An immigration court sign is seen as federal agents patrol the halls of the Ted Weiss Federal Building in New York City on May 12, 2026. | Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images
This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.
Welcome to The Logoff: The Trump administration is further limiting due process for asylum-seekers in the US.
What’s happening? On Tuesday, the administration issued a rule changing how some asylum requests are handled. Under the new policy, immigrants in more than 444,000 asylum cases could be denied the chance to speak with an asylum officer and claim asylum, which requires them to have experienced persecution, or the threat of persecution, in their home country because of their race, religion, nationality, political opinions, or another characteristic.
Instead, those immigrants would be redirected to immigration judges — who could order their deportation without any additional process.
The change, according to the administration, is intended to help clear a substantial backlog in the US asylum system, which has 1.4 million cases currently pending. But it fits a pattern by the Trump administration of dramatically curtailing access to asylum in the US.
What’s the context? Under the second Trump administration, many previous immigration judges have been forced out or fired from their roles. Their replacements, as Bloomberg reported earlier this year, are minimally trained and instructed to deny most asylum claims outright.
What’s the big picture? The Trump administration also has a long record of sending immigrants back into dangerous situations in their home countries, or even to countries to which they have no connection.
And those deportations are poised to get worse: In June, the Court also cleared the way for Trump to end temporary protected status for immigrants from Haiti and Syria, without consideration of procedural rules. Now, Immigration and Customs Enforcement is reportedly preparing to target hundreds of thousands of Haitians living in the US for deportation, even though the island nation is dealing with serious and widespread gang violence.
With less than 100 days until the 2026 midterm elections, don’t miss my colleague Astead Herndon’s new newsletter, The Midterms, Actually. Every week, Astead breaks down the big ideas and key people behind the political shifts shaping the 2026 elections. You can subscribe here.
And with that, it’s time to log off…
Want to spend less time on social media? Here’s some excellent advice from my colleague Constance Grady, available here with a gift link.
Thanks for reading, have a great evening, and we’ll see you back here tomorrow!
Masked law enforcement officers in tactical gear throwing civilians to the ground. In some cases — like Renee Good, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo and Joan Sebastian Guerrero — officers shoot people dead. Others disappear into detention before being deported to countries where they may have no family or connections.
Critics argue that the great country President Donald Trump envisions could be taken right out of a dystopian novel. A version of this society has existed since 1977 in the comic book world of Judge Dredd, a British series set in the year 2099 AD that depicts an authoritarian police state in the eastern United States.
And Judge Dredd is the image the Trump administration has chosen to assist with recruiting new immigration judges.
Earlier this year, Daniel Sanchez-Estrada was sentenced to 30 years in prison for moving a box of zines. He was charged with corruptly concealing a document or record, one of the nine people convicted in the prosecution following last year’s noise demonstration at the Prairieland Detention Center near Dallas in northern Texas. Unlike the others convicted in this case, Sanchez-Estrada was not at the protest and maintains he had no role in its planning.
According to prosecutors, Sanchez-Estrada moved the zines at the request of his wife, Maricela Rueda, who attended the demonstration and was sentenced to 70 years in prison after being convicted of rioting, explosive charges and providing material support to terrorists. But no evidence was presented at trial regarding why Sanchez-Estrada moved the publications, which a defense committee has subsequently told Salon “was done entirely of his own accord and for his own reasons.”
The Prairieland case has been widely criticized for its application of terrorism charges against protesters. Sanchez-Estrada’s conviction, in particular, has been criticized for the harsh sentencing applied and his tangential connection to the protest. Ana Bell, the sister of Sanchez-Estrada, spoke with Salon about her brother’s case and what it means for free speech in Trump’s America.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How is your family holding up, and how has the trial and conviction impacted you and your family personally?
My brother Dez was the main caregiver for my parents, with him having the most flexible schedule. He could easily schedule his appointments for whenever my mom didn’t have a doctor’s appointment and stuff like that. We’re not complaining. They’re parents, and we love them. We want to take care of them. It did present a challenge that we weren’t expecting because he was the main person taking care of them.
My younger brother is a teacher, so he’s usually in a classroom. I opened a bookstore a couple of months ago, so I’m trying to run the business and everything. It’s been interesting with all of the things that we have to take care of. We were talking yesterday, I had to figure out how to deal with his taxes. He was detained, I have his power of attorney, and I’m just like, “Okay, so a lot of this stuff that is in the house, what is receipts, what is actually business expenses? Stuff like that is not something that one is expecting to do, and all of a sudden you have to take care of it, and it adds an additional layer of stress that wasn’t there before.
“Everything that’s happening right now, it’s very hurtful, very painful for our family.”
And that’s on top of the emotional roller coaster. You don’t know if this is the last conversation we will have for a while, because he could be moved to a different facility and then we have to figure out how to set up communications, how to set up his commissary. Like, would we be allowed to visit him in person? Is he even at a distance where we can drive to see him?
For example, this weekend, on Saturday, we were able to visit. My mom, dad and his stepdaughter. So he was able to see me and he was so happy that she was there. But then on Sunday, when it was my turn to go visit him, we showed up, and visitations had been canceled, so we didn’t get to see him on Sunday. Now we have to wait until next Saturday or Sunday, and hope that from here until then, he hasn’t been moved to a different facility, and we didn’t miss our chance to see him.
Sometimes he calls and we miss the phone call, or sometimes the number doesn’t work, and like you’re trying to press five to answer the call, and it just hangs up the call instead. It’s an emotionally-charged situation, even though it was just a phone call. It all adds up because right now, everything feels like an open wound that we have been trying to heal, and it’s not closing. Everything is fresh. Everything just gets harder.
Could you talk a little bit about how it feels having people on the internet trading incorrect information about your brother?
I’m not saying that these people have ill intent, but I do believe that words have a lot of power and the words we use to communicate can make a breakthrough.
Someone asked me in a comment if he had just printed the magazines, and someone would come and grab them from that house, and I was just like, “You have completely wrong information.” These were magazines that he bought. They weren’t 10 or 20 copies of the same magazine. They were one like one copy about freedom, one about the environment. They were materials that he read, and he critiqued.
I think people just need to take a step back before making a statement and actually do a little bit of research because a lot of the information is just one Google away. You can go on the internet right now and look for all the evidence. It’s available. It has been unsealed. Once you have that in your hands, you can see all the information, not just what I say, not just what the government is saying.
I try not to spend a lot of time online doing this because, as I said, I do run a business. I have three kids. I’m a single mom. There is a lot of misinformation out there, and a lot of people are just running with it, kind of like a case of broken telephone.
Everything that’s happening right now, it’s very hurtful, very painful for our family. If I don’t check my emotions before I start talking with people, I could make it a bigger issue than it actually needs to be.
For me, it’s very important right now for people to understand that while my brother is the one who is in jail, and the government is not literally stating, “We are coming for your freedom of speech.” That’s exactly what is happening. He is just the vessel right now.
Could you speak a little bit about what it’s been like to witness this campaign from the government to paint your brother in this way? I think the idea that you could be convicted for what amounts to moving a box of your own magazines is a very foreign idea to most Americans.
It is very disturbing. I just opened a bookstore. So what are the odds that I literally have countless works right now in my store of examples of people who fought against fascism? I only sell fiction, but you have Katniss Everdeen in “The Hunger Games,” you have Harry Potter in Hogwarts, you have Thomas in “The Maze Runner.” You have all these characters that are literally standing up to oppression and fascism, and those who are in power and they show an amount of corruption that you think only happens in books.
“We felt that the government was trying to make an example out of people who are not content with the current administration.”
We felt that the government was trying to make an example out of people who are not content with the current administration. Judge Reed, at my brother’s sentencing, said it. The state is trying to make an example to not encourage people with similar ideologies to follow this path. “The reason why you guys are getting this many years,” and this is me paraphrasing, “It’s because we’re trying to make an example.” He said the quiet part out loud, and it’s on the record.
This is the reason why I encourage people over and over to look at the court transcripts, listen to what the prosecution presented as their case, listen to what the defense attorneys were questioning and asking for and then see who told the truth by looking at the evidence that they’ve presented to you.
In my brother’s case, when you look inside the box, everything was dated prior to COVID. Even if you did not like the political observations of some of those magazines, essays, critiques, poetry or whatever was in ther, these are feelings from the people, and they’re protected under the First Amendment. You are allowed to feel how you want. You are allowed to feel that the current administration is the best one ever, and you’re allowed to tell that to people and not go to jail. But you’re also allowed to do the opposite and it still doesn’t earn you a sentence.
None of the stuff that was in there, whether it was for or against the government, was a crime or illegal to have, and it was not used to persecute anybody who took part in the noise demo, which my brother was not an attendee of.
My understanding is that you must commit a crime in order to be punished, right? It’s not because of what you think. It’s not because of what you read. It’s not because of what you have in your house. Even more absurd is that it’s not because of the paper magazines, books or pamphlets that you have in your house. That’s what is so incredibly disturbing to me.
What is your message to other people who might be critical of the current government, to would-be protesters?
If I could just give one word of advice to people, as a person who loves this country but doesn’t love what is happening right now, it would be to study the Constitution and fight for it. Listen to which political candidates right now are talking about freedom of speech or immigration issues. Ask yourself what things seem to be in jeopardy in our Constitution and find a way to make a change for those. I do not believe that staying quiet is the way to go. I also don’t believe violence is the answer. I do believe that we all need to speak up and defend and uphold the Constitution.
Why do you think the government decided to go after your brother? Assuming this conviction stands, there will be potentially profound implications for the First Amendment and who does and does not enjoy freedom of speech in this country.
I actually think that if he had been somebody else, it would have been the same thing. With him, I feel like the main reason why was that his wife was at the noise demonstration. She was arrested on July 4, and the government had a whole day to look into her and see who she was married to. He was arrested on Sunday, and they did a big production. I watched a video of his arrest.
“In the current political climate, anyone who has brown skin is low-hanging fruit. It’s someone who you expect to get lost in the system.”
I saw all the units that were surrounding him and asked, “What is this?” They came after him as if he were a terrorist, and all he had with him was a box of zines. At some point, they claimed it was explosives, but when they opened it, it was just paper. In the current political climate, anyone who has brown skin is low-hanging fruit. It’s someone who you expect to get lost in the system.
But the fact is that he’s an immigrant — an immigrant who has legal status in the county but an immigrant regardless. Right now, there is so much hateful and hurtful feelings towards immigrants that I feel he was just the perfect scapegoat. It changed the whole thought process of how they see him. They completely dehumanized him simply because of that.
For me, it just aligns so perfectly with everything that they were looking for in a “terrorist.” Even the beard. Some people were crazy about how he had a beard and said that he was in a sleeper cell and all this stuff. He’s a tattoo artist who loves cats. This is outrageous.
There are some headwinds in that this appeals to the Fifth Circuit and then the Supreme Court, both of which are very closely tied to the current administration and their view of the world. At the same time, these judges who handled the case, they do have a record of going too far, even for the Fifth Circuit, and so I’m wondering how optimistic you are about your brother being able to prevail through the legal system.
I wanted to believe that justice would be served. I wanted to believe that we would be bringing my brother [home], but the moment I heard the sentence for Autumn Hill and the reasons that the judge gave, the judge said that the sentence was not more than he thought was reasonable to give. That changed my perspective on that moment. I lost hope before we got to my brother’s sentencing. I lost hope because it didn’t make any sense. It didn’t make any sense from the legal point of view that they would receive this much punishment for something that was so minimal.
I don’t know how to feel. Part of me wishes that I could be hopeful again, because we’re gonna keep fighting regardless. I made the statement before that we’re probably going to spend every last minute of our lives trying to fight for his freedom, and that’s very unfortunate because he’s so young. They’re all so young, but they shouldn’t be behind bars. And I feel that the justice system is failing them, and it’s failing all of us. If the appeal doesn’t work, then it will be just like a failure in the justice system. I want to be hopeful, but I’m not holding my breath.
Do you think there is a chance of a potential political solution to this, or is there the political bravery out there to speak to this issue? I’ve spoken with people who have suggested that the next president should consider a pardon if they don’t prevail on appeal.
I don’t think the current administration will do it at all. But I would like to think that we will vote better next time, and that if we have not been successful with the appeal, or we’re still fighting this case, we could ask for a pardon.
So I’m hoping that if we end up having to go that route, we are able to ask for it and that it might be granted. I would like for the judicial system to actually do its part and be just.
While the hunger and labor strike at the Delaney Hall immigration detention facility in New Jersey ended weeks ago, conditions within the facility have not improved, and may be even worse than before the strike there. Now, policies are seemingly directed at obscuring conditions in the for-profit facility operated by The GEO Group.
In May of 2025, Delaney Hall, which operated as a holding facility for those picked up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement from 2011 to 2017, was recommissioned to support President Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda. On May 22, detainees at Delaney Hall launched a hunger and labor strike at the facility, capturing national attention to what they described as inhumane conditions in the facility. In particular, detainees described unsanitary, moldy or spoiled food and mistreatment by guards. The strike led to significant protests outside the Newark, New Jersey, detention center, and high-profile clashes between protesters and the guards there as well as a frenzy of attention from the national press.
On June 22, advocates for detainees there said that the strike had ended, though not because conditions had improved, but rather because the facility and the Department of Homeland Security had adopted a tactic of frequently transferring detainees between facilities, which effectively broke the ability of detainees to organize themselves within the facility.
Volunteers at an aid tent maintained by local religious groups and organizers say that conditions at the facility have not improved, and may even be getting worse for some, based on conversations with released detainees and their families.
Haydee Colon Hernandez, a pastor at Saint John’s Lutheran Church in Summit, New Jersey, relayed one story in which guards seemingly retaliated against a man in a wheelchair following a conversation between the detainee and Sen. Andy Kim, D-N.J., in which she says guards told the man, “Do you think that just by talking to the senator you’re going to be released?”
“If you want to tell a guy that is in a wheelchair, ‘Stand up when I’m talking to you,’ that’s really abuse. He said, ‘I wasn’t able to get up. I’m in a wheelchair,’” Hernandez said.
Other complaints include persistently low-quality food, isolation within the facility, and frequent transfers between Delaney Hall and other facilities, which serve to prevent organizing in the detention center. One volunteer also described a new system adopted, in which new detainees, often there for shorter periods of time, are kept away from longer-term detainees. Those who are held for shorter periods of time also describe better conditions upon release than other detainees who are held for longer periods. Other volunteers said that the families of detainees have been intermittently encouraged not to discuss conditions in the facility after visits to their family members.
“ICE has really escalated in kidnapping people out in the community.”
In response to a request for comment from Salon, an ICE spokesman denied any allegations of “subprime conditions or overcrowding” at Delaney Hall.
“All detainees are provided with proper meals, water, medical treatment, and have opportunities to communicate with their family members and lawyers. We offer everything a traditional ICE detention facility offers, including access to free legal services and a law library, a variety of reading materials detainees can borrow in our library, recreational space and religious accommodations. All detainees receive full due process,” the spokesperson said.
The frequent transfers between facilities is one of the most important developments since the strike, according to Sally Pillay, the director of the Mami Chelo Foundation, and one of the lead organizers at the aid tent, which provides assistance to both families visiting the facility and those released.
(Photo by Adam Gray/Getty Images) Detainees stand by a window inside the federal immigration center at Delaney Hall in Newark, where ICE is housing detained immigrants on May 26, 2026 in Newark, New Jersey.
“ICE has really escalated in kidnapping people out in the community,” Pillay said. “So every day, hundreds and hundreds of people are being brought into the facility, and every day, hundreds and hundreds of people are being moved out.”
Pillay theorized that the frequent transfers, alongside preventing organizing within the facility, also make it harder for detainees to file habeas corpus petitions, which is a legal mechanism that allows detainees to challenge their detention in court.
Pillay, who has spoken with hundreds of detainees and their families, said that detainees are typically woken up around 1 a.m. for transfers, and that the transfer bus will leave anywhere between 4 a.m. and 10 a.m.
Gabriela Soto, the wife of Martin Soto, a leader of the hunger strike, recalled her experiences with ICE attempting to move her husband from Delaney Hall, which was ultimately successful.
“I saw my husband being thrown into a van from the ramp inside, going into the visiting chapel, two ICE agents grabbed my husband by his ankles and his wrists and threw him in the van. I just hate to see — or to understand why they will do these things,” Soto said in an interview with Salon.
Martin Soto was in Delaney Hall from February until late May, and according to Soto, he was transferred to the Elizabeth Detention Center in New Jersey around 2 a.m. on May 25.
Other volunteers said that it has been harder to gauge what is happening at the facility from the outside due to the disassembly of the so-called “First Amendment” area, which blocked off traffic in the lane of Doremus Ave. closest to Delaney Hall. Before the disassembly, they said they could often hear commotion and sometimes screams from inside the facility, potentially owing to alleged instances where guards pepper-sprayed and beat detainees with batons.
(Photo by Adam Gray/Getty Images) An ICE agent sprays chemical irritants at protesters and media outside the federal immigration center at Delaney Hall, where ICE is housing detained immigrants on May 27, 2026 in Newark, New Jersey. The ongoing protests, which became tense over the holiday weekend, come amid reports of a hunger strike by detainees.
Delaney Hall is not the only detention facility plagued by allegations of abuse. A recent report from Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union found that detainees at the Camp East Montana detention center were forced to endure filthy conditions, fed inedible meals and denied medical care. Detainees also described frequent beatings. DHS denies those allegations.
DHS, in response to a request for comment, also claimed that they provide comprehensive medical care to everyone in ICE custody and that ICE maintains a “zero-tolerance policy for all forms of assault involving individuals in ICE custody.”
“ICE takes every allegation of misconduct seriously and is committed to holding perpetrators fully accountable. Protecting the rights and safety of those in our care is a top priority. This includes safeguarding against abuse by staff, contractors, volunteers, or other detained individuals,” the DHS spokesperson said.
Kathy O’ Leary, a mainstay at the aid tent who works with Pax Cristi, spoke with Salon both during and after the strike and noted that visitation has been much more restricted since the strike began in May, and as tensions escalated throughout June.
For example, visitors were once allowed to wait in an indoor air-conditioned room and are now expected to wait for visitation in an outdoor seating area inside of a chain link fence near the gate of the facility. Inside the facility, there are other issues with heat. For example, during a dangerous heat wave in early July, air conditioning in one section of the facility also went down.
O’Leary cited persistent issues with transparency at the privately owned for-profit detention center as well. If a legislator is visiting for an inspection, they are now required to present privacy waivers for each detainee they want to speak with, which must be signed by the detainee. However, visitors aren’t allowed to bring the papers with them when they visit family in detention, meaning that the only chance detainees have to sign the papers is during a weekly visit to a nearby law library. O’Leary said that the aid tent keeps these papers on hand, but even the volunteers and organizers there needed assistance from legislative aides to ensure they were filled out correctly, and that language barriers can prove a challenge for detainees and their families.
“They’re a little confusing. We have them here in the tent. They’re a little confusing for even for us to figure out. We’ve had to ask the legislative aides for help,” O’Leary said.
Separate from the aid tent, protests at the facility persist, with a grassroots group of activists maintaining a mutual aid table of their own near the detention center. One protester who goes by Basher, and has become a fixture of the protest efforts, said that even though the cameras have left, protests at the facility continue, with between 20 and 30 protesters showing up most nights. In recent days, however, owing to recent killings by ICE in Basher’s view, ICE and guards have been more reluctant to clash with protesters.
In recent weeks, immigration enforcement officers have shot and killed two people: Lorenzo Salgado Araujo in Texas and Johan Sebastian Guerrero in Maine. In Florida, another yet-to-be-identified man was killed after being struck by a semi-truck in Florida while fleeing ICE.
Caregivers in the U.S. are paid just under $26,000 a year on average for the most important work there is. And this June, we learned the government drew up a plan to mark many of them dead.
Let’s back up: When someone who receives Social Security dies, the government owes nothing for the month of the death, even if she lived to its final day. Benefits run a month behind, so her last payment lands after she’s gone, and the bank is told to send it back. We have a system that can find a dead woman’s last dollar and claw it back inside a month. It’s made to ignore the living woman who bathed her, fed her, and sat with her at the end.
And now we know just how little this government values her.
Last month, The Washington Post reported on a whistleblower disclosure from senior Social Security Administration executive Jeremiah Schofield, filed with Sens. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass. and Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn. It describes a plan, devised by Elon Musk’s DOGE and the Department of Homeland Security, to enter nearly 2.7 million living immigrants into the Social Security Administration’s Death Master File, the database used by banks, employers and agencies to confirm who has died. To be marked dead is to be severed from wages, banking and all social benefits.
That was the point: make immigrants miserable enough to self-deport. Two memos reportedly from then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to the acting Social Security Commissioner, Leland Dudek, waved off the legal warnings, the disclosure says, stating “death is a state of ineligibility.” It didn’t matter that the people were alive.
The agency says the plan wasn’t carried out. But roughly 6,000 immigrants were marked dead last year, some of whom had to walk into a government office and prove they were still breathing. And when they did, Immigration and Custom Enforcement was there waiting to arrest them.
Even without the fear that this stunt evoked, aides and the night nurses are already leaving — their protections revoked, status in question — but the need for them isn’t shrinking. Over the next decade, the U.S. will have 10 million openings in direct care. We’ll squeeze this need into the margins.
Even without the fear that this stunt evoked, aides and the night nurses are already leaving — their protections revoked, status in question — but the need for them isn’t shrinking.
The care crisis will be intensified by the Supreme Court’s June 25 ruling in Mullin v. Doe, which clears the way to revoke the Temporary Protected Status of roughly 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians by July 10. This decision has been covered as a healthcare-staffing crisis, and it is that. But that is smaller than the truth: This will be a whole-lifespan problem, as the same workforce holds up both ends of American caregiving, elder care and childcare.
The PHI, a national research organization for the direct-care workforce, has already warned that without immigrant care workers, family caregivers will be forced to leave the workforce or cut their hours to fill the gap. That loss lands hardest on women across every sector and level of the workforce — caregiving is already the number one reason women voluntarily leave their jobs, cited by 42% of those who quit, according to Catalyst research — at a moment when women’s declining labor force participation is already draining the U.S. economy to the tune of an estimated $650 billion a year, or 2.9% of GDP.
New York and Massachusetts sit among the states with the most engaged care policy in the country. Florida and Ohio sit near the opposite end of that spectrum. It hardly matters. Take the caregivers out, and all four states end up in the same place: families with no one to turn to. No state legislates its way out of this loss. Without a caregiver, there is no care. Hard stop.
In much of East Asia, however, shaped by Confucian ideals of filial duty, and in Latino families bound by familismo, tending to the old and the dying is a calling claimed with pride. In the Philippines, which sends caregivers to the whole world, the work is a point of honor.
Other societies put public money in the place of reverence. The Netherlands has covered long-term care under universal insurance since 1968 and now devotes more of its GDP to it, about 4%, than any country tracked by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Sweden, Norway and Denmark similarly fund it as a public good, not a private scramble.
In Japan, the two meet. A Confucian, deeply familial culture, it wrote care into law, requiring every citizen over 40 to carry long-term care insurance, and spending, in 2020, 67% more of its economy on that care than we did. Reverence and infrastructure, together.
The U.S. managed neither. We file care work under menial; overwhelmingly staff it with women, people of color, and immigrants; and pay as if they could feed their families on the sheer joy of being useful.
The reverence born in other countries arrives here, carried by the first generation, and finds nothing to hold onto: no paid leave, no funded care, no status, no relief. If it survives, it does so against the steady pull of a country that degrades and ignores caregiving. The further individuals get from arrival, the easier it becomes to forget cultural standards. That is not immigrants shedding their values. It is a country that imports devotion and budgets nothing to keep it alive.
One in five of the people caring for our children are immigrants — more than 40% in New York City, half in LA — more than half of whom are not citizens. When these hands go, the need remains. Intense work lands on the daughter, the wife, the sister, who absorbs the collapse, on top of her own life and career, uncompensated. It lands on the Panini Generation, pressed between aging parents and young children without paid leave or reprieve.
That daughter is often the one the family was proudest to send away. Education carries a woman farther from home — two to three times farther from her family, research finds, than her less-schooled peers. In her memoir, “My Life In Full,” Indra Nooyi, who left her parents in India to ultimately run PepsiCo, wrote that her mother raised her with “one foot on the accelerator and one on the brake, to go succeed and then come back to family.”
So, we lose. We lose in our communities, as neighbors disappear and businesses shutter with a workforce afraid to show. We lose in our homes, where we need those extra, loving hands. We lose in our accounts, drained by the care no one will fund. We lose in our companies, as women leave when caregiving can’t be negotiated. We lose in our relationships. We lose our people. And then, we reach our melting point and quietly lose ourselves.
The U.S. machine can find the dead and reclaim their last dollar inside a month. It purposefully leaves destitute the people who rocked, fed, bathed, lifted and bury us. Whose hands have caught everything this country dropped and asked almost nothing back. That’s what they get — and we lose.
Members of a spiritual delegation arrive at the Broadview Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) processing center to administer Ash Wednesday sacraments to detainees on February 18, 2026, in Broadview, Illinois. | Jacek Boczarski/Anadolu via Getty Images
On June 28, Sister Leticia “Letty” Ugboaja, a Catholic nun from Nigeria, stepped out of her home to take the short, one-block stroll to her church in McAllen, Texas. It should have been uneventful: dressed in her white habit and bearing a rosary, Sister Letty was walking to Sunday morning mass at Our Lady of Sorrows.
She didn’t make it — US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents stopped, arrested, and handcuffed the 56-year-old. They took her to a detention facility an hour away, reportedly confiscated her rosary, and declined to bring her the medication she takes. She called her diocese for help — and as news spread, both Republican and Democratic members of Congress appealed directly to Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin for details. Hours later, she was released — without explanation.
Plenty of questions surrounding this incident remain. According to her diocese, Sister Letty had worked as a registered nurse in the area for about a decade and entered the country legally.
But the incident is not a one-off — and instead is representative of a concerning trend in America over the last year. Though ICE and President Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement activities have receded from national headlines, Sister Letty’s detention shows how two forces are clashing in the second Trump term: the drive for hardline immigration enforcement and the constitutional imperative of preserving religious liberty and free exercise in America.
The tightening of federal immigration enforcement around religious spaces and believers
The last year of Trump’s mass deportation program has produced many cases like Sister Letty’s — even if they haven’t made national news. Federal immigration agents have detained and harassed Catholic, Protestant, and Muslim chaplains and priests, while sparking fear across denominations — particularly as religious leaders and communities organized and led responses to immigration crackdowns across the country.
Both the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Sister Letty’s case, or other religious liberty concerns. They have also not responded to requests for comment to other local and national outlets in the case of Sister Letty.
In November, the Episcopal bishop of Texas reported that a Kenyan priest working for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice had been detained by ICE while leaving his workplace and transferred to a detention facility. His diocesan leaders said he was working in the US legally, and had the proper documentation to be in the US. In July 2025, a Muslim hospital chaplain in Ohio was arrested and detained during an immigration check-in. An Egyptian immigrant, he was held in detention for weeks before finally being released. And earlier this year, Catholic Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago reported that priests in his archdiocese have been stopped by federal agents and ordered to prove their citizenship. That’s all on top of clergy who were shot at with pepper balls or sprayed with tear gas at anti-ICE protests in Illinois and California.
Yet this clash has shown up not just through harassment of clergy and those dedicated to religious life, but also in restrictions on how those in detention receive pastoral care, how those trying to provide that care are allowed to operate, and whether places of worship can be free of a federal presence.
For years, federal immigration enforcement was limited by “sensitive location” rules designed to protect places like hospitals, schools, and churches from unnecessary intimidation. Those guidelines were first formalized during the Obama administration, kept in place by the first Trump administration, and reaffirmed during the Biden presidency. Nor were these restrictions entirely new: Some form of protection for houses of worship has existed for more than 30 years, according to the legal organization Democracy Forward.
But DHSrescinded the “sensitive location” rules at the start of the second Trump presidency — to “empower” CBP and ICE to go after “criminals” who “will no longer be able to hide in America’s schools and churches to avoid arrest,” according to a DHS statement at the time — triggering legal responses from immigrant rights and religious freedom groups.
“For decades, the federal government recognized a simple truth: targeting people at houses of worship violates religious freedom and harms communities,” Bradley Girard, the senior counsel at Democracy Forward, said earlier this year when announcing friend-of-the-court briefs in federal cases brought by a coalition of Quaker, Sikh, and Baptist groups. “These briefs make clear that the Trump-Vance administration’s policy is not only unlawful — it is dangerous. It chills religious exercise and undermines public safety by driving people into the shadows.”
Many of those suits ended up succeeding — at least in getting judges to protect various Baptist, Lutheran, Christian, and Sikh places of worship that could prove they were being affected by immigration raids. But broader federal protections for places of worship have not yet been formalized.
Instead, churches, religious organizations, and legal aid organizations have waged piecemeal legal fights to secure religious liberty protections, like in Minnesota and Illinois — particularly to exercise pastoral care, like providing counseling, sacraments, and religious rituals. In Minneapolis, for example, Groundwork Legal, a local nonprofit, public interest law firm, sued ICE over a ban on clergy access to the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building.
“Under federal law — both the Constitution and statute — it’s clear that the government can only limit the ability of somebody to practice their religious faith, including the ability to provide [or receive] pastoral care, in the least restrictive means possible given the circumstances,” Irina Vaynerman, the co-founder and lead attorney of Groundwork Legal, told me. “And here, a categorical bar from even entering the building, to offering that care to anyone who wants to receive, it was obviously not the least restrictive means.”
Groundwork filed that suit in February on behalf of multi-denominational faith organizations and faith leaders under both the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act and the First Amendment’s free exercise protections. They won a preliminary injunction in March, with a judge ordering the federal government to allow faith leaders to offer pastoral care to those held by ICE at the building.
Catholic clergy and religious leaders launched a similar suit last fall in Illinois after ICE and CBP officials denied clergy access to the Broadview federal center to minister to detained people — including offering Communion to them. They won a partial victory this year, when a judge ordered federal agents to allow clergy access for Ash Wednesday services — and in May, ICE and religious leaders reached an agreement to allow daily visits once again while litigation plays out.
Vaynerman reiterated to me that the Illinois case is still playing out — these agreements and changes are temporary reprieves, in part because no national protections or guarantees have been formalized beyond piecemeal fights over religious liberty and free exercise in specific cities and around specific federal buildings or places of worship.
“Certainly this is something that we know folks are experiencing across the country…and we know that this is happening all over the country because there is not a standard protocol or policies related to this incredibly important constitutional and statutory right,” she said. “It is so important that the government recognizes [the importance of pastoral care] and then offers that level of access that is constitutionally required to support people going through one of the darkest times in their lives.”
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