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Aaron Reichlin-Melnick Profile picture
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick
@ReichlinMelnick
Senior Fellow @immcouncil. Tweeting on immigration policy and data. Formerly immigration lawyer with @IJCorps. Views my own, retweets =/= endorsements.
16 subscribers
Oct 13 • 12 tweets • 5 min read
This makes NO SENSE. A 13-year-old was arrested by local police for unknown reasons, and then turned over to ICE, which is detaining him far away from his mother — who is going through immigration court, has an asylum application on file, and is legally authorized to work. Image Important context from @TriciaOhio that I'm posting in the interest of fairness. I do not automatically trust it given that she has made multiple inaccurate claims in the past (including even yesterday). IF true, it would at least provide an explanation.
Oct 10 • 6 tweets • 4 min read
UPDATE: Judge Perry’s opinion blocking the Texas National Guard deployment in Chicago is out!

She begins with Alexander Hamilton’s rejection of a “preposterous” idea that the Constitution lets a President deploy a State’s militia to a different State for political retribution. Image Judge Perry spends four pages going over the history of the debates around the Constitution as to the proper relationship of the President to a state militia, especially after overthrowing the British, who had maintained standing armies in the colonies against their wishes. Image
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Oct 5 • 12 tweets • 5 min read
Stephen Miller has now declared this Trump-appointed judge an insurrectionist.

To emphasize, the judge painstakingly examined all the protest happening in Portland before Trump activated the Guard. She noted that there hadn't been any violence at a protest since mid-July. Image Here's how Judge Immergut summarized the last two and a half months of protests at the ICE facility in Portland; they "generally were limited to fewer than 30 people and were 'largely sedate.'"

Stephen Miller's efforts to claim insurrection in this decision is pure propaganda. Image
Oct 2 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
In this raid, they dragged naked children out of their homes and put them into U-Haul vans. And now they're bragging about it.

U.S. citizens had their doors smashed down and were forced into handcuffs and held outside for hours. Senior citizens held outside, their homes trashed. Image Story here: chicago.suntimes.com/immigration/20…
Oct 2 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
This is FALSE. The first thing Vance describes is Emergency Medicaid — not a "Biden" program, from 1986, and not eliminated in the OBBBA.

The second is Cuban/Haitian Entrant Assistance from 1980 (also not Biden-era), and was EXCLUDED from the OBBBA Medicaid cuts (see highlight)! Image Provide a single piece of evidence that anything I posted above is wrong. One.

Am I lying that Emergency Medicaid (1986) and Cuban/Haitian Entrant Assistance (1980) are not "Biden-era"? Am I making it up that the OBBBA doesn't eliminate either?
Oct 2 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
🚨A dangerous moment for America. If the normal police ever pulled something like this — pulling every single person out of an apartment building and handcuffing them to run checks — they would be sued into oblivion. It's beyond unconstitutional. Yet DHS is laughing about it! 🚨What @DHSGov pulled in Chicago on Tuesday is insanely unconstitutional. They raided an apartment building, smashed down every door and dragged entire families into the street, and detained everyone for hours ("Kavanaugh stops").

One U.S. citizen was held for FIVE HOURS. Image
Oct 1 • 8 tweets • 4 min read
That is an outright lie. You can read the text for yourself; the Medicaid section starts on page 55. There is nothing in there AT ALL about “free healthcare” for undocumented immigrants. Vance is just making that up COMPLETELY.

Link in the next post, since Musk suppresses link. Image appropriations.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/…
Sep 30 • 4 tweets • 3 min read
WOW. Remember this May video of a US citizen wrestled to the ground by ICE agents and detained for an hour despite having a valid REAL ID? It gets worse. Two weeks later, ICE did it AGAIN — handcuffed him and detained him for 20 minutes despite his REAL ID.

Now @IJ is suing. The new @IJ lawsuit contains an appalling story of how ICE agents entered a construction site with no warrant — seemingly just because they spotted Latino workers.

Multiple people with legal status marched away from work and held by ICE for 20-30 minutes. Image
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Sep 30 • 25 tweets • 11 min read
I gasped when I saw the front page of this decision; Judge Young includes a postcard sent to him asking "Trump has pardons and tanks ... what do you have?"

He responds "Alone, I have nothing but my sense of duty. Together, We the People ... have our magnificent Constitution." Image Judge Young: "This case ... squarely presents the issue whether non-citizens lawfully present here in United States actually have the same free speech rights as the rest of us. The Court answers this Constitutional question unequivocally 'yes, they do.' 'No law' means 'no law.'" Image
Sep 29 • 23 tweets • 11 min read
NEW: @reuters uncovers that the Trump admin is prosecuting the LOWEST number of drug trafficking cases in decades.

Why? Because the Trump admin has diverted so many law enforcement resources AWAY from drugs to going after migrants instead! Image Story here: reuters.com/legal/governme…
Sep 27 • 5 tweets • 3 min read
This is UNACCEPTABLE. A Border Patrol agent was caught on camera saying that when people in his custody would ask for a doctor, he'd refuse to get them medical help — in part because he views migrants as "animals." It says something that this agent was perfectly happy to openly brag to local police about breaking Border Patrol rules and dehumanizing the people in his custody — refusing to give people a phone or refer them to a doctor when they're sick. It's a sign of a culture of impunity.
Sep 23 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
So far Trump has fired nearly 150 immigration judges, and the purges continue. At the start of his term in office, there were 735 judges. There are now below 580.

The goal is to purge those who believe in due process and replace them with "temporary" judges who won't push back. In some courts, over 75% of the immigration judges have been fired since Trump took office. That this will cause more delay for some cases is no problem for this admin—with more and more people locked in detention, it lets ICE pressure them into giving up.
Sep 19 • 8 tweets • 3 min read
NEW: I got a copy of the H-1B proclamation. It's a 212(f) travel ban proclamation banning the entry into the US of H-1B visa holders who haven't paid the United States $100,000.

It appears to go into effect IMMEDIATELY, despite the US having no system to accept such payments. Image Now it's up on the White House website. whitehouse.gov/presidential-a…
Sep 8 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
🚨The Supreme Court today gives Trump a license to engage in racial profiling, with Justice Kavanaugh writing in concurrence to expressly endorse ICE and Border Patrol targeting any Latinos they observe in Los Angeles speaking Spanish and then demanding their papers. Image
Image Justice Sotomayor is utterly scathing: "We should not have to live in a country where the Government can seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and appears to work a low wage job. Rather than stand idly by while our constitutional freedoms are lost, I dissent." Image
Sep 5 • 10 tweets • 4 min read
🚨NEW: Reversing *generations* of practice, the Board of Immigration Appeals gives ICE exactly what it demanded, ruling that any undocumented immigrant who entered illegally is categorically ineligible to ask a judge for bond — expanding mandatory detention by millions of people. Image The new decision comes after the Trump admin announced in July that it would take the legal position that a 1996 law barred release on bond anyone who crossed illegally — despite no admin having EVER made that claim before. Now the BIA greenlights that completely novel argument.
Sep 3 • 10 tweets • 4 min read
🚨 The Trump admin is moving to de-legalize more than a quarter of a million Venezuelans who have been here for at LEAST four years.

The vast majority entered before Biden took office (often on tourist visas) and were previously granted deportation protections by Trump himself. Trump is now moving to strip protections and deport the same people that he himself granted deportation protections to in his last week in office in 2021.

Trump’s order said protecting noncriminal Venezuelans from being sent back to Maduro was a matter of U.S. national interest. Image
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Sep 3 • 8 tweets • 4 min read
🚨NEW: Declarations filed in the lawsuit against the rushed attempt to deport 600 Guatemalan children reveals the chaotic way the Trump admin carried out the operation.

Children were taken out of bed after midnight to be rushed onto planes. One girl "was so scared she vomited." Image Other declarations directly refute the Trump admin's claims that the children's parents requested their return to Guatemala.

One dad in Guatemala says he got "a strange call" two weeks ago saying that his daughter was about to be deported — despite never having asked for that. Image
Sep 2 • 8 tweets • 3 min read
NEW: The Trump admin plans to double the number of immigration judges, ordering hundreds of military lawyers to serve as immigration judges, despite flimsy legal authority to do so.

Notably, immigration law is infamously complex, and judges normally require months of training. Many former JAGs serve as immigration judges today, having gone through a competitive hiring process. JAGs are often good lawyers, so I am not of the belief that they will all become rubber stampers. But the command pressure to deny will undoubtedly be *enormous.*
Aug 19 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
NEW: McCarthyism returns to immigration law, as @USCIS announces that it will begin screening applicants for immigration benefits for "Anti-America ideologies or activities." The term has no prior precedent in immigration law and its definition is entirely up to the Trump admin. Image The full policy memo is here. The Trump administration says that it will use its discretion to deny immigration benefits to anyone it deems to have supported a group with "anti-American ideologies" or engaged in "ant-American activities." uscis.gov/sites/default/…
Aug 14 • 4 tweets • 3 min read
ICE used your taxpayer dollars to trick out a bunch of trucks in new livery, all painted black with "ICE" and a logo printed in gold on the side (and Trump's name in gold on the back window), then shoot a rap video in DC to post on social media.

I am not making this up. Imagine fitting that thing through narrow streets or alleyways when you’re trying to do an enforcement operation in a city.
Aug 12 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Trump's people at DHS are referencing here "Which Way, Western Man," a book by white supremacist William Gayley Simpson that was published by an American Neo-Nazi organization, the National Alliance.

In the book, Simpson argued that Hitler was right and Jews must be killed. Image To be blunt; the propagandists running @DHSgov are deliberately pushing thinly-veiled neo-Nazi material through the official communications channels of the U.S. government. Their goal is stirring outrage (to which they will express fake outrage) and signaling to their followers.