The US government collected over $1 billion in immigration fees then refused to process the applications. No denials. No refunds. Just silence. This is the largest fee fraud in the history of the American immigration system. Here's what's happening. 🧵 Three separate policies (signed by Trump, Secretary Rubio, and USCIS head Edlow) now bar citizens of 92 countries from receiving immigrant visas. That covers roughly half of all legal immigrants entering the US from abroad.

Latino voters are not just pushing back on Trump's immigration agenda, they're making it an electoral priority. Here's what the data shows, and why it matters heading into 2026 Trump's immigration enforcement approach is rejected by 86% of Hispanic voters, with only 14% supporting his hardline tactics. One-third of Latino voters specifically say ICE is "out of control." That's not a fringe view it's a supermajority.

ICE isn't just building detention centers. It's engineering an entirely new industrial infrastructure for mass deportation; modeled explicitly on Amazon's supply chain. Here's the full architecture of what's being built. 🧵 ICE calls it the "Detention Reengineering Initiative." The goal: consolidate 300 existing facilities into just 34, while increasing total capacity. Processing centers hold people 3–7 days. Mega centers hold people up to 60 days before deportation. @axios

Congress gave ICE $45 billion last year in a single bill. Here's where that money is going and who is cashing in on the largest expansion of immigrant detention in American history. 🧵 In July 2025, Congress gave ICE a total of $45 billion for immigration detention more than a decade of normal funding in one lump sum. ICE's annual detention budget had previously been around $3.4 billion. That's a 13x increase. @immcouncil

ICE has a playbook for buying warehouse detention centers: move fast, tell nobody, and let communities find out from property records or news leaks. It's happened in at least 20 towns across the country. A thread. 🧵 In Socorro, TX a town of 40,000 outside El Paso a deed was filed showing DHS had already inked a $122.8M deal for 826,000 sq ft of warehouse space before the mayor received any communication. "Nobody from the federal government bothered to pick up the phone," the mayor said.

The Trump administration built Camp East Montana in 2 months, handed a $1.2B contract to a company operating out of a single-family home in Virginia, and called it the model for its new national detention system. Here's how that's going. 🧵 Camp East Montana opened at Fort Bliss in El Paso in August 2025. Within 50 days, ICE’s oversight office documented more than 60 violations of federal detention standards. ACLU called for the facility’s closure following reports of abuse, medical neglect, & coerced deportations.

The House just passed the SAVE America Act for the third year running. It would require proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections. At least 21 million U.S. citizens don't even have driver's licenses, let alone passports or birth certificates. (thread) The bill targets a problem that barely exists. Noncitizen voting in federal elections is extraordinarily rare. Meanwhile, the ID requirements would create real barriers for low-income and minority communities where these documents are harder to obtain.

ProPublica reviewed months of Fox News coverage and 700+ social media videos from Portland protests. The found that Fox repeatedly aired 2020 footage and labeled it 2025. Trump watched, announced the National Guard was coming, and said the city looked like "World War II." Specifically, a Sept. 4 segment showed a Navy veteran being pepper-sprayed and struck with a baton. Fox said it was 2025. The video was posted to social media July 18, 2020. They showed a burning flag from 2020, a mile away from the 2025 protest site.

ICE has been posting daily statistics about arrests and detainers this week. The data might prove to be accurate with independent verification, but here’s why I’m skeptical.

https://twitter.com/icegov/status/1883317983914656217

First, ice uses multiple data systems to manage its enforcement data, including a massive comprehensive warehouse of transactional data records and other cleaned up and summarized data systems that feed into pre-produced reports.

24 hours from now President Trump is set to unleash a series of aggressive executive orders targeting immigration. Here are seven things he appears set to do (or attempt to do). Reinstating Travel Bans: The administration intends to reimpose entry restrictions on several countries, reminiscent of the previous "Muslim ban," affecting individuals from specific nations.

It's time for another thread of TRAC's immigration data tools!

Are you looking for immigration data? @TRACReports is a great place to get data, but it can be confusing to navigate. Here's what we have and how to find it! 🧵.

Please share & bookmark for the good of all. @TRACReports Preliminary remarks - don't skip!

First, the data we have comes from the federal government through #FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) requests. This is the government's own data, not data we come up with on our own.

CBP One is the new app that asylum seekers must use at the southwest border. But how does this app work? And how should we think about CBP One?

Highlights from my article: “Glitches in the Digitization of Asylum.” 🧵

Bookmark it here (no paywall): mdpi.com/2075-4698/13/6… It is the law of the United States that migrants are allowed to seek asylum. Migrants should be able to do so at ports of entry (POEs), but when access is restricted, migrants may cross the border between POEs and request asylum from Border Patrol.

law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/8/…