Allegra Love - Intolerable

Allegra Love is a veteran immigration attorney based in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
She has represented and advocated for immigrants in the U.S. and Mexico.
This commentary originally published on her blog May 7, 2025.

Seen on the side of the highway during a wild dust storm in Southern New Mexico

Photo credit: Allegra Love

A couple weeks ago, I began describing my work as a little like palliative care. Some colleagues were accompanying a big family to an ICE check-in where they would almost certainly face removal to their home country. They lawyers were incredible advocates and had taken some swings, but options were running low - it seemed like it was time to tell the family to prepare for the fact that they were going to face deportation. They had to figure out what they needed to manage stress, to be as comfortable as possible, and to exert as much control as they could on how it all went down.

One way to describe my job is to help people avoid this moment. We take detailed notes about their histories and their families and review regulations and footnotes in practice advisories to try and find a path through the labyrinth of immigration laws that could allow them to avoid being forcibly removed from the country. Those pathways are rarely easy and never cheap or fast. Sometimes those pathways take an unfathomable amount of strength for our clients to follow. But very often we find them. So, one of the hardest parts of the deal is when you have to level with a client and explain that there is nothing you can offer them and that they need to start wrapping their head around what it is going to mean to face their imminent removal. I have gotten better at this conversation over the years but it can turn an already difficult day into one where I come home and cry or zone out to a couple hours of TV, as I have been doing lately.

Which is why I have been pretty solemn lately facing the days at work. There hasn’t been much fanfare, but on April 11, the government somewhat quietly enacted a new (but also old) registration requirement for certain non-citizens living in the US. This has not made much headway in the news yet. How could it when the White House has been engaging in a standoff with the Federal Courts over the return of Mr. Abrego Garcia from the CECOT in El Salvador? But that horrifying mess can also inform us about what is so terrifying about registration. Let me explain:

About two weeks ago, United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) opened up the process of Alien Registration and issued a warning. Through reviving a dormant piece of the Immigration and Nationality Act, it is now regulation in the U.S. that a certain class of non-citizens fill out a form to register as not having any immigration status, get fingerprinted, and carry a card that says they are undocumented. It’s a simple online form called the G-325R. It doesn’t cost anything to fill out. The idea is to send in your information, go to the nearest application support center, get fingerprinted, and then be issued a card that says you registered. The card does not confer any status or access to work authorization. If a person fails to do this within a very short time frame they could face fines, potential criminal liability, and myriad unforeseen consequences. If it sounds like a trap, well, that’s because it is.  And we are already seeing the first reports of federal criminal charges for people failing to register.

Please do not mistake this newsletter as permission for you to now analyze and advise your non-citizen neighbors on their need to register with USCIS. There are enormous swaths of folks without discernible legal status in the U.S who are also not required to register because they are already considered registered by virtue of something in their history as a non-citizen in the U.S. like, say, a previous employment authorization document, a notice to appear in immigration court, or an expired visa. The media is going to say things like “illegal immigrants required to register under new law” but this is false. It only applies to certain individuals. Registration is dangerous and people should consult with a qualified practitioner to understand if they are currently subject to the requirements. Again, it does not affect everyone and comes with significant consequences. Do not advise if you are not qualified to do so. 

This kind of classification is a step towards genocide. If that sounds dramatic to you, consider that people are being disappeared from our country into an El Salvadoran torture center from which no one has ever been publicly released. The government is now also saying that they will send people to Libya. Through registration, folks are demanded to carry proof that they are subject to this kind of treatment. And if they choose not to? Then they face criminal penalties that could separate them from their children and would almost certainly be paired with deportation with aggravated consequences. 

There are those of you out there who might think that there is an element of fairness here. After all, people in the United States without permission have violated a law - why shouldn’t they be subject to enforcement? The problem is that people perceived as “illegal immigrants” in this country are being deprived of due process and subjected to extraordinary levels of human rights abuses. Perhaps it seems fair to ask someone to carry around a card that shows they do not have immigration status in the U.S. but that’s not really what is being asked here. Folks who engage with registration have to show up and be fingerprinted and face the potential gulag. How could anyone trust that they are not the next to be sent to CECOT, or interned without due process? The government is actively lying about the people who they are disappearing and baselessly claiming that they are heinous criminals. Is it reasonable to ask a person to roll the dice and subject themselves to this? Why would anyone incriminate themselves as being an undocumented immigrant when our country is treating that administrative violation as being on par with terrorism? There is an extremely strong legal argument that under the fifth amendment, non-citizens subject to registration have the right to remain silent. But will that protect them if and when charges come down in Federal court?

The ethical quandary here for an attorney is unenviable. On one hand, it is a lawyer's job to advise their clients to comply with the law. Registration is now required for many and avoiding it creates criminal liability and could prevent folks from accessing future immigration benefits. And yet the Trump administration is publicly engaging in illegal human rights abuses of people who are classified as undocumented. How could a lawyer advise a person to incriminate themselves and expose their family to that level of illegality and violence? The only thing that one can do is examine each case individually and explore the various options and consequences. There’s no real way around trouble. Ultimately, every person must decide for themselves what they want to do with this quagmire.

I saw a headline a couple weeks ago about a person who disappeared - a Venezuelan man who ran astray of his truck route at the Canadian border and got detained crossing back. He wasn’t located in ICE detention and wasn’t on the deportation manifests. Only now is the Trump administration saying he is in El Salvador. We will certainly be told  that he was a heinous criminal as a means of justifying his disappearance, assured we are all safer because of this brutality. From reading the articles about it, I understand that this gentleman waited in line to get his parole into the U.S. last November and came across the bridge with the permission of our government, hardly here illegally. I think about the many mornings I spent at a shelter in El Paso last fall helping recently arrived individuals just like him fill out their work permit applications before they headed out for their destination in the U.S. Was he among them?

Here in New Mexico, ICE reported the arrests of 48 people straight off back in March - straight off of the mean streets of Santa Fe and Albuquerque – and none of those individuals have been identified by name or located. Jonathan Blitzer’s article in the New Yorker - The Mystery of ICE’s Unidentifiable Arrests – bears out what happened or didn’t happen or … no one really knows who those people are, if they ever existed, or where they are now. In the article ICE list crimes these mystery men had committed – homicide, child sexual assault, drug trafficking … shoplifting. We are meant to simply trust that disappearing people from our streets is in all of our best interests.

The question of course is, what can we do? It is really important that all of us continue to reflect on our attitudes towards non-citizens and illegality in this country. I will talk till I am blue in the face about how misunderstood the concept of immigrants as criminals is, but I don’t actually think that is what is relevant here. What’s relevant is that even if a person does the most vile thing in the U.S. if they murder or rape or kidnap a kid, they are afforded due process in criminal courts and in U.S. immigration courts and we are not allowed to disappear them. It’s part of the constitution that is supposed to protect us all. We have to immediately stop qualifying that protection as only for people who are born here.

The Trump administration just recently expressed frustration that if everyone got due process it would "take, without exaggeration, 200 years.” It’s really difficult to stomach this President, who himself benefited from lengthy legal battles for extremely serious criminal charges, asserting that in some cases, due process is simply too inconvenient. 

I may be naive, but I still think there is time for all of us to express to our elected officials, from Congress people down to our local city councils, that the right to due process under the constitution must be defended – because none of us should be naive enough to believe that this is going to stop with non-citizens. It is intolerable now. And we must say so. And act as if it is so. 

I discussed this all on the phone a couple weeks ago one of my best friends, who can be counted on to send me thoughtful encouragement, and afterwards he texted me a quote from John Berger: “When something is termed intolerable, actions must follow. These actions are subject to all the vicissitudes of life. But the pure hope resides first and mysteriously in the capacity to name the intolerable as such: and this capacity comes from afar — from the past and from the future. This is why politics and courage are inevitable. The time of the torturers is agonizingly but exclusively the present.”

Thanks, friend! I am reflecting on that quote today. Wishing everyone courage for the things they face today, no matter how large or small.

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COMMENTARY: Immigration Police Spread Dragnets Across U.S.

By Peter Costantini

Originally published by Inter Press Service ~ Roma, Italia

SEATTLE. US, May 26 2025 (IPS) - On May 21, I was in the Seattle immigration court accompanying a young mother from a South American country who was applying for asylum to a routine hearing. Local media had reported that Immigration and Customs Enforcement had arrested several people there the previous day.

Immigration courts have long seemed to be relatively safe places where immigrants were unlikely to be arrested, because they were already in the immigration legal system. [EOIR] [ICE]

While we were waiting, a group of four Haitians with a four-month-old baby sat down across from us. When I heard them speaking Kreyol and French, I introduced myself as someone who had lived in Haiti. We chatted briefly about their country and the immigration situation here, and smiled at the baby. Then they were called into court before us, and when they emerged, they seemed unperturbed by whatever was the outcome of their hearing.

However, when they walked out of the waiting room, they were surrounded by a group of burly men in Northwest-style outdoor wear and ball caps who proved to be agents of ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations. The officers wore nothing that identified them as ICE or police, and I did not see them display any badges or warrants. They operated quietly, apparently trying not to attract public attention. They did not arrest the baby and its father, but took the mother and the two other men.

The arrestees looked stricken but did not resist, and I don’t believe the police handcuffed them. The father was left holding the baby in a basket, stunned and unbelieving. Further down the hall, another group of officers arrested a man who spoke to them in Spanish, asking them not to arrest him and crying. They put handcuffs and leg shackles on him and wrestled him onto an elevator.

...

[More: https://ipsnews.net/2025/05/commentary-immigration-police-spread-dragnets-across-u-s]

Allegra Love - Newsletter #40 - Illegal

First published January 26, 2023

Allegra Love is a veteran immigration attorney based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She has represented and advocated for immigrants in the U.S. and Mexico. This piece was originally published on her blog at the beginning of the third year of the Biden administration. But many of its observations on the meanings and uses of the term “illegal” resonate even more strongly today.

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Wherever there are folks talking about the U.S. border or U.S. immigration policy, there seems to be a whole lot of confusion about what the word illegal means. Without getting too philosophical, we can just generalize and say that illegal means something forbidden by law. There are so many instances we can point to where we can confidently call an action illegal because we understand the law that prohibits it. But when it comes to immigration, I think sometimes we throw the word illegal around willy-nilly without actually understanding the mechanics of the law or being able to articulate the actual violation of a statute.

The latest federal policy concerning Haitians, Cubans, Venezuelans and Nicaraguans at the U.S. border is a prime example of this. Three weeks ago, on January 5th, the White House made a major announcement in regard to the “situation in the southwest border”. If you didn’t catch the news about it then, you can read the President’s remarks on the White House web site.

The announcement revealed the rollout of two new programs supposedly designed to reduce migration pressure. The first is an app called CBP ONE that will theoretically allow an asylum seeker to schedule an appointment at a port of entry to make an asylum claim. The second is a “parole program” that creates a pathway to the U.S. for Haitians, Venezuelans, Nicaraguans, and Cubans, the nationalities that represent the highest number of border crossers in the last couple years. A limited, though substantial number of people can apply but to qualify they must do so from their country of origin and have a fiscal sponsor in the United States.

Neither of these programs are a terrible idea. In fact, they could be an awesome step forward to creating a better and more humane way to seek safety in the U.S. We need more orderly ways to apply for asylum at the border and an app could theoretically streamline information and communication. And although “parole” can be a complicated and problematic immigration status once someone arrives to the U.S., having more humanitarian pathways directly out of these countries that circumvents the drama at the border is a nod in the right direction. But these programs should complement the right to asylum, not undermine it.

See the problem is that when the President announced these programs, he completely undermined our laws about how a person can legally seek asylum. Unless they do what he says, Cubans, Haitians, and Nicaraguans will now be ineligible for asylum and categorically expelled from the U.S. border (the administration had already been subjecting Venezuelans to this ban). He said it in his speech:

“My message is this: If you’re trying to leave Cuba, Nicaragua, or Haiti… do not just show up at the border. Stay where you are and apply legally from there.”

Moments later he said:

“We can’t stop people from making the journey but we can require them to come here … in an orderly way under U.S. law.”

It’s a sleight of hand for sure. The administration has created these new programs which will make things more orderly for them. They want people to use them. They would prefer it if they used them. But they communicate it by saying that this is the new way of coming to the U.S. is legal and the other is illegal. This is not true.

Let’s take a look at the text of 8 U.S. Code § 1158, part of the Refugee Act as it was adopted by Congress in 1980, which describes the general authority to apply for asylum:

“Any alien* who is physically present in the United States or who arrives in the United States (whether or not at a designated port of arrival and including an alien who is brought to the United States after having been interdicted in international or United States waters), irrespective of such alien’s status, may apply for asylum in accordance with this section or, where applicable, section1225(b) of this title.”

(* Here I would like to acknowledge that calling someone an alien is a shitty thing and we should not do it in conversation and should push back anytime people around us including politicians and media do it. In a recent piece I wrote blasting the Biden Administration, my editor and I discussed how you should quote a law that uses such a vitriolic term and we decided that the best thing to do is quote the statute faithfully and then include aside bar explaining why the term sucks. Consider this my sidebar.)

The law states it rather plainly. A person can ask for asylum whether or not at a designated port of entry. This means that someone who crosses the U.S. border in pursuit of asylum has not acted illegally. They do not need to stay in their home country. They do not need a fiscal sponsor. They do not need to use an app. This is true no matter how many times our President, politicians on the right, or reporters for the media imply otherwise. A president cannot arbitrarily decide that it is illegal for entire nationalities to seek asylum at the border because they are undesirable and problematic and because he created a way that would be easier for his administration to deal with. There are people for whom asking for parole from will be impossible and for whom it is too dangerous to wait for an appointment at the border. These people are allowed to ask for asylum by crossing the border, exactly the way our Congress prescribed.

This point was almost universally missed in the media coverage following Biden’s announcement.

Take the NY Times headline: “Biden Announces Major Crackdown on Illegal Border Crossings.”

Or Politico: ”Biden announces new program to curb illegal migration as he prepares for visit to border.”

Or the lede from PBS New Hour: “President Joe Biden said Thursday the U.S. would immediately begin turning away Cubans, Haitians and Nicaraguans who cross the border from Mexico illegally, his boldest move yet to confront the arrivals of migrants that have spiraled since he took office two years ago.”

If you re-read those headlines and substitute the word undesirable, uncontrollable, or unwelcome in for the word illegal, you will get a more accurate sense of what this new policy means. But when we keep saying it – “illegal, illegal, illegal” - it’s understandable that we start to believe it’s true.

Perhaps a more accurate use of the word illegal is where it concerns the President’s actions. He is not only contravening federal law by turning back people of these nationalities, he is also violating the Refugee conventions to which the U.S. is a signatory.

Yesterday a group of 77 Congress people sent a letter to the White House criticizing Biden’s policies and calling them out as illegal for, well, the exact same reasons I laid out above. According to NBC news this was the White House’s response:

“Donald Trump tried to categorically bar asylum in the United States for everyone, everywhere. The Biden administration is creating safe and orderly pathways for people who want to seek asylum in the United States. People can make an appointment from their phone to apply for asylum at a port of entry; plus, they can use the expanded parole process, or use the expanded refugee programs. That’s not an asylum ban. It’s a safe, orderly, and humane process for seeking asylum.”

This White House official does not mention the expulsions of people who can’t follow their new, safe, orderly process and shouldn’t be expected to because they don’t have the luxury of waiting in their country or waiting for an appointment at the port of entry. The whole point of asylum is its universality and to say that this is not a ban because there are still some people in the world who can get it is just ... gaslighting.

I do not imagine that there is going to be much uproar about the effective end of asylum rights for Haitians, Nicaraguans, Venezuelans, and Cubans. The public seems to believe that providing these protections is an option, not a law and unfortunately, many people who were watchers on the wall to call out Trump’s border policies as illegal, seem less inclined to do so when it is President Biden calling the shots. Once this transition is complete and we normalize violating the international rights of asylum seekers, then there is no reason to doubt that we will turn this policy on the next nationality of people who threaten the White House’s political narrative. It took them less than two months to expand it from Venezuelans to three more nationalities. They tested it, there was little pushback, they expanded it.

I hope people read this newsletter and think about what it means for something to be illegal versus undesirable. I hope that when the White House inevitably reports a sharp decline in “illegal” border crossings and touts the success of their program, that you pause and consider just which people are acting illegally. Think a few steps down the line to what this might mean as climate catastrophes worsen. What if the only option we allow people is to stay where they are and request a limited number of spots on the parole list. What if they are cooking to death or drowning? This could happen any day now. And what will we think when the president says:

“My message is this … Stay where you are and apply legally from there.”

Will you feel comfortable with a president deciding on the fly what legal means? Or would it be better if we had a set of international conventions and norms that guaranteed the right of people to move when they are going to die? Well, we have them and though they are flawed and insufficient and in dire need of modernization, we adopted them into U.S. law 43 years ago to protect ourselves from ourselves when it becomes inconvenient to help people who need humanitarian protection. This president is abandoning them.

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See also Allegra’s previous post: Allegra Love - Newsletter #41 - More Boxes

Allegra Love, PO Box 3218, El Paso, TX 79923

Laura Carlsen - Why Trump won and what that means for Mexico

Laura Carlsen, director of MIRA: feminisms and democracy, dives deeply into the 2024 electoral victory of Donald Trump, and its implications for the United States and Mexico. She focuses particularly on opportunities for the new Mexican government of Claudia Sheinbaum to mitigate damages and craft new political and economic strategies around migration, trade and other salient issues.