Week of March 5–11, 2025

The Democratic mayors of Boston, Chicago, Denver and New York City appeared before the House Oversight Committee on March 5 at a hearing titled “A Hearing with Sanctuary City Mayors.” Chairman James Comer said their policies create “sanctuary for criminals” and said he would hold them accountable for failing to follow the law.

Michelle Wu, Brandon Johnson, Mike Johnston and Eric Adams rejected the claim that they shelter dangerous immigrants. Sanctuary jurisdictions still enforce federal immigration law but limit local cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Adams said he does not control who enters the country but must manage the population inside the city, and that residents need access to services without fear of being turned over to federal authorities.

Ranking member Gerry Connolly said the state and local laws at issue comply with federal law and do not obstruct ICE.

Source: ABC News

CoreCivic said on March 5 that it had signed an agreement with ICE and the city of Dilley, Texas to reopen the 2,400-bed South Texas Family Residential Center, about 85 miles north of Laredo. A company spokesman said CoreCivic anticipates housing families there. The contract runs through at least March 2030.

The center operated under the Obama administration and during Donald Trump's first term. The Biden administration phased out family detention in 2021, and CoreCivic said the site was idled in 2024. ICE began 2025 with no facilities geared toward families, who accounted for about one third of arrivals on the southern border last year.

ICE did not say who would be held at Dilley or how soon. The agency has also expanded detention onto military sites, including the naval station at Guantanamo Bay.

Source: AP News

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services published a notice in the Federal Register on March 5 proposing to collect social media handles and platform names from people who apply for immigration benefits. The agency said the collection is required by Executive Order 14161, which directs uniform vetting standards and screening for grounds of inadmissibility.

The notice covers nine forms, among them the N-400 citizenship application, the I-485 green card application, the I-589 asylum application, the I-131 travel document, the I-730 refugee and asylee relative petition and the I-751 petition to remove conditions on residence. USCIS estimated 1,073,059 respondents for the I-131, 1,060,585 for the I-485 and 909,700 for the N-400, and a total annual burden of 285,999 hours at no added cost to applicants.

Comments were accepted for 60 days, until May 5, 2025.

Source: Federal Register

Secretary of State Marco Rubio launched an effort called “Catch and Revoke” to cancel the visas of foreign nationals who appear to support Hamas or other designated terrorist organizations, senior State Department officials told Axios on March 6. The effort includes AI assisted reviews of the social media accounts of tens of thousands of student visa holders.

Reviewers are looking for statements made after the October 7, 2023 attack on Israel, and are also checking internal databases for visa holders who were arrested but allowed to remain in the country. Officials said they examined records for 100,000 people in the student and exchange visitor system going back to October 2023 and found no visa revocations during the Biden administration.

The State Department is working with the Justice and Homeland Security departments on the program.

Source: Axios

President Trump said on March 6 that he would soon decide whether to revoke temporary legal status for about 240,000 Ukrainians who fled the war with Russia. “I'll be making the decision pretty soon,” he told reporters, after Reuters reported that his administration planned to take that step.

Reuters reported that the rollback would form part of a wider effort to strip status from more than 1.8 million people admitted under Biden era humanitarian parole programs, and that action on the Ukrainians could come as soon as April. The administration planned to revoke parole for about 530,000 Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans within the month. The programs also covered more than 70,000 Afghans.

The White House said no decision had been made. An internal ICE email seen by Reuters said people stripped of parole could be placed in expedited removal.

Source: Reuters

Two immigrant advocacy groups, Centro de Trabajadores Unidos and Immigrant Solidarity Dupage, sued the Treasury Department on March 7 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to block the release of taxpayer information to the Department of Homeland Security. They asked Judge Dabney Friedrich to bar the disclosure.

The groups said the Internal Revenue Code forbids the IRS from sharing return information for immigration enforcement, and that the government was seeking names and addresses tied to Individual Taxpayer Identification Numbers held by the agency. They said more than 13 million people are subject to the administration's deportation plans.

Nandan Joshi, a Public Citizen lawyer representing the groups, said Congress wrote the taxpayer privacy laws in response to the Nixon administration's use of IRS records for political purposes.

Source: Courthouse News

Employees of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services were asked to volunteer for 60 day assignments helping Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to an internal notice obtained by CBS News. The request came from Kika Scott, who was leading the agency in an acting capacity, and the assignments were set to begin on March 10 in several states.

The email said staff from any job series could apply but that ICE particularly needed immigration officers, immigration services officers, refugee officers and operations support personnel. A Homeland Security source said volunteers could be used for detainee processing, case management, records checks and data entry. Managers were told to approve the details unless an absence would seriously harm their own work.

ICE detention stood at 120 percent of capacity, holding more than 46,000 people in a system structured for 38,500.

Source: CBS News

Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian activist who helped lead protests at Columbia University, inside his university owned apartment on the night of Saturday, March 8. His attorney, Amy Greer, said an agent told her they were acting on State Department orders to revoke his student visa, and then said they would revoke his green card after being told he was a permanent resident.

Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said the arrest supported executive orders on antisemitism and alleged that Khalil had “led activities aligned to Hamas.” Greer said agents also threatened to arrest Khalil's wife, a U.S. citizen who was eight months pregnant, and that she could not locate him the next day.

It was the first publicly known deportation effort against a student protest organizer.

Source: AP News

U.S. District Judge Jesse Furman ordered on March 10 that Mahmoud Khalil not be deported “unless and until the Court orders otherwise,” and set a hearing for that Wednesday. Khalil had been moved to a federal jail for immigration detainees in Louisiana, according to his lawyers and a government detainee database.

His lawyers asked Furman to order his return to New York, saying the government was trying to deprive him of access to counsel. The administration has not said Khalil is charged with a crime. Trump wrote on social media that the arrest was “the first arrest of many to come” and that Khalil's presence was contrary to national and foreign policy interests.

The same day, the Education Department wrote to 60 universities warning of federal funding cuts unless they addressed allegations of antisemitism on campus.

Source: Reuters

The Department of Homeland Security announced on March 10 that it had launched the CBP Home mobile application, which lets people in the country illegally submit their intent to depart. Secretary Kristi Noem said self deportation preserves the option of returning legally later and saves enforcement resources.

All CBP One accounts were automatically converted to CBP Home, and the app was made available free through mobile app stores. CBP One had been used under the Biden administration to schedule appointments at ports of entry, which Noem said had allowed more than 1 million people to enter the United States.

The new reporting feature is part of a $200 million domestic and international advertising campaign urging people without status to leave the country.

Source: Department of Homeland Security

Washington Attorney General Nick Brown sued Adams County in Spokane County Superior Court on March 10, alleging that sheriff's deputies had violated the state's Keep Washington Working Act since at least 2022. The 2019 law bars local law enforcement from assisting federal immigration enforcement.

The complaint says deputies jailed people solely on the basis of immigration status, allowed federal agents to question people in custody, and shared personal information on hundreds of Washington residents with federal officials, often by sending lists of people held in the county jail. The state said it had been working with the county on compliance until Trump's inauguration.

The county's lawyers, from America First Legal, argued in February that federal law conflicts with the state statute and called the state's action an abuse of power.

Source: Washington State Standard

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services restored grace periods for at least nine immigration forms after requiring new editions with no transition time, Newsweek reported on March 10. The forms, dated January 20, 2025, took effect on March 3 and were revised to reflect executive orders, including recognizing only male and female and using the term “alien” in place of “noncitizen.”

Applicants who file an outdated edition risk delay or denial, and attorneys said the change put at risk applications submitted in the days before March 3. The American Immigration Lawyers Association and the firm Benach Collopy sued the administration in federal court in Washington on Friday, March 7.

The following day the agency posted grace periods of 30 days or more on the nine form pages, pushing the requirement to use the new editions into early April.

Source: Newsweek