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<placeholder type="custom-code" class="ph3 ph4-ns"><aside class="dn-p relative mv4 _bt _bb"><div class="mw6 mw7-l _mw-75rem-l center bg-black-05 br2"><div id="donate" class="mt4 mb0 pa3 pa4-l _bt _bw1"><div class="avenir f4 f3-ns b lh-title">The <em>World Socialist Web Site</em> is the voice of the working class and the leadership of the international socialist movement. We rely entirely on the support of our readers. Please donate today!</div></div><div class="w-100 tc center ph3 ph4-ns"><placeholder type="donorbox" source="https://donorbox.org/embed/wsws-ny-fund-2025-articles?" html-id="donate"></placeholder></div></div></aside></placeholder>

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In this photo taken Sept. 10, 2019, detainees walk toward a fenced recreation area at the GEO Group’s immigration jail in Tacoma, Washington during a media tour. 

Fabian Schmidt

The US immigration gestapo, empowered by the Trump administration with the complicity of the Democratic Party, is willfully violating the law to kidnap, detain and deport people across the country.

Over the last week, outrages have been reported targeting teachers, students and workers of virtually every background and legal status. This underscores the necessity of building a mass, international movement in the working class that defends the right of all immigrants and refugees to live and work wherever they choose.

Boston’s Logan Airport has been the site of several such incidents in the last week. On Friday, Dr. Rasha Alawieh, 34, a Lebanese citizen, organ transplant specialist and professor at Brown University, was detained at Logan Airport for approximately 36 hours while returning to the US from a two-week visit to family in Lebanon.

On Friday, Yara Chehab, Alawieh’s cousin, filed a complaint to prevent her from being deported, noting that she was in the US legally on an H-1B temporary visa. In an email to

, Thomas Brown, a lawyer for Dr. Alawieh, wrote, “I can confirm that Dr. Alawieh had a valid H-1B temporary worker visa in her passport when she arrived at Logan Airport on Friday, March 14, 2025.”

In a court order filed later that same day, Judge Leo T. Sorokin of the Federal District Court in Massachusetts ordered the government to provide the court 48 hours’ notice before any attempt to deport Alawieh.

Despite Judge Sorokin’s order, Alawieh was forced to get on a flight to Paris, France over the weekend. In a court order filed Sunday morning, the judge wrote that Chehab’s lawyers had filed a petition on Saturday alleging that Customs and Border Protection “willfully” disobeyed his previous order to not remove Alawieh without providing him 48-hour notice.

“These allegations,” Judge Sorokin wrote, “are supported by a detailed and specific timeline in an under oath affidavit filed by attorney.” He ordered the government to respond to these “serious allegations” by Monday morning. 

, Dr. George Bayliss said his co-worker, Dr. Alaweih is “a very talented, very thoughtful physician.” He added, “We are all outraged, and none of us know why this happened.”

In another disturbing incident at Logan Airport, on Friday, March 7, Fabian Schmidt, 34, a legal resident of the United States and German national, was detained and, according to his mother, tortured at the airport for refusing to give up his green card.

In an interview Friday, March 14, with WGBH, Astrid Senior, Fabian Schmidt’s mother, said she had not heard from her son directly until this past Tuesday, March 11, after he had been hospitalized as a result of being assaulted at the airport upon returning from Luxembourg on March 7. She told the TV outlet her son’s partner had gone to the airport to pick him up but after four hours was told by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement that he would not be available.

She said that on Tuesday her son recounted being “violently interrogated” at the airport “for hours.”

This interrogation, Senior related, included being stripped naked, forced to take a cold shower and then placed in a chair. Senior said her son was not the only person tortured and that after he refused to give up his green card he was placed on a mat in a brightly lit room at the airport with “other people.”

She recounted that her son and the others were given little food or water, deprived of sleep and denied access to medication for anxiety and depression. Senior said that under these conditions, “He hardly got anything to drink. And then he wasn’t feeling very well, and he collapsed.”

Senior said that after a brief stay in the hospital, where Schmidt was diagnosed with influenza, he was eventually transported to the ICE Wyatt detention facility.

Senior told WGBH that she and Schmidt moved to the US in 2007, both received their green cards in 2008, and her son’s was recently renewed. Schmidt is currently an electrical engineer. He has a partner and an eight-year-old daughter, both US citizens.

 reported that Camila Muñoz, wife of US resident Bradley Bartell, was detained by immigration police while the couple was returning to the United States after honeymooning in Puerto Rico. Bartell told the newspaper that while Muñoz had overstayed a temporary visa, she worked on a W-2, paid her taxes and had already applied for a green card.

Despite the fact that Muñoz, originally from Peru, has no criminal record, she is still being detained in an ICE prison in Louisiana, “trapped in a room with 100 other people,” Bartell told 

. The only communication the couple has is 20-cent per minute phone calls. 

 reported that Muñoz is not the only woman without a criminal record “that ICE has detained for weeks.” Through lawyers, court filings and ICE, the newspaper confirmed that several people were “swept up” at airport checkpoints in mid-February in Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands, including:

a woman in her 50s who has lived in the US for more than 30 years and is married to a US citizen;

a woman in her 30s with proof of valid permanent legal residency, who first came to the US as a teenager and whose father and siblings are US citizens; and

a woman engaged to a US legal permanent resident with whom she has lived nine years.

Workers who have no memory of living in any country but the United States are being kidnapped and deported to countries they have never visited and with which they have no family or language connection. In a particularly horrific case that threatens the life of a mother of five children, the 

reported last week that Ma Yang, a South Milwaukee resident, was deported to Laos. 

The paper reported that the 37-year-old Hmong American came to the United States as a baby after her parents, Hmong refugees, fled the country after the Vietnam War. Yang, a nail technician and mother to five children, the youngest being six years old, was a legal permanent US resident starting at age 7, but, unbeknownst to her, that status was revoked in 2022 after she was convicted for her role in a marijuana distribution operation.

As part of her plea deal, Yang spent 30 months in federal prison. She claimed her lawyer told her it would not affect her immigration status, but at the conclusion of her sentence she was transferred to an ICE facility, where, on the advice of a different attorney, she signed a paper agreeing that a deportation order would be levied against her in exchange for being released. Neither Yang nor her lawyer, apparently, thought she would be deported, as Laos typically does not accept US deportees.

However, at an ICE check-in in mid-February, Yang was arrested and sent to a jail in Indiana before being whisked onto a plane to Laos, where she arrived on March 6. Upon arriving, Yang said she was questioned by military authorities and placed under house arrest for five days before being allowed out to purchase a cell phone.

Yang told the newspaper she does not speak the language and that Laos officials took all of her documentation. She also said she has no insulin for her diabetes and is running out of her high blood pressure medication. 

In an interview with WTMJ4, Yang said, “I’m so scared because there’s a lot of unknown questions.” She added, “I would love to come back. I have five children. I’m praying. I pray every day to come back.

“I don’t know what I would do. I don’t have any family here. I don’t have any friends here. I’ve never been in this country.”

Empowered by the Trump administration and with the complicity of the Democratic Party, US immigration police are detaining and deporting legal tourists, multi-decade residents and visa holders in violation of court orders.

US immigration gestapo ignores court orders, legal status to carry out abductions

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