Episodes From the Great Disappearance

Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure that they strive to eliminate. It sees its salvation in giving these masses not their rights but a chance to express themselves.

– Walter Benjamin

+ On January 31, Julio Noriega, a US citizen born in Chicago, was walking in Berwyn, Illinois, to get a pizza when ICE descended on him, placed him in handcuffs, and shoved him into a van with other shacked men. His wallet, which held his ID and Social Security card proving his citizenship, was confiscated. He was detained overnight before being released without a record of what occurred.

+ At 5:30 in the morning of January 27, Jhony Godoy Gregerio was driving with his brother Bayron to work in Maywood, Illinois, when he was pulled over. Bayron was wearing an ankle bracelet mandated by ICE. The officer asked if his name was “Brian.” After Jhony answered “no,” the officer opened the car door and pulled Jhony from the car, his hands and feet cuffed. As multiple trucks carrying 15 armed officers surrounded the vehicle, the officer said he was from ICE. The ICE agent didn’t show Jhonny a warrant, and he has no criminal history other than a few traffic citations. He was taken to Indiana, and before he was able to contact his wife and child or a lawyer, he transferred to the same Louisiana prison where ICE sent Mahmoud Khalil. Jhony has been living legally in the US for 15 years.

That same day, Jhony’s brother Marco Godoy Gregerio, who was driving in a second car, was also pulled over and arrested by ICE. The ICE agent also asked Marco if he was “Brian.” Marco said, “No,” and handed the officer his ID from the Guatemalan consul’s office. As armed ICE agents surrounded his car, Marco was told to turn the car off and that he was going to be placed under arrest. He wasn’t told why, and he wasn’t shown a warrant. Marco had no criminal record. Like his brother Jhony, he was taken into custody, held in Indiana, and quickly transferred to Louisiana without being able to contact his family or a lawyer. He was held for 25 days before being able to request bond from an immigration judge.

+ On January 26, ICE agents surrounded an apartment building in Chicago where Sergio Bolanos Romero lived. As he got into his car and started driving to work, he was pulled over by armed ICE agents who told him to exit the vehicle and demanded he show them proof of his immigration status. After Sergio didn’t provide any, he was handcuffed, taken to a parking lot, which served as an ICE processing center, and then transferred to a jail in Wisconsin. It turned out that ICE had mistaken Sergio for the target of a planned raid who lived in the same building, even though Sergio’s car did not match ICE’s intended target.  Sergio had not committed a crime and was not shown a warrant for his arrest. He was released two days later.

+ On January 29, ICE pulled over Bernandino Randa Marinas on his way to work in Chicago. After handing his ID to an ICE agent, Bernandino was ordered to keep his hands on the steering wheel of his car and not to move. He was held this way for around 40 minutes before one of the ICE officers told him he was under arrest. When Bernando asked to see a warrant, the officer quickly flashed him his cell phone. But he was not shown a Notice to Appear, and at the time of his arrest, there were no pending proceedings against him. Bernandino has lived in the US for more than 20 years, has two children who are US citizens, and a third is due in May. He has no criminal history. 

+ On the morning of February 6, 2025, Jose Ortega Gonzalez was arrested by ICE while driving to work in Kansas. Jose has lived in the US for 20 years and is the father of children who are US citizens. Armed ICE officers surrounded his car and demanded his immigration papers. Jose told them he didn’t have proof of his legal status on him. He was then asked if he’d been arrested for drug trafficking. Jose told the officers he had no criminal history besides a couple of traffic tickets. Jose was then handcuffed, taken to a local police station, and then to an ICE detention center, where he was held for three weeks before seeing a judge who freed him on bond.

+ On January 26, Abel Orozco Ortega was driving back from the grocery store to the same Lyons, Illinois house he’s lived in for 15 years when he was stopped and arrested by ICE. The ICE agents had mistaken him for his son, Abel Jr., who is more than two decades younger. After Abel handed an ICE officer his driver’s license, the immigration cop reached inside Abel’s car window, unlocked and opened the door, then grabbed Abel’s arm and told him he was under arrest. He was hauled out of the car, cuffed, and put into an ICE vehicle. Abel’s son Eduardo came out of the house to see what was going on. As Eduardo, who is a US citizen, tried to speak with his father, the driver of the ICE car drove over his foot. These traumatic events caused Abel to experience a severe health episode, which required his hospitalization. After he was discharged from the hospital, ICE transferred him to a detention center in Indiana, where he remains. Abel Ortega has no criminal record and was never shown a warrant for his arrest. 

+ On the morning of January 27, ICE agents showed up at an apartment building in Chicago. They were looking for a man named Carlos. When one of the residents of the apartment told them no one named Carlos lived there, eight ICE officers busted through the door and began searching the apartment. They found 24-year-old Jockneul Hernandez Rojas in his room watching television while in bed. The officer told him to get dressed and that he was under arrest. Jockneul was handcuffed and led out of the building. Jocknuel was not shown a warrant and had no criminal record. He had previously been issued a Notice to Appear by ICE, but the immigration court had dismissed the case against him. Jocknuel was taken to the ICE center in Indiana and then swiftly transferred to Louisiana, where he was later released on the orders of an immigration judge.

+ In the early morning hours of January 28, federal agents broke down the door of Raul Lopez Garcia’s house in Elgin, Illinois. They located Raul in an upstairs bedroom, where they handcuffed him and confiscated his identification documents. He was taken to an ICE facility for processing. Raul was not shown a warrant for his arrest and had no criminal record. ICE later claimed that they encountered Raul while looking for his stepson. Raul was eventually released on bond by a federal judge.

+ ICE agents broke down the door of Senen Becerra Hernandez’s Chicago apartment, looking for his roommate. Senen was placed in handcuffs and ordered to wait outside for more than an hour as they looked for the target of their raid. Instead of releasing him, the ICE officers took Senen to a detention center. ICE later justified his warrantless arrest by falsely claiming that he didn’t live at the address and had no community ties. In reality, Senen lived in the apartment where the raid occurred, had a job, and attended a local church.

+ At 11 AM on February 7, an ICE team entered El Potro’s Mexican Café and Cantina in Liberty, Missouri. The 10-member team was armed and dressed in tactical gear. Several of the agents wore masks over their faces. One of the ICE agents told the cafe owner they were looking for someone and ordered him to make all his employees available for questioning. They didn’t provide a name, show him a photograph, or provide a warrant. Still, the owner felt he had to comply. 

As two ICE agents guarded the door, the employees were rounded up and placed in separate booths in the restaurant, where each employee was ordered to provide their ID. One employee was almost immediately placed in handcuffs, while the others were detained in the booths for more than two hours as ICE seized the employment records from the restaurant. At 12:30, 12 employees were placed in handcuffs, marched out of the cafe, and taken into custody. Eleven workers were detained in Kansas, while another was taken to Kentucky and later to Indiana. All but two of the workers were soon released on minimal bonds. One was deported, and the other remains in detention. 

(Note: Most of these accounts are taken from a class action suit filed this week by the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights and Organized Communities Against Deportation.)

+++

+ In their mass roundups of alleged members of the Tren de Aragua gang, ICE has been using tattoos as justification to deport noncitizens to a life of hard labor and torture in Salvadoran prisons. Among those deported are: a tattoo artist who entered the US legally seeking asylum: a teenage boy in Arlington, Texas, who got a tattoo on his left hand of a rose with paper money as its petals because, his sister said, he thought it “looked cool;” and a 26-year-old man whose tattoos his wife claims are unrelated to any gangs, never mind TdA.

+ Here’s the declaration of immigration attorney Linette Tobin on the arrest and deportation to El Salvador of her client Jerce Reyes Barrios, a professional soccer player and dissident from Venezuela who was seeking asylum in the US as a political refugee.

1. I am the immigration attorney for Jerce Reyes Barrios, born in [sic] January 16, 1989 in Venezuela.

2. In February and March 2024, Mr Reyes Barrios marched in two demonstrations in Venezuela, protesting the authoritarian rule of Maduro. At the second demonstration, he was detained and taken to a clandestine building where he was tortured (electric shocks and suffocation) along with other demonstrators.

3. Shortly after his release, he fled Venezuela for the United States. He registered with CBP One in Mexico, then presented himself to CBP officials on the day of his appointment. He was taken into custody and detained at Otay Mesa Detention Facility in September 2024. 

4. We applied for asylum, withdrawal of removal, and CAT protection in December 2024. His final individual hearing is set for April 17, 2025, before Judge Robinson at the Otay Mesa immigration court.

5. On March 15, 2025, Mr. Reyes Barrios was deported to El Salvador with no notice to counsel or family. It was not until March 18, 2025, that counsel was able to reach an ICE official and learn that he had, in fact, been deported.

6. Mr. Reyes Barrio was/is a professional soccer player in Venezuela. He has never been arrested or charged with a crime. He has a steady employment record as a soccer player, as well as a soccer coach for children and youth.

7. Initially, Mr Barrios was placed in maximum security at Otay Mesa and accused of being a Tren de Aragua gang member. The accusation is based on two things. First, he has a tattoo on his arm of a crown sitting atop a soccer ball with a rosary and the word “Dios.” DHS alleges that this tattoo is proof of gang membership. In reality, he chose the tattoo because it is similar to the logo for his favorite soccer team, Real Madrid. See the logo below.

8. Second, DHS reviewed his social media posts and found a photo of Mr. Reyes Barrios making a hand gesture that they allege is proof of gang membership. In fact, the gesture is a common one: It means “I Love You” in sign language and is commonly used as a Rock-and-Roll symbol.

9. After submitting a police clearance from Venezuela indicating no criminal record, multiple employment letters, a declaration from the tattoo artist who rendered the tattoo, and various online images showing similar soccer ball/crown tattoos and explaining the meaning of the hand gestures, Mr Reyes Barrios was transferred out of maximum security.

10. Nevertheless, on March 10th or 11th, he was transferred from Otay Mesa to Texas without notice. Then, on March 15, 2025, he was deported to El Salvador. Counsel and family have lost all contact with him and have no information regarding his whereabouts or condition.

+ If this is how they’re treating opponents of Maduro, imagine how they’re treating dissidents of the Bukele regime in El Salvador.

+ How does ICE justify these arrests and deportations to Buekele’s concentration camp-like prison, where torture, food deprivation and killings are commonplace? In truly Kafkaesque terms: “the lack of specific information about each individual actually highlights the risk they pose. It demonstrates they are terrorists with regard to whom we lack a complete profile.”

+ In other words, lack of evidence is evidence of guilt!

+ Immigration lawyer Lindsay Toczylowski described the case of another Venezuelan asylum seeker caught in Trump’s drift net:

Our Immigrant Defenders Law Center client fled Venezuela last year & came to the US to seek asylum. He has a strong claim. He was detained at entry because ICE alleged his tattoos are gang related. They are absolutely not.

We last spoke to our client on Thursday before he was supposed to have a hearing in immigration court,  but ICE didn’t bring him. The govt atty had no info about why he was not there. The Judge reset the hearing for Monday. We have been trying to contact our client ever since.

Our client came to the US seeking protection but has spent months in ICE prisons, been falsely accused of being a gang member and today he has been forcibly transferred, we believe, to El Salvador. We are horrified tonight thinking what might happen to him now.

The Alien Enemies Act would allow the Trump administration to remove people from the US based on an accusation alone. The accusation could be, as it is for our client, completely baseless. But they would remove them anyway, despite the dangers, despite the lack of due process.

What happened today is a dark moment in our history. One bright spot in this madness that I see are the many lawyers and advocates across the country who spent their Saturday fighting like hell to preserve justice in the face of horrific cruelty.

We will keep fighting.

+ On Saturday, March 15, Judge James Boasberg, chief judge of the US District Court in DC,  issued a temporary restraining order barring deportations by the Trump administration based on the Alien Enemies Act of 1798–which the administration used to circumvent regular deportation proceedings and quickly remove 238 noncitizens who it accused of belonging to the Tren de Aragua gang–and ordered all flights to turn around and return to the US. The Trump administration defied the judge’s order.  As documented in a timeline prepared by Adam Isaacson of the Washington Office on Latin American Affairs, every one of the flights landed after Judge Boasber’s order, some hours after the order, and at least one plane departed a U.S. airport after the Justice Department received notice of the court’s order.

+ The Trump administration responded to Judge Baosberg’s ruling by demanding that a federal appeals court remove him from the case, called him a Marxist and a terrorist sympathizer and asked Congress to impeach him. Then Trump let loose on him in his customary manner.

+ It didn’t take long for Elon to join the lynch mob.

+ The guy whose geek-freak minions are wrecking the government couldn’t pass a basic civics test on how the government works under the Constitution, even though we’ve just been through two impeachment trials…(The House indicts (i.e., impeaches), and the Senate tries. To convict, the Senate requires a two-thirds majority vote. Two-thirds of 100 is 67, not 60.)

+ James Emanuel “Jeb” Boasberg, who Trump claims is a “radical left lunatic,” was Brett Kavanaugh’s room-mate at Yale Law School, served as a top homicide prosecutor in DC, and as a federal judge stopped the release of Trump’s tax returns, forced the release of Hillary’s emails, gave lenient sentences to January 6 rioters, is a close friend of John Roberts, served as the presiding judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and was appointed to the bench not by Barack Obama but George W. Bush…

+ All this roused an anodyne reply from the ordinarily somnolent John Roberts. “For more than two centuries,” Roberts wrote, “It has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision. The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose.”

+ Roberts’ feeble pushback against the coming “putsch” targeting federal judges who stand in Trump’s way was less of a rebuke than a signal to Trump to let the appeals courts do his bidding for him. This is, after all, the same justice who wrote the Supreme Court opinion giving Trump total immunity for any presidential actions.

+ Judge Boasberg’s response was more forceful and to the point. He chastised the Trump administration in a hearing on Thursday for their “woefully insufficient” response to his order, saying the Trump administration had “again evaded its obligations” to provide information on the timing and locations of the deportation flights after he issued his injunction last Saturday.

+ But the attorney general of the United States, Pam Bondi, made the novel argument that a federal judge didn’t even have the right to question the DHS over its violation of his court order:

This judge has no right to ask these questions. You have one unelected federal judge trying to control foreign policies, trying to control the Alien Enemies Act, which they have no business presiding over. This has been a pattern with these liberal judges. It’s been a pattern with what they’ve been doing.This judge has no right to do that. He’s attempting to meddle in foreign affairs. Meddling in our government. And the question should be, why is the judge trying to protect terrorists who have invaded our country over American citizens.

+ Farewell, Marbury vs. Madison!

+ In late February, the Canadian actress Jasmine Mooney was kidnapped by ICE after she tried to renew her work visa at the US/Mexico border. She was cuffed, thrown into a van, held prisoner for 12 days, denied access to a lawyer, made to sleep on concrete floors and given a forced pregnancy test before being sent back to Canada with no explanation from DHS officials for the brutality of her treatment. Mooney described her surreal ordeal in vivid terms for an article in The Guardian.

+ On March 5, Ranjani Srinivasan was told by email that her student visa had been revoked after she attended a couple of protests and liked some social media posts in support of Palestinians in Gaza. Ranjani, a 37-year-old architect from India who was on the verge of completing her doctoral program in urban planning at Columbia, withdrew from school and fled to Canada after ICE knocked on her dorm door and accused her of advocating “violence and terrorism.” In an interview with Boston radio station WBUR, Ranjani said:

I’m not a terrorist sympathizer. I’m not pro-Hamas. And I think it’s really dangerous to label any free speech that somebody disagrees with, or any sort of peaceful objection to global issues, as terrorism. I think it just creates a climate of fear where people are scared to share their opinions. There’s a feeling that your visa could be revoked for even the simplest political speech, and the whole point of an American university is to have debate and nuance about ideas to contest them freely. I think there’s a general fear of doing that now.

+ On March 9, a French space researcher was subjected to a “random” search upon arrival in the US. His phone and computer were confiscated and searched. The DHS agents found a series of text messages describing Trump’s treatment of scientists, which they used to accuse him of harboring a “hatred of toward Trump that could be described as terrorism.” He was held in custody overnight and deported back to Europe the next day. Agence France Press later reported that DHS had accused him of “hateful and conspiratorial messages” and had referred him to the FBI.

+ On March 12, Dr. Rasha Alawieh was detained by immigration officials at Boston’s Logan Airport. She was told that her visa had been revoked and that she would be deported back to Lebanon, where she’d been visiting her parents. Her phone and computer were confiscated. Dr. Alawieh works at Brown Medicine and Rhode Island Hospital. She had secured an H-1B visa that doesn’t expire until 2027. She was trained in the U.S. at Ohio State, the University of Washington, and Yale as a transplant surgeon. She hasn’t been convicted or accused of a crime. In court filings, ICE claimed to have discovered photos on her phone that were “sympathetic” to leaders of Hezbollah. It turns out that the images weren’t Dr. Alaweigh’s but had been posted to a group chat she belonged to.

+ On March 17, masked ICE agents arrested Badar Khan Suri outside his own in Arlington, Virginia. Bara is an Indian national with a student visa who was doing post-doctoral research at Georgetown University. The agents told Badar his visa had been revoked and he would be deported to India. Badar has no criminal record and is married to a US citizen. Badar’s lawyer, Hassan Ahmad, told Politico that he had been targeted because of his wife’s Palestinian heritage. In a sworn statement, Badar’s wife, Mapheze Saleh, said the detention of her husband “has completely upended our lives…Our children are in desperate need of their father and miss him dearly. As a mother of three children, I desperately need his support to take care of them and me.” On Thursday, a federal court blocked Badar’s deportation.

+ ICE has arrested more people (13,000) in the first 22 days of February 2025 than any other month in the last seven years.

+ Just as Clinton and Biden laid the groundwork for the Patriot Act with the Counter-Terrorism laws of the ’90s, the Biden administration set the stage for Trump’s onslaught on noncitizen students on college campuses in the US…

+ ICE is opening a new private prison in Michigan for noncitizens (maybe even citizens, given ICE’s recent track record) rounded up by Trump’s raids. The North Lake Facility in Baldwin used to be a private federal prison. It was closed in 2022 and then acquired by the GEO Group, which expects to rake in more than $70 million in yearly revenue. Ka-aching! (The German company Topf und Söhne, which described itself as just “an ordinary company,” made millions selling crematoria and ventilation systems for gas chambers to the SS. Their full role in the Holocaust wasn’t uncovered until 1980. The companies complicit in the ethnic cleansing of the US can be found on the stock exchange.)

+ John Sandweg, who served as an acting director of ICE during the Obama administration.“If your goal is to increase the number of deportations, you can’t hit big numbers of removals without focusing on the non-criminal population.”

+ DHS Secretary Kristi “the Puppy Killer” Noem has reportedly begun performing lie detector tests on employees to determine who is leaking ICE raids to the media.

+ Even the NYT’s rightwing columnist Ross Douthat sees the problem with this: “As in the War on Terror, a theory of sweeping executive power over suspected enemies will allow for executive practices that sweep up people who may not be enemies at all.”

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