Week of April 16–22, 2025

U.S. District Judge James Boasberg said he had found probable cause to hold the administration in criminal contempt for violating his order to turn around planes carrying deportees to El Salvador.

Boasberg had directed the government last month not to deport anyone in its custody under the Alien Enemies Act, the 1798 statute Trump invoked over what he described as an invasion by the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua. Told that planes were already in the air, the judge said they had to return. They did not.

He wrote that the government must try to purge itself of the contempt finding or he would open hearings and could refer the matter for prosecution, adding that none of the government’s explanations had been satisfactory. Trump has called for Boasberg’s impeachment, and the Justice Department has accused him of overstepping his authority.

Source: PBS NewsHour

The city of Homestead voted on April 16 to sign a memorandum of agreement with Immigration and Customs Enforcement under the 287(g) program, which allows trained local police officers to carry out certain federal immigration functions.

Homestead joins other Miami-Dade municipalities with large Hispanic populations that have signed on, among them Coral Gables, Hialeah, West Miami, Miami Springs and Doral, whose council voted the same day.

Police Chief Mario Knapp said the agreement gives the department limited authority over specific criminal activity involving people unlawfully present and is narrowly tailored rather than a general immigration enforcement tool. Doral Mayor Christi Fraga described the vote as an obligation to comply with state law. Residents have protested previous cooperation agreements in Homestead.

Source: NBC6 South Florida

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem told Harvard University in a letter dated April 16 that it must hand over detailed records on its student visa holders or lose its certification under the Student and Exchange Visitor Program, which allows the school to enroll noncitizen students.

The request covers records of students’ known illegal or violent activity, threats to students or faculty, disciplinary action arising from protests, whether a student obstructed the learning environment, and coursework taken to maintain visa status.

Noem wrote that hosting foreign students is a privilege rather than a guarantee, said Harvard relies on funding tied to more than 10,000 foreign students, and accused the university of failing to address antisemitism. If Harvard does not respond within the stated period, she wrote, the program will automatically withdraw its certification.

Source: ABC News

More than 1,000 international students and recent graduates at over 130 schools have had visas revoked or their records terminated in the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System this year, according to statements collected by CNN. Colleges in 40 states confirmed cases.

Most schools said the government gave no reason and did not notify them. Universities generally learned of the terminations by checking the federal database themselves.

A spokesperson at Middle Tennessee State University said six students from Asia, Europe and the Middle East lost their visas and that the university knew only that the records had changed. The University of Oregon said four students lost status over unspecified criminal charges, with no advance notice and no details provided.

Source: CNN

An immigration judge denied bond to Rumeysa Ozturk, the 30-year-old Tufts University doctoral student held in Louisiana for three weeks, her lawyers said. The Department of Homeland Security offered a single document in opposition, a one-paragraph State Department memo revoking her student visa on March 21.

According to her lawyers, the memo cited an assessment that she had been involved in associations that may undermine U.S. foreign policy by creating a hostile environment for Jewish students and indicating support for a designated terrorist organization, including co-authoring an opinion piece in the student newspaper.

Her lawyers separately asked a federal judge in Vermont weighing jurisdiction over her habeas case to have her moved to that state and to hold a hearing. They said she has had five asthma attacks in detention.

Source: PBS NewsHour

A January 31 letter from Secretary of State Marco Rubio to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem recommending the termination of Temporary Protected Status for about 600,000 Venezuelans became public through court filings.

Rubio wrote that the State Department had assessed that allowing Venezuelan nationals to remain temporarily in the United States under the TPS statute is contrary to the national interest, and recommended that Noem terminate the designation.

The letter surfaced in a case brought by Venezuelan advocacy groups, including the Venezuelan American Caucus, seeking to preserve protections extended under the Biden administration in January. The plaintiffs are asking for an 18 month extension. Adelys Ferro, who founded the caucus, noted that Rubio had urged the Biden administration to extend the same protections in 2022.

Source: CBS News Miami

A presidential memorandum published in the Federal Register directs the Secretary of Labor, the Secretary of Health and Human Services and the Commissioner of Social Security to take all reasonable measures to keep ineligible noncitizens from receiving funds under Social Security Act programs.

It tells those agencies to issue guidance or regulations as needed and to prioritize civil or administrative enforcement against states, localities and other grantees that do not adequately verify eligibility or stop payments to ineligible recipients.

The memorandum also directs the Justice Department to expand the Social Security Administration’s fraud prosecutor program to at least 50 U.S. Attorney offices by October 1, 2025, and to create a comparable program covering Medicare and Medicaid in at least 15 offices, with new staff assigned first to districts holding the largest unauthorized populations.

Source: Federal Register

U.S. District Judge Kathleen Williams extended her order barring enforcement of Florida’s SB 4-C until April 29. The law, passed in a special session this year, makes it a first-degree misdemeanor for an unauthorized immigrant to enter the state.

At the hearing Williams raised the arrest of Juan Carlos Lopez-Gomez, a 20-year-old U.S. citizen born in Georgia, who was stopped by a Florida Highway Patrol trooper and held in the Leon County jail on a 48-hour ICE detainer even after a county judge found no probable cause. He was released the previous evening.

An attorney for the plaintiffs said local agencies were continuing to make arrests under the law despite the April 4 order, exposing those arrested to immigration holds.

Source: Florida Phoenix

In an order issued early on Saturday, the Supreme Court directed the government not to remove any member of a putative class of Venezuelan detainees held at the Bluebonnet Detention Center in Anson, Texas, under the Alien Enemies Act until further order of the court.

The order followed warnings from the American Civil Liberties Union that removals were about to restart. A group of detainees at Bluebonnet had been told late on Thursday that they would be deported immediately, and an ACLU lawyer said men were being loaded onto buses on Friday night.

Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dissented. Alito wrote that the court had granted unprecedented relief in the middle of the night, within eight hours of the application, without hearing from the government or explaining its reasoning.

Source: NPR

U.S. District Judge Michael McShane issued a 14-day temporary restraining order requiring the government to reinstate the student status of two international students in Oregon and barring officials from moving them out of the state or deporting them.

McShane pressed government lawyers on what rule authorized the terminations. An assistant U.S. attorney said he had not had time to gather the information and argued the students had not suffered irreparable harm because no final decision had been issued.

Court papers from Homeland Security Investigations said the status of one student, Aaron Ortega Gonzalez, was terminated on April 4 over an unspecified encounter with border officials in 2014, seven years before he received the visa that brought him to Oregon State University.

Source: The Oregonian

At least eight immigration judges in Massachusetts, California and Louisiana were told they would be placed on leave and terminated on April 22, according to two people familiar with the firings and the union that represents immigration judges.

The judges were given no reason and were at the end of a two-year probationary period with the Executive Office for Immigration Review, the Justice Department agency that runs the immigration courts. The agency declined to comment.

The firings come as the administration seeks to raise the number of removals, and they add to criticism that noncitizens are receiving too little process. Trump wrote on social media this week that the government cannot give everyone a trial because doing so would take, in his words, 200 years.

Source: NPR