This week in immigration news — July 25, 2019

On Wednesday, a federal judge in Washington, DC, allowed a new Trump administration rule to stand after the White House was sued by Capital Area Immigrants’ Rights Coalition and RAICES.

The rule that was introduced by the administration would prohibit asylum seekers from applying for asylum if they had traveled through a third country to reach the United States. This is a situation that is the case for many who are traveling from Central American countries, who travel up through Mexico to arrive in the United States. The groups have indicated that they plan to keep fighting the ruling.

Francisco Galicia, a U.S. citizen, was held by immigration authorities over an alleged conflict in the information that he provided to verify his status.

Despite providing documentation to prove that he’d been born in the United States, Galicia was placed in removal proceedings before he was finally released on Tuesday. He had been held in custody for 23 days.

Galicia is far from the first U.S. citizen to have been detained by immigration officials. Just this past December, the ACLU filed a lawsuit over the detention of Peter Sean Brown, a U.S. citizen who was born in Philadelphia and detained in Florida.

In January, Jilmar Ramos-Gomez, a Marine veteran who was born and raised in Michigan, also spent a few days in the custody of Immigration Customs Enforcement (ICE).

ICE’s acting director Matthew Albence reported that they take all reports of U.S. citizens in ICE custody extremely seriously.

In Kansas City, ICE officers arrived to arrest Florencio Millan-Vazquez—but when they didn’t show him a deportation order, he refused to get out of his car.

ICE then used a device to blast open one of the car’s windows to forcibly drag Millan-Vazquez out of the vehicle in front of his girlfriend Cheyenne Hoyt, and their two children. Hoyt captured the incident on video—and one of their children can be heard begging to see their dad.