In early March 2013, Gerson Alvarenga-Flores was in a taxi with three friends, on his way to a birthday party in a rural town outside of La Unión, El Salvador. Suddenly, two men with rifles appeared in the road ahead and signaled for the taxi to stop. The men were both members of the MS-13 gang. When the passengers refused to exit the taxi, the gang members began shooting.

The United States is in an age of mass deportation. This may not be surprising, given how consistently President Trump has denigrated, demonized, and threatened immigrants. His administration has waged an assault on the entire immigration system, shutting down access to asylum, pressuring the immigration courts to churn out removal orders, and adopting rules that narrowed the avenues to legal immigration and crippled US Citizenship and Immigration Services, which administers it. According to the most recent official figures, from the beginning of Trump’s term through September 2019 his administration carried out more than 584,000 formal deportations. As of last October, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was monitoring more than 3.2 million cases of immigrants who were in active deportation proceedings.

When police arrest people for suspected crimes, the U.S. Constitution requires them to show probable cause to a judge within 48 hours. But Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) does not do that. When ICE arrests people, it typically holds them for weeks before any judge evaluates whether ICE had a valid legal basis to make the arrest.

This week on IndyMatters, reporter Megan Messerly has another COVID-19 update for the listeners before she gives a rundown on how the race for the presidency is shaping up in Nevada, especially after visits last week from both President Donald Trump and Democratic Vice Presidential Nominee Kamala Harris. After that reporter Michelle Rindels talked with director of the UNLV Immigration Law Clinic Michael Kagan about a court decision on temporary protected status for immigrants in the US. At the end of the show Michelle and host Joey Lovato give listeners a short preview of what to expect from IndyFest, the upcoming virtual conference we are putting on!

A federal appellate court on Monday sided with the Trump administration in its effort to terminate humanitarian protections for approximately 300,000 refugees from Haiti, Sudan, Nicaragua, and El Salvador, ruling that the administration can legally end their Temporary Protected Status (TPS). The 2-1 decision from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit overturned a district court ruling. The lower court had emphasized that President Donald Trump’s references to those such nations as “shithole countries” was evidence that the decision may have been based, at least in part, on racial animus. The Ninth Circuit decided differently, citing a “glaring lack of evidence […] linking the President’s animus to the TPS terminations.”

The Fourth Amendment requires U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detainers be subjected to neutral review of probable cause, a split Ninth Circuit panel said Friday.

Michael Kagan is an immigration law professor at the University of Nevada Las Vegas. His career has been spent working to help refugees and immigrants around the world. Kagan recently published a book, “The Battle to Stay in America: Immigration’s Hidden Front Line,” released yesterday, stringing several of those storylines together. The root of those stories, however, starts in Delmar, New York — where Kagan is from.

When I received the email from my editor that Michael Kagan, a graduate of the Bethlehem school district, had published his first book, I immediately wrote back that I wanted to interview him. I was Mike’s seventh-grade English teacher back in the late 1980s, and I remembered him fondly.