On Friday, Mohommad Nazeer Paktyawal was arrested while preparing to drop his kids off at school in Richardson, Texas. The 41-year-old Afghan immigrant had helped U.S. special forces with its military operations in Afghanistan since 2005, and was evacuated-by the federal government-to the U.S. in 2021 with his wife and six kids. He was pronounced dead Saturday morning.
Permanent-residency applications from more than seventy countries have been frozen, naturalization ceremonies cancelled. When spouses of U.S. citizens have shown up for routine green-card interviews, they've been arrested; others in the middle of applying for their legal status are getting detained and, in some cases, deported outright. The agency is beginning a sweeping campaign to denaturalize large numbers of citizens, aiming to strip them of their legal status; officials have monthly quotas for how many cases they must flag for review.
Federal records obtained by WIRED show that over the past several months, Immigration and Customs Enforcement ( ICE) and the Department of Homeland Security ( DHS) have carried out a secret campaign to expand ICE's physical presence across the US. Documents show that more than 150 leases and office expansions have or would place new facilities in nearly every state, many of them in or just outside of the country's largest metropolitan areas.
Juan Nicolás has been detained at Dilley since January, where his mother said he's been consistently sick. According to reports compiled by Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Texas), Univision's Lidia Terrezas, and Juan's mother, at about 3 a.m. on Sunday, Juan suffered a "medical episode" where he was "choking on his own vomit." He was rushed to a hospital on Monday night and diagnosed with bronchitis.