Tag Archives: immigration

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick – The American Immigration Council

Aaron Reichlin-Melnick is Senior Fellow at The American Immigration Council. He previously worked as a Staff Attorney at the American Immigration Council, working on impact litigation, Freedom of Information Act litigation, and practice advisories. Prior to joining the Council, he was an Immigrant Justice Corps Fellow and Staff Attorney at the Immigration Law Unit of The Legal Aid Society in New York City, representing immigrants placed in removal proceedings because of a prior criminal conviction.

Of course the implications for those from other countries, both documented and undocumented, are dire, but the implications for American rule of law and democracy are also increasingly disturbing. Things are happening so fast, norms are being shattered, judicial rulings are being ignored. To find out what’s going on, we spoke with Aaron Reichlin-Melnick on December 5, 2025 via Zoom.

Articles pertinent to this interview:

The Trump Administration Won’t Stop Firing Immigration Judges https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/12/deportation-judge-trump-immigration-court-purge-federal-plaza-new-york-city/

Putting Military Lawyers in Charge of Immigration Courts Is Problematic—and “Unlawful” https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/09/trump-administration-military-lawyers-jags-immigration-court-judges/

US army lawyer fired as immigration judge after defying Trump deportation agenda https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/19/army-lawyer-fired-immigration-trump-deportation

“The Entire System Will Collapse”: Inside the Purge of US Immigration Courts https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/03/trump-immigration-courts-firing-doge-nonsensical-system-collapse-eoir/

ICE Investigations, Powered by Nvidia https://theintercept.com/2025/11/01/ice-nvidia-software-hsi-surveillance/

Trump’s Military Occupations of U.S. Cities Cost $473 Million and Rising https://theintercept.com/2025/11/11/cost-trump-national-guard-military-occupation/

The Contempt of Court Buck Stops With … Kristi Noem? https://talkingpointsmemo.com/morning-memo/tcontempt-of-court-kristi-noem-emil-bove-alien-enemies-act

Chicago Protestors Reel After Fending Off Federal Charges https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/chicago-protestors-reel-after-fending-off-federal-charges

ICE Is Targeting Workers. Here’s How Employers and Unions Are Fighting Back. https://truthout.org/articles/ice-is-targeting-workers-heres-how-employers-and-unions-are-fighting-back/

Trump’s Thanksgiving Attack on Immigrants Likened to ‘Stuff You Hear Coming Out of White Nationalists’ https://www.commondreams.org/news/trump-immigration-national-guard

Stephen Miller Is an Immigration Hypocrite. I Know Because I’m His Uncle. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/08/13/stephen-miller-is-an-immigration-hypocrite-i-know-because-im-his-uncle-219351/

Trump is using a tragic shooting to demonize millions https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/dec/03/trump-national-guard-shooting-anti-immigration-push

Trump’s Immigration Forces Are Recklessly Deploying ‘Less Lethal’ Weapons. Protestors Are Getting Maimed https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/trumps-immigration-forces-deploy-less-lethal-weapons-protests-are-getting-maimed

A Tale of Two ICEs https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/12/02/a-tale-of-two-ices/

Reverse Migration Is Not A Cure. It Will Only Make America Weak and Alone https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/trump-reverse-migration

Charlotte activists met the immigration crackdown with ‘bless your heart’ resistance https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/nov/23/activists-immigration-charlotte-north-carolina

A groundswell of activism takes hold in the US: ‘We are a bridge to the future’ ttps://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/nov/21/us-activism-protests-boycotts-mutual-aid

20 states and D.C. sue DOJ to stop immigration conditions on funds for crime victims https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/20-states-and-d-c-sue-doj-to-stop-immigration-conditions-on-funds-for-crime-victims

The Education Department’s Forgotten Antiracist Origins https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/29/opinion/education-department-trump-antiracist.html

DHS Spends Millions Of Taxpayer Funds To Get Its Own Fleet Of Deportation Planes: Report https://www.huffpost.com/entry/scotus-blockbuster-case-2026-golden-globe-noms_n_6936a122e4b0a1c98be2a8f0/liveblog_6939a59fe4b028000c59fa6c?origin=home-latest-news-unit

Kristi Noem reportedly tried to buy 10 engineless Spirit Airlines planes that airline didn’t own https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/nov/08/kristi-noem-spirit-airlines-planes

Trump administration moves to deny visas to factcheckers and content moderators https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/05/trump-administration-us-visa-crackdown

Arizona congresswoman says she was ‘pepper sprayed’ at protest against ICE https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/05/adelita-grijalva-arizona-pepper-spray-ice-protest

Senator says ICE ‘attack dog’ caused ‘horrific’ injuries to unresisting man as he was detained https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/dec/06/us-senator-ice-attack-dog-horrific-injuries

Dana Frank WHAT CAN WE LEARN FROM THE GREAT DEPRESSION? Stories of Ordinary People & Collective Action in Hard Times

Dana Frank, Professor Emerita of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz, is a longtime historian of labor, women, and social movements in the US and beyond. For many years she has worked on human rights and US policy in Honduras. She has been an expert witness testifying in the US Congress, The House of Commons in The Canadian Parliament, as well as the CA Legislature.

Among her seven books are Buy American: The Untold Story of Economic Nationalism; The Long Honduran Night: Resistance, Terror, and the United States in the Aftermath of the Coup; and, with Robin D.G. Kelly and Howard Zinn, Three Strikes: Miners, Musicians, Salesgirls and the Fighting Spirit of Labor’s Last Century.

Her work has been published in diverse outlets ranging from the New York Times, Washington Post, The Guardian, to Labor Notes, The Nation, The Baffler, The Jacobin, The Progressive, to Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, to mention just a few, as well as in many scholarly publications.

Her latest book is WHAT CAN WE LEARN FROM THE GREAT DEPRESSION? STORIES OF ORDINARY PEOPLE & COLLECTIVE ACTION IN HARD TIMES, published by Beacon Press.

We spoke with her on February 24, 2025, the third anniversary of the Russian Invasion of Ukraine, via Skype from her home in Santa Cruz, CA.

‘Fixing a problem we didn’t cause’: the Black Appalachian activists cultivating community power https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/23/black-appalachia-activists

Neo-Nazi group plots rebuild as Trump’s FBI chief takes helm, audio reveals https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/feb/24/neo-nazi-trump-fbi-chief

No Money, No Milk https://hammerandhope.org/article/black-wet-nurses

You Know About the KKK, but What About the Black Legion? https://jacobin.com/2024/10/black-legion-white-supremacist-violence

Donald Trump Has Already Spent $10.7 Million Of Taxpayer Money Playing Golf https://www.huffpost.com/entry/donald-trump-golf-doge_n_67b50fbfe4b0319f377e6c6a

Kristi Noem Says $200 Million DHS Ad Campaign Thanking Trump Was His Idea https://www.yahoo.com/news/kristi-noem-says-200-million-035856089.html

Lessons for the resistance 2.0 on how to fight back against Trump https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/feb/21/lessons-for-the-resistance-20-on-how-to-fight-back-against-trump

With Babies and Banners: Story of the Women’s Emergency Brigade https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pa75V-tdBko

Opinion: Trump says he’ll expel a million immigrants. Believe him — it happened before https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2024-10-10/donald-trump-immigration-repatriados-depression

America Is Pushing Its Workers Into Homelessness https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/01/opinion/crisis-working-homeless.html

Todd Miller Storming the Wall: Climate Change, Migration, & Homeland Security

Todd Miller has researched and written about border issues for more than 15 years. His work has appeared in the New York Times, TomDispatch, The Nation, Guernica, Al Jazeera English, and Common Dreams, among other places. He has written two books: Border Patrol Nation: Dispatches from the Front Lines of Homeland Security and the recently released Storming the Wall: Climate Change, Migration, and Homeland Security , both published by City Lights. He is currently at work on another project investigating the extension of the U.S. border regime abroad–to places far away from U.S. territorial boundaries, but well within its political and economic sphere of influence. He is a contributing editor on border and immigration issues for the North American Congress on Latin America Report on the Americas and its column “Border Wars”.

https://cuencalosojos.org/
” Since the 1990s, the restoration project has embedded galvanized wire cages, called gabions, on the banks and beds of washes.

These gabions are filled to the brim with rocks and go as far as 18 feet deep into the ground.

At first glance, they have the striking appearance of an intricate stone wall, a contrast to the border barrier just 100 yards away.

But instead of keeping people out, they were built to be sponges shaped to the contour of the streambed and riverbank, slowing the water and replenishing the soil with life.

Before they were built, rushing water from monsoon storms would take topsoil and leave cutting erosion. Now, there is water year-round.” – Todd Miller, journalist for Edible Baja