From JMD: write your elected federal senators and congresspeople and demand the 238 detainees be returned for due process proceedings

Posted on April 18, 2025 by Joanne M Denison

here are my sample letters and you can google contact my senator or congress person and click on the contact link. same for your governor.

JUSTICE 4 EVERY1, NFP

5958A N. Milwaukee Ave JoAnne Denison, Executive Director
Chicago, IL 60630 Cell Phone 773-255-7608
ph 312-553-1300 http://www.justice4every1.com
fax 773-423-4455 JoAnne@Justice4Every1.com
A social Justice Services NFP

To: Illinois Gov. Pritzker

April 18, 2025–Good Friday so do something good!

RE: Immediate demand to return 238 wrongfully deported immigrants from a torture prison in El Salvador on 3/15/25

Dear Gov. Pritzker;

This is to demand that your offices immediately contact the nefarious President of El Salvador and his offices and work together to return some 238 wrongfully deported immigrants to the US where they should be provided with a skilled immigration lawyer to defend their immigration cases.

This is a dire travesty of justice and it undermines democracy, human and civil rights, not just in the US, but throughout the world.

Almost none of these men have committed any crime, many had green (LPR) cards and all of them were entitled to notice, a petition and a hearing prior to deportation and none of them received that. In essence, they were summarily kidnaped to El Salvador.

The US Supreme court has already agreed with such an analysis and has made the following finding:

“The order properly requires the government to ‘facilitate’ Abrego Garcia’s release from custody in El Salvador and to ensure that his case is handled as it would have been had he not been improperly sent to El Salvador,” the Supreme Court’s ruling said.
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24a949_lkhn.pdf, p.2.

As a elected representative of Illinois voters , I am expecting that you and your offices work assiduously to remedy this situation since the present Trump administration is clearly infirm and has dilapidated into some deep dark abyss of full blown incessant unmitigated ineptitude.

The future of US and world democracy depends on your work, so please do it with all alacrity and earnest.

I thank you for your work to help these detainees

Sincerely,

Joanne Denison
Joanne Denison
Executive Director,
Justice 4 Every1, NFP

and for your congresspersons/senators:

JUSTICE 4 EVERY1, NFP

To: All US Senators &
Congress People
via email or fax
Washington DC 20510

April 18, 2025–Good Friday so do something good!

RE: Immediate demand to return 238 wrongfully deported immigrants from a torture prison in El Salvador on 3/15/25

Dear Senator or Congressperson;

This is a dire travesty of justice and it undermines democracy, human and civil rights, not just in the US, but throughout the world.

The US Supreme court has already agreed with such an analysis and has made the following finding:

As a elected federal representative of US voters , I am expecting that you and your offices work assiduously to remedy this situation since the present administration is clearly infirm and has dilapidated into some deep dark abyss of full blown incessant unmitigated ineptitude.

The future of US and world democracy depends on your work, so please do it with all alacrity and earnest.
I greatly appreciate your efforts in this matter.

Sincerely,

Joanne Denison
Joanne Denison
Executive Director,
Justice 4 Every1, NFP

From PP: ICE indiscriminately detains US citizens and green card holders and keeps no stats on their wrongful acts

Posted on April 6, 2025 by Joanne M Denison

Some Americans Have Already Been Caught in Trump’s Immigration Dragnet. More Will Be.

by Nicole Foy

ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

https://www.propublica.org/article/more-americans-will-be-caught-up-trump-immigration-raids

Series: The New Immigration:How Recent Arrivals at the Border Have Changed the Country and Its Attitudes

More in this series

About a week after President Donald Trump took office, Jonathan Guerrero was sitting at the Philadelphia car wash where he works when immigration agents burst in.

The agents didn’t say why they were there and didn’t show their badges, Guerrero recalled. So the 21-year-old didn’t get a chance to explain that although his parents were from Mexico, he had been born right there in Philadelphia.

“They looked at me and made me put my hands up without letting me explain that I’m from here,” Guerrero said.

An agent pointed his gun at Guerrero and handcuffed him. Then they brought in other car wash workers, including Guerrero’s father, who is undocumented. When agents began checking IDs, they finally noticed that Guerrero was a citizen and quickly let him go.

“I said, ‘Look, man, I don’t know who these guys are and what they’re doing,” said Guerrero. “With anything law-related, I just stay quiet.”

Less than two months into the new Trump administration, there has been a small but steady beat of reported cases like Guerrero’s.

In Utah, agents pulled over and detained a 20-year-old American after he honked at them. In New Mexico, a member of the Mescalero Apache nation more than two hours from the border was questioned by agents who demanded to see their passport. Earlier this month, a Trump voter in Virginia was pulled over and handcuffed by gun-wielding immigration agents.

In Texas, a 10-year-old citizen recovering from brain cancer was detained at a Border Patrol checkpoint and eventually deported to Mexico with her undocumented parents and other citizen siblings in February. The family said it was rushing her to an emergency checkup in Houston when Border Patrol agents ignored a hospital letter that the family had used to go through checkpoints before. An agency spokesperson said the family’s account was inaccurate but declined to provide specifics.

It’s unclear exactly how many citizens have faced the Trump administration’s dragnet so far. And while previous administrations have mistakenly held Americans too, there’s no firm count of those incidents either.

The government does not release figures on citizens who have been held by immigration authorities. Neither Customs and Border Protection nor Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which handles interior immigration enforcement, would provide numbers to ProPublica on how many Americans have been mistakenly detained.

Experts and advocates say that what is clear to them is that Trump’s aggressive immigration policies — such as arrest quotas for enforcement agents — make it likely that more citizens will get caught up in immigration sweeps.

“It’s really everyone — not just noncitizens or undocumented people — who are in danger of having their liberty violated in this kind of mass deportation machinery,” said Cody Wofsy, the deputy director of the Immigrants’ Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union.

Asked about reports of Americans getting caught up in administration’s enforcement policies, an ICE spokesperson told ProPublica in a written statement that agents are allowed to ask for citizens’ identification: “Any US immigration officer has authority to question, without warrant, any alien or person believed to be an alien concerning his or her right to be, or to remain, in the United States.” The agency did not respond to questions about specific cases.

The U.S. has gone through spasms of detaining and even deporting large numbers of citizens. In the 1930s and 1940s, federal and local authorities forcibly exiled an estimated 1 million Mexican Americans, including hundreds of thousands of American-born children.

Spanning both Obama administrations, an NPR investigation found, immigration authorities asked local authorities to detain about 700 Americans. Meanwhile, a U.S. Government Accountability Office report found that immigration authorities asked to hold roughly 600 likely citizens during Trump’s first term. The GAO also found that Trump actually deported about 70 likely citizens.

The GAO report did not get into any individual cases. But lawsuits brought against federal immigration agencies detail dozens of cases where plaintiffs received a settlement.

When local deputies in Pierce County, Washington, arrested Carlos Rios on suspicion of drunken driving in 2019, not even the fact that he had his U.S. passport could convince the deputies — or the ICE agents who took him into federal custody — that he was a citizen.

Rios, who immigrated from Mexico in the 1980s and became a citizen in 2000, often carried his passport with him in case he picked up a welding job on a Coast Guard ship or a commercial fishing job that took him into international waters. But no one listened to him when Rios insisted repeatedly that he was a citizen and begged Pierce County jail officials and ICE officers to check his bag. Rios ended up being held for a week. ICE did not comment on the case.

Rios received a $125,000 settlement but is still haunted by his time in detention.

“I don’t even have to close my eyes,” Rios said. “I remember every single second.”

There are other, more recent instances too. This January, in the last days of President Joseph Biden’s time in office, Border Patrol conducted raids in Kern County, California, more than four hours from the border.

Among those detained was Ernesto Campos, a U.S. citizen and owner of a Bakersfield landscaping company. Agents stopped Campos’ truck and slashed his tires when he refused to hand over his keys.

At that point, Campos began recording on his phone and protested that he is a U.S. citizen.

In the video, agents said they were arresting Campos for “alien smuggling.” (His undocumented employee was in the truck with Campos.) Border Patrol told a local TV station that agents were also concerned about human trafficking.

Campos has still not been charged. His lawyer said he was held for four hours.

Campos’ case is mentioned in a recent lawsuit by the ACLU of Southern California and the United Farm Workers contending that agents in the same operation detained and handcuffed a 56-year-old grandmother who is a legal permanent resident. The suit argues that Border Patrol agents “went on a fishing expedition” that profiled Latinos and farmworkers.

Asked about Campos’ case and the lawsuit, Customs and Border Protection said it does not comment on ongoing litigation.

While there are a number of fixes the government could make to limit the wrongful detention of citizens, immigration authorities have often failed to follow through.

After a series of lawsuits against the Obama administration, ICE began requiring officers to consult with supervisors before detaining someone who claims to be a citizen, and to not arrest someone if the evidence of citizenship “outweighs evidence to the contrary.” But the GAO report on mistaken detention of citizens noted that ICE wasn’t actually training officers to follow the policy. (In response to the GAO report, ICE said it revised its training materials. It told ProPublica that agents are still following those policies for determining citizenship)

Customs and Border Protection and ICE are not even required to track how often they hold citizens on immigration charges, the GAO found. While ICE agents could note in their database if someone they’ve investigated turns out to be a citizen, the GAO found that they are not required to do so. As a result, records are often wrong and left uncorrected even after agents have been told of a mistake. Someone flagged incorrectly in an ICE database once may be forced to deal with questions about their citizenship for years.

Peter Sean Brown, another U.S. citizen born in Philadelphia, was mistaken more than 20 years ago for a Jamaican national living in the U.S. illegally. When he was later arrested in 2018 for a probation violation, immigration officials requested he be held, despite their own records documenting the case of mistaken identity, his lawyer said.

Brown repeatedly insisted he was a citizen, a claim agents are supposed to immediately review.

“I’M TRYING TO OBTAIN INFORMATION CONCERNING A UNVALID ICE HOLD,” Brown wrote to guards on April 19, 2018, while still detained at the Monroe County jail in Florida. “IM A US CITIZEN…HOW IS THIS EVEN POSSIBLE?”

ICE eventually released him — after three weeks in detention.

Correction

March 19, 2025: This story originally incorrectly referred to an agency that provided statements to ProPublica. It was Customs and Border Protection, not Border Patrol.

Pratheek Rebala contributed research.

From PP: This is what ICE detainees are wanted for: slave labor to make US billionaires rich and richer

Posted on April 6, 2025 by Joanne M Denison

An ICE Contractor Is Worth Billions. It’s Still Fighting to Pay Detainees as Little as $1 a Day to Work.

Link to original story: https://www.propublica.org/article/inside-ice-air-deportation-flights?utm_source=sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=majorinvestigations&utm_content=feature

by McKenzie Funk

ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter to receive stories like this one in your inbox.

The for-profit prison company GEO Group has surged in value under President Donald Trump. Investors are betting big on immigration detention. Its stock price doubled after Election Day.

But despite its soaring fortunes, the $4 billion company continues to resist having to pay detainees more than $1 a day for cleaning facilities where the government has forced them to live.

At the 1,575-bed detention center GEO runs for Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Tacoma, Washington, detainees once prepared meals, washed laundry and scrubbed toilets, doing jobs that would otherwise require 85 full-time employees, the company estimated. The state’s minimum wage at the time was $11 an hour. (It’s now $16.66.) In 2017, Washington sued GEO to enforce it, and in October 2021 a federal jury ruled unanimously in the state’s favor.

This year, GEO and Washington are back in court — for a third time — as the company tries to reverse the earlier decision that sided with the state. GEO has brought in contract cleaners at the Tacoma facility while the case plays out, keeping detainees there from paid work and from having a way to earn commissary money.

The legal battle has national repercussions as the number of ICE detainees around the country rises to its highest level in five years. The vast majority are held in private facilities run by GEO or corporate competitors like CoreCivic. If following state minimum wages becomes the norm, Trump’s immigration crackdown could cost the country even more than it otherwise would — unless private detention centers absorb the cost themselves or decide to cut back on cleaning, which Tacoma detainees have already accused GEO of doing.

GEO frames the lawsuit as a fight over the federal government’s authority to make the laws of the nation. Multiple courts have decided that the Fair Labor Standards Act, which sets the federal minimum wage, does not apply to detained migrants. At issue in the Tacoma case is the state minimum wage.

“Simply put, we believe the State of Washington has unconstitutionally violated the Supremacy Clause of the United States Constitution,” GEO wrote in a news release.

The company did not respond to a request for comment from ProPublica. ICE and CoreCivic declined to comment.

GEO’s latest legal salvo came last month.

A three-judge panel at the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals had recently affirmed lower courts’ rulings. GEO had to pay state minimum wage at the Tacoma facility. The company was also ordered to hand over $17 million in back wages, plus $6 million for “unjust enrichment.” The combined penalties amounted to less than 1 percent of GEO’s total revenues in 2024.

Rather than pay up, GEO petitioned on Feb. 6 for a rehearing by the full 9th Circuit. In the news release, it vowed to “vigorously pursue all available appeals.”

It isn’t that GEO lacks the ability to pay, the company has made clear in legal filings. Its gross profit from its Tacoma facility, today called the Northwest ICE Processing Center, was about $20 million a year when Washington filed its lawsuit. The company told a judge in 2021 it could “pay the Judgments twenty times over.”

The real issue is the precedent the Tacoma case could set. GEO, which manages 16 ICE detention facilities across the country, faces similar lawsuits in California and Colorado. The California case, also before the 9th Circuit, is on hold pending the outcome of Washington’s. Colorado’s is winding its way through a lower court.

GEO is expected to fight the case all the way to the Supreme Court, if needed.

If eventually forced to pay state minimum wages across the country, the company could decide to pay detainees more or else hire outside employees at all its locations – either of which would potentially eat into its profits, stock price and dividends.

The company also could try to renegotiate its long-term contracts with ICE for a higher rate of reimbursement, Lauren-Brooke Eisen, an expert in incarceration, noted in an article for the Brennan Center for Justice.

Or GEO could respond to higher labor costs another way. After the jury decision against it in 2021, the company paused Tacoma’s Voluntary Work Program, as it is known, rather than pay detainees there minimum wage. Some could no longer afford phone calls to family members. (For such detainees, the program had never been entirely voluntary. “I need the money desperately,” one testified. “I have no choice.”)

The facility also “got really gross” after the sudden stoppage, a Mexican detainee told the Associated Press at the time. “Nobody cleaned anything.”

GEO brought in contract cleaners eventually.

Mike Faulk, a spokesperson for the Washington state attorney general’s office, said testimony in the minimum-wage issue highlights the problem with housing detainees in private prisons: profit motive. Not only did GEO pay $1 a day for cleaning in Tacoma, it budgeted less than $1 per meal that each detainee ate, one kitchen worker testified. “So the grade of food is abysmal,” Faulk said of the detainee’s testimony. “He routinely picked out grasshoppers/insects from the food.”

For its part, GEO argues that Washington wants to unfairly — and hypocritically — hold the Tacoma facility to a standard that even state facilities don’t have to meet. The company has noted that a carveout in Washington law exempts state prisons from minimum-wage requirements, allowing the state to pay prisoners no more than $40 a week. The federal government, taking GEO’s side, has made the same point in “friend of the court” briefs under both the first Trump administration and the Biden administration. So did a dissenting judge in the recent 9th Circuit decision.

But to liken state prisons to a privately run immigration facility is an “apples and oranges” comparison, the 9th Circuit decided. Washington doesn’t let private companies run its state prisons. And the migrants in Tacoma are detained under civil charges, not as convicted criminals.

As judges have noted, GEO’s contract with ICE states that the prison company must follow “all applicable federal, state, and local laws and standards,” including “labor laws and codes.” It also holds that GEO must pay detainees at least $1 a day for the Voluntary Work Program. The federal government “made a deliberate choice to dictate to GEO the minimum rate,” the 9th Circuit wrote in its most recent decision, but “it also made a deliberate choice not to dictate to GEO a maximum rate.”

Conditions in Tacoma are worsening as the number of detainees rises, according to Maru Mora Villalpando, founder of the activist group La Resistencia. The group is in regular contact with people inside the detention center.

Meal service, Mora Villalpando said, is faltering: “Dinner used to be at 5. Then 6. Now it’s 9.”

Cleaning is faltering, too, she said. Without detainee labor, the outside cleaners have to do it all.

“But these people,” Mora Villalpando said, “can’t keep up.”

MaryGSykes.com

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