Week of April 8–14, 2026

Arrests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement of people with no criminal convictions rose 770 percent during the first year of President Trump's second term, according to an analysis by the Deportation Data Project at the University of California, Berkeley. Arrests made outside jails and prisons rose more than 1,000 percent.

The project, which obtained the underlying government data through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, said overall ICE arrests more than quadrupled through March 10, while transfers from jails and prisons roughly doubled. Street arrests took place in neighborhoods, at immigration courts and at ICE field offices during routine check-ins.

A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said the project had “cherry picked” data and that 70 percent of ICE arrests involve people convicted or charged with a crime. Report author David Hausman said detention itself pushes many people to abandon cases they could win.

Source: NBC News

A federal judge blocked the Trump administration from revoking Temporary Protected Status for about 5,000 Ethiopians, keeping their permission to live and work in the United States in place while the case proceeds.

District Judge Brian Murphy ruled that the administration had bypassed the procedures Congress set for granting and revoking TPS. “The will of the President does not supersede that of Congress,” he wrote, calling that principle fundamental to the constitutional system. Murphy said a January 2025 executive order directing the Department of Homeland Security to review whether designations were “appropriately limited in scope” gave the agency a pretextual basis for terminating them.

The administration has moved to end TPS designations for 13 countries. The status allows people to remain and work in the United States when conditions at home are judged temporarily unsafe.

Source: Al Jazeera

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin is reviewing a plan to convert warehouses across the country into detention facilities able to hold tens of thousands of immigrants.

Immigration officials have spent about $1.074 billion on 11 warehouses so far. Days after Mullin was sworn in, the Department of Homeland Security paused purchases of additional warehouses and began scrutinizing contracts signed under his predecessor, Kristi Noem.

Most of the sites have met local resistance. In Surprise, Arizona, ICE bought a 418,000-square-foot warehouse for $70 million without telling local officials, state Attorney General Kris Mayes said. Documents later provided by ICE described a processing site with an average daily capacity of 1,000 to 1,500 people under a contract worth at least $313.4 million. The department now plans to start with 250.

Source: AP News

Eight immigrants and several advocacy organizations sued federal immigration authorities in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York, alleging that ICE agents routinely stop and detain people without judicial warrants or reasonable suspicion.

Plaintiffs describe being arrested on the way to work, stopped on the street after offering identification, and held for hours after a traffic stop before any paperwork was produced. One says he was moved between detention facilities, including out of state, without prior judicial authorization. The complaint also alleges that warrants were sometimes issued only after an arrest had already been made.

The Department of Homeland Security said ICE has arrest authority under 8 U.S.C. 1357 and that officers use reasonable suspicion to investigate immigration status and probable cause to arrest.

Source: Newsweek

Justice Sonia Sotomayor criticized Justice Brett Kavanaugh over the Supreme Court's September 2025 order allowing the Trump administration to resume broad immigration stops in Los Angeles. She spoke on April 7 at an event hosted by the University of Kansas School of Law.

Without naming him, Sotomayor referred to Kavanaugh's concurring opinion, which described such encounters as typically brief. “This is from a man whose parents were professionals,” she said, according to Bloomberg Law. “And probably doesn't really know any person who works by the hour.” She added that people held for hours are not paid for the time they lose.

The order, issued over the dissent of the court's three liberal justices, set aside a lower-court ruling requiring agents to have reasonable suspicion before questioning someone about immigration status.

Source: USA Today

The Department of Homeland Security's inspector general has paused roughly 85 percent of its audits and reviews because of the partial government shutdown that has cut off funding to the agency, the office said.

Suspended work includes an audit of no-bid contracts, reviews of ICE detention facilities, inquiries into possible use of excessive force during immigration enforcement, a review of ICE's efforts to find and check on unaccompanied immigrant children, and four inquiries into the Secret Service's response to the July 2024 assassination attempt on President Trump.

Sixty percent of the inspector general's workforce is furloughed. ICE arrests have continued through the shutdown, funded in part by the $75 billion the agency received under the tax and spending law Trump signed last year.

Source: NBC News

President Trump endorsed a party-line budget reconciliation package limited to immigration enforcement funding, strengthening Senate Republican leaders in a standoff over Department of Homeland Security appropriations.

His statement followed a White House meeting with Senate Budget Chair Lindsey Graham and Majority Whip John Barrasso, who pitched restricting the measure to money for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and parts of Customs and Border Protection. Barrasso said Trump repeated a June 1 deadline for the bill to reach his desk.

Reconciliation would let Republicans pass the bill without Democratic votes. Democrats have refused to reopen shuttered DHS operations without new limits on ICE and CBP. Graham is expected to assign drafting to the Judiciary and the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs committees.

Source: Politico

Eswatini's Supreme Court ruled that four men sent there by the United States last July under the Trump administration's third-country deportation program may meet with a lawyer, after nine months in a maximum-security prison without in-person legal counsel.

A lower court had already granted access to Sibusiso Nhlabatsi, a local attorney acting for the men's U.S.-based lawyers, but the Eswatini government appealed. The men have no ties to the country.

Under the program the United States pays African governments to accept deportees. The administration has spent at least $40 million to remove roughly 300 people through such deals and is negotiating with 47 countries to expand it.

Source: Los Angeles Times

An Iowa bill restricting H-1B hiring at colleges and universities moved closer to a floor vote. House File 2513 has passed the Iowa House and cleared a subcommittee and the Senate Workforce Committee, placing it on the Senate calendar.

The measure would bar Iowa's public universities, community colleges and some private institutions from entering new employment contracts with H-1B holders who are citizens of countries the federal government designates as foreign adversaries or state sponsors of terrorism, including China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Cuba, Syria and Venezuela.

Other Republican-led states have acted on the same lines. Florida's Board of Governors approved a one-year ban on new H-1B faculty and staff hires across public universities, and Texas Governor Greg Abbott ordered state agencies and public universities to pause new H-1B hiring through May 2027.

Source: Newsweek

Conservative immigration hardliners allied with President Trump say the White House is backing away from its mass deportation promise ahead of the midterm elections.

The Mass Deportation Coalition, led by the Oversight Project's Mike Howell, spans the Heritage Foundation, the Immigration Accountability Project and a number of Young Republican clubs. Mark Morgan, a former head of ICE and Customs and Border Protection, said the group exists to give Trump “a right flank” against advisers urging restraint.

Howell said the administration has faced pressure only to tone enforcement down and argued that the first year was “not a year of mass deportation.” The group blames business groups and donors for the shift and says public opinion still supports removals, despite scrutiny of fatal use-of-force incidents by federal agents.

Source: Axios

The global adjusted refusal rate for U.S. student visas reached 35 percent in 2025, the highest in the decade examined, according to a study by the international education firm Shorelight. The rate was 31 percent in 2024.

The figures come from State Department data obtained through a public records request. The report describes the consolidation of a “high-refusal tier” covering most of the Global South and argues that an applicant's chance of entry now depends more on country of origin than on academic credentials or funding.

The increase coincided with a decline in international student enrollment in fall 2025. U.S. embassies paused new student visa interviews during 2025 while expanded social media screening was introduced, and further vetting requirements followed.

Source: Newsweek

Rio Grande Valley residents urged McAllen city commissioners on April 13 to oppose any Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility in the city and to be transparent about what officials know.

Nine speakers addressed the commission. “I demand you reject public funding, approvals and local resources for ICE,” resident Alexis Saenz told them. A warehouse in an industrial park in McAllen's trade corridor, less than five miles from the Anzalduas International Bridge, appeared on a list of potential ICE sites that circulated online in February.

A Dallas-area property was also on that list; its owner, Majestic Realty Co., confirmed in February that it had been contacted. Residents in Texas and elsewhere have pushed local officials to use their authority to stop ICE's use of warehouses as detention space.

Source: The Texas Tribune