Tag: Kristi Noem

JHISN Newsletter 04/25/2026

Posted on April 25, 2026 by - News, Newsletter

Dear friends,

Remain vigilant? Breathe a temporary sigh of relief? The mass targeting of immigrants for deportation in central Queens has not yet materialized. We share recent wisdom from Queens Neighborhoods United: “[W]e can’t always live in fear that ICE is around, and we can’t pretend that ICE is never around. Finding a balance and arming ourselves with information to inform our day-to-day lives is important.” Find a balance; stay informed; build and hold our collective strength.

Yet, every day, police violence against immigrants continues, and our first article highlights the pursuit of justice for two Queens families shattered by NYPD shootings in their homes.

Our second article dives into the mess of government propaganda, misinformation, missing data, and realistic “best estimates” of the number of immigrants in the US who have been recently detained and/or deported. Who really counts in US society? All those whose lives have been upended by a revved-up mass detention and deportation machine deserve to be counted.

Newsletter highlights:
  1. Where is justice for two Queens families shattered by NYPD violence?
  2. Checking the numbers on US detentions and deportations

1. Justice for Win Rozario and Jabez Chakraborty!

On March 27, 2024, struggling with a mental health crisis in his Ozone Park home, 19-year-old Bangladeshi immigrant Win Rozario called 911 for help. What showed up was two aggressive cops, who provoked, tased, and gunned him down without mercy in front of his family.

“After shooting Win, the NYPD forced Win’s mom and brother to go to the precinct immediately, refusing to let them accompany Win to the hospital. Win’s mother and brother were separated and interrogated without lawyers and before being notified that Win had died. The NYPD then refused to let the Rozario family back into their apartment for over 48 hours, refusing to let them retrieve critical medications or even feed their cat. It took the advocacy of the Public Advocate to get the Rozario family back into their home – which the police had neglected to clean up after murdering Win.” —The Justice Committee

In September 2025, NYC’s Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB) found that Officers Matthew Cianfrocco and Salvatore Alongi used excessive force and abused their authority. But so far, they have not faced any consequences. State Attorney General Letitia James refused to prosecute the cops, a decision the family called “cowardly.” Potential disciplinary action is now at the discretion of New York Police Commissioner Tisch, who is considered likely to order the loss of some vacation days—or no punishment at all. Only Mayor Mamdani can overrule whatever she decides.

This April 1, the Rozario family and local immigrant justice group Desis Rising Up and Moving (DRUM) led a demonstration at Diversity Plaza, solemnly marking the second anniversary of Win’s murder and calling on the city to fire Cianfrocco and Alongi:

“Win’s mother shared her experiences and demands: ‘I can’t believe two years have passed and still the police have not been punished… I want to say that police should not be sent to respond to situations involving illness or mental health crises. Otherwise, more families like mine will be forced to live with this emptiness and grief.’” —@DRUMNYC

The Diversity Plaza protest also mobilized support for another Queens immigrant family brutalized in a similar way by the NYPD. Jabez Chakraborty, 22, who lives with schizophrenia, was shot by cops in a January 2026 confrontation that his family insists was completely unnecessary.

“We are shocked and outraged by the NYPD’s treatment of our son and brother, Jabez Chakraborty, and our family. We called for help. We called 911 for an ambulance to provide medical attention for our son, who was in emotional distress. We did not call the police. Instead of medical responders, the NYPD arrived and shot our son multiple times right in front of us.” —Chakraborty family, 1/30/26

Although he was severely wounded, Jabez Chakraborty survived. But District Attorney Melinda Katz rushed to arraign him on assault and weapons charges as he lay chained to his hospital bed—ignoring objections from Mayor Mamdani.

“What purpose does it serve to punish someone who needed medical and mental health care, and got bullets instead? This shooting was not an isolated incident: it’s a devastating example of how our systems repeatedly fail the most vulnerable New Yorkers.” —Fahd Ahmed, Executive Director of DRUM

WHAT CAN WE DO?

2. The Reality Behind Detention & Deportation Propaganda Numbers

“We know of no reliable count of the total number of deportations during the first year of the Trump administration.” — Deportation Data Project (January 2026)

Those managing the anti-immigrant agenda of Trump and his hatemongering Homeland Security advisor, Stephen Miller, regularly obfuscate their arrest, detention, or deportation numbers. Such transparency problems are not new. Before Trump took office in 2024, the American Immigration Council (AIC) published Transparency Recommendations identifying numerous legally mandated reporting requirements that ICE failed to fulfill. The AIC reported that ICE, under Biden, was “severely undercounting the number of people it has in immigration detention.” In July of last year, Robert Garcia, a representative on the House Committee on Homeland Security, stated, “I actually just don’t trust numbers the administration is putting out, and I don’t think the American public should.” Thankfully, the diligent work of non-profits and university researchers does serve as a lighthouse in the fog.   

The number of people processed through the deportation machine is obscured by the administration’s hyperbolic statements. Only through the independent work of organizations, reporters, and pro bono lawyers, who process Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuits to delve into Homeland Security data, can we get a sense of how many people are actually being processed through the deportation machine.

In March of last year, TRAC Reports won a major FOIA case against ICE and CPB when a court rejected all the government’s arguments for withholding records. In November 2025, TRAC released a report about detention and removals after the massive deployments of military and civil immigration enforcers: “The data show surprisingly little has been accomplished given the huge expenditure of resources devoted to this effort.” The increase in ICE removals under Trump in 2025 was reportedly only 7% higher than the 2024-25 numbers under Biden.

Before Trump’s second inauguration, data on border arrests, deportations, and other immigration metrics were published twice a month (as mandated by the DHS funding bill). An April 2026 visit to the DHS website finds that the immigration websites have not been updated since 2024. ICE Detention and Repatriation data has also not been updated since 2024. The 2025 numbers reported by Homeland Security on its detention management site are severely limited. Even a high school student’s online ICE Tracker project is making a better attempt than Homeland Security to share this data publicly.

While TRAC Reports highlighted the many data errors in ICE data releases, the Vera Institute of Justice reported that the “failure [of ICE] to regularly release accurate, complete, and accessible data is part of what enables it to operate this multi-billion-dollar network with little oversight or accountability.” With the support of the Deportation Data Project, the Vera Institute published its December 2025 report on ICE Detention Trends in 1,464 facilities. If the ICE reports from August of last year are accurate, then the 61,226 people detained by ICE is the highest ever level of detention. 

“First, ICE arrests quadrupled, including both street arrests and transfers from criminal custody to ICE immigration custody. ICE street arrests (i.e. arrests not at jails) went up by over a factor of eleven. Street arrests at this order of magnitude are a new phenomenon. For both types of arrests, ICE was much less likely to target people with criminal convictions. These changes led to over a sevenfold increase in arrests of people without criminal convictions.”—Deportation Data Project


Transfers from Jails and Prisons Doubled and Street Arrests Increased by 11x—Deportation Data Project

The self-deportation component of the Miller-Trump strategy, despite a significant increase in numbers, failed spectacularly to deliver its promise as a cost-effective way to remove immigrants rapidly. Last September, DHS posted self-aggrandizing statements, and Kristi Noem talked about self-deportation numbers, which came from an estimate by the anti-immigrant think tank CIS that did not even use DHS data. 

Homeland Security spent $200M on ads (created by agencies with direct ties to DHS staff) to urge self-deportation through the incongruously named Project Homecoming. The “voluntary” project claims to offer applicants a free plane ticket and a stipend of $1,000, recently increased to $2,600. Data review confirmed around 25,000 people registered for self-deportation on the CBP mobile app. Only half of those actually returned home with DHS support. The others face delays in paperwork processing, have not received payments, and still await their flights home. Immigration attorneys indicate their lack of trust in the program. In reality, only a minority of immigrants are eligible for those incentives to leave: those who do not meet the requirements are simply handing over their information and risking detention. 


Voluntary Departures Increased by 28x—Deportation Data Project

Although the government’s Project Homecoming data is questionable, reliable data shows that the number of court cases ending in “voluntary departure” increased to 35,000—over three times those during the previous year. Looking at New York specifically, under Biden, less than 1% of people arrested by ICE opted for voluntary departure—today it is 22%. People are also deciding to self-deport without government intervention—but even at the point where they are boarding flights to return home, they are still being detained and handed over to ICE agents.

The end goal of this administration is really not just about deportation. It is about enabling white nationalism and authoritarianism through racial profiling, eroding constitutional rights, scapegoating and subjugating immigrants, and weaponizing a massive private, for-profit prison system. 

WHAT CAN WE DO?

 

In solidarity and with collective care,

Jackson Heights Immigrant Solidarity Network (JHISN)

Follow @JHSolidarity on Facebook and Twitter and share this newsletter with friends, families, neighbors, networks, and colleagues so they can subscribe and receive news from JHISN. 

 

 

JHISN Newsletter 03/21/2026

Posted on March 21, 2026 by - News, Newsletter

Dear friends,

There is some important good news this week amidst the cascade of bad news, national and global—including the grim assessment that the US is no longer a functioning democracy, according to the world’s leading democracy watchdog. Sweden’s prestigious Variety of Democracies (V-Dem) Institute writes in their newly-released report, “The scale and speed of autocratization under the Trump administration are unprecedented in modern times.”

But the autocrat’s project also has cracks, and good news includes the release from detention this week of Dylan Contreras, the Bronx high school student arrested by ICE in May 2025. And our second newsletter article reports the end of Leqaa Kordia’s incarceration by ICE, when she finally walked free on March 16.

Our first article investigates the very bad news of the Trump regime’s surge toward holding immigrant detainees in commercial warehouse spaces turned ‘mega detention’ centers across the US.  

Newsletter highlights:
  1. New architecture of deportation: ICE warehouses
  2. Leqaa Kordia freed after one year

 

Warehouse, Social Circle, Georgia

1. Amazon Prime, But With Human Beings: Warehousing Immigrants

In the run-up to the midterm elections, the Trump regime is signaling a tactical retreat from its increasingly unpopular policy of mass deportation. This change in public posture is reflected in the president’s firing of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, and his call for a “softer touch” on immigration enforcement. The White House has even quietly urged House Republicans to stop talking about mass deportation altogether. After meeting with Trump’s border “czar” Tom Homan in Albany on March 6, Governor Kathy Hochul sounded convinced that ICE won’t escalate enforcement in New York any time soon. 

Still, the machinery of mass deportation grinds on. Nationally, ICE arrests were down about 11% from January to February, but still four times higher than they were before Trump took office. More than 70,000 people are in immigration detention. In NYC, courthouse arrests continue. Rapid response teams in our neighborhood report continued ICE kidnappings, especially off the streets of Corona.

Perhaps the most damning evidence that mass deportation is still on the agenda—and might ramp up after the elections—is the regime’s rush to build out massive infrastructure for new immigrant detention centers. Flush with $45 billion appropriated for this purpose by Congress, ICE is buying a network of commercial warehouses that it plans to retrofit into immigration prisons. The goal, says ICE Director Todd Lyons, is to be “[Amazon] Prime, but with human beings.”

The plan includes 16 new “processing centers” and 8 large detention centers to hold 7-10,000 people each. Reportedly, 9 of the projected 24 warehouses have already been purchased. One of the planned detention centers, in South Circle, Georgia, is expected to confine more people than any prison in the US.

To speed things up, the regime is using the US Navy’s procurement system, which allows them to bypass federal contracting requirements. By purchasing and subcontracting out the renovation of its own detention facilities, ICE also evades many state and local sanctuary restrictions. GEO Group, CoreCivic, and other profiteering private prison contractors are being tapped to run the facilities.

Conditions at privately-run immigration lockups are particularly grim. Systematic abuse serves to pressure refugees, asylum seekers and others with provisional status to abandon their legal claims and agree to “voluntarily” self-deport.

GEO Group, the country’s largest private prison operator, has been “churning out deportations almost at the rate of approximately 100% of [the company’s detention facilities’] capacity per month,” executive chairman George Zoley said in an earnings call in November. “We’ve never seen anything like this before,” Zoley said on the call. “Our existing facilities are full throttle.”  —Huffpost (March 7, 2026)

This is a specific form of mass deportation that the Trump regime is committed to expanding at breakneck speed.

Local opposition to the new warehouses has been fierce in many places and has successfully prevented ICE from finalizing some pending purchases. For instance, after ICE announced it acquired a former Pep Boys warehouse in Chester, NY, local politicians, community activists, and national Democratic leaders reacted with outrage. A petition denouncing ICE’s plan quickly gathered tens of thousands of signatures. On February 17, ICE released a statement denying that it had bought the building, saying its previous claim was “a mistake.”

A major battle is currently taking place over the future of a giant warehouse in Roxbury, New Jersey, which ICE purchased from Goldman Sachs for $129.3 million—more than double its official taxable value. Several hundred local residents and activists attended a protest outside the site on February 28. Opposition is bipartisan, based on anti-ICE sentiment as well as the practical impact on local services and utilities. Gothamist reports that ”Many local Republicans also oppose the Trump administration’s plans for the ICE detention facility in Roxbury Township, despite saying they broadly support detention centers as a means of immigration enforcement, just not in their backyard.”

On March 11, a federal judge temporarily halted renovation work on an ICE warehouse in Williamsport, Maryland, ruling that the administration had illegally bypassed a required environmental review. It remains to be seen if this ruling will hold up on appeal, and what implications it may have for other facilities.

ICE’s plan–already underway–for a sprawling network of detention warehouses cuts against the narrative that the Trump regime is “softening” immigration enforcement. In fact, they are literally laying the groundwork for a new, intensified stage of mass deportation.

WHAT CAN WE DO?

2. Palestinian detainee and solidarity activist Leqaa Kordia walks free

“DHS insists they are targeting criminals. But all I see here [at Prairieland Detention Facility] are mothers, sisters, daughters, grandmothers. Some have active green cards. Nevertheless, they are transferred from detention center to detention center. It is human trafficking, by another name.” –Leqaa Kordia, Zeteo (March 9, 2026)

She is the name many of us could not remember. She was never a Columbia student but was regularly referred to as one. She was held by ICE for 12 months and 3 days inside a women’s detention center in Texas, 1,500 miles from her home and community in New Jersey, and largely out of the media spotlight. In February, Leqaa Kordia fainted, had a seizure, and was hospitalized, in shackles. Her story started to receive national attention.

On International Women’s Day this month, Kordia, still imprisoned, published an essay that shared the stories of the women she lived with inside Prairieland: “We laugh together. We cry together. When somebody is crying, everybody is crying. When somebody is laughing, everybody is laughing. We try to do anything to make anybody happy …. We have each other. We only have each other.” In Kordia’s first public speech after her release on March 16, she spoke of her sadness at leaving behind the beautiful, courageous women and men still living in “ICE dungeons.”

In April 2024, Kordia was arrested by NYPD alongside more than 100 protesters outside Columbia University’s locked gates. The group was supporting students inside who had launched the historic Gaza solidarity encampment, demanding a ceasefire and university divestment from the Israeli war-machine. Nearly 200 members of Kordia’s extended family in Gaza have been killed. Although charges were dropped against Kordia and the other protesters in 2024, ICE obtained Kordia’s sealed arrest record from NYPD. Federal prosecutors then tried to build trumped-up “money laundering” charges based on a $1000 check that she sent to support relatives under siege in Gaza. 

One year after participating in the protest, Kordia was ambushed by ICE during what she thought was a routine check-in in Newark, NJ, in March 2025. The Trump regime had just started its campaign of politically targeting noncitizen students and protesters who called for an end to the genocide. Many of those targeted, like Leqaa, are Palestinian.

The Trump regime’s rounding up of international students and faculty who stood in solidarity with Palestine was found to be unlawful in September 2025. Yet Kordia—not a student but a waitress in Paterson, NJ—still languished in detention long after more well-known detainees like Columbia graduate Mahmoud Khalil were released. Khalil published a moving public letter to Kordia during Ramadan this month while she was still incarcerated: 

“I keep replaying what it felt like to walk into those detention centers. How impossible it is to describe to anyone who hasn’t lived it …. Leqaa, I want so badly to tell you that the world has stood by you. But I refuse to lie to you. The truth is that the world has failed you, and so have we. I cannot grasp that you remain, a full year later, thousands of miles away from your home, from your family, from the life you were building. And for what? For the crime that has followed our people across continents and generations: being Palestinian and daring to speak our truth.”

On Monday, March 16, the world stopped failing Leqaa Kordia. Mayor Mamdani had reportedly asked for her release; Columbia-Barnard faculty had organized a week-long relay hunger strike in solidarity with Leqaa; and her legal team and community in Paterson had never given up their efforts to bring her home. Leqaa finally walked out of Prairieland Detention Facility in Texas after 368 days. She still faces ongoing deportation proceedings.

Tens of thousands of detainees remain in cages. Kordia’s challenge to us is to remember their dignity and reinvent what solidarity can mean in this era of ‘mass deportation’ and massive social suffering in immigrant communities.

WHAT CAN WE DO?

  • If you are able, consider a donation of any amount to the LaunchGood fundraising campaign for Kordia to help with medical expenses and the ongoing legal fight against her deportation.
  • Support Justice for Migrants which offers material assistance and information for women and men detained at Batavia Federal Detention Facility outside Buffalo, NY.

 

In solidarity and with collective care,
Jackson Heights Immigrant Solidarity Network (JHISN)

Follow @JHSolidarity on Facebook and Twitter and share this newsletter with friends, families, neighbors, networks, and colleagues so they can subscribe and receive news from JHISN.