Human Rights Glance
A Guardian analysis of government records has found that the vast majority – 77% – of people who entered deportation proceedings for the first time in 2025 had no criminal conviction, exposing a stark gap between the Trump administration’s rhetoric and reality.
Within days of Donald Trump’s inauguration, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) trotted out a phrase that his surrogates would come to use over and over again: “the worst of the worst.”
The term has become a shorthand justification for the administration’s unprecedented overhaul of immigration enforcement – a relentless campaign the administration claims is focused on arresting and deporting violent criminals.
However, a review of records obtained by the Guardian and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed against DHS, raises questions about those claims.
Worst of the worst? Most US immigrants targeted for deportation in 2025 had no criminal charges, documents reveal
Huckabee’s Israel land remarks condemned as ‘dangerous’ as controversy rumbles on
Arab and Islamic countries jointly condemned remarks by the US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, who suggested Israel had a biblical right to a vast swath of the Middle East.
Huckabee, a former Baptist minister and a fervent Israel supporter, was speaking on the podcast of Tucker Carlson.
In an episode released on Friday, Carlson pushed Huckabee on the meaning of a biblical verse sometimes interpreted as saying that Israel is entitled to the land between the Nile River in Egypt and the Euphrates in Syria and Iraq.
In response, Huckabee said: “It would be fine if they took it all.”
When pressed, however, he continued that Israel was “not asking to take all of that”, adding: “It was somewhat of a hyperbolic statement.”
The backlash widened sharply on Sunday as more than a dozen Arab and Islamic governments – alongside three major regional organisations – issued a joint statement denouncing the US diplomat’s comments as “dangerous and inflammatory”.
Israeli prisons 'begin preparations to apply death penalty' for Palestinians
The Israeli Prison Service has begun preparations to introduce the death penalty for Palestinian prisoners, Israeli media reported on Sunday.
According to Israel's Channel 13, preparations include the creation of a facility dubbed "Israel's Green Mile", where executions will take place.
Training and procedural preparations have also started, while a delegation from the prison service is expected to visit an East Asian country to study the legal and regulatory framework for implementing capital punishment, the report added.
The move follows the Knesset’s approval of the death penalty bill in its first reading last year, with 39 MPs in favour and 16 against.
The bill must pass two further readings before becoming law.
The report added that executions will be carried out by hanging, with three guards pressing the trigger simultaneously.
Specialist teams, composed entirely of volunteers, will be assigned to the task.
An Israeli source told the channel that death sentences will be carried out within 90 days of the final verdict.
Israel detains journalists, solidarity activists in occupied West Bank
Israeli forces have detained two journalists, two foreign solidarity activists and a Palestinian anti-settlement activist in the southern occupied West Bank city of Hebron while they were documenting attacks carried out by illegal Israeli settlers, according to local sources.
Osama Makhamera, a Palestinian activist involved in resisting settlement expansion, told Anadolu on Friday that Israeli forces stormed the Rujum al-Aala area after illegal settlers attacked residents of the Masafer Yatta region, south of Hebron.
He said the forces detained two journalists working with a foreign media outlet, along with two foreign activists and Rateb al-Jbour, coordinator of the popular and national committees opposing illegal Israeli settlement activity in southern Hebron, as they were documenting the settler assault.
Makhamera added that the detainees were taken to a nearby Israeli settlement in the area. Al-Jbour was later released, while the fate of the journalists and foreign activists remains unknown.
He said the Rujum al-Aala community has faced repeated attacks by illegal settlers, with incidents escalating in recent days.
The assaults have left residents wounded, including women and children, caused extensive damage to homes and property, destroyed crops, and prevented residents from accessing their farmland and grazing areas.
Walz Presses DHS To Disclose The Number Of Kids Detained By ICE In Minnesota
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz (D) warned Tuesday that 5-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos’s detention could be far from an isolated case.
“Here’s the thing, we don’t know how many others are in the same situation that didn’t get a photo that went viral,” Walz said during a Tuesday press conference as he denounced the ways ICE had targeted schools and students.
In a letter he sent this week, Walz also pressed Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to reveal the number of children who’ve been detained in Minnesota.
“Incredibly, his case is only one of many. Each day brings new reports of children detained by ICE,” Walz wrote.
Walz’s statements underscore how the detention of children has skyrocketed under the Trump administration, and also point to how limited the oversight is of the treatment of kids in federal detention.
According to an analysis by The Marshall Project, ICE held roughly 170 children on an average day during President Donald Trump’s second term, a major uptick compared to the last year of former President Joe Biden’s administration. In the last 16 months of the Biden administration, ICE held about 25 children per day.
U.S. Envoys Refused to Report "Apocalyptic" Conditions in Gaza. Exclusive Photos Show the Reality They Suppressed
In February 2024, just over three months into Israel’s war on Gaza, U.S. ambassador to Israel, Jack Lew, and his deputy, Stephanie Hallett, blocked an internal cable intended for wider distribution among senior officials in the Biden administration that warned northern Gaza had turned into an “apocalyptic wasteland,” according to Reuters.
Lew and Hallett reportedly blocked the cable, which described the consequences of Israel’s assault in harrowing detail, because they believed it lacked balance.
The cable was drafted by U.S. Agency for International Development staffers and was based on a two-part humanitarian fact-finding mission by a small United Nations team that visited the area on January 31 and February 1, 2024.
I was part of that mission.
Northern Gaza had been under a total siege for over three months when we were eventually allowed to enter in January 2024. We moved through Gaza City, Beit Lahia, Jabaliya, and Beit Hanoun.
What we found was an endless horizon of destruction. People were living under plastic sheeting or in the rubble of buildings. Schools had been destroyed. In parts of Beit Hanoun, the entire area had been depopulated and decimated. There was a deadly shortage of clean drinking water, food and access to healthcare.
Judge orders release of father and 5-year-old detained by ICE in Minnesota
U.S. District Judge Fred Biery on Jan. 31 ordered the release of Liam and his father, asylum seeker Adrian Conejo Arias, from the Dilley, Texas, immigration detention center. Biery previously ruled on Jan. 27 that the Minnesota preschooler or his father could not be deported.
The detention of Conejo and his son Liam garnered national attention, with many criticizing ICE after photos began circulating showing the blue bunny-hat-wearing 5-year-old being detained in the driveway of his home on Jan. 20.
The case has its genesis in the ill-conceived and incompetently-implemented government pursuit of daily deportation quotas, apparently even if it requires traumatizing children," Biery wrote in his order filed Jan. 31.
Biery's order continued: "Observing human behavior confirms that for some among us, the perfidious lust for unbridled power and the imposition of cruelty in its quest know no bounds and are bereft of human decency. And the rule of law be damned."
More Articles...
- Five-year-old deported to Honduras despite being US citizen is latest child victim of Trump crackdown
- Israeli forces kill Palestinian, detain others in occupied West Bank
- ICE detains five-year-old Minnesota boy as he came home, say school officials
- Israel escalates deadly strikes in Gaza; U.S. seizes another oil tanker in the Caribbean; ACLU sues Trump admin for racial profiling in Minnesota
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