The following is an AZPM original production.

♪ RHYTHMIC BRASS MUSIC ♪ Welcome to this latest edition of The Press Room from the radio studios of AZPM.

I'm Steve Goldstein.

Coming up on the program, we'll talk about the incredible story of a US citizen who was detained for more than 10 days by immigration officials and Governor Hobbs vetos the so-called Arizona ICE act.

Joining me to talk about these and other topics are Paul Ingram of the Tucson Sentinel, Danyelle Khmara of AZPM News and Rafael Carranza of AZ Luminaria.

Welcome to all of you.

Thanks for being here.

Danyelle, you had the biggest story of the week starting about a week or so ago.

You told the story of 19 year old Jose Hermosillo, a US citizen who was arrested in Tucson, wrongly detained in Florence for 10 days.

Give us as much background on this as you want to.

What are some of the details of his arrest?

Yeah, so basically the basic details are what you just laid out, but then there's some discrepancies in the story.

Basically Jose and his family have said that he was approached by border patrol, that he told them he was a US citizen, that they didn't believe him, and he ended up in detention.

What the government has said is that he signed an affidavit saying that he was from Mexico and that he had crossed the border and come into the country illegally.

So those are the details that, it's sort of one person's word against another.

There is an affidavit that the government put out after I had broken the story, after this started to get a lot of national attention.

They posted the affidavit on Twitter on X, which it has a signature that just says Jose and it's sort of rudimentary writing.

Again, he continues to say he didn't sign it, You know, I spoke to his family about this too, and his girlfriend had told me, look, if he did sign anything, he doesn't know how to read, he has learning disabilities, he says yes to everything.

So that's just sort of another element to this story.

But the fact remains that a US citizen was held in immigration detention for 10 days.

I was also struck by, you spoke to his girlfriend's aunt, and she seemed especially distraught on Jose's behalf.

What stood out about your conversation with her?

Yeah, so basically, I mean, she was one of his family members, you know his girlfriend's family and him and his girlfriend have a baby together.

So she had said that they started looking for him when they couldn't find him.

He's visiting Tucson from Albuquerque.

She knew that he didn't know his way around.

They started looking for him, and nobody could tell me exactly how long it took, but it took them making a number of calls before they could figure out where he was.

You know, I also spoke with his lawyer, and his lawyer had told me that he provided Jose's birth certificate to officials the day after he was detained.

But officials said, we're gonna go ahead and prosecute this case, which the lawyer was, frankly, flabbergasted to hear.

But yeah, so the aunt, I mean, she was extremely worried about him, as was many family members.

Even a family member went up to the detention center to try and tell officials, look, you have this person for the wrong reasons.

Paul, one of the interesting points Danyelle made is, so why did it take 10 days, if there may have been evidence 24 to 48 hours that he was a US citizen, shouldn't have been holding him, does that give us any insights on where DOJ is with some of these issues now?

Yeah, I mean, one thing I think is really interesting is that the DOJ was given this document, but they still wanted a judge to rule on this.

They wanted to hold him until that was done, which I think raises several questions about why they wanted to do that, why they weren't willing to just simply dismiss the case out of hand, or quickly go to a judge and say, essentially, we've got somebody in our detention facility who's not supposed to be there, and let's get him out as quickly as possible.

So that delay is really because of the Justice Department waiting to go to a magistrate judge who could say, yes, I guess this guy's a US citizen, the magistrate said, yes, obviously it's true.

And one thing I think is important is, you know with the immigration system, this has happened before There's at least 280 citizens who've been detained, or there was a study that was done by Northwest University.

And there was also, there was a study that was done for about a six year period that found about 4,000 people said, I'm a US citizen, about 40% had their cases closed, either because they had US citizen or they said it's had some other kind of legal residency.

So, you know, the system is not particularly well designed in some ways for someone to say, no, I really, I belong here, and for the agency, for CBP, or for ICE, or for the Marshall Service to sort of undo this.

There's a tendency to keep people in detention, sometimes for months.

Rafael, you've also covered the border for a long time.

I'm really curious about your perspective on this story.

Well, I think something else that I think stands out to me is the difficulty sometimes that family members have in locating their loved ones whenever they're picked up by border patrol or ICE, or they're held in immigration detention.

I mean, as this kind of case illustrates, sometimes not able to access them or locate them right away.

And so you have to really kind of go through hoops and try all these different avenues to try to locate them.

And that I think is not uncommon.

I think something that we have seen, particularly within immigration and customs enforcement is this process where they will shuffle people through different detention sites, and sometimes not even within the same state.

Sometimes they'll send them to other parts of the country.

And I think that that kind of then makes it even harder for many of these family members or even their attorneys to try to locate them, because by the time that they kind of find some information leading them to one particular detention site, they may have already been moved somewhere else.

And so that I think has also been a part of this detention process.

That has been a big frustration, both for family members as well as for attorneys who are trying to work to locate and get their clients or family members released.

Certainly the Trump administration has gotten a lot of criticism, but is this a case where this has been maybe in a less quote unquote mean way, but has this been a policy of the United States for a while?

And we're just getting more headlines because it's so much more aggressive with this current administration.

With the reporting you've done over the years, have you seen this with other administrations too?

I think that this has been something that has been kind of a hallmark of the detention process.

At least, certainly I think it's received a lot of attention under this current administration, but it's happened under many other administrations as well.

And that's something that concern that I think many attorneys kind of know beforehand.

And so, especially I think as a result of this administration, whenever there was this focus on increased enforcement, raised a lot of questions.

And I've talked to many attorneys who said that they were getting inundated with calls from people asking for more information about that.

And I think that that just kind of puts it more into focus, but it has been something that has been in place for a very long time.

Danyelle, how is Jose doing, for lack of a better way to put that?

Has he recovered from the 10 days?

Was it, do we know how?

I mean, it sounds like a horrible, horrible experience, but have you, as far as the family, have they told you any insights on that?

Yeah, I mean, the family has told me that he is having a hard time just emotionally.

you know he told me that it was very difficult being in there.

And I mean, I spoke with him earlier this week and I spoke with his family earlier this week and his mother, he has an aunt in Phoenix and his mother had come to Phoenix from Albuquerque and he had met them there.

So, because it was his girlfriend's family who is here in Tucson.

And so, actually they had been here visiting to see if they might wanna move here.

And his girlfriend told me, he just wants to go home.

Like, he doesn't wanna be here anymore.

And, you know, I mean, he sounded like he was doing okay, but he said it was a really hard experience.

Legal ramifications of this, Paul, going forward, just speculating, but I mean, I presume we'll see a lawsuit.

I mean, I could see a civil lawsuit happening and that, you know, there had been other cases in that where there have been civil lawsuits have over this.

And it's, those civil lawsuits have, there's a very high bar.

It's very difficult to win those lawsuits because essentially here, Border Patrol say, this is what this guy told us.

And the mistakes made, I mean, one thing I think is interesting is like, it's not clear how he even ended up in BP's custody.

You know, Border Patrol has said he went up to their gate and rang it.

And I don't know if you know where the gate is, but it's essentially right next to the Air Force base.

It's in a weird spot.

It's not right off a nice pedestrian pathway.

So for him to walk up and ring the bell and then say, oh, I'm from Mexico.

I mean, it's just so weird.

But ultimately, it's gonna be really difficult for the family to sue.

And because he was released, I mean, it's not like they held him for months at a time.

10 days, I don't know.

That's gonna be a difficult, that's gonna be a difficult task.

Danyelle, before I move on, I have to bring this up.

I mean, it's just because we've all been journalists for a really long time.

You broke a story.

I don't wanna overplay this, but there was a conflict on social media over how, and I think it's important for our viewers and listeners to know that this happens where a reporter does work.

And then to some extent, it's either borrowed or stolen in some cases.

Can you give us just a quick background on what happened there?

Yeah, I mean, that, you know, people reach out to me, and this probably happens to you guys too, on a regular basis, like national reporters or researcher or people that are doing some sort of documentary, saying, well, reach out to me and ask me for help finding the case documents or sources or something in a story.

And that is what happened over the weekend.

A couple of days after I had broken the first story, this man that has like a huge Substack following and a huge following on Twitter reached out to me and asked me for help finding the court documents.

I sent him the court documents.

And he had said, like, of course I will credit your incredible reporting.

And then I saw his story like a few days later saying, first interview with Jose Hermosillo, no mention of AZPM, no mention of my reporting.

And, you know, any experienced reporter knows that like the common thing to do out of respect to the reporters that break the story is just say, first reported by AZPM.

That's all you need to do.

Add a link to the story, that's it.

But anyway, and at this point, I already knew three at least other local reporters that had published interviews with him.

And so I posted about it on X and, oh no, sorry, I'm getting ahead of myself.

I called him to ask him about why he did it.

And he yelled at me and swore at me.

It was incredibly rude.

And then he texted me and said that he had credited me.

And I posted about it on social media and we had, yeah, in exchange where he continued to defend himself and not taking a responsibility.

But a lot of other reporters sort of came to my defense and said, this happens all the time.

Like, please credit local journalists.

And it's true because we're the ones on the ground.

If you look at national news, CNN, like a bunch of different national news outlets, a lot of those stories that they're showing you have been broken by local reporters.

And so this is something that happens all the time.

And it's really important to credit local reporters so that we can continue to have the backing to do this work.

Yeah, I mean, I've definitely seen like stories that I've written where they've been basically redone wholesale by all sorts of different international, national, organizations Now the really good ones, of course, will credit the story.

And so, I mean, sometimes it's kind of funny to basically read your story, but it's been essentially like rewritten.

But it has, at least it's credited to you.

But then I've had stories that have been completely almost pulled wholesale and rewritten.

The ones that actually really frustrated me are the ones that have taken our story and then regurgitated it and gotten all the details wrong, which I've also seen, of course, there was a story we did about a woman who died in Yuma just a couple of weeks ago.

And that story went all over the place.

And you got to watch it get increasingly wrong as new people stole the story from the previous person.

So it was like watching the story.

The equivalent of the game of telephone, I guess.

Exactly, yeah.

Okay, Paul, let's move on to international student lawsuits.

Third case, filed on behalf of 11 students who've been affected by having their visas taken away or frozen by the Trump administration.

The lawsuits are interesting to me.

What are the bases of the lawsuits here?

Yeah, so the base of the lawsuit is there's this program called SEVIS and it's basically designed to support the visa requirements for students.

And in recent weeks, ICE has been going through and basically doing a criminal background check.

And anytime they find anybody where there was a charge, and it doesn't mean a conviction, just simply a charge, they are erasing the record.

Now what that means is that it means the student's visa is canceled, which means that they can't go to school, they can't work legally in the United States, and they're really supposed to leave the United States as soon as possible.

And they've been doing this.

Now then they go to the State Department and say, "Hey, we want to cancel the visa."

And the State Department, of course, just cancels this visa.

What this means for the students is that they now have to figure out what to do with their lives, and it's been, they've been kind of unmoored.

And this has happened to students, at least 50 students at ASU.

This has happened to about 1500 students across the entire United States.

And there's a few dozen students here in the U of A.

A few of them have decided to sue, and they've gotten a lawsuit.

So there's three lawsuits.

There's one kid for one student for one lawsuit, one student for another, and then 11 with this next lawsuit.

And really what they're asking is for their visas to be reappointed so that they can go to school, so they can work, and they can actually finish their programs.

One of the things that's really interesting is how many of them are sort of in post-doc or master's programs.

So one woman, she's just about to finish.

She's losing her visa, and now she also has a U.S. citizen and husband.

She has a U.S. citizen and child.

So the question is, what does that mean?

If she continues to work, then ICE could conceivably deport her.

And I think there's a lot of fear in this because deportations used to mean, eventually they would come get you and maybe put you in a detention facility like Hermosil and then you would eventually be sent home.

But now it means that you could be scooped up by ICE and theoretically sent to a prison in El Salvador, or sent to, there was one guy they just sent to Rwanda.

It's just not clear if the country of your origin is gonna take you, that they might just send you somewhere else, or they might send you a detention facility in Louisiana.

So all these students are trying to also keep their names away from the government and trying to protect themselves while they're suing.

Yeah, Rafael, what stands out to you about this?

Well, I think the arguments of this case, because it has been litigated, not just here in Arizona, but nationwide, there's been a lot of lawsuits that have been filed by attorneys representing this international students.

And I think what the government, some of the claims that the government has been making in sort of these issues is that, they're arguing, for example, that because they eliminated their information from this system, the other thing that's really impressive is that it doesn't necessarily mean that their status is terminated, but then you have a lot of other attorneys or former administrators who say, essentially, if you remove them, if you remove them from that system, you're eliminating pretty much all access to their classes, ability to work, all these other things.

So essentially, it becomes like a de facto way to end their status without having that official kind of policy in place.

And so I think that that kind of, since that has been litigated, so much, I think it's been pretty notable that just on Friday morning, that ICE has kind of taken kind of like a U-turn and decided to reinstate many of the international students has decided to kind of reinstate their status, active status within SEVIS.

And so that, I think, is a pretty big development, but it seems to be something that just kind of happens while these cases are being litigated.

Well, and I'm struck too by as many things we've seen, as far as Trump administration policies, many of them related to immigration or border security, that it's almost like the old joke about when people used to listen to vinyl, I guess they're listening to it again, but you'd sort of hit the needle then, and then all of a sudden, wait a second, let's reverse.

This is one of the things that keeps frustrating people is that, okay, maybe because of the actions of the judicial branch, that the Trump administration has to change what it's doing, and yet, by that point, you've already disrupted people's lives so dramatically.

And then there's also what we don't know so far because we don't exactly know how many international students have been impacted by this.

We also don't know how many of them already left.

And so that, I think, it's kind of like a whole other dimension or level when it comes to impact because many of their lives have already been disrupted so drastically.

Yeah, and just to add onto that, it's like these cases that Paul was talking about, I think it represents in total the ones in Arizona, 14 students, or no, 13 students.

And there's not a public list of how many students have been affected by this, but the Star reported that ASU said over 100 of their international students, the U of A, while they have been publicly silent, they said they're not gonna give any information about that.

The student union leaders have said less than a dozen students, there's other schools that have international students, Pima has international students.

So even though a judge issued a temporary restraining order in the cases for two of those students to be able to continue their studies while the case is seen in court, like Rafa was saying, that doesn't help all the other students who didn't necessarily sue the administration because of this.

And I think what it means is essentially if you wanna protect yourself, then you have to get a lawyer, you have to sue, which I mean, that's time, that's money, that's stress that people are putting into to protect themselves.

And yeah, I think not all students are gonna do that.

Some students may have packed up their stuff and went, "I guess I'm going home," and headed out.

Or they just didn't finish their classes, in which case, I mean, one of the things to keep in mind for universities, especially state universities like the U of A and ASU and NAU, is that international students pay full freight tuition.

This is a huge moneymaker for these universities.

In a lot of ways, they actually keep tuitions or in-state students down.

So if these students all leave, I mean, all these colleges and universities have really a major problem in how expensive things is.

Also, research programs are getting cut because all of a sudden, if you're running research and all of a sudden your researcher is like, "I gotta go, ICE told me I gotta go home," all of a sudden, they may drop everything they're doing.

So it's really creating a lot of chaos inside university systems.

And to be honest, I think that's intentional.

I think this is one of the things the Trump administration is trying to do, which is ding the universities and using immigration and the international students as a bit of a cudgel.

And I think that something interesting to keep an eye out on will be the chill effect that that creates because then they discourage international students who had been thinking about coming to the US from going elsewhere perhaps because they don't wanna have to face all these additional hurdles.

And of course, we saw for a little bit now that Elon Musk has gone back to private life, it seems.

He was someone who actually was fighting with the Trump administration about that.

On one issue saying, "Wait a second, we need some of these people to keep some of these programs going."

So we'll see if that engenders even more chaos.

Paul, let me give you a couple minutes on this.

We were talking about it before Danyelle and I I think both use the word paint a picture.

When you went to check out a stretch of the border near the San Pedro River, and you got some incredible quotes from some border patrol agents who, aren't that busy, sounds like?

Everyone's bored.

When it comes down to it, everyone's bored.

So it's 'bored-er' patrol?

They are bored patrol, that's pretty good.

I like that all.

Yeah, so what I did is I wanted to go to two places.

I wanted to go to the San Pedro River, and I also wanted to go to the San Rafael Valley.

The reason for going to the San Rafael Valley is because the Trump administration is forging ahead to building 25 miles of new border wall.

One thing to keep in mind is Arizona has lots and lots and lots of border wall now.

A lot of it was already existed before the Trump administration, but certainly during the Trump administration, they built as much as they could.

And one of the consequences of that is they kind of built all their border wall in places that are on federal protected landscapes.

The San Rafael Valley is state land, it's protected land, and now it's going to get a border wall as well.

And one of the things about it is how dramatic and empty this landscape is.

There's really nothing out there except for ranches on both sides.

And so I wanted to see that, but I wanted to do was start in Naco because I thought that'd be a good place to sort of run and then drive west.

I used to be able to drive west from Naco, almost all the way to the San Rafael Valley on the border road, and now you really can't.

There's some complications of that.

Part of it is that they're closing off roads.

Now, during this trip, of course, we talked to border patrol agents.

And one thing I always like to do is drive up and roll it out on a window and say, "Hey, how's it going?"

And chat, and I had some really interesting conversations with multiple border patrol agents on that day.

And one thing is, yeah, they're bored.

There's just not many people crossing.

One guy really went through and he said, "Look, he had a dog with him."

And he talked about, "Hey, we will get one or two people."

And all of a sudden, four or five agents, he said, "We'll zoom to this one place."

And really, it's hard.

And of course, with him, he's trying to keep the dog trained.

He's kind of to keep his dog sharp, which means he wants to chase people.

And unfortunately, that means he can't because the guy's already been caught, and also those just border patrol agents out there.

So what he told me is essentially, he's asking agents to hide so he can have the dog search for them and kind of keep the dog from being bored, essentially.

And that's been pretty consistent.

We've talked to lots of agents in lots of different areas, and really, there's been a dramatic shift.

Apprehensions have completely collapsed along the border.

There's just so few people crossing.

Even I went with border patrol agents and we looked for even the guys doing smuggling.

Usually, there's scouts up on the hill.

Those guys aren't even up on the hills.

They're not up there with binoculars.

So the border has gotten really quiet and changed, which is really interesting because at the same time, we're heavily militarizing it.

They're promoting all these DOD things.

And we did see the DOD, which saw six empty Humvees sitting in a parking lot out in the middle of nowhere.

Story on the tucsonsentinel.com by Paul Ingram, great stuff.

Rafa, does this indicate in any way that Mexican authorities are cracking down on that side of the border?

Does that have anything to do with it?

That Trump is putting pressure on there and President Scheinbaum has been playing the game a little bit?

Well, I think that we do kind of know that Mexico has played an increasingly bigger role when it comes to immigration enforcement and essentially pushed the US border farther south.

And so they're doing a lot more efforts along the border with Guatemala to stem some of the flows there, trying to keep migrants from crossing through Mexico and instead keeping them in the southern part of Mexico.

Even the deportations, whenever someone is removed from the US, instead of being sent back to the border cities like Nogales, they're instead bused down to Tabasco or Chiapas or some of the other communities in southern Mexico.

And so essentially, it's kind of been shifted down and I think Mexico has played a very active role with that, which I think is very interesting kind of given the relationship kind of at least between Trump and Scheinbaum at the moment and they haven't necessarily have the closest ties, but it still kind of indicates that that relationship or that work behind the scenes, that collaboration is still happening.

But it definitely kind of does have a big role to play.

But I also think that as we have seen over the course of many, many years, because there hasn't been any significant changes to the immigration system, a lot of times whenever these decreases happen because of a new administration, it's just a temporary thing because people are waiting and seeing.

But then a few months later, those shifts could begin to start again or we could start seeing those numbers increase once again.

And so that's a very likely possibility just given on the historical precedent of new administrations or new policies whenever they're put in place.

I'm gonna go speed round.

We've only got about two minutes left and I want all of you to weigh in as quickly as you can.

Governor Hobbs vetoes the Arizona ICE Act.

Do we expect the legislature to do an end around again as they did with Prop 314 and just say we're gonna get this on the ballot?

I think they're gonna wanna put it on the ballot.

The one thing is it's going to be hard to explain exactly what they didn't wanna do because they want to require detainers.

They want to require local police agencies to hold people.

And one of the problems with 287(g) and the detainer request is that what this does is it puts local agencies to cover the costs of holding somebody.

And it also means that if anything happens to this person that they're really liable for lawsuits, which is why almost only three agencies in Arizona currently have 287(g)s. And that's been true for a long time.

So trying to convince local agencies to do this is gonna be hard.

Danyelle, go ahead.

I believe to get it on the ballot, they need to provide some funding or explain where the funding is gonna come from.

And actually I read in the Arizona Mirror, Gloria Gomez had written that Senate president said, well, that's not a problem because it doesn't cost anything to comply with these detainers, which is just not true.

It costs $125 a day, I believe, to hold people in the Pima County Jail.

So it does cost money.

There are costs associated and the Pima County Sheriff has told me, I'm not gonna spend a cent of my budget on this.

Rafael, very briefly Yeah, and I think that they're also pointing to Proposition 314 as kind of the motivation for this and the fact that the Arizonans want more of this stricter enforcement.

But like with 314, there also wasn't any additional funds allocated to that effort.

And it's of course worth noting that that proposition is not in effect because the case or the model that it's based after Texas as before is still being litigated in courts.

And so that's, I think, is pretty notable for people to know that even though this passed, it's still not in effect.

Great conversation, Rafael Carranza, AZ Luminaria, Danyelle Khmara, thank you, AZPM.

Paul Ingram, Tucson Sentinel, always good to see you.

And thank you very much for joining us for this edition of The Press Room on AZPM.

We'll be back again next week.

I'm Steve Goldstein, have a great night.