On February 18, Damaris Bello accompanied her mother to a green card interview in downtown Sacramento.
By the next morning, Maria de Jesus Estrada Juarez had been deported to Mexico, where she hasn't lived in 27 years and despite having valid DACA status.
The January letter shows the ICE areas of responsibility where the arrests of DACA recipients have taken place:
The office of Rep. Ramirez has reached out to DHS to clarify the inconsistency, saying in a March 4 letter that the "discrepancies between your two responses demonstrate gross incompetency or intentional misdirection."
I've also reached out to DHS for clarification.
The February letter shared with Sen. Durbin and first reported by CBS News stated that 261 DACA recipients had been arrested and 86 deported between January and November 2025.
(Note the distinction between recipients and applicants in the two letters.)
SCOOP: In a January letter to Rep. Delia Ramirez (D-IL), DHS says 270 DACA recipients have been arrested from January to September 2025. In addition, 174 DACA applicants have been deported, according to ICE records.
Those numbers differ from what was shared with Sen. Dick Durbin in February.
My dispatch from the Jersey suburbs:
www.motherjones.com/politics/202...
Immigrants are successfully challenging the Trump administration's mass detention policy and winning release from ICE custody—thanks to a centuries-old legal principle and constitutional right. My latest for @motherjones.com:
Steven Tendo is a pastor and asylum seeker from Uganda who has survived unimaginable harm and persecution back home. He has been fighting his case for years and reporting to ICE regularly. Yesterday, he was taken into custody—days before a scheduled check-in—and moved from Vermont to New Hampshire.
“It’s not at all surprising that this is happening with these ICE [removal] officers being sent out to basically treat people terribly,” a one-time deputy chief counsel with the agency told me, anticipating more escalation of violence. My latest for @motherjones.com:
“Mass deportation will be a labor-market disruption celebrated by American workers,” Stephen Miller said in late 2023.
But as I wrote here before Trump's re-election, researchers estimated that large-scale deportations would result in fewer jobs for Americans, not more.
"We have voted. We have protested. We have been killed. We have been persecuted. We have been imprisoned. We have been tortured. We have done everything in our power to have a path to democracy—and we deserve that opportunity.”
Finally, in December, I reported on the fallout of the administration's crackdown on legal immigration following the shooting of two National Guard members in Washington, DC.
More to come in 2026.
And I profiled a Navy veteran who chases ICE on a scooter across the neighborhoods of Baltimore.
In November, I also wrote about the Trump administration's active targeting of DACA recipients with valid protection for arrest, detention, and deportation.
For the November/December issue, I reported on a one-time prison town in Colorado that has gotten divided over potential plans to open an ICE detention center in their backyard.
In October, I followed up on my March piece about the US immigration courts with detailed accounts from fired immigration judges.
For the September/October issue of the magazine, I reported on Trump's attack on Temporary Protected Status for Venezuelans and the largest de-legalization push in modern US history.
@nlanard.bsky.social and I talked to some of the Venezuelans after they were released from CECOT and sent back to Venezuela and documented their stories about what they endured in El Salvador.
In July, I reported on ICE's arrest of a Brazilian-born high schooler and how it galvanized a Massachusetts town.
In June, I wrote about how several of the men sent to CECOT had their pending asylum cases in the United States dismissed by immigration judges.
I also looked back at my previous reporting on "Remigration" in light of Trump's proposal to create a Remigration Office within the State Department.
In May, I worked on an article about the Trump administration's attack on a legal services program for detained immigrants with serious mental health needs and cognitive disabilities.
@nlanard.bsky.social and I also reported on the detained migrants who were at risk of being sent to El Salvador next.
In April, I followed up on our original investigation with an in-depth story about another Venezuelan sent to CECOT, Julio Zambrano, and the impact his removal had on his family.
Also in March, @nlanard.bsky.social and I interviewed the relatives, friends, and lawyers of 10 Venezuelans sent to El Salvador's CECOT without due process and on flimsy allegations of gang membership due to innocuous tattoos. One man, Neri Alvarado, had an autism awareness tattoo for his brother.
