www.thecentersquare.com – By Bethany Blankley | The Center Square contributor – (The Center Square – ) 2025-04-15 11:26:00
(The Center Square) – U.S. Republican senators led by Ted Cruz, R-Texas, have introduced a bill to strip international organizations’ immunity from lawsuits that provide material support to designated terror groups that commit violent acts against Americans.
The Limiting Immunity for Assisting Backers of Lethal Extremism (LIABLE) Act would allow American victims of terrorism to sue international organizations that provide resources to terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah. It would amend title 28 of U.S. Code to state that international organizations do not have immunity in U.S. courts in certain cases related to terrorism under the International Organization Immunity Act (IOIA) “in which money damages are sought against an international organization for personal injury or death that was caused by an act of torture, extrajudicial killing, aircraft sabotage, hostage taking, or the provision of material support or resources for such an act if such act or provision of material support or resources is engaged in by an official, employee, or agent of such international organization while acting within the scope of his or her office, employment, or agency,” according to the bill language.
The bill would authorize U.S. courts to hear cases filed against international organizations that conspired with or materially supported groups designated as a foreign terrorist organization by the U.S. government. American victims include all U.S. citizens, including members of the U.S. military, government employees and contractors. It also would allow U.S. victims and their family members to sue within a 20-year timeframe of when the terrorist act occurred.
Cruz highlights the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) as an international organization that could be sued if his bill became law. UNRWA received hundreds of millions of dollars from the Biden administration that was “poured into the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip,” he said. “That process would normally constitute material support for terrorism, because the assistance directly and indirectly benefits Hamas – a known terrorist group. And yet, the Biden administration granted waivers among other legislative measures to circumvent the law and enable UNRWA to support Hamas.”
Under the first Trump administration, the U.S. stopped all federal funding to UNRWA in 2018. President Donald Trump also signed a bill into law prohibiting U.S. funds from benefitting the Palestinian Authority unless it terminates its prisoner and martyr fund.
Former President Joe Biden reversed Trump’s first-term policy and funneled at least $1 billion to UNRWA, a coalition of 26 state attorneys general argued when they called on Congress to stop funding UNRWA, The Center Square reported. Congress kept funding it, as it kept funding taxpayer-funded programs that were used by alleged terrorists released into the U.S. by the Biden administration, according to a recent DOGE report.
A Texas congressman also sued the Biden administration alleging it sent more than $6.3 billion to the Palestinian Authority, which funds terrorism, before the Hamas Oct. 7 terrorist attack against Israel ever occurred, The Center Square reported.
While some UNRWA officials have denied agency support of terrorism, Cruz and other Republicans argue UNRWA officials for decades have “knowingly provided support to Hamas terrorists, including salaries and materials,” which helped facilitate the Oct. 7 attack. The attack “was the worst one-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust and included the murder and kidnapping of dozens of Americans. Those victims and their families deserve the ability to hold UNRWA accountable, and the LIABLE Act would give them that opportunity,” Cruz said.
Months after the Oct. 7 attack, intelligence reports revealed that Hamas was still operating underneath UNRWA’s Gaza headquarters. Large quantities of weapons, rifles, ammunition, grenades and explosives were found in UNRWA offices, as well as a 700-meter long and 18-meter deep tunnel below it, according to several reports, The Center Square reported.
Last year, Cruz and several Republicans called on former Attorney General Merrick Garland to open a criminal investigation into UNRWA.
“The Biden administration has also channeled hundreds of billions of dollars into the Gaza Strip largely through UNRWA. … Israeli officials have presented detailed evidence credibly alleging that 190 UNRWA staff are ‘hardened fighters, killers,’ and that roughly 10% of UNRWA staff – 1,200 personnel – are affiliated with terrorist groups,” they wrote Garland, who ignored their request.
Under the Biden administration, Islamic terrorist incidents increased in the U.S. and worldwide, according to several reports, and a majority of Americans polled said terrorism dangers increased under his watch, The Center Square reported.
Cruz’s bill has several Republican cosponsors. It’s unclear if it will gain enough support from Senate Democrats to pass.
Army Sgt. Ayssac Correa’s wife, Shirly Guardado, was deported despite his military service and their efforts to legalize her status. Military families with undocumented members face risks amid immigration enforcement, as there’s no guaranteed protection or citizenship path for them. Military parole in place can help but is difficult to obtain, inconsistently supported, and often denied. Legal assistance varies by branch, with the Coast Guard recently pausing aid. Deportations of military spouses increase anxiety and strain military readiness. Advocates push for legislation easing green card access for military families. Correa considers leaving the Army to reunite his family in Honduras after Guardado’s deportation.
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This article first appeared on The War Horse, an award-winning nonprofit news organization educating the public on military service. Subscribe to their newsletter.
Army Sgt. Ayssac Correa had just started his day at the 103rd Quartermaster Company outside of Houston on the morning of March 13 when he got a phone call from his sister-in-law.
She worked at the same company as Correa’s wife and had just pulled into the parking lot to see three ICE agents handcuffing her.
“They’re taking Shirly away!” she told him.
This month, as protesters clash with law enforcement amid immigration raids in Los Angeles, President Donald Trump has ordered 4,000 National Guardsmen and 700 active-duty Marines to respond. The move injected the military into the highly contentious debate over immigration. For the tens of thousands of service members whose spouses or parents are undocumented, the issue was already personal, pitting service against citizenship.
National Guard soldiers deployed this month to Los Angeles guard ICE agents during an immigration enforcement operation. Credit: Photo by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement
In his first week in office, President Trump signed multiple executive orders aimed at reshaping the country’s immigration policy, calling border crossings in recent years an “invasion” and arguing that many undocumented migrants have committed “vile and heinous acts against innocent Americans.”
But Correa and his wife weren’t too worried. After they got married in 2022, the couple had filed paperwork to start Shirly Guardado on the path to citizenship, and Correa assumed that, as an active-duty soldier, his family wouldn’t be impacted.
“Me being in the military — I felt bad that it was happening, because I’m also married to somebody who’s going through the [immigration] process. But I was like, ‘Oh, there’s no way this is going to happen to us,’” he said.
That misconception is common, immigration attorneys and advocates told The War Horse. But in reality, there is no guaranteed path to citizenship for undocumented military family members — and no guaranteed protections against deportation.
There are no reliable statistics on how many service members marry citizens of other countries, but it’s not uncommon, says Margaret Stock, a leading expert on immigration law and the military. The progressive group Fwd.us has estimated that up to 80,000 undocumented spouses or parents of military members are living in the U.S.
“You can imagine what happens when you’re deployed in more than 120 countries around the world,” Stock said.
Service members are often hesitant to speak out about their family members’ immigration status.
“It’s taboo,” says Marino Branes, an immigration attorney and former Marine who first came to the U.S. from Peru without documentation. “It’s not like you’re announcing it to the world.”
But he and other immigration attorneys told The War Horse they are working with active-duty clients who are scrambling to get their spouses or parents paperwork as immigration enforcement actions ramp up, and it becomes clear that military families are not immune.
In April, ICE arrested the Argentinian wife of an active-duty Coast Guardsman after her immigration status was flagged during a routine security screening as the couple moved into Navy base housing in South Florida. Last month, the Australian wife of an Army lieutenant was detained by border officials at an airport in Hawaii during a trip to visit her husband. She was sent back to Australia.
As the debate over illegal immigration roils the country, recent polling from the Pew Research Center shows that about a third of Americans think that all undocumented immigrants living in the country should be deported. Fifty-one percent believe that some undocumented immigrants should be deported, depending on their situation. For instance, nearly all those respondents agree that undocumented immigrants who have committed violent crimes should be deported. But just 5% think that spouses of American citizens should be.
Lawmakers have reintroduced several bills in Congress that would make it easier for spouses and parents of troops and veterans to get their green card.
“The anxiety of separation during deployment, the uncertainty of potentially serving in a conflict zone — these challenges weren’t just mine. They were my family’s as well,” Rep. Salud Carbajal, a Democrat from California, said at a news conference last month. He came to the U.S. from Mexico as a child and served in the Marine Corps.
“I find it unconscionable that someone could step up to serve, voluntarily, in our military and be willing to sacrifice their life for our country only to have their families torn apart.”
“I didn’t hear from her for three days”
The morning that ICE took Shirly Guardado into custody had started like any other. She and Correa had woken early to prepare their 10-month-old son for the day and then taken him to Guardado’s mother to watch him while they worked — Correa as a logistics specialist, handling the training for part-time Army reservists at his unit, and Guardado as a secretary at an air conditioning manufacturing company.
Guardado had gotten a work permit and an order of supervision from ICE, meaning she needed to check in regularly with immigration officials, after she was apprehended crossing the border about 10 years earlier, her lawyer, Martin Reza, told The War Horse. Her last check-in had been in February, just a month before.
Shirly Guardado with her husband, Sgt. Ayssac Correa, along with her mother and son, the winter before she was deported to Honduras. Credit: Photo courtesy of Ayssac Correa
“She reported as normal,” Reza said. “Nothing happened.”
But on that morning in March, Guardado got a strange phone call at work. Some sort of public safety officer had dialed her office and wanted her to come outside to talk. In the parking lot, three men in plain clothes identified themselves as Department of Public Safety officers, Correa told The War Horse. As Shirly approached, they said her car had been involved in an accident. But when she got close, they grabbed her and handcuffed her, telling her they were ICE agents.
That’s when Guardado’s sister-in-law called Correa.
He said the ICE agents refused to tell him where they were taking his wife. By the time he got to her office, they were gone.
“I didn’t hear from her for like three days,” he said. When she was finally able to call him, from an ICE facility in Conroe, he told her there must have been some mistake.
“They’re gonna realize you got your stuff in order, and they’re gonna let you go,” he told her.
“I kept thinking, ‘Oh, she’s gonna get out tomorrow. She’s gonna get out tomorrow.’ And then that turned into almost three months,” he said.
On May 30, ICE deported her to Honduras. It was her 28th birthday.
Protection through military parole in place
Correa had met Guardado in a coffee shop in Houston in 2020 — “the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen,” he said. After they got married, Reza helped the couple file paperwork for Correa to sponsor Guardado to get her green card.
Because Correa was in the military, the couple also put in an application for military parole in place, a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services program that can help military and veteran family members temporarily stay in the U.S. legally while they work to get a more permanent status.
The program grew out of the experiences of Yaderlin Hiraldo Jimenez, an undocumented Army wife whose husband, Staff Sgt. Alex Jimenez, went missing in Iraq in 2007 after his unit came under insurgent fire.
Alex Jimenez had petitioned for a green card for his wife before he deployed, but while the Army searched for him, the Department of Homeland Security worked to deport her. After the case gained national attention, the department changed course and allowed her to stay in the U.S. temporarily. She was awarded a green card in July of 2007. Almost a year later, the Army found her husband’s remains.
“After that case, the bureaucracy realized that they could go ahead and do this for everybody,” Stock said. “It would solve a lot of problems for military families, and it would contribute to readiness, and the troops are going to be a lot happier, because there’s a lot of troops that have this problem.”
But not everyone is granted parole, and filing can be complicated. Historically, all of the military branches have offered legal assistance to military family members applying, as long as legal resources were available. But the Coast Guard recently “discontinued” its legal assistance to undocumented Coast Guard family members looking to apply for a military parole in place, a spokesperson said in an email to The War Horse.
In response to follow-up questions, the Coast Guard called it a “pause” that resulted from a “recent review of assistance with immigration services available to dependents.” The War Horse has confirmed multiple examples of Coast Guard families being denied this legal assistance, although USCIS says the program is still active and military families are still eligible to apply. The other military branches say they have not made any changes to the legal immigration assistance they provide military families under the new administration.
But even for families who are able to apply for parole in place, approval isn’t guaranteed. There are certain disqualifying factors, like having a criminal record, and USCIS offices have discretion over granting parole.
“All of these field offices have a captain, a chief there,” says Branes. “They dictate policy there.”
USCIS denied Guardado and Correa’s application for military parole in place. Even though ICE had released her to work in the U.S. with check-ins a decade earlier, and she had no criminal record, she was technically under an expedited deportation order, which USCIS told her was disqualifying. They told her to file her application for military parole in place with ICE instead.
That’s not uncommon, Stock said. “But ICE doesn’t have a program to give parole in place.”
When ICE agents arrested Guardado, Reza said, her request for a military parole in place had been sitting with the agency for over a year with no response.
“Families serve too”
Correa is planning to fly down to Honduras shortly to bring their son, Kylian, to reunite with his mother. He’s put in a request to transfer to Soto Cano Air Base in Honduras in hopes of being stationed closer to them. He said his wife has been bouncing from hotel to hotel since landing in the country. Her brother, who is a legal resident, flew to Honduras to meet her there, since she has no family in the country, having come to the U.S. more than a decade earlier.
He wants to continue serving in the Army, which he joined in 2018. Shortly afterward, he deployed to Syria.
“This is what I want to do,” Correa said. But if his transfer request isn’t approved, he said he won’t renew his enlistment when his contract is up next year. He’s looking at selling all his possessions and moving to Honduras — anything that will make it possible to bring his family together again.
“You recruit the service member [but] you retain the family,” says Stephanie Torres, who was undocumented when her husband, Sgt. Jorge Torres, who had served in Afghanistan, died in a car crash in 2013. “You retain the family by letting them know, ‘You belong here. You serve too.’”
She and other advocates say that targeting military family members for deportation can harm military readiness by taking away a focus on the mission. Some service members may be scared or unable to enroll their family members for military benefits or support programs.
Today, Torres is working with the group Repatriate Our Patriots, which advocates on behalf of deported veterans, to build up a program to support military and veteran family members who are deported or are facing deportation.
Federal agents prepare undocumented immigrants for deportation at Biggs Army Airfield, Fort Bliss on Feb. 6, 2025. Credit: U.S. Army photo by Cpl. Adaris Cole/DoD Southern Border 2025
Juarez crossed into the U.S. from Mexico when she was a teenager and said she signed a document she didn’t understand at the time that permanently prevented her from gaining legal status.
Alejandra Juarez with her family in 2022, following her return to the United States on humanitarian parole. Juarez is second from the right; her husband, Temo Juarez, who served in the Marines, is on the right. Credit: Photo courtesy of Alejandra Juarez
“When my husband was called into active duty and put his life on the line, it didn’t matter if I had documents,” she told The War Horse. “I was a military wife.
“We should be able to get a second chance.”
Earlier this month, Juarez’s parole expired, and she has no path to citizenship. She sees the administration ramping up its immigration enforcement and ending many of its parole programs. She doesn’t want to spend money or time on what she assumes will be a dead end.
When her parole expired, she said, her immigration officer extended her a grace period to stay in the United States for one more month, to celebrate her younger daughter’s birthday. She’s turning 16.
Then, on the 4th of July, Juarez must leave the country.
This War Horse story was edited by Mike Frankel, fact-checked by Jess Rohan, and copy-edited by Mitchell Hansen-Dewar. Hrisanthi Pickett wrote the headlines.
Big news: 20 more speakers join the TribFest lineup! New additions include Margaret Spellings, former U.S. secretary of education and CEO of the Bipartisan Policy Center; Michael Curry, former presiding bishop and primate of The Episcopal Church; Beto O’Rourke, former U.S. Representative, D-El Paso; Joe Lonsdale, entrepreneur, founder and managing partner at 8VC; and Katie Phang, journalist and trial lawyer.
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Note: The following A.I. based commentary is not part of the original article, reproduced above, but is offered in the hopes that it will promote greater media literacy and critical thinking, by making any potential bias more visible to the reader –Staff Editor.
Political Bias Rating: Center-Left
This article, published by The Texas Tribune in partnership with The War Horse, takes a human-centered approach to reporting on immigration enforcement’s effects on military families. The focus is empathetic, highlighting emotional and logistical hardships faced by service members with undocumented spouses. While it includes quotes from policymakers across the spectrum, the framing strongly emphasizes the failures and perceived injustices of current enforcement policies, particularly under Republican administrations. The narrative prioritizes personal stories over policy defense and critiques systemic gaps without equal weight to counterarguments, suggesting a Center-Left lean that is sympathetic to immigration reform and critical of strict enforcement.
www.youtube.com – FOX 7 Austin – 2025-06-16 13:26:19
SUMMARY: Iran has intensified missile attacks on Israel, marking the conflict’s fourth day. The strikes, targeting civilian areas, are a response to Israeli airstrikes aimed at destroying Iran’s nuclear program. U.S. Embassy offices in Tel Aviv were damaged and remain closed. President Trump, attending the G7 summit in Canada, emphasized Iran must return to negotiations. Reports reveal Trump privately advised Israel against assassinating Iran’s Supreme Leader, though Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu declined to comment on this. Israel’s goals focus on dismantling Iran’s nuclear and ballistic missile capabilities, with regime change a potential outcome. The U.S. continues supporting Israel amid challenging behind-the-scenes talks.
Iran has stepped up its missile attacks against Israel as the conflict between the two countries continues. FOX’s Doug Luzader has the latest as news came out that President Trump told Israel not to assassinate Iran’s Supreme Leader.
FOX 7 Austin brings you breaking news, weather, and local stories out of Central #Texas as well as fun segments from Good Day Austin, the best from our video vault archives, and exclusive shows like the Good Day Austin Round-Up and CrimeWatch.
SUMMARY: A Kimble County jury found 26-year-old Keanue Swan Pratt of San Antonio guilty of murdering 32-year-old Christopher Gates in 2023 and sentenced him to life in prison. The two men, neighbors at a Junction RV park, were socializing and drinking before Pratt violently assaulted Gates in his trailer. Evidence showed Pratt punched, kicked, stomped, and struck Gates with a glass ashtray, even after Gates was unconscious. He stopped only when confronted by the park owners, whom he also attacked. Pratt later confessed. A forensic psychiatrist described Pratt as having antisocial traits and a history of drug abuse dating back to age 13.
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