The Freedom-Loving Minutemen of Massachusetts Strike Again-Immigration

The Freedom-Loving Minutemen of Massachusetts Strike Again: Just down the road from Lexington and Concord, American patriots scurried to defend their immigrant neighbors.

The Disappeared: Lessons from LATIN AMERICA

 

The ‘Disappeared’: Lessons From Latin America National Security Archive May 12, 2025 National Security Archive We can’t help but connect what is happening in our country today to a long history in the Americas of governments’ use of enforced disappearance. Three experts with direct experience provide lessons in how to protest, to mobilize, to fight back. ,    On April 30, the National Security Archive and the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA) co-hosted an online conversation with three Latin American experts to learn from their experiences with enforced disappearance. The motivation behind the meeting was a growing sense of alarm, disbelief, and helplessness among many Americans as we witness the Trump administration’s unprecedented actions targeting immigrants in the United States. At the president’s direction, U.S. government agents have seized men, women, and children for detention and deportation without due process. We have seen the images of masked security forces swarming a student outside her home, a mother driving with her kids, workers in a restaurant kitchen. To take them where? Whether the agents are from ICE, DEA, ATF, CPB, or the local police, they don’t always reveal the victim’s destination. They don’t always inform their families that they’ve taken them. They don’t always allow the victim to contact their lawyer. They don’t always bring them before a judge. And now they don’t even always imprison them in the United States. How do we make sense of this? For those of us working in Latin America, the actions of Trump’s security forces ring a deeply disturbing bell. We can’t help but connect what is happening in our country today, right now, to a long history in the Americas of governments’ use of enforced disappearance to punish people considered dissidents. In Latin America, that could mean armed guerrillas or suspected subversives; more often it meant students, teachers, journalists, investigators, indigenous activists, opposition politicians, lawyers, priests. But if the region has a dark history of disappearing its perceived enemies, it also has a proud and powerful tradition of fighting back. People mobilized. They organized. They created strategies to protest the disappearances, demand information, hold hearings, fight in the courts, create new laws, search for the missing, expose injustice, and tell the rest of the world what was happening. That’s why we invited these three experts – these colleagues and friends – to speak to us. Mimi Doretti, Juan Méndez, and Marcela Turati all have direct experience with enforced disappearance and its impact on a society. We need to hear from them. We need to learn from their histories. We need to pull lessons from what they have to tell us about how to fight back. Our conversation is archived for anyone who missed the live event. And go to WOLA’s posting about the webinar for a transcription of the some of the key remarks and a set of powerful conclusions drawn from our speakers’ presentations. Learn about disturbing parallels between the U.S. government’s current trajectory and what their nations have lived through—and learn about how courageous people from many walks of life have responded. WATCH THE RECORDING Speakers include: Mercedes Doretti, Executive Director, Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team Juan E. Mendez, Professor of Human Rights Law in Residence, Washington College of Law, American University Marcela Turati, an investigative journalist based in Mexico Kate Doyle, Senior Analyst at the National Security Archive, will moderate. Carolina Jiménez Sandoval, President of WOLA, will introduce the event. About the National Security Archive: Founded in 1985 by journalists and scholars to check rising government secrecy, the National Security Archive combines a unique range of functions: investigative journalism center, research institute on international affairs, library and archive of declassified U.S. documents ("the world's largest nongovernmental collection" according to the Los Angeles Times), leading non-profit user of the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, public interest law firm defending and expanding public access to government information, global advocate of open government, and indexer and publisher of former secrets. Latin America   disappeared Political repression

Federal Judge Restricts Border Patrol in California

 A federal court on Tuesday issued a preliminary injunction forbidding the Border Patrol from conducting warrantless immigration stops throughout a wide swath of California. 

The ruling came in response to an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit filed after the El Centro Border Patrol traveled to Kern County to conduct a three-day sweep in January, detaining day laborers, farm workers and others in a Home Depot parking lot, outside a convenience store and along a highway between orchards.  

The ruling prohibits Border Patrol agents from taking similar actions, restricting them from stopping people unless they have a reasonable suspicion that the person is in violation of U.S. immigration law. It also bars agents from carrying out warrantless arrests unless they have probable cause that the person is likely to escape before a warrant can be obtained. 

“You just can’t walk up to people with brown skin and say, ‘Give me your papers,’” U.S. District Court Judge Jennifer L. Thurston said during a Monday hearing in Fresno that featured moments of heated exchange between government attorneys and the judge.

The ACLU filed suit on behalf of United Farm Workers, arguing that the stops violated the Fourth Amendment. The judge has not decided on the totality of the case, but on Tuesday granted the ACLU’s motion to stop the Border Patrol from conducting similar operations while the case moved through the courts. 

“I think that it’s pretty clear that half of a century of really established law is being upheld. It’s unfortunate that this is a cause for celebration. It’s not legal to snatch people off the street for looking like farm workers or day laborers,” said Elizabeth Strater, vice president of United Farm Workers. 

California Attorney General Rob Bonta agreed. “That’s existing law, and the judge’s order reflects existing law.” 

“You can’t just indiscriminately stop people and search them without any appropriate reasonable suspicion or probable cause or without a warrant,” Bonta said at a news conference in San Diego on Monday about conditions in ICE detention. “So, it sounds like the judge had seen enough and wanted to issue an order. “

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The injunction is in effect in the jurisdiction of California’s Eastern District, which spans the Central Valley from Redding to Bakersfield. 

After the January sweep, the man who led it, Chief Patrol Agent Gregory Bovino, said his agents specifically targeted people with criminal and immigration histories. However, a CalMatters investigation revealed that the Border Patrol had no criminal or immigration history on 77 of the 78 people it arrested.