Saturday, Jun 14th
Last update05:08:06 AM GMT
Human Rights Glance
A woman being detained in Arizona by US border patrol for overstaying her visa has died by suicide, according to Democratic congresswoman Pramila Jayapal.
The woman, a 52-year-old Chinese national, had first been picked up in California after it had been determined that she had overstayed her B1/B2 visitor visa, Jayapal said in a statement. She was later sent to the Yuma station in Arizona where she stayed until her death on 29 March.
A federal judge in a scathing decision on Sunday said the Trump administration had no legal grounds to arrest, detain and deport a Salvadoran national from the United States to a prison in his home country, saying the decision was “wholly lawless.”
U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis in a 22-page decision ordered the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Secretary Kristi Noem to return Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia to the United States.
“Neither the United States nor El Salvador have told anyone why he was returned to the very country to which he cannot return, or why he is detained at CECOT,” Xinis wrote, referring to the El Salvador prison now holding Abrego Garcia.
J ust before the graphic artist Rebecca Burke left Seattle to travel to Vancouver, Canada, on 26 February, she posted an image of a rough comic to Instagram. “One part of travelling that I love is seeing glimpses of other lives,” read the bubble in the first panel, above sketches of cosy homes: crossword puzzle books, house plants, a lit candle, a steaming kettle on a gas stove.
Burke had seen plenty of glimpses of other lives over the six weeks she had been backpacking in the US. She had been travelling on her own, staying on homestays free of charge in exchange for doing household chores, drawing as she went. For Burke, 28, it was absolute freedom.
Within hours of posting that drawing, Burke got to see a much darker side of life in America, and far more than a glimpse. When she tried to cross into Canada, Canadian border officials told her that her living arrangements meant she should be travelling on a work visa, not a tourist one. They sent her back to the US, where American officials classed her as an illegal alien. She was shackled and transported to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) detention centre, where she was locked up for 19 days – even though she had money to pay for a flight home, and was desperate to leave the US.
Catch up quick: Ozturk, who was arrested in broad daylight by ICE agents in Somerville, had her student visa revoked after a pro-Israeli group, Canary Mission, doxxed her over a pro-Palestinian op-ed in Tufts' student newspaper'
Driving the news: Judge Denise Casper ruled that Ozturk's habeas corpus petition should be heard by the District of Vermont's federal court, not the District of Western Louisiana as Trump administration lawyers requested.
The Trump administration has admitted that it mistakenly sent a Salvadoran immigrant to a supermax El Salvador prison despite the man having a U.S. court order that prevented him from being sent there due to fear of persecution.
Justice Department officials in a federal court filing Monday dismissed Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia’s removal to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT prison as an “administrative error.”
“On March 15, although ICE was aware of his protection from removal to El Salvador, Abrego Garcia was removed to El Salvador because of an administrative error,” they wrote.
“This was an oversight, and the removal was carried out in good faith based on the existence of a final order of removal and Abrego Garcia’s purported membership in MS-13,” Robert Cerna, an acting field office director with ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations, wrote in a separate court filing.
Fifteen emergency and aid workers from the Red Crescent, Palestinian Civil Defense and the United Nations have been recovered from a grave in the sand in the south of the Gaza Strip, U.N. officials said on Monday.
U.N. aid chief Tom Fletcher said in a post on X that the bodies were buried near "wrecked & well-marked vehicles," adding: "They were killed by Israeli forces while trying to save lives. We demand answers & justice."
Israel's military did not comment directly on the deaths of the Red Crescent workers.
In a later statement to Reuters, it said that it had facilitated the evacuation of the bodies from the area, which it described as an active combat zone. It did not specifically respond to questions about why the bodies were retrieved beneath the sand nor why the vehicles were found crushed.
A Russian medical researcher at Harvard University is being detained at a Louisiana immigration facility after her visa was revoked last month over undeclared frog embryo samples found in her luggage, her lawyer told NBC News.
Kseniia Petrova has been in the U.S. on a J-1 scholar visa since May 2023, working at Harvard University. Her lawyer, Gregory Romanovsky, said Petrova is fighting the possible deportation back to Russia for fear of persecution and jail time over her protests decrying the Ukraine war.
On Feb. 16, Petrova returned from France to Boston's Logan Airport from a work trip and passed through immigration without issue. But while awaiting her luggage, two Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) officers took her into a room to inspect her luggage and searched her phone, her lawyer said.
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