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Hundreds of protesters showed up to tell ICE and other federal officers in full battle gear they weren’t welcome in a Minneapolis neighborhood where feds raided a Mexican restaurant. People chanted “Get the fuck out!” at the agents, demonstrators threw traffic cones and garbage cans in the path of the federal vehicles as they left the scene, and some wonderful smartass Sharpied “BITCH NAZI” on the door of a Bearcat armored truck.
ENHANCE! Two lessons here: 1) Use a marker with a wider tip than a Sharpie, so it’ll be more visible, and 2a) if civilians are able to get right onto your armored vehicle to write graffiti, maybe this wasn’t the kind of militarized raid that you needed an armored truck for in the first place, or 2b) at the very least, your security cordon sucks.
Mayor Jacob Frey later said that the raid was “related to a criminal search warrant for drugs and money laundering and was not related to immigration enforcement.” Other officials also said it wasn’t an immigration sweep either. Silly protesters! All that fear and paranoia and it wasn’t even a deportation raid, just the normal militarized policing and performative, heavily armed security theater we’ve come to expect in America!
That said, it’s also the case that the heavily militarized law enforcement action, including the presence of armored vehicles and agents in full battle rattle, was meant to send an intimidating message to residents of the area, described by the Associated Press as “the heart of the Latino community in Minneapolis.”
What’s more, the multi-agency raid was led by Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), the division of ICE that’s normally tasked with criminal investigations — hey, like into money laundering and drugs! — but which under the Trump administration has been at the forefront of some of the most performative Get Tough immigration-related overreactions, a point Rachel Maddow has been pounding on for weeks now, arguing that HSI should stick to money laundering and not cosplay as if they “were gonna rappel out of helicopters into the Tora Bora cave complex to fight al-Qaeda.”
In fact, last Friday’s militarized immigration raids at two Italian restaurants in San Diego, which also drew spontaneous protests from the community, were also very prominently led by HSI. The Trump administration has repeatedly used both militarized law enforcement and the actual goddamned military in immigration enforcement, so if protests against ICE spring up around more “legitimate” deployments of HSI, that’s hardly the result of people in the communities having faulty discernment — particularly if (likely when) the administration escalates the use of force against protesters, potentially including the GOP’s wet dream of shooting them.
Over the weekend, an Egyptian national, Mohamed Soliman, was arrested and charged with multiple counts of attempted murder and a federal hate crime for allegedly committing a horrific Molotov cocktail attack on demonstrators calling for the release of Hamas hostages in Gaza. None of the victims died but several were seriously injured. Soliman reportedly shouted “free Palestine!” during the attack, confessed after being detained, and told federal officers he had planned for over a year to attack a “Zionist group.” None of the charges sound inappropriate to us; it looks like a clear-cut terrorist act. Soliman will now go through the criminal courts, and if convicted, he would serve his sentence in a US prison and then be subject to deportation. Even if he’s somehow not convicted, his arrest for such a serious crime would make him subject to deportation, and rightly so.
But of course, in the age of Trump, it’s not enough to charge the criminal suspect. ICE has detained Soliman’s wife and five children, and the administration wasted little time announcing on social media Tuesday night (archive link) that the family will be punished too.
Normally, in US America at least, the justice system only goes after criminals themselves; we don’t do collective punishment! But as we’ll see, that gets complicated in immigration cases.
The White House post boasted, “Six One-Way Tickets for Mohamed’s Wife and Five Kids. Final Boarding Call Coming Soon” [airplane emoji], and added, in big bold text with highlights, “Wife and Kids of Illegal Alien Behind Antisemitic Firebombing Could Be Deported By Tonight.”
A second White House tweet Tuesday night (archive link) — why waste a propaganda opportunity? — said that the family was “now in ICE custody for expedited removal.” In big red letters, the tweet proclaimed “FAMILY ARRESTED” in a font that looked like an official stamp or stencil, so you know that his family is guilty too.
Fox News reports that sources in the State Department confirmed that the visas of all members of the family have been revoked, and that the “family is being processed for expedited removal.”
If the government does attempt to deport the family via expedited removal, that would be an illegal use of the procedure, which fast-tracks deportations, without a hearing. But expedited removal is intended only for people arrested at the border, or picked up within two years after coming in without permission. Soliman came to the US on a tourist visa in August 2022, so he came here legally, as did his family, although we haven’t seen any reporting on whether his family arrived with him or joined him later. If their visas were revoked, that would imply they still had valid ones, but who knows for sure. So “expedited removal” should be off the table, not that niceties matter to the current gang of mass deporters.
A month after Soliman arrived in the US, he applied for asylum, and that case is still pending. Normally, a pending asylum case means the applicant gets a work permit and protection from deportation while the case moves forward, even if, as in Soliman’s case, their visa expires while they’re waiting for their asylum hearing.
In any case, before he committed an alleged act of terrorism, Soliman was not an “illegal immigrant.” And in normal circumstances, his family would be protected from deportation by any pending asylum case too.
But as Wonkette Operative and Minnesota immigration attorney Kim Hunter explained to us, eligibility for asylum can be denied for “engaging in terrorist activity,” which certainly makes sense! (This was something that immigration lawyers became familiar with when helping Afghan refugees.) That legal bar to asylum is so broad that it also applies to an alleged terrorist’s spouse and children (see page 44 of this guide from the American Bar Association and the Catholic Legal Immigration Network).
This is where we get to the matter of what’s legal and what’s right: Legally, the family’s shot at asylum is probably gone, and they can most likely be deported, even if expedited removal would be illegal (again, they arrived here with visas).
Morally, we’d say that if the family knew nothing about Soliman’s plans, they should still be allowed to pursue asylum, but that’s not the law. At this point, Hunter explained, just about all they have to fall back on would be a claim under the UN Convention on Torture: If they have a credible fear that they would be subject to torture in their home country, Egypt, then they can’t legally be deported there, but they would still be subject to deportation to a third country that will accept them, as long as it’s all done with due process.
In any case, the administration is having a field day bragging about how it’s going to start going after families, and that’s one more indication that things are getting uglier.
In California, the family of a four-year-old girl with a rare, life-threatening illness was ordered in April to self-deport to Mexico because DHS revoked the humanitarian parole granted to her so she could be treated at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles. The treatment for her condition, short bowel syndrome, is only available in the USA, and doctors warned that if the family were to go back to Mexico, the girl, identified only as Sofia, would die within days. Not could, would.
The family was given permission to come to the US during the Biden administration, with an application processed using the now-defunct CBP One app which Trump discontinued immediately after being sworn in. Sofia’s doing well under her treatment, which requires her to be receive IV treatments for 14 hours a day, but it can be done at home by her parents. It just can’t be sent outside the US.
The Trump administration considers all admissions under CBP One invalid, so like hundreds of thousands of others allowed in using the app, Sofia and her family all retroactively became “illegals” under an executive order. (In a triumph of Newspeak, the administration announced in April that CBP One had been relaunched “with a self-deportation reporting feature for aliens illegally in the country.”)
Sofia’s family was allowed to re-apply for humanitarian parole, at least, and we learned yesterday that their application was approved, for at least another year, with the option to re-apply.
So hooray, no death sentence for Sofia just yet! She’ll get to turn five, her parents can still work, and maybe she’ll even attend kindergarten part time.
But we aren’t supposed to be a country that sends children to die because there’s a new president. None of this should have happened, and the family shouldn’t be fearing that in a year, Sofia will face another death sentence if DHS’s record keeping gets sloppy or Stephen Miller decides some court case will make her deportation OK.
There’s your good news, as far as it goes.
Open thread.
[Minnesota Reformer / AP / Guardian / CNBC / Fox News / NBC News / OC Register]
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