TAPIA-RUANO & GUNN P.C.

08/07/2026

As of July 24, 2026, a federal judge in the Southern District of Illinois has blocked Illinois from providing in-state tuition and state financial aid to undocumented students, such as DACA and the RISE Act recipients.

The Department of Justice has also filed suit against other States. Kentucky undocumented students are no longer eligible for in-state tuition at public colleges.

08/07/2026

Is this the country we want?

ICE is on pace for the deadliest year in its history. In the 500 days between President Donald Trump’s inauguration on January 20, 2025 and June 4, 2026, 52 people died in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) custody in the United States. This does not include others murdered by ICE like Renee Good and Alex Pretti. The mortality rate of deaths in ICE custody is at its highest level in over a decade and has more than doubled since Trump’s second term began.

The second Trump administration launched an aggressive campaign to expand immigration detention, pushing the number of people held to a record high of over 71,000 people in January 2026. The surge in deaths is much worse than what one would expect even considering the much higher number of people in detention. Deaths in ICE custody have increased at a rate disproportionate to the growth in the detained population.

In July ICE just set the largest single month arrest record in the history of the Department of Homeland Security. ICE is holding roughly 68,000 people, and most of them have never been convicted of anything. Nearly 90 percent of the people ICE holds are in for profit prisons.

The private prisons are owned by the GEO Group-a group that donated more than $12 million to Trump's Pac in 2023, and as recently as April 2026, donated more than $1+ million to MAGA, Inc., Trump's super PAC. (See reporting by New York Times, and CNN.)

If you want to stop this-- wishing for it to stop is not enough, vote for change in the upcoming elections.

07/17/2026

We join AILA in urging the Administration to shift course on public charge and to maintain clear, consistent standards that ensure fair adjudications and protect the well-being of families.

AILA raised serious concerns about the Trump Administration’s changes to the “public charge” rule which will take effect on September 20, 2026, warning that the policy would create confusion, expand government agents’ discretion without accountability, and harm immigrant families and communi...

06/30/2026

Trump's Executive Order on who would be considered a US citizen is dead- as it should be.

AILA College of Past Presidents Member Jeremy McKinney shares takeaways from today's SCOTUS decision in Trump v. Barbara, writing “Executive Order 14160 is dead. Birthright citizenship is again what it has been since 1898 and what the Fourteenth Amendment has guaranteed since ratification.”

06/04/2026

Chicago Public Media has partnered with local newsrooms to create one comprehensive "Chicago Immigration Hub." The hub pulls together essential immigration coverage from 15 newsrooms, including WBEZ, the Chicago Sun-Times and La Voz Chicago.

The site offers "solutions-oriented news, guides and cultural coverage for local immigrants and all Chicagoans.” Its a collaborative space for journalists to fortify their immigration-related coverage and more efficiently get immigration resources and news to the community.

Participating newsrooms include: Block Club Chicago, Borderless Magazine, Chicago Reader, Coalition for a Better Chinese American Community (Chinatown Spotlight), Cicero Independiente, Injustice Watch, La Raza, ProPublica, Public Media Institute (Lumpen Radio), Reparations Media, South Side Weekly and The TRiiBE.

A link to the hub can be found below:

Your source for Chicago immigration news, guides and explainers.

05/28/2026

President President Trump Adds 10,000 Additional Refugee Admissions for Afrikaners for FY2026

On May 21, 2026, President Trump issued an "Emergency Presidential Determination", published in the Federal Register today, increasing the FY2026 refugee admissions ceiling from 7,500 to 17,500. The additional admissions are designated to be used ONLY by Afrikaners from South Africa [meaning only white people].

05/19/2026

On May 18 The Guardian reported that more than 145,000 U.S. citizen children have likely experienced the detention of a parent by immigration authorities since the start of the Trump administration’s second term, according to a recent Brookings Institution report. The study estimates that approximately 146,635 children have had a parent detained amid the ongoing mass deportation campaign, including more than 22,000 children who experienced the detention of both co-resident parents, with a significant share of affected children under age six. Researchers also noted geographic and demographic disparities in impacts, while emphasizing that official DHS figures likely undercount the true scope of family separation tied to immigration enforcement.

03/31/2026

"Trump’s Justice Department Dropped 23,000 Criminal Investigations in Shift to Immigration"

Report by ProPublica
by Ken B. Morales and David Armstrong
March 31, 2026, 5:00 am

[Excerpts from published Report.]

In the first days after Pam Bondi was appointed attorney general last year, the Department of Justice began shutting down pending criminal cases at a record pace. …

In total, the DOJ quietly closed more than 23,000 criminal cases in the first six months of President Donald Trump’s administration, abandoning hundreds of investigations into terrorism, white-collar crime, drugs and other offenses as it shifted resources to pursue immigration cases, according to an analysis by ProPublica.

The bulk of these cases, which were closed without prosecution and known as declinations, had been referred to the DOJ by law enforcement agencies under prior administrations that believed a federal crime may have been committed. The DOJ routinely declines to prosecute cases for any number of reasons, including insufficient evidence or because a case is not a priority for enforcement.

In February 2025 alone, which included the first weeks of Bondi’s tenure, nearly 11,000 cases were declined, the most in a month since at least 2004. The previous high was just over 6,500 cases in September 2019, during Trump’s first administration.…

Some of the cases shut down were the result of yearslong investigations by federal agencies such as the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Administration. For complex cases, the DOJ can take years before deciding whether to bring charges.

The shift comes as the DOJ has undergone an extraordinary overhaul under the Trump administration, with entire units shuttered, directives to abandon pursuit of certain crimes and thousands of lawyers quitting or, in some cases, being forced out of the agency.

In doing so, the DOJ is retreating from its mission to impartially uphold the rule of law, keep the country safe and protect civil rights, according to interviews with a dozen prosecutors and an open letter from nearly 300 DOJ employees who have left the department under Trump. …

For entire report go to:

Under Attorney General Pam Bondi, the DOJ abandoned a record number of cases — including hundreds of investigations into terrorism, white-collar crime and drugs — in just the first six months of President Donald Trump’s second term.

02/19/2026

Great news: a recent decision in an important Federal Court Order exposes the current Administrations' Policies that repeatedly disregard the rule of law.

On February 18, 2026, Judge Sunshine Sykes of the Central District of California vacated Matter of Yajure Hurtado, the Board of Immigration Appeals decision that immigration judges across the country had been citing to deny bond hearings to detained noncitizens. The order came in Maldonado Bautista v. Santacruz, the same case that produced the December 18, 2025 nationwide class declaratory judgment declaring indefinite detention of “Bond Eligible Class” members unlawful.

The ruling is devastating for the government. Not because of its legal novelty, but because of what it reveals about how the executive branch has been operating: selectively obeying its own regulations, ignoring federal court orders, and attempting to insulate unlawful policy from judicial review by laundering it through a different agency.

02/19/2026

New analysis linking immigration data with employment data for specific areas suggests that the rapid rise in unauthorized immigrant worker flows increased local employment roughly one-for-one. Extending the analysis to the industry level further suggests that the slowdown of net immigration had a large negative impact on local employment, particularly for construction and manufacturing.

The large increase and subsequent decline of unauthorized immigrant workers in recent years have raised questions about the impact of these changes on local labor markets across the United States. New analysis linking immigration data with employment data for specific areas suggests that the rapid r...