the Acacia Center for Justice, a nonprofit legal advocacy group, in its Witness for Justice program. It’s an initiative that trains people to observe immigration court proceedings to restore visibility and accountability to a system that operates largely out of public view — and to ensure that no one faces immigration court alone and unseen.
Eventually, I found my way to the “detained children’s docket,” something I still can’t quite believe exists in the United States. I observed children appearing on camera for their immigration hearings from detention centers and shelters — children who do not speak English, who do not have lawyers, who are in the country alone. These children consistently state that they are afraid of returning to their home countries, yet they are not provided with counsel. They are accountable for finding a lawyer and filing claims for asylum on their own.
On one of my first children’s dockets, half of the cases resulted in the judge ordering the children — age 5 to 17 — removed from the U.S. without giving them an opportunity to have their asylum claim heard. Instead, this particular judge repeatedly ruled that the children were not entitled to present evidence, and that they did not qualify for relief as a matter of law. In one case, a 16-year-old girl had been sexually assaulted by a gang member in Honduras and feared that if she returned, she would be assaulted, kidnapped and enslaved by the gang. The court stated that those fears are “not a basis for protection in the U.S.” and ordered her removal.
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ICE prepares to