The Trump Administration’s War on Activists Is Escalating
Lelo’s immigration status hasn’t been confirmed. The Bellingham Herald has noted that he would have been eligible to apply to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program given that he was only 13 when he arrived in the U.S. (DACA provides a path to citizenship for undocumented U.S. residents who arrived in the country before the age of 16.) In 2015, Lelo was detained and then transferred to ICE by Bellingham police after he drove the wrong way down a one-way street and police were unable to verify his identity. He was released after a brief stay at the Northwest ICE Processing Center. Zeferino’s family sued the police department, alleging racial discrimination; they later settled with the city for $100,000. He served on Bellingham’s Immigration Advisory Board until it was dissolved last October. Among its recommendations was to create a resource center for immigrants in Whatcom County.
“We’re worried they’re going to deport him to El Salvador, Gitmo, or these other places that are horrific,” Rosalinda Guillen, longtime organizer and founder of Community to Community Development, where Lelo volunteered, recently told Seattle-based news publication The Stranger. “This administration is just punitive and mean. They’re cruel.” Lawyers in Seattle have filed a lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security to prevent the administration from deporting people without legal status to “third countries” rather than their countries of origin. But in other recent cases, DHS has continued to defy federal courts and send people arrested by ICE to a hellish El Salvador prison under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, refusing to acknowledge mounting evidence that people are ending up there who have no connections to criminal gangs, as the White House alleges.
The administration is also now embroiled in a court battle over whether it can deport legal residents it deems to threaten national security. The case—currently being heard in Newark—centers on 31-year-old Columbia University graduate student and green card holder Mahmoud Khalil, whom ICE abducted from his university-owned apartment earlier this month. Khalil had not been charged with a crime. The State Department said it revoked his legal status because he was undermining the Trump administration’s foreign policy goal of halting the spread of antisemitism via his involvement in pro-Palestine protests on Columbia’s campus. Several other students and academics have been targeted by ICE on similar grounds, under obscure and legally dubious federal statutes. In what her lawyers argue is a politically motivated arrest, high-profile immigrant rights advocate Jeanette Vizguerra was ambushed by ICE while on break from her job in Denver, Colorado, on March 17; she’s currently being held in an Aurora detention facility.