Recently, as the world becomes increasingly hostile to my community, I have been haunted by the feeling that every horizon is a wall. Last Thanksgiving, when the Trump administration terminated Temporary Protected Status for Burma, a temporary immigration pathway that over 3,000 Burmese immigrants are relying on, a friend of mine remarked that we fled a tyrant only to run into the arms of a worse one.
It is not normal for a healthy 41-year-old man to die less than 24 hours after being taken into government custody, said Shawn VanDiver, president of AfghanEvac, a San Diego-based group that helps Afghans who sought refuge in the United States after cooperating with U.S. authorities during the war in Afghanistan.
Up to 21,000 asylum seekers who have waited for a year for their claims to be processed could be allowed to enter the jobs market so they can support themselves, the Home Office has said, as part of a package of measures to be announced on Thursday. As the government seeks to empty asylum hotels, claimants who break the law, work illegally or are found to have enough assets to live without support will from June be ejected and lose their support payments.
Project Play, an NGO that has worked with 2,192 children hoping to cross the Channel from northern France to the UK to claim asylum in the last two years, has documented the impact of the hostile conditions in northern France due to regular teargassing, evictions and dinghy-slashing by the French police. During that period the NGO documented the deaths of 22 children trying to cross the Channel, including five last year.
The memo was filed as a part of documents submitted in a federal court case tied to refugees who were arrested in Minnesota. In it, USCIS Director Joseph Edlow and ICE acting Director Todd Lyons direct their agencies to "detain and inspect" refugees who do not "voluntarily return to DHS custody for inspection and examination" to be a legal permanent resident at the one-year mark of being in the country.
He was arrested because on February 15, 2025, he was out for a walk in his neighborhood when he got lost and wandered onto a woman's porch, who called the police. He was using a curtain rod as a walking stick, which officers demanded he drop. When he didn't, they tased, beat, and arrested him.
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.
The board employs more than 50 social workers to conduct the assessments, but some children have said they are out to get them. The report finds that in some cases the process has led to children's deteriorating mental health, including self-harm and suicidal ideation, and that going through a Home Office age assessment is far more severe and traumatic than a comparable experience with a local authority social worker.
French authorities rescued more than 6,000 migrants attempting to reach Britain in small boats last year, while 25 people died and two remain missing, the maritime prefecture said Friday in its annual report. France has long been a launchpad for migrants hoping to cross the Channel and start a better life in Britain, where the centre-left Labour government is under pressure from the anti-immigration hard right to curb arrivals.
Investigators discovered the gangs were brazenly offering to transport migrants from Calais to Dover in the back of trucks and touting it as a "taxi service". In one promotional video, three migrants are seen reclining on a mound of soft white packages inside a truck. One of the young men gives a thumbs-up to the camera. "By truck, Safe reach London UK in 2 hours," reads the caption.
The Common European Asylum System (CEAS) is the European Union's legal framework to create uniform, fair, and efficient standards for processing asylum applications. The system's reform, agreed in 2024, will become legally binding in Germany and throughout the EU in June, 2026. EU member states had a two-year implementation period during which the new rules including stricter border procedures were transposed into national law.