Travel

ICE deports Texas father to Ghana, which puts them on a flight to the country a judge banned.

By SalStaff Writer · the evening edition, 26 October 2026

A Texas father spent months fighting deportation to the one country a U.S. judge said could get them killed: Mali. Ghana's airport read that paperwork differently.

The State Department warns Americans not to travel to several of the places the agency has been treating as deportation receiving docks all year. In September, CNN found the Central African Republic had taken in dozens of men with protection orders just like this one, the same month CBS traveled to Liberia and found deportees who said they had never heard of the country before ICE put them on the plane.

The common thread through Liberia, the Central African Republic, and now Ghana-by-way-of-Mali is the same missing document: a signed agreement showing the receiving government actually agreed to take someone, and agreed to keep them. Nobody has produced one. Not the Ghanaian government, not the State Department, not ICE. The only paper trail that exists is the agency's own file, and the only reason the public has even that much is that CBS News got it — not ICE, not a court, not a congressional committee with subpoena power, CBS.

That is the whole mechanism now. A court rules a person cannot go to Mali. The agency says, on paper, they're going to Ghana instead. Ghana's own officials, answering to nobody in Washington, decide otherwise within the same day. And when a reporter finally asks who signed what, the only answer on file is the one the agency wrote about itself, filed where only a subpoena or a leak will ever find it. The court order didn't fail. It just stopped being able to follow this father once they left the room.

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ICE posts its highest custody death count in more than a decade; California's own report blames medical neglect.

By The Wrecking CrewThe Remedy Desk · the afternoon edition, 26 October 2026

Start with the standards. The agency that runs these facilities wrote the detention standards it is measured against — medical care, food, sanitation, the whole conditions list — and this month three states' worth of paper says the standards are not being run. Nothing to invent. Nothing to pass. A document exists, and it is not being used.

Open on 7 October. Advocates and family members estimated at least 73 people inside the privately run immigration jail at Folkston, Georgia had stopped eating, protesting prolonged detention and the facility's violations. A hunger strike is a conditions report filed by the only people with standing to file one, in the only currency they have.

8 October, the next beat: children held in record numbers, sometimes alone, in places where lawyers and family cannot find them. At the Dilley processing center in Texas, lawyers filed complaints about contaminated food; Dilley held the five-year-old whom immigration officers arrested in January in a blue bunny hat and a Spider-Man backpack, and celebrities called for the place to be closed. Mark the shape. The complaint goes to the agency. The call to shut the building goes out on television.

16 October. A court filing tells a court that people at Camp East Montana, the desert detention camp on the Fort Bliss base in west Texas, face a risk of serious injury or death: physical abuse by guards, filthy living conditions, disease outbreaks. Same complaint. Second state. This one with a docket number.

23 October. Fault Lines investigated the deaths at California's Adelanto Processing Center, operated by the private prison company GEO Group. At least 59 people have died in ICE custody since the start of this term, the highest number in more than a decade; many of those deaths are linked to medical neglect, four of the five recent Adelanto deaths among them, according to the state attorney general's 2026 report. Third state.

Today, Folkston again. Luis Sandoval died there, in the facility the hunger strike has been aimed at for over two weeks.

Now the parts list, because the planner likes this one. The spec sheet is the agency's own standards. The finding of fact is written already, by a state attorney general. The venue is open already — the Texas filing of 16 October, before a court that can be asked to order conditions fixed. The public record is a documentary and a strike, both dated. The pilot's job is to carry a decade-high death count into the one courtroom that already has a camp on its calendar.

Assembled, bolted, sitting on the bench. Whether it turns over is the reader's call.

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NO ANSWER

Pretti family demands Justice Department release evidence file it stopped sending four days earlier

By The Wrecking CrewThe Remedy Desk · the evening edition, 27 October 2026

The chief lays the file on the table first: in January, federal agents in Minneapolis shot Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse and U.S. citizen, and in the same crackdown shot Renee Good. Two bodies, one state, and by March Minnesota had already sued the federal government just to see what its own officers wrote down.

For seven months the only paperwork that moved fast was the smear: by August, Pretti's family was hearing officials describe their son as an "assassin" and a "domestic terrorist," a label applied to a man they'd just finished calling a nurse.

Then came the part with the receipts. On October 23, Minnesota told a court that the flow of evidence had not slowed — it had stopped. The federal government, the state said in a filing, is no longer sharing anything related to either shooting. Four days later, Pretti's parents stood in front of cameras and asked the Department of Justice "to do what is right," saying the government had ignored them, then misled them.

The planner studies that timeline and likes what it reveals: the state's lawsuit was never going to be enough on its own, because a civil suit only forces the other side to hand over what it already decided to hand over. Which is where the tinkerer goes to work. The federal government did not need Minnesota's cooperation, a new statute, or an act of Congress to open a second track — the civil-rights pattern-or-practice review the Justice Department is already authorized to launch on its own agencies, no state subpoena required, no family request necessary. It sits in the same building as the evidence that stopped moving. Nobody has touched it.

The muscle goes first on the excuse, because the excuse is load-bearing: "ongoing investigation" cannot cover an investigation that, by Minnesota's own filing, isn't being shared with anyone investigating it. Knock that wall down and there is nothing behind it but the choice not to open the drawer.

The pilot's job is simpler than it sounds: fly the file to where the family already is. Nine months after a nurse died on a Minneapolis street, the tool that doesn't need the state's permission, doesn't need a new vote, and doesn't need the file Minnesota can't get — is still sitting closed, in the one office that owns the key.

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ICE agent indicted for ramming SUV into man while chasing suspect dead for years

By LouOne More Question · the afternoon edition, 30 October 2026

My wife told me to leave it alone. Twice. Once when I got up at eleven to find the folder, and once around two, when she heard the garage door and came out in her robe to ask what exactly I thought I was going to find out there that I hadn't found in the house. I didn't have an answer for her. I still don't, entirely. But I went out to the garage anyway, because that's where the toolbox is, and because I wasn't going to sleep regardless, and a man might as well do something with his hands while his head won't quit.

Here's what wouldn't let me alone. On October 11th, ICE agents in Houston were trying to pull over two men — a Jose Mendoza-Cervantes and a Miguel Parra Hernandez — when the two got out of their vehicle and ran. An ICE officer driving an unmarked SUV struck Parra Hernandez. Broke his leg. I wrote that part down clean: struck, with a vehicle, during a pursuit. No argument from anybody on that.

Three days later the Harris County district attorney, Sean Teare, said he was looking at the video and considering a felony charge — aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, the kind of charge that can carry twenty years. The story that ran about his review used a word I keep turning over, not because he said it in quotes — he didn't, and I'm not going to pretend he did — but because the headline writer reached for it anyway: appeared. The vehicle appeared to veer intentionally into the man. I don't know what the DA's exact words were that day. I know what the headline decided to call it. I genuinely don't know. That's not a complaint. That's a question I can't answer from where I'm sitting.

Then, on the 17th, a different fact landed that I had to read twice. An immigration advocacy group told reporters that the man ICE was chasing that morning — Mendoza-Cervantes, the one who ran — has, according to their research, been dead for almost ten years.

Out in the garage, I was looking for a fan belt. What I found instead was a receipt, folded up behind the coffee cans, for a car I traded in before my daughter started high school. She's thirty-one now. I still get the recall notices for that car. Some department somewhere still has it on a list, still sends the letter, still believes the thing it's addressed to is sitting in somebody's driveway waiting to be fixed. The car doesn't exist. The letter doesn't know that. The letter keeps arriving like the car is still out there, like the chase is still live.

On Friday, the 30th, a Harris County grand jury indicted the officer — Mario Alberto Morales, thirty-three — on that same charge, aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. That part is settled now. He's charged. The man he hit is in the hospital record with a broken leg and a hip injury, and that's settled too.

What isn't settled, at least not for me, standing in a cold garage at two in the morning with a fan belt in one hand and an old recall notice in the other, is what you call the thing the government was chasing when the SUV turned. A man. A name. A file.

Oh — one more thing, and then I promise I'll let you get back to bed.

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Judge pauses plan to speed children through an asylum system already denying 94 percent of claims

By MitchInvestigations · the evening edition, 31 October 2026

I never have to meet anyone in a parking garage. That is the small mercy of this desk: the material arrives published, paginated and free, and all I do is read it in order.

Today a federal judge paused the administration's plan to fast-track asylum interviews for unaccompanied children. The New York Times put the qualifier in the headline — for now. Lawyers for the children called the plan a deportation assembly line, and I want to be careful with that phrase, because an assembly line is a machine for producing an identical object at speed.

All together now — the June tally from the Executive Office for Immigration Review, which is to say the administration's own immigration courts. Ninety-four percent of asylum claims decided that month were denied. The same analysis notes that the courts are plowing through asylum cases at an expeditious rate. Expeditious is their word. I have no improvement to offer on it.

So the memo a judge paused today was a plan to speed up a process that denies 94 percent of the claims it decides. I have reread that sentence several times looking for the part I got wrong.

Follow the calendar back from here. On October 16, immigrant advocacy groups sued to stop what they called a cruel and unlawful scheme to fast-track children's cases — fifteen days ago. Ten days before that, on October 6, in Boston, U.S. District Judge George O'Toole blocked a separate effort by the same administration: fining migrants up to $1.8 million apiece for failing to leave the country after a final order of deportation. The judge ruled the fines were imposed unlawfully, and wrote that the people facing them were in an economically precarious position. Up to $1.8 million, in a ruling you can read this afternoon.

That is the count, and the count is the story.

What neither ruling touched is the 94 percent. No court was asked to pause that, because a denial rate is not a memo; it is the result the memos were written to deliver faster. The children's interviews stop for now. The number they were being hurried toward was never under review.

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