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migrant rights
President Trump Must Reverse Course on Border Policy to Uphold Human Rights
Elected officials, civil society, and our communities must band together to resist the current assaults on asylum, and push for humane and welcoming border policies.
Feb 12, 2025
On January 20, the fate of asylum seekers at the U.S.-Mexico border was abruptly changed as U.S. President Donald Trump announced new executive orders further dismantling the right to asylum.
That morning, the patients I saw in our pop-up clinic at a migrant shelter were full of apprehension about the threatened Trump policies, but a sense of hope remained. One young man told me he was so excited he could barely sleep because his CBP One appointment, which would allow him and his family to request parole to enter the U.S. while they applied for asylum, was scheduled for the following day.
By noon, the tone had changed. People tried desperately to log in to the CBP One app but were given error messages. Cancelation notices arrived in the email inboxes of those who had already been granted appointments. One patient who had left his country fleeing political violence and had been waiting for eight months at the border for the appointment, frantically held his phone up to show me the email. “Now what are we supposed to do?” he lamented, “We have nowhere safe to go.”
There is much work to be done now to uphold human rights in the U.S. But we must not forget the people who are desperate for relief at our borders.
Indeed, the end of the CBP One appointment program has effectively closed the door on asylum seekers at the U.S.’ southern border. With the ongoing restrictions of the asylum ban and border closure rules put in place during the Biden administration, there are now no viable legal pathways to entry for the hundreds of thousands of migrants seeking safety at the border.
The effect on our patients waiting in Mexico has been devastating, and it’s only going to get worse. Patients came into the clinic reporting depression, panic attacks, and despair. Some had just narrowly survived being kidnapped, beaten, or raped, and were petrified about being targeted again by the organized crime groups that prey on migrants in Mexican border cities.
Over the years in our clinics, we have seen that increased restrictions in border policies—such as Trump’s Remain in Mexico—increase danger, injuries, mental health problems, childhood developmental problems, and untimely death for asylum seekers trying to make it to the U.S. Most recently, these issues had still been occurring given the long waiting periods of the CBP One system, but now they will undoubtedly worsen.
Being stranded leads people to make impossible choices. Some families will risk (and some lose) their lives trying to cross the swift currents of the Rio Grande or the harsh landscape of the desert. Some families choose to send their children over the border unaccompanied, taking on the trauma of family separation because they see no other way for their child to escape from danger and have a better life.
President Trump says we shouldn’t care about the plight of immigrants and should instead focus on American citizens’ needs—of which, undoubtedly, there are many. But such perspectives miss the bigger picture, and are, in fact, woefully inaccurate. Not only are we able to support immigrants, we desperately need to, for the sake of all of us. Without immigrants, we’d be facing a home care crisis, an agricultural crisis, and our economy would suffer. What’s more, the plight of migrants in transit impacts our communities in the U.S. I have patients at my primary care clinic in Massachusetts who have fallen into a deep depression or whose blood pressure has skyrocketed when a loved one of theirs is lost along the migrant route or is assaulted on the journey. Let alone our international and domestic legal obligations that require us to recognize and honor the right to seek asylum.
As our patients at the migrant shelter reeled from the news of the cancelation of CBP One, one man was still smiling. “I believe the new president will have compassion for us,” he said, standing outside his tent and nodding toward his wife and small children inside. “He has a family too. I pray that he will be able to understand that we need safety for our kids.”
It would be nice. But in the absence of that change of heart, our communities need to take action. Elected officials, civil society, and our communities must band together to resist the current assaults on asylum, and push for humane and welcoming border policies. There is much work to be done now to uphold human rights in the U.S. But we must not forget the people who are desperate for relief at our borders—it’s our obligation, and it’s a matter of life and death.
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'Careful What You Post': ICE Expanding Surveillance of Social Media Critics
"ICE's attempt to have eyes and ears in as many places as we exist both online and offline should ring an alarm for all of us," said one campaigner.
Feb 11, 2025
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is seeking to hire a contractor as part of an effort to expand the monitoring of negative social media posts about the agency, its personnel, and operations, according to a report published Monday.
According toThe Intercept's Sam Biddle, ICE is citing "an increase in threats" to agents and leadership as the reason for seeking a contractor to keep tabs on the public's social media activity.
The agency said the contractor "shall provide all necessary personnel, supervision, management, equipment, materials, and services, except for those provided by the government, in support of ICE's desire to protect ICE senior leaders, personnel, and facilities via internet-based threat mitigation and monitoring services."
"These efforts include conducting vulnerability assessments and proactive threat monitoring," ICE added, explaining that the contractor will be required to provide daily and monthly status reports and immediately alert supervisors of "imminent threats."
Careful what you post: ICE is seeking private contractors to conduct social media surveillance including detection of merely "negative" sentiment about the agency's leadership, agents, and general operations theintercept.com/2025/02/11/i...
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— Sam Biddle (@sambiddle.com) February 11, 2025 at 9:27 AM
ICE will require the monitor to identify and report "previous social media activity which would indicate any additional threats to ICE," as well as any information indicating that individuals or groups "making threats have a proclivity for violence" and anything "indicating a potential for carrying out a threat."
According to Biddle:
It's unclear how exactly any contractor might sniff out someone's "proclivity for violence." The ICE document states only that the contractor will use "social and behavioral sciences" and "psychological profiles" to accomplish its automated threat detection.
Once flagged, the system will further scour a target's internet history and attempt to reveal their real-world position and offline identity. In addition to compiling personal information—such as the Social Security numbers and addresses of those whose posts are flagged—the contractor will also provide ICE with a "photograph, partial legal name, partial date of birth, possible city, possible work affiliations, possible school or university affiliation, and any identified possible family members or associates."
The document also requests "facial recognition capabilities that could take a photograph of a subject and search the internet to find all relevant information associated with the subject." The contract contains specific directions for targets found in other countries, implying the program would scan the domestic speech of American citizens.
"Careful what you post," Biddle warned in a social media post promoting his article.
ICE is already monitoring social media posts via contractor Giant Oak, which was hired during the first Trump administration and former Democratic President Joe Biden's term. However, "the goal of this [new] contract, ostensibly, is focused more narrowly on threats to ICE leadership, agents, facilities, and operations," according to Biddle.
Cinthya Rodriguez, an organizer with the immigrant rights group Mijente, told Biddle that "the current administration's attempt to use this technology falls within the agency's larger history of mass surveillance, which includes gathering information from personal social media accounts and retaliating against immigrant activists."
"ICE's attempt to have eyes and ears in as many places as we exist both online and offline should ring an alarm for all of us," Rodriguez added.
The search for expanded ICE social media surveillance comes as President Donald Trump's administration is carrying out what the Republican leader has promised will be the biggest mass deportation campaign in U.S. history. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security has been deporting migrants on military flights, with some deportees imprisoned at Guantánamo Bay, the notorious offshore U.S. military prison in Cuba.
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Pope Calls Trump's Mass Deportation Plan 'Major Crisis'
The pontiff also rejected Vice President JD Vance's attempt to use a Catholic tenet to serve the administration's anti-migrant agenda.
Feb 11, 2025
Pope Francis on Tuesday reaffirmed his condemnation of U.S. President Donald Trump's anti-migrant agenda and explicitly rebuked what critics have called Vice President JD Vance's misinterpretation of Catholic theology in an attempt to justify the Republican administration's mass deportation plan.
In a letter to U.S. bishops, the pontiff wrote: "I have followed closely the major crisis that is taking place in the United States with the initiation of a program of mass deportations. The rightly formed conscience cannot fail to make a critical judgment and express its disagreement with any measure that tacitly or explicitly identifies the illegal status of some migrants with criminality.
What is built on the basis of force, and not on the truth about the equal dignity of every human being, begins badly and will end badly.
The Pope acknowledged "the right of a nation to defend itself and keep communities safe from those who have committed violent or serious crimes while in the country or prior to arrival," but also asserted that "the act of deporting people who in many cases have left their own land for reasons of extreme poverty, insecurity, exploitation, persecution or serious deterioration of the environment, damages the dignity of many men and women, and of entire families, and places them in a state of particular vulnerability and defenselessness."
The Pope continued:
This is not a minor issue: An authentic rule of law is verified precisely in the dignified treatment that all people deserve, especially the poorest and most marginalized. The true common good is promoted when society and government, with creativity and strict respect for the rights of all—as I have affirmed on numerous occasions—welcomes, protects, promotes, and integrates the most fragile, unprotected, and vulnerable. This does not impede the development of a policy that regulates orderly and legal migration. However, this development cannot come about through the privilege of some and the sacrifice of others. What is built on the basis of force, and not on the truth about the equal dignity of every human being, begins badly and will end badly.
While not explicitly naming him, the Pope's letter refutes remarks by Vance, who last month invoked the medieval Catholic concept of ordo amoris—which posits a ranking of affection with the deity figures God and Jesus at the highest level, followed by self, family, friends, and others—to show that Christians should love citizens more than migrants.
"Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups," the missive states. "In other words: The human person is not a mere individual, relatively expansive, with some philanthropic feelings! The human person is a subject with dignity who, through the constitutive relationship with all, especially with the poorest, can gradually mature in his identity and vocation."
"The true ordo amoris that must be promoted is that which we discover by meditating constantly on the parable of the Good Samaritan... that is, by meditating on the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception," the pontiff said.
Imagine you're just some 30-something guy who converts to one of the world's major religions and in less than a decade its spiritual leader is rebuking you in front of the entire world That's how big a loser JD Vance is apnews.com/article/pope...
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— Will Bunch ( @willbunch.bsky.social) February 11, 2025 at 8:21 AM
"I exhort all the faithful of the Catholic Church, and all men and women of goodwill, not to give in to narratives that discriminate against and cause unnecessary suffering to our migrant and refugee brothers and sisters," the Pope added. "With charity and clarity we are all called to live in solidarity and fraternity, to build bridges that bring us ever closer together, to avoid walls of ignominy, and to learn to give our lives as Jesus Christ gave his for the salvation of all."
Pope Francis is a longtime champion of migrant rights. The 88-year-old Argentinian criticized Trump's so-called "zero-tolerance" immigration policies, including family separation and construction of a wall along portions of the Mexican border, during the Republican's first term in office.
"Builders of walls, be they made of razor wire or bricks, will end up becoming prisoners of the walls they build," the Pope said in 2019.
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