News & Commentary

We’ve been getting a lot of questions about when border agents can legally conduct searches of travelers’ electronic devices at international airports and other ports of entry. Unfortunately, the answer isn’t simple.

By Rebecca Sheff, Senior Staff Attorney at the ACLU of New Mexico & Zoe Bowman, Supervising Attorney at Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center 

Yofer Fernando Orozco-Herrera, from Barinas, Venezuela, dreamed of a career in public service. Instead, he was forced to flee his homeland in search of safety and opportunity.

Junior is one of the hundreds of people held on any given day in immigration detention in New Mexico. His experience illustrates the systemic abuses that plague these facilities.

This summer, Colorado College students working with Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center and the ACLU of New Mexico sat down with people detained in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody at the Otero County Processing Center.

In this interview, our Border and Immigration Policy Advocate Leonardo Castañeda shares how the ACLU of New Mexico and the Border Humanity Project (a group of ACLU affiliates in New Mexico, Arizona, San Diego, Imperial Counties, Texas, and the ACLU National Office) worked together to issue a travel advisory in response to extremist laws passed by Texas lawmakers that target immigrants and people of color.  

The White House announced an impending executive action that will severely restrict the legal right to seek asylum at the U.S.-Mexico border.

A new report details Border Patrol’s cruel and unnecessary confiscation and destruction of migrants’ belongings, including medicines, legal documents, and religious objects.

In July, more than 90 percent of the average 30,000 people held daily in ICE detention were housed in private facilities, as private corporation revenues from immigrant detention soar.