Week of April 9–15, 2025

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services said on April 9 that it would begin screening immigrants' social media accounts for evidence of antisemitic activity and treat what it finds as grounds to deny immigration benefit requests. The policy took effect immediately.

The Department of Homeland Security said the screening would apply to people applying for lawful permanent residence and to foreign nationals affiliated with educational institutions. Tricia McLaughlin, the department's assistant secretary for public affairs, said the United States was under no obligation to admit or keep people it regards as terrorist sympathizers.

The announcement followed the detention of pro-Palestinian student activists including Mahmoud Khalil and Rumeysa Ozturk, whose lawyers deny the government's allegations. The Council on American-Islamic Relations and the advocacy group J Street both criticized the policy, arguing that it recasts criticism of the Israeli government as antisemitism and threatens free speech.

Source: NPR

The Supreme Court said on April 10 that the Trump administration must work to bring back Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Salvadoran citizen who had lived in Maryland and was deported to a prison in El Salvador despite an immigration court order barring his removal to that country. The justices rejected the administration's emergency appeal.

The unsigned order, issued with no noted dissents, said the district court had properly required the government to facilitate his release from Salvadoran custody and to handle his case as it would have been handled had he never been sent there. The justices added that U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis must clarify her order so it does not intrude on executive authority over foreign affairs, and said the government should be ready to explain what steps it had taken to get him back.

The administration says Abrego Garcia belongs to MS-13. He has never been charged with or convicted of a crime, and his attorneys say there is no evidence of gang membership.

Source: AP News

More than 600 international students and recent graduates at over 100 American colleges and universities have had their visas revoked or their immigration status changed by the State Department, according to data compiled by Inside Higher Ed and reported on April 10.

Some of the cases involved participation in campus protests over the war in Gaza. Others involved what officials called minor offenses, including traffic citations. Inside Higher Ed reported that most college officials did not know why their students were affected, and that many students had received no formal notice from immigration authorities.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in late March that more than 300 student visas had been revoked in the first three weeks of a State Department program called Catch and Revoke, which screens social media to identify visa holders the government says support designated terrorist organizations.

Source: The Guardian

The Trump administration has moved more than 6,000 living immigrants into a Social Security Administration database normally used to track the deceased, canceling their Social Security numbers, the Associated Press reported on April 10, citing two people familiar with the decision.

Officials told the AP that stripping the immigrants of valid numbers would cut them off from banks and other services that require one, and was meant to push them to leave the country on their own. Those affected lose the ability to work lawfully or to receive benefits.

It was not clear how the individuals were selected. The administration has focused on people admitted temporarily under Biden-era programs, including more than 900,000 people who entered using the CBP One app and whose parole the Department of Homeland Security revoked earlier that week.

Source: AP News

A requirement that everyone living in the United States without legal status register with the federal government and carry proof of registration took effect on April 11. U.S. District Judge Trevor McFadden had cleared the way a day earlier, ruling that the groups challenging the requirement lacked standing rather than deciding their substantive claims.

Registration is mandatory for everyone 14 and older without legal status, and applicants must submit fingerprints and an address. Parents and guardians must register children under 14. Failure to register is a crime, and people can face fines or prison time for not carrying their documents. The rule also reaches Canadians who stay in the country more than 30 days.

The administration has said between 2.2 million and 3.2 million people could be affected. The National Immigration Law Center, one of the groups that sued, called the ruling disappointing and urged affected people to consult an attorney before deciding whether to register.

Source: PBS NewsHour

An immigration judge in Jena, Louisiana, ruled on April 11 that Mahmoud Khalil can be deported. Khalil, a lawful permanent resident who led pro-Palestinian protests as a Columbia University graduate student, was arrested in New York on March 8 and has been held in Louisiana since.

The government relied on a determination by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who wrote in an undated two-page memo that letting Khalil remain would undermine the U.S. foreign policy goal of combating antisemitism. Rubio used a provision of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 that allows the secretary of state to find a noncitizen's presence contrary to American foreign policy interests.

The judge gave Khalil until April 23 to request a stay of removal and said that without one she would order him deported to Syria, where he was born, or Algeria, where he is a citizen. His lawyers said they would appeal. A separate case over the legality of his arrest is pending in federal court in New Jersey.

Source: NPR

The Department of Homeland Security said on April 11 that it would not renew temporary protected status for Afghans in the United States, leaving them open to deportation as early as May 20. More than 9,000 people from Afghanistan were covered by the designation as of September 2024.

Temporary protected status shields people from countries affected by war or disaster from removal and grants work authorization. The Biden administration first designated Afghanistan in 2022, after the Taliban takeover, and extended it in 2023. DHS said Secretary Kristi Noem ended the designation after U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services reviewed conditions in the country in consultation with the State Department.

Shawn VanDriver of the veterans group AfghanEvac disputed the finding, saying conditions in Afghanistan had worsened. A federal judge in San Francisco paused a similar move against Venezuelans on March 31.

Source: NPR

President Trump issued a memorandum on April 11 giving the military temporary jurisdiction over the Roosevelt Reservation, a 60-foot-wide corridor of federal land that runs along the border in California, Arizona and New Mexico.

The order lets troops detain people who enter that strip. Analysts said the arrangement appears designed to work around the Posse Comitatus Act, which generally bars active-duty forces from domestic law enforcement, by treating border crossers as trespassers on military property. Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council described the approach in those terms.

The memorandum said threats at the southern border required the military to take a more direct role than in the recent past. It came as the Defense and Homeland Security departments prepared recommendations, due April 20, on whether Trump should invoke the Insurrection Act. Border crossings have dropped sharply, with the administration reporting 7,200 encounters in March against more than 189,000 a year earlier.

Source: Politico

A Massachusetts immigration attorney who is a U.S. citizen received a federal email telling her that her parole status had been terminated and that she should leave the country within seven days. Nicole Micheroni, 40, was born in Newton and has no immigration status that could be revoked.

Micheroni said her name and email address appear on paperwork for many clients facing deportation, and that the message read like a spam email but was genuine. A senior Department of Homeland Security official said Customs and Border Protection was sending parole termination notices to email addresses that recipients had themselves supplied, and that notices may have reached unintended recipients where a non-personal address, such as a U.S. citizen contact, was given. The agency said it would handle problems case by case.

The notices are part of the administration's effort to end parole for more than half a million people, which a federal judge was then weighing.

Source: NBC10 Boston

U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani in Boston blocked the Trump administration on April 14 from revoking the deportation protections and work permits of migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela who entered the country under a Biden-era sponsorship program. The government had told them to leave by April 24 or face arrest and removal.

Talwani suspended those notices and barred officials from cancelling the parole grants, writing that ending legal status early, without case-by-case justification, for people who complied with the program undermines the rule of law. Under the program, known as CHNV, 532,000 people flew to the United States after securing a sponsor and received two years of parole with work authorization.

DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin said Secretary Kristi Noem would use every legal option to end the policy. A federal judge in California blocked a separate attempt to end temporary protected status for Venezuelans in late March.

Source: CBS News

The Justice Department published an interim final rule on April 14 reducing the Board of Immigration Appeals from 28 authorized member positions to 15. Issued by the Executive Office for Immigration Review, the rule took effect on the day it was published, with public comments accepted until May 14.

The board is the appellate body that reviews decisions of immigration judges, and its precedent decisions bind immigration judges and Homeland Security officers. The department argued that past expansions did not raise output: authorized positions grew by 13 after 2015 while annual completions did not keep pace, and published precedent decisions fell from 28 in 2015 to 14 in 2024.

The department said 15 was the board's size before the expansions that began in 2015, that an odd number reduces tie votes on en banc matters, and that the attorney general can appoint temporary board members on renewable six-month terms if the caseload requires it.

Source: Federal Register

The Executive Office for Immigration Review told staff that immigration judges may dismiss legally deficient asylum cases without holding a hearing, according to an April 11 memo from acting director Sirce Owen reported on April 15.

Under the directive, a judge could find someone ineligible for asylum based only on the written application, without the merits hearing at which applicants normally testify and submit evidence. The memo said adjudicators have a duty to manage their dockets efficiently and pointed to nearly 4 million pending cases.

The agency had more than 4 million cases pending at the end of 2024, including about 1.5 million asylum claims, and recently laid off more than 100 staff, among them judges, lawyers and interpreters. Ben Johnson of the American Immigration Lawyers Association said most applicants have no attorney, and that thinner filings would now be more likely to end in removal orders.

Source: NPR