When I came to the bar [in the 1990s], women couldn't even wear trousers. I used to get men saying: What colour knickers are you wearing today, Lesley?' It's better now, but back then law was way worse than music in how it treated women. Woods who is now 67 still works as a barrister, specialising in immigration law, though in the last 15 years she has dipped her toes back into music, performing occasional solo gigs and self-releasing an EP, In the Fade, in early 2025.
My mother, Regina Treitler, had in fact violated the War Brides Act, but she justified her actions as the only way she could reunite her family after the Holocaust. My parents had fled Germany in 1938, right before Kristallnacht. They had saved themselves, but my mother had been tormented by the fact that her two brothers and her sister-in-law had not escape. They were trapped in Europe for the duration of the Holocaust, their fates unknown.
A federal judge late on Tuesday blocked the Trump administration from making widespread immigration arrests in the nation's capital without warrants or probable cause that the person would be an imminent flight risk. The US district judge Beryl Howell in Washington granted a preliminary injunction sought by civil liberties and immigrant rights groups in a lawsuit against the US Department of Homeland Security. Officers making civil immigration arrests generally have to have an administrative warrant.
At some point during that endless wait, the UK slowly became my home. I began to feel connections and love toward Sheffield: real, grounding affection, that I had never felt toward my hometown of Donetsk. For the first time in my life, I felt safe walking down the street. No one shouted slurs at me for being queer. No one mocked me for being autistic. No one pushed me because I looked weird.
He explained that after being released from prison, in 2014, he spent time in Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody while they tried and failed to deport him to Ukraine and Russia. Both countries, according to legal filings reviewed by NPR, could not provide or confirm Surovtsev's citizenship since he left before the fall of the Soviet Union. They couldn't give him the travel documents needed for deportation.
But foreign government officials, immigration attorneys and court filings indicate that wasn't the case with at least two groups of deportees this summer that included a dozen migrants from Mexico, Vietnam and Jamaica who'd been convicted of crimes such as murder and robbery. It's unclear whether U.S. officials gave those deportees' home countries a chance to accept the return of their citizens - as has long been required by law - before sending them to the prisons in Africa.
"In the United States of America, no one should fear a midnight knock on the door for voicing the wrong opinion," Conor Fitzpatrick, an attorney representing the plaintiffs, said in a news release. "Free speech isn't a privilege the government hands out. Under our Constitution it is the inalienable right of every man, woman, and child."
A U.S. District Judge has barred federal agents from conducting detention stops in Southern California without reasonable suspicion of immigration law violations. Agents cannot rely solely on factors like race, ethnicity, or language.
New York City has long been at the vanguard of interfering with enforcing this country's immigration laws. Its history as a sanctuary city dates back to 1989, and its efforts to thwart federal immigration enforcement have only intensified since.