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Cuban Mother Remains in ICE Custody
Daughter Says Cuban Mother Has Spent Eight Months in ICE Detention Despite Dismissed Removal Proceedings Xiomara Companioni González walked into what her family says was a routine immigration check-in on Nov. 13, 2025. According to her daughter, Yaimi Yanet, she never walked back out. ICE detained the 63-year-old Cuban national, and she has remained in federal custody while her immigration case continues through the legal system. Court records confirm she has remained detaine

Maria Salinas
Jul 303 min read


"Come Here Legally" Is Easier Said Than Done
The People Yelling "Come Here Legally" Usually Have No Idea How Immigration Works Public debates about immigration often collapse into a single sentence. "They should have come here legally." It sounds tidy and decisive, but it also reveals how few Americans have ever interacted with the immigration system beyond repeating what they have heard from politicians, television pundits, or the loudest far-right influencer on social media. Most U.S. citizens never file an immigratio

Maria Salinas
Jul 283 min read


The Deportation Should Be the Punishment, Not the Funeral
A post on Threads has gone viral: immigration is paperwork law, and nobody should die over paperwork. No caveats can soften that sentence, and none are needed. It sets a moral floor that predates any statute. The floor has needed restating all year, in different states, under different agencies. An ICE officer fatally shot a man on Canal Street in a predominantly Latino neighborhood of Houston in July, prompting LULAC to demand release of all body cam, dash cam, and bystander

Maria Salinas
Jul 173 min read


The Truth Behind Dilley's "Blue Butterfly Zone"
The "Blue Butterfly" at Dilley: What's Real, What Isn't, and Why It Matters The South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas, is not a place most people think about until something goes wrong. And lately, something has, though the full picture is considerably messier than social media wants it to be. Dilley is an ICE family detention facility. It has held mothers, their children, and more recently single adult women. The facility is operated by a private contractor,

Maria Salinas
Jun 94 min read


Jasmine Crockett Said the Quiet Part Out Loud About Latino Voters
Representative Jasmine Crockett angered people when she compared some Latino voting patterns to a "slave mentality" during a post-election interview with Vanity Fair. Her words have been resurfaced and people are obviously losing their minds. But nobody wants to talk about whether she was right about the matter. In a December 2024 Vanity Fair interview about Kamala Harris's loss, Crockett was asked about race and gender in the election. Trump pulled 46 percent of the Latino v

Maria Salinas
Feb 243 min read


ICE Just Bet Your Freedom on a Racial Profile
The Supreme Court handed down a decision in September that should terrify anyone who thinks showing an ID means they belong here. In Noem v. Vasquez Perdomo, the Court's conservative majority allowed federal immigration agents to resume raids across Los Angeles after a lower court tried to stop them from targeting people based on race, language, workplace, and location alone. The Fourth Amendment requires reasonable suspicion before law enforcement can detain you. That means

Maria Salinas
Jan 204 min read


Stripping a War Hero's Pension for Daring to Speak
Senator Mark Kelly, the combat-tested Navy captain turned Arizona senator, has launched a blistering 46-page federal lawsuit against Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and the Pentagon, exposing what can only be described as a brazen, vindictive power grab by the Trump administration. This isn't justice—it's a political hit job, a chilling warning shot fired across the bow of any veteran or lawmaker daring to speak truth to power. In a move reeking of authoritarian overreach, Heg

Janie Flores-Alvarez
Jan 174 min read


The Feeling That Everything Is Falling Apart Has a Name
ICE is here. The inevitable is happening here in Starr County and all across the Rio Grande Valley. Social media is filled with photos of people being detained. There is impotence. There is anger. There is fear. And sadness. That suffocating feeling in the air has a name: anomie. South Texas is a border region. The people who live here know immigration enforcement. But this is different. Now people are being detained at gas stations, at stores, at churches. Now filming an arr

Maria Salinas
Jan 174 min read


A Man Vanished After ICE Took Him
Vicente Ventura Aguilar spent his last documented moments doing something completely ordinary. The 44-year-old was moving to music with friends on a South Los Angeles street corner near a strip mall. Security cameras caught him at 8:40 on an October morning, laughing and dancing. Five minutes changed everything. Federal immigration agents in masks flooded the corner. They deployed some kind of spray. Multiple people got arrested. Ventura became one of them. What happened next

Maria Salinas
Jan 173 min read


Obama Deported More. But Trump Made It Crueler.
Barack Obama stood at a podium in 2014 and delivered words that still echo louder than any policy Trump has ever managed to articulate. "Felons, not families. Criminals, not children. Or gang members. Not a mom who's working hard to provide for her kids. We'll prioritize." The speech laid out a framework for immigration enforcement that acknowledged reality instead of weaponizing fear. Obama prioritized deporting actual criminals while recognizing that millions of undocumente

Maria Salinas
Jan 174 min read


Democrats Built This Machine Too
Elizabeth Warren fumbled the easiest question in progressive politics. Asked whether she'd continue funding Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Massachusetts senator offered a conditional yes—funding with restrictions on behavior. A technocratic answer that misses the entire point. The correct answer was no. ICE didn't materialize from Trump's fever dreams. The agency was created in 2003 under the Homeland Security Act, signed by Republican George W. Bush but supported b

Maria Salinas
Jan 146 min read


Officer-Induced Jeopardy
Here's what you need to know about how federal agents are trained to kill people and call it self-defense. In February 2013, the Police Executive Research Forum delivered a report to Customs and Border Protection that should have ended careers. Instead, CBP tried to bury it. The nonprofit had reviewed 67 use-of-force incidents from January 2010 through October 2012 that left 19 people dead along the southern border. What they found was a pattern so egregious it read like a tr

Maria Salinas
Jan 143 min read


The Traumatic Little Boy Inside Stephen Miller
Stephen Miller is the man who looks like every mall Santa’s lawyer, if that lawyer’s specialty was getting kids deported for crying in line. He is best known not for one bad policy or one ugly soundbite, but for a sustained, years‑long crusade to turn the immigration system into a weapon, especially against Latino families who dared to believe that “land of opportunity” was a promise and not a legally unenforceable slogan. He is the human embodiment of the “Do Not Enter” sign

Janie Flores-Alvarez
Jan 123 min read
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