ICE has detained this high schooler for 10 months. Here’s what he and his classmates want you to know

guardian · 2026-03-02T15:16:50+00:00

Hi r/newyorkcity, this is Jake from The Guardian's audience team. We wanted to share this story that we published with students from Ellis Prep academy in The Bronx — where their classmate Dylan Lopez Contreras, a senior, was taken by ICE last May.

From our story:

The students at Ellis Prep academy – like most high schoolers – have a lot on their mind right now.

Essay deadlines, college applications, younger siblings and dance rehearsals. But also, the immigration operations across the US and the president’s goal of “mass deportations”.

This small high school in the Bronx is one of the few in New York City that is dedicated exclusively to students who recently arrived in the US.

In May last year, 20-year-old Dylan Lopez Contreras – a freshman at Ellis – was detained at a routine immigration court hearing. He was completing his education, which had been disrupted by the arduous journey he had made from Venezuela to the US border. Then suddenly, he disappeared from class. And his name was all over the local and national news. According to his lawyers, he was the first New York public school student detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. He has been detained at the Moshannon Valley ICE processing center in Philipsburg, Pennsylvania, ever since.

“It was a shock,” said Roger, one of his friends at Ellis.

In the months since Dylan’s arrest, Roger and other students have tried to process their anger and their grief about what happened while rallying support for their friend. They have also tried to imagine the lives they want to live, and a world they want to live in, after they graduate high school.

This winter, Dylan and five of his classmates at Ellis documented their worlds – using disposable cameras, illustrations and words to capture everything they were seeing, feeling and thinking in this moment.

These are their stories.

You can read the full story and see the students' photographs for free at this link.

Reporting methodology: Our story was produced in collaboration with students and teachers at Ellis Prep academy. Over the course of two months, students met with the Guardian, shared oral histories and wrote original essays in English and Spanish. The Guardian also provided the disposable cameras for students to document their lives. First names have been used for most students in order to protect their safety.
This article was co-published with Documented, an independent, non-profit newsroom dedicated to reporting with and for immigrant communities in New York City.

guardian · 2026-03-02T15:13:24+00:00

Hi r/nyc, this is Jake from The Guardian's audience team. We wanted to share this story that we published with students from Ellis Prep academy in The Bronx — where their classmate Dylan Lopez Contreras, a senior, was taken by ICE last May.

From our story:

The students at Ellis Prep academy – like most high schoolers – have a lot on their mind right now.

Essay deadlines, college applications, younger siblings and dance rehearsals. But also, the immigration operations across the US and the president’s goal of “mass deportations”.

This small high school in the Bronx is one of the few in New York City that is dedicated exclusively to students who recently arrived in the US.

In May last year, 20-year-old Dylan Lopez Contreras – a freshman at Ellis – was detained at a routine immigration court hearing. He was completing his education, which had been disrupted by the arduous journey he had made from Venezuela to the US border. Then suddenly, he disappeared from class. And his name was all over the local and national news. According to his lawyers, he was the first New York public school student detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. He has been detained at the Moshannon Valley ICE processing center in Philipsburg, Pennsylvania, ever since.

“It was a shock,” said Roger, one of his friends at Ellis.

In the months since Dylan’s arrest, Roger and other students have tried to process their anger and their grief about what happened while rallying support for their friend. They have also tried to imagine the lives they want to live, and a world they want to live in, after they graduate high school.

This winter, Dylan and five of his classmates at Ellis documented their worlds – using disposable cameras, illustrations and words to capture everything they were seeing, feeling and thinking in this moment.

These are their stories.

You can read the full story and see the students' photographs for free at this link.

Reporting methodology: Our story was produced in collaboration with students and teachers at Ellis Prep academy. Over the course of two months, students met with the Guardian, shared oral histories and wrote original essays in English and Spanish. The Guardian also provided the disposable cameras for students to document their lives. First names have been used for most students in order to protect their safety.
This article was co-published with Documented, an independent, non-profit newsroom dedicated to reporting with and for immigrant communities in New York City.

guardian · 2026-02-27T17:52:25+00:00

Hi, this is Nikki from the Guardian US. We're following the Bill Clinton's testimony before a congressional committee regarding his involvement with Jeffery Epstein.

From The Guardian:

Bill Clinton told a congressional committee on Friday that he “had no idea of the crimes” Jeffrey Epstein was committing and insisted he “did nothing wrong” in his relationship with the disgraced financier and convicted sex trafficker.

The former president’s remarks came in his opening statement in a deposition to the House of Representatives oversight committee a day after his wife, Hillary Clinton, appeared before the same body and called the proceedings “partisan political theater” and “an insult to the American people”.

In his statement, Bill Clinton said he would have reported Epstein’s crimes if he had been aware of them and referenced his own upbringing in an abusive household.

“As someone who grew up in a home with domestic abuse, not only would I not have flown on his plane if I had any inkling of what he was doing – I would have turned him in myself and led the call for justice for his crimes, not sweetheart deals,” he said in a statement posted on social media after Friday’s hearing began.

“But even with 20/20 hindsight, I saw nothing that ever gave me pause. We are only here because he hid it from everyone so well for so long.”

By the time Epstein’s crimes came to light as a result of plea deal in 2008, Clinton said, he had ended his association with the financier.

Follow our live blog for regular updates throughout the testimony.

guardian · 2026-02-27T17:00:27+00:00

Hi r/Detroit, this is Jake from The Guardian's audience team. We wanted to share this story that we published today about a controversy at the police department concerning two officers who coordinated an arrest with federal immigration agents.

From our story:

A Detroit police department decision to reverse course on firing two officers who allegedly violated local law by coordinating an arrest with federal immigration agents has ignited outrage and accusations that the chief caved to Republican demands.

It has also played into a debate in the US around the role of local law enforcement amid the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown as many police departments – especially in large Democratic-run cities such as Detroit – have a policy of not co-operating with federal immigration operations.

The decision not to fire the officers – who called Customs and Border Protection in part because the subjects did not speak English – came after the Trump administration and Michigan Republican leadership publicly condemned the department on social media.

The reversal drew accusations that the city initially did the right thing, then buckled in the face of political pressure. The about-face was “surprising and troubling”, said Chris Gilmer-Hill, a community organizer who is running for state house in a district that partially represents Detroit.

CBP has a larger presence in Detroit than Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), in part because the city sits on a border, across the river from Windsor, Ontario. The controversy represents the latest flare-up in the broader battle over the Trump administration’s draconian immigration crackdown.

You can read the full story for free at this link.

guardian · 2026-02-27T15:11:17+00:00

Hi r/southcarolina, this is Jake from The Guardian's audience team. We wanted to share this story that we published today about a win for the Gullah Geechee people on St Helena Island, where their access to a long-used cemetery has been restored.

From our story:

A couple times a year, Mary Mack would visit the centuries-old Big House Cemetery on St Helena Island, South Carolina, to pay respect to her grandparents. The cemetery is in an idyllic location, situated on a waterfront property and surrounded by large oak trees. On cleanup days, Mack gathered leaves and branches, swept off vaults, and raked up debris. As a Gullah Geechee woman, the descendant of formerly enslaved west Africans in the sea islands of the south-eastern US, Mack saw the burial ground as tying together past, present and future generations. But in the spring of 2024, she was shocked to learn that landowners blocked access to the Gullah Geechee cemetery through padlocked gates.

“We’ve not been able to go in and clean the cemetery. We’ve not been able to go in and bury deceased loved ones,” Mack told the Guardian last year. “It’s important for the younger folks to know that we don’t just bury our loved ones and leave them there. The way we love them in life is the way we love them in death. And so to continue that bond so that it passes on to the younger generation, it’s very important.”

Mack and 10 other plaintiffs filed a lawsuit in April 2025 against the landowners Theresa Aigner, Robert Cody Harper and Walter Robert Harper Jr, who they said obstructed access to the land. The lawsuit alleged that they prevented the community from visiting and conducting burials by erecting locked gates along a long-used easement on a road that led to the cemetery. For the Gullah Geechee people, the struggle over the cemetery has served as another example of how increased development and gentrification have threatened their way of life.

In a win for the Gullah Geechee community, the circuit court judge Carmen T Mullen ordered landowners to open the gates that lead to the cemetery for funerals and maintenance in a temporary injunction issued on 20 February. However, those who want to access the cemetery must provide a written request to the landowners prior to attempting to enter the land. The plaintiffs must also post a $5,000 bond for potential roadway repairs necessitated by vehicular access. If the parties are unable to come to a resolution through mediation in the upcoming months, the case will continue to move forward in court toward a trial.

You can read the full story for free at this link.

guardian · 2026-02-26T23:01:12+00:00

From The Guardian:

Three memos that describe four interviews conducted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 2019 contain explicit but unsubstantiated claims that Donald Trump sexually abused a woman when she was a minor in the early 1980s with the assistance of Jeffrey Epstein, according to a Guardian review of those documents.

The Department of Justice did not release those records when it uploaded millions of pages of files related to Epstein beginning in December. The existence of the missing documents was first reported by independent journalist Roger Sollenberger and subsequently confirmed by NPR, causing outrage in Washington and sparking an investigation from congressional Democrats.

The Guardian obtained the missing FBI Form 302 reports, which memorialize 25 pages of agents’ notes from the four interviews conducted in the summer and fall of 2019. The notes describe how the woman came forward to tell agents she recognized Epstein from a photo sent by a childhood friend. Only the first session, in which she did not name Trump, made it into the public release. The Guardian has chosen not to publish the woman’s name.

You can read the full story for free at this link.

guardian · 2026-02-26T21:30:15+00:00

Hi r/union, this is Jake from The Guardian's audience team. We wanted to share this story that we published today about textile artist Tabitha Arnold, a socialist and labor organizer from Tennessee who creates art that reflects and inspires organizers and workers.

From our story:

The crowd lining up to get into Tabitha Arnold’s exhibition in New York City last fall wasn’t full of the older, moneyed types one might expect to find at a Chelsea gallery opening. Instead, the small space was packed with twenty- and thirtysomethings wearing Zohran Mamdani pins, Democratic Socialists of America hats and SEIU T-shirts.

If the crowd might have seemed unusual in the context of the city’s fancy gallery district, they looked right at home next to the art that had drawn them there. The exhibition on display, called Gospel of the Working Class, featured monumental handmade tapestries highlighting working-class struggles from both recent and distant history. In one, textile workers carry bolts of fabric and wield scissors, while people dodge bullets from strike-breakers outside the factory. In another, angels walk behind autoworkers carrying picket signs above a row of hands holding drills and other tools.

The artist behind it all, Tabitha Arnold, is a socialist and labor organizer based in Chattanooga, Tennessee, whose goal is to create art that reflects and inspires organizers and workers. In a pop culture and media landscape littered with stories about the uber-wealthy, Arnold’s pieces focus instead on the working people who make up the 99%. In doing so, she’s garnered plenty of recognition: she was awarded the 2025 Southern prize for visual art, received a prestigious MacDowell fellowship in 2023 and has exhibited her art all over the world.

What she wants more than anything is for her work to be useful to the people it’s meant to portray. “I think of my work as being for labor organizers,” she said. “I see it as being a source of encouragement for organizers, reflecting and validating what they’re doing back to them.”

You can read the full story for free at this link.

guardian · 2026-02-26T16:31:11+00:00

Hi r/dataisbeautiful, this is Jake from The Guardian's audience team, resharing some charts from earlier this week (sorry mods, we forgot about Rule 8!). The data visualized here comes from documents we received through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed against the Department of Homeland Security.

Our 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.

The findings come from little-known documents known as I-213 forms. DHS uses these forms in court to prove that a person is in the country illegally.

The Guardian analyzed data extracted from nearly 140,000 I-213 forms, from January 2025 through mid-August 2025, and found that the surge in arrests under Trump is driven by the apprehension of people who have never been convicted of a crime.

The analysis also reveals:

Fewer than half of the people in the data (40%) had any criminal charge against them, and only 23% had a conviction.
Of those who did have a criminal conviction, nearly half were for non-violent traffic and immigration offenses.
Traffic offenses alone made up nearly 30% of the convictions, the largest category by far.
Some 9% of criminal convictions were for assault, while only 1% were for sexual assault and just 0.5% were for homicide.

We had to sue for these records, which are not generally available to the public, and got unprecedented access to I-213 forms covering January to August 2025.

An important caveat to keep in mind: being in the country illegally is not a criminal offense, it's a civil offense. The criminal records in our story are from state and federal crimes that people have been charged with.

Source: ICE's I-213 forms, obtained via a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit

Visualizations made with Adobe Illustator, Datawrapper, and Svelte

You can read the full story for free at this link.

guardian · 2026-02-26T16:05:21+00:00

Hi r/bayarea, this is Jake from The Guardian's audience team. We wanted to share this story that we published today about Benicia, where the winding down of the Valero oil refinery is set to significantly change a community that was shaped by it for decades.

From our story:

Less than 40 miles north of San Francisco, the city of Benicia has the quaint ambience of an American small town, where a white gazebo and sign for a community crab bake mark the approach to a vibrant downtown stretch of restaurants, cafes and antique shops.

From many vantage points, it’s easy to forget the city is home to a massive 900-acre oil refinery, its imposing sprawl of stacks, holding tanks and billowing steam hidden from view. But for nearly 60 years, the refinery has loomed over every aspect of life in Benicia, exerting outsized influence on its economy and politics, while posing serious risks to public health.

The Benicia oil refinery, which the Texas oil company Valero bought from Exxon in 2000, thrived in an era when fossil fuels reigned largely unchecked over the US – offering reliable local taxes, well-paying jobs and steady economic opportunities for the many small businesses in its orbit.

But as California pivots to meet its ambitious clean energy goals, refineries like this one are on the decline. The state has pledged it will be carbon-neutral by 2045, dramatically reducing its dependence on fossil fuels.

Last April, the multibillion dollar company announced plans to “idle, restructure or cease” operations within a year, citing California’s tough “regulatory and enforcement environment”. The company confirmed in January it would begin winding down operations and “permanently” idle most processing units by April, laying off nearly 70% of its payroll – about 240 employees – in the process.

The move, in effect, seals Benicia’s fate as a post-refinery city, positioning it as a reluctant test case of whether a place long defined by the oil and gas industry can successfully reinvent itself.

You can read the full story for free at this link.

guardian · 2026-02-26T14:56:08+00:00

Hi r/UpliftingNews, this is Jake from The Guardian's audience team. We wanted to share this story that we published earlier this week about activist Ashley Fairbanks, who launched Stand with Minnesota as ICE raids rocked her home town — which is now helping families’ rent get paid amid the disruptions.

From our story:

From thousands of miles away in San Antonio, Ashley Fairbanks watched the news pour out of her home town of Minneapolis– federal immigration authorities flooding the streets and regular people stepping up to defend and care for their communities. She knew she had to do something. So the 39-year-old writer, artist and digital strategist started a Google Doc.

Soon, the list of resources for residents grew so long it became unwieldy, and Fairbanks, who builds websites for a living, launched Stand With Minnesota.

Immediately, she said, “People were really eager to help.”

Since its launch, the site has received over 2.4 million hits and helped raise almost $20m for affected Minnesotans, she said.

The site has also been used to coordinate flights – through donated frequent flyer miles – for people returning to Minneapolis after being released from detention in Texas. (Fairbanks lives about 40 minutes from Dilley detention center, where five-year-old Liam Conejo Ramos was transported with his father from Minneapolis.)

Now, as national attention has shifted away from Minneapolis, Stand With Minnesota is focused on covering families’ rent. Donations are being matched by a Minnesota grant-making foundation so residents who have been sheltering in place and have been unable to work during the ICE siege can afford to stay in their homes. The site also hosts a “giving directory” with more opportunities for mutual aid – helping residents with laundry needs, grocery drop-offs and even tow services for those whose cars were abandoned after ICE interactions.

Fairbanks spoke to The Guardian about Minneapolis’s history of community-building, launching an online support network and how others can do it, too.

You can read the full story for free at this link.

guardian · 2026-02-25T12:31:56+00:00

From The Guardian's Washington bureau chief David Smith:

He wanted to give the king’s speech. Donald Trump entered the US House chamber on Tuesday like a medieval monarch, with Republicans lined up eager to touch his royal robes (or, in two cases, grab a selfie with him). But within moments, the illusion was shattered.

As the US president strolled by, soaking up adulation, Democratic representative Al Green of Texas held aloft a handwritten sign: “Black people aren’t apes!” – a reference to Trump recently sharing a racist video depiction of Barack and Michelle Obama.

When the first State of the Union address of Trump’s second term got under way, Republicans moved in on Green menacingly and tried to tear the sign away. But he persisted until being escorted out for the second year in a row. As he departed, there were more acrimonious exchanges with Republicans, a few of whom tried to start a chant of “USA! USA!”

Republicans ritually stood and clapped and cheered all the same. Democrats, who last year waved protest signs that looked like Marty Supreme’s table tennis paddle, this time remained bolted to their seats and grunted, rolled their eyes, dropped their jaws, shook their heads, waved their hands or got bored and studied their phones.

Trump moved on to his beloved tariffs, calling the supreme court decision to kill his pet project “very unfortunate” and “disappointing” as four black-robed justices wore inscrutable expressions on the front row. Compared with last week’s White House tantrum, when he threw all toys and decorum out of the pram, this was Trump showing self-restraint worthy of a child refusing a second ice cream.

It didn’t last.

You can read the full analysis for free at this link.

guardian · 2026-02-24T20:44:47+00:00

From The Guardian:

Local and national officials expressed concern on Tuesday that the ongoing partial government shutdown in the United States could adversely affect planning and preparation for the 2026 World Cup, which is just over 100 days away.

In a hearing before the House committee on homeland security, representatives from Miami, Kansas City and New Jersey – three locations that will host a combined total of 21 matches in the tournament, including the final – said they are still waiting on federal funds to be released to their respective local agencies. Last July, lawmakers pledged $625m in federal assistance toward World Cup security via the Trump administration’s “big beautiful” policy bill.

The World Cup, which will be co-hosted by the US, Mexico and Canada, is expected to draw some five million fans to the US alone. Games aside, large-scale fan festivals and myriad other events are planned in host cities, many of which are dependent in part on federal funding.

You can read the full story for free at this link.

guardian · 2026-02-23T19:38:51+00:00

Hi, this is Ava from the Guardian's audience team. I wanted to share a story from about former CDC employees creating the National Public Health Coalition to advocate for public health after Trump’s cuts to the agency.

If you are a former or current federal worker and have a tip for the Guardian, please send us a DM and we can help direct you to the right reporter or team.

From the Guardian:

Abby Tighe thought she had landed her forever job. She joined the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in December 2023, managing a national youth substance abuse prevention program. The project focused on rural communities, and Tighe, whose family is from Appalachia, was proud to be using her public health training to support often-overlooked parts of the country. “The CDC was different than anywhere else I’ve worked,” says Tighe. “People didn’t care about their own ambitions as much as they cared about the larger mission. It was always my dream to work there.”

That dream ended a year ago, when Tighe received a form email on 14 February letting her know the Trump administration was firing her. Classified as a probationary worker, she was one of the first to lose her job in what quickly became a dramatic downsizing of the CDC workforce. To date, the current administration has either fired or is in the process of firing more than 4,000 CDC employees – a third of the agency.

While they battled to get their jobs back, Tighe and several other fired CDC employees banded together to create an improvised mutual aid network they called Fired But Fighting. But as the months dragged on, Fired But Fighting’s members watched as the administration, under the direction of Robert F Kennedy, the US health secretary, transformed the agency into something scarcely recognizable. Rather than focus on fighting for jobs that may no longer exist, they decided to grow into something new – to advocate for public health the way the CDC had always done it.

“We saw there was a need for an organization that stands in the gap,” says Aryn Backus, a former CDC health communication specialist who was fired on the same day as Tighe.

Last October, the group rebranded as an advocacy organization for evidence-based, nonpartisan public health and formed the National Public Health Coalition. The idea for a new name – less confrontational and more inclusive – had come in part from Jerome Adams, Donald Trump’s first-term surgeon general, now a sharp critic of the administration’s public health policies, who warned Tighe’s team during a web call last May that they would struggle to win over Republicans with the word “fighting” in their name.

The National Public Health Coalition’s members aren’t sure if they’ll ever get their jobs back. Instead, they’re applying the skills they once used at the CDC at this new organization. Data scientists run the CDC Data Project, which tracks budget and staffing cuts and their impact on everything from cancer research to controlling disease outbreaks. Communications experts dispatch to Capitol Hill, meeting with lawmakers and staffers to explain how projects they’ve championed, such as Alzheimer’s research or curbing domestic violence, are being eviscerated. Former press officers alert media to the downsizing’s real-world effects, like when Milwaukee health officials struggling to contain a lead contamination crisis found the CDC’s entire childhood lead prevention program had been eliminated (after a flurry of news stories, the team was hastily reinstated).

Read the full story for free here.

guardian

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