Dozens of migrants may have drowned in attempt to cross to Spain, NGO says

DENVER: D Pablo Morales has nothing against Donald Trump, and when the US president promised mass deportations, he was not worried because as a legal migrant from Cuba, he thought they would only affect criminals.
But then immigration officers arrested his son, Luis — a rideshare driver who has never broken the law and was also in the US legally.
“He has all his papers, he has his social security number, his work authorization,” Morales told AFP, displaying the documents.
The two men were visiting friends in Denver when they were woken by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raid.
When agents knocked on the door, they calmly presented their papers thinking they had nothing to fear — until Luis was handcuffed and sent to an administrative detention center.
He has yet to be released.
Luis filled out paperwork to apply for residency in 2023 but, the agents told his father, he did not have a hearing date for his application.
Immigration lawyers say the blame lies with the backlog in the US immigration system, where cases often drag on for years because of a shortage of judges.
Luis has lived in New York for almost four years and is married to an American citizen.
“He is not a criminal,” insists his father.
“He’s a hardworking boy like me; we came to this country... to work,” explains this former employee of a Las Vegas casino.
ICE did not respond to multiple requests for comment on the case when contacted by AFP.
The agency said on social media that it had conducted several raids in Aurora, a Denver suburb, on February 5.
“100+ members of the violent Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua were targeted for arrest and detention in Aurora, Colorado, today by ICE,” it posted.
According to a report by Fox News, around thirty people were arrested, of whom only one was a gang member.
“I don’t understand,” said Morales. “They were looking for Venezuelans who are part of a criminal gang.
“If he is Cuban and he shows them his papers, I don’t know why they are coming to take him away.”
Local media reported an asylum seeker was also among those rounded up in that particular raid.

Trump rode back into the White House on a wave of anti-immigrant sentiment sweeping America.
He pledged to carry out “the largest deportation operation in history.”
However, data shows ICE deported fewer people in February — Trump’s first full month in office — than it did under Joe Biden in the same month last year, according to a report by NBC.
But its actions have been very visible, with military jets used to ostentatiously deport handcuffed people to Latin American countries, or to detention at Guantanamo Bay.
Colorado knows it is in the crosshairs.
Its capital, Denver, is a sanctuary city, where Democratic authorities limit the cooperation of local law enforcement with federal immigration police.
And Aurora has been cast by Trump and conservative media as a symbol of an “occupied America,” because of a viral video showing armed men breaking into an apartment there.
City police point out that crime has fallen in Aurora over the last two years.
Last month’s raids were little more than “photo ops” says Laura Lunn, an immigration lawyer.
“I think that the focus on Aurora was a fabricated story to begin with. They’re trying to solve a problem that never existed,” says Lunn, a member of the Rocky Mountain Immigrant Advocacy Network.
“The rhetoric that the government is using — conflating immigration and criminals — is really damaging, because those two things are not the same.”
ICE says that while its agents are targeting criminals, they are content to make “collateral arrests.”
During the first month of the Trump presidency, the proportion of people without criminal records detained by ICE increased from six to 16 percent, according to the New York Times.
Lunn says no one is safe anymore, even immigrants who are just awaiting their day in court but who have everything in order.
She advises her worried clients to always have photocopies of their files.
“People are being detained today that I would never have guessed even a month ago that they would be detained,” she says.
“It’s really hard for us to predict who might be at risk.”

BANGKOK: A group of Myanmar soldiers fled across the Thai border on Friday after an assault by an ethnic armed group ousted them from their base, Thailand’s military said.
Myanmar has been riven by civil war after the military seized power in a 2021 coup, with the junta fighting an array of armed ethnic organizations and pro-democracy partisans.
Fighters from the Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA) attacked the Pulu Tu frontier military base in the early hours of Friday, the Thai military said.
“The Myanmar military defended the base but ultimately the KNLA successfully seized control,” it said in a statement.
“Several Myanmar soldiers were killed and some fled across the border into Thailand.”
The statement did not specify how many Myanmar soldiers had crossed the border into Thailand’s Tak province but said they had been “provided humanitarian assistance.”
KNLA forces seized the base around 3:00 am (2030 GMT Thursday), according to a spokesman for the organization’s political wing, the Karen National Union.
The KNLA fighters took the base after Myanmar troops “abandoned their guns and ran into Thailand,” it said.
A spokesman for the Myanmar junta could not be reached for comment.
The Pulu Tu base is around 80 kilometers (50 miles) north of the border town of Myawaddy, a vital trade node that became a battleground between anti-junta fighters and the military last year.
The region is also the epicenter of the scam-center boom in Myanmar, where thousands of foreign nationals trawl the Internet for victims to trick with romance or investment schemes.
Many workers say they were trafficked into the centers and thousands have been repatriated through Thailand in recent weeks under mounting international pressure.
The KNLA has been fighting for decades to establish greater autonomy for the Karen people living along Myanmar’s southeastern flank.
It is among dozens of ethnic armed organizations, already active before the coup, which have proved the most effective fighting forces against the junta.
While the military has suffered substantial territorial losses, analysts say it remains strong in Myanmar’s heartland, with an air force capable of inflicting punishing losses on its adversaries.
The junta issued a conscription order a year ago to boost its embattled ranks, allowing it to call up all men aged 18-35 for military service.