Law Office of Lina Baroudi

10/18/2026

The Trump administration cut legal immigration in half early this year with policies blocking visas for immigrants from nearly half the globe.

The State Department issued just 26,000 immigrant visas, which grant a green card and legal permanent resident status, in February, compared with an average of 52,000 a month in the years before Trump took office, according to the most recent available government data.

The policies, which took effect late last year and early this year, made it all but impossible to immigrate from 91 countries and reduced the number of immigrant visas available in another 61. Africa and the Middle East were hit particularly hard, and immigration from Muslim-majority countries plunged by more than 90 percent.

A freeze on visas made it all but impossible to immigrate from dozens of countries. Student and work visas also declined.

10/08/2026

San Francisco’s immigration court was officially closed last month, shifting thousands of cases to Concord

09/23/2026

09/23/2026

Awful

Their asylum hearing was moved up three years. With no lawyer, a Modesto-area family lost their case and now has to pay $2,060 to appeal.

09/21/2026

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has stopped publicly revealing where it is holding thousands of detainees who are subject to final deportation orders, an unannounced move that has made it far more difficult for lawyers and relatives to find them, according to current and former officials familiar with the practice.

ICE removed those detainees from its online detainee locator system on Sept. 15, according to three current and former ICE officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the change. Several lawyers contacted by The Associated Press confirmed their clients vanished from the system this week, and the American Immigration Lawyers Association warned its members about the situation Friday.

The move represents a stark departure from previous practice and highlights the hardline nature of President Donald Trump's immigration crackdown, leaving thousands of detainees exceedingly hard to trace and potentially unable to exercise all of their legal options.

The practice, which applies to detainees who have received final orders of removal from an immigration court, could speed deportations by making last-minute legal challenges harder to pursue, immigration lawyers said. Nearly 16,000 people who were arrested and booked into ICE detention in July were subject to final removal orders, more than a third of the overall bookings, according to ICE data obtained by the Deportation Data Project based at U.C. Berkeley and UCLA.

The practice does not apply to detainees held at a detention facility in Adelanto, California or at temporary holding facilities in Minneapolis, New York City or suburban Chicago, the sources said. Judges have ordered ICE to list detainees in those facilities in the online locator promptly upon their arrival, as part of litigation over their detention practices.

Lawyers and relatives distressed by lack of information on detainees

The effort to hide their locations adds to the ways in which the Trump administration has made life harder for detainees and their families as it has increased pressure on them to waive appeals and agree to deportation.

ICE did not publicize the move and in a statement issued to the AP, the agency did not confirm or deny it. The statement said detainees with final removal orders were being prioritized for deportation, even as ICE faces a “historic number of injunctions” from courts stopping individual removals.

As a result of the change, lawyers and relatives lost track of their clients and loved ones without explanation, which is especially concerning because detainees are frequently moved to new facilities before deportation, said Greg Chen, senior director of government relations at the American Immigration Lawyers Association.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has stopped publicly revealing where it is holding most detainees who are subject to final deportation orders, in a move that has made it harder for lawyers and relatives to find them

09/14/2026

Two lawsuits filed today challenging the new public charge rules

Federal law has long barred immigrants from obtaining green cards if they are likely to become primarily dependent on the government for subsistence. Immigration officers have historically considered the use of cash assistance programs or institutionalized long-term care, but not the use of benefits like the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or Medicaid.

The Trump administration’s policy would reverse the longstanding practice, expanding the federal programs that immigration officers can consider before determining that someone is likely to become reliant on the federal government.

The states’ suit was brought by New York, California, Illinois, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Jersey, New Mexico, Nevada, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin and the District of Columbia.

The second suit was led by Mayor Zohran Mamdani of New York and joined by Chicago, San Francisco, Seattle, Santa Clara County in California and King County in Washington.

The policy would give immigration officers wide authority to deny green cards to people using public benefits.

09/05/2026

Secret courts. No due process. What does it remind you of?

The new effort appears to be another tactic in a broader Trump administration strategy to short-circuit immigrants' already limited due process options in order to speed deportations.

09/05/2026

Immigration judges across the United States have been instructed to deny some of the most vulnerable people appearing in court the time needed for their visas or green cards to arrive – putting them at imminent risk of being thrown out of the country as the Trump administration continues to intensify its mass deportation campaign, the Guardian has learned.

Among the immigrants affected are abused and abandoned children and survivors of violent crime, according to the US government’s own training materials, which were shared exclusively with the Guardian.

Judges also appeared to be discouraged, under a hardline interpretation of existing policy guidance and laws, from giving people more than 10 days to find an attorney before proceeding with a case, a deadline that made critics balk.

Exclusive: Mandatory training for judges also urged them to threaten attorneys who accept too many cases

09/03/2026

Blocked again!

The judge said the issue raised in Trump’s August executive order was settled by the Supreme Court, and “no Presidential Executive Order can undo what the Supreme Court has done.”

08/30/2026

Bravo Judge Wise 👍👍

The ruling was a win for Stanford’s student newspaper, The Stanford Daily, and it followed another court victory for students targeted by the Trump administration last year.