Late last month, Kevin Zaldaña Ramírez was detained by Immigration Customs and Enforcement officers at the construction site outside of Houston where he was working.
Zaldaña, 20, came to the U.S. in 2018, fleeing gang recruitment in El Salvador. He has legal protection from deportation under Special Immigrant Juvenile Status, which aids youth under 18 fleeing abuse or neglect. Although Zaldaña had not yet applied for permanent residency, he has a legal basis to be in the country, and he held a valid work permit. According to his mother, arresting officers said his case number was “fake,” and he remains in custody in Texas as she pleads for his freedom, Houston Landing reported.
“I ask the president to have mercy,” Yolanda Ramírez said at a press conference last week. “And to catch the people who are really criminals, but not innocent people like my son.”
Zaldaña’s case is one of several that have recently unsettled immigration law experts, as the Trump administration eschews long-standing enforcement norms. Similarly, in Washington, D.C., this week, a Venezuelan couple was arrested and charged with misdemeanor illegal entry, more than two years after their arrival at the southern U.S. border.
While federal law allows illegal entry charges to be filed up to five years after apprehension, typically they come just days or weeks later. Advocates for the couple told the Los Angeles Times that it’s the first time they’ve seen immigrants charged with illegal entry this long after the fact. According to the paper, the couple both have pending asylum claims, as well as Temporary Protected Status — although the Trump administration revoked those protections for Venezuelans in a move set to take effect next month.
The aggressive enforcement approach is starting to bear out in the numbers. According to an analysis published by The Guardian on Thursday, U.S. officials arrested more immigrants in the first 22 days of February than in any month over the past seven years.
Deportations, on the other hand, are down compared with the same period last year, but those numbers can be misleading, since border encounters have plummeted to decades-long lows. Most of the deportations occurring at this time last year involved the quick return of people apprehended at the border to Mexico. Locating and then deporting people from cities and towns throughout the country is more complicated, and takes more time and resources.
The high rate of arrests and slow pace of deportations has swelled numbers in immigration detention centers to capacity, according to the Department of Homeland Security, and many are becoming overcrowded. Detainees told the news outlet Capital & Main that this has led to smaller meals and delays in medical care.
“It keeps getting worse, and it’s going to get worse. It’s horrible since Trump came,” Ledys Isea told the outlet in Spanish. “They bring people, they bring people, and they bring people.”
Private prison companies, which supply the vast majority of the nation’s immigration detention space, are reportedly clamoring for new contracts to open up more beds. The Trump administration is also considering detaining immigrants on military bases, according to multiple reports. Writing in Lawfare on Tuesday, law professor Chris Mirasola concluded that there is a narrow but viable legal pathway for this to occur.
Mahmoud Khalil, a 30-year-old green card holder who was detained last week and transferred from New York to a facility in Louisiana, is one of the most high-profile immigration detainees in custody. President Trump said in social media this week that Khalil’s detention is related to his involvement in pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University, where he earned a master’s degree last year.
Khalil’s legal team has described his arrest — as a permanent legal resident — as unprecedented, while some legal bloggers and journalists have placed it in a larger context of what they describe as politically-motivated enforcement targeting pro-Palestinian activists. Immigration researcher and Syracuse University professor Austin Kocher explained this week that both understandings are, in fact, correct.
On the one hand, “green card holders and even U.S. citizens are arrested and detained by immigration authorities more often than most people are aware,” and a number of those arrests have involved Palestinian activists. On the other hand, Kocher writes, use of “the specific law that might allow the U.S. to deport Mahmoud is extraordinarily rare in recent history.”
The law that Kocher is referring to is an element of the Immigration and Nationality Act, which was last used in 1995, according to The New York Times. The Trump administration has argued the provision allows the Secretary of State to deport permanent legal residents if they represent a threat to national security. Secretary of State Marco Rubio shared a Department of Homeland Security statement claiming that Khalil satisfied that criteria by having “led activities aligned to Hamas,” during the protests. The White House cited unreleased “intelligence” to defend the claim, the New York Post reported.
Some legal scholars have argued this law was struck down as unconstitutional in 1996 by a federal district court after the Clinton administration targeted a Mexican national for deportation. That decision was later reversed by an appeals court on procedural grounds, without weighing in on the merits of the case.
In a twist of irony, the judge behind that district court decision was Maryanne Trump Barry — the president’s late older sister.
“The issue,” Barry wrote, “is whether an alien who is in this country legally can, merely because he is here, have his liberty restrained and be forcibly removed to a specific country in the unfettered discretion of the Secretary of State and without any meaningful opportunity to be heard. The answer is a ringing ‘no.’”
Late Thursday, lawyers for Khalil filed a petition for his immediate release.
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