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ICE agents detain immigrants during routine check-ins, advocates say

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ICE agents detain immigrants during routine check-ins, advocates say

Within the past several weeks, at least four people have been detained after routine check-in appointments at the Pearl U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement office, local advocates say. 

The most recent was Carthage resident Baldomero Orozco Juarez, who is Guatemalan and has been living and working in Mississippi for 14 years. He was detained April 12 during a scheduled check-in, said Lorena Quiroz, executive director of the Immigrant Alliance for Justice and Equity. 

Since then, he has been at the LaSalle Detention Center in Jena, Louisiana, which is where many Mississippi immigrants are sent, she said. 

Orozco Juarez was deported after the 2019 ICE chicken plant raids, reentered the country and spent over a year in a detention center in Texas until the agency approved his probationary release, she said. 

Carthage resident Baldomero Orozco Juarez, center, an immigrant from Guatamala, pictured with his wife Sylvia Garcia and their two children, was detained by ICE during an April 12, 2023, scheduled check-in.

“It was already determined you can do that,” Quiroz said about Juarez awaiting his court date from home instead of in a detention center.

Nearly two weeks ago, she and a dozen other community advocates went to the Pearl ICE office to ask for answers about Orozco Juarez’s detention but were not told much. Demonstrators were asked to leave the building and local police were called as they stood outside. 

With probationary release, Orozco Juarez was able to obtain a work permit, driver’s license and a Social Security card, Quiroz said. 

She said Orozco Juarez, who has been working, caring for his family and going to routine ICE check-ins, is not a flight risk. Before his recent detention, he had gone to three scheduled check-ins. 

Orozco Juarez’s wife, Sylvia Garcia, came to the immigration office once she learned her husband had been detained. With translation from Quiroz, Garcia said it will be difficult without Orozco Juarez because she is injured and unable to work. 

“They are separating our families without any reason,” Garcia said. 

She and Juarez have two children, ages 5 and 9, who were born in Mississippi. 

Dalaney Mecham, an immigration attorney in Gulfport, said officers have a lot of discretion when it comes to deciding whether to let someone into the country at the U.S.-Mexico border or whether to detain them during a check-in.  

Due to changes with processing at the border within the past several years, the agency has started issuing paperwork for people to report to an ICE office so they can get a document called a “notice to appear,” which would include a time, date and location of their next immigration court date. Previously, people were issued a notice to appear at the border, Mecham said. 

A clear picture of common arrests during check-ins in Mississippi and nationwide is not known. A spokesperson with ICE’s public affairs office in Washington D.C. did not respond to a request to access any data the agency keeps about arrests during check-ins, and data the agency does have online does not specify about these kinds of arrests. 

ICE spokesman Nestor Yglesias said the agency makes decisions about who to place in custody on a case-by-case basis regardless of nationality based on policy and factors of each case. 

But Orozco Juarez has a documented history of disregarding immigration law, which contributed to his recent detention, he said. 

“For the past two years, ICE afforded Mr. [Orozco Juarez] the opportunity to be compliant with his removal order by planning his own return to Guatemala,” Yglesias said in the statement. “He will remain in ICE custody pending his removal from the country.”

The Immigrant Alliance for Justice and Equity knows of three other people who have been detained in recent weeks. 

ICE had given those people a smartphone with an app that allows the agency to monitor whether they are staying in the area by taking a picture of themselves or answering a phone call when requested, Quiroz said. 

The immigrants received an email saying the app was closed and they needed to come to the ICE office, she said. When they called the office back to learn when to come, there was no answer. They went to the office to check in on their appointment and were held without explanation. 

All three of the detained people are Nicaraguan immigrants who are seeking asylum due to political instability and violence in their country, Quiroz said. They had been in the United States for a year or less, and one was transferred to the Jena detention facility.  

Orozco Juarez could be detained until his trial, which could take years, but the Immigrant Alliance for Justice and Equity and his attorney are hoping to bring him home. 

Most of the immigration court proceedings for the area are conducted in New Orleans. 

The average wait time for a case in the New Orleans court is 709 days, which is nearly two years, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse immigration backlog tracker by Syracuse University. This wait time is about two months shorter than the national case wait time of 762 days

As of January, there are an estimated 48,690 pending cases across all of Louisiana’s immigration courts, which include the largest in New Orleans and two smaller ones based in detention centers in Oakdale and Jena, according to the TRAC backlog tracker. 

Mecham said some people he has represented have also been taken into custody during their routine ICE check-ins. He has noticed how people seek attorneys before their appointments because they are scared and have heard stories about others being detained during their check-ins.  

“Not knowing if they are going to come home that day is scary, especially if you have kids and you’ve been here for a while,” Mecham said. 

Similar to the experience of Orozco Juarez at the Pearl office, Mecham’s client, Lenin Ramirez, went to an ICE check-in in August 2021 in New Orleans, and that resulted in a two-month detention in a Louisiana detention center. 

Mecham called the immigration office to ask why his client was detained, especially since Ramirez, who lives in Mobile, was seeking asylum from Nicaragua. The officer said he was detained because he entered the country without authorization, Mecham said. 

Mecham was able to get Ramirez out by going first to the New Orleans ICE field office, then at the federal level through ICE’s ombudsman and the Department of Homeland Security, which reviewed Ramirez’s case and issued him a notice to appear with his scheduled court date. 

Since Ramirez’s release, Mecham has filed Ramirez’s asylum application and they are waiting for his next court date in July 2025. 

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

Mississippi Today

On this day in 1848

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mississippitoday.org – Jerry Mitchell – 2025-02-15 07:00:00

Feb. 15, 1848

Like the Black children shown in this engraving from the Anti-Slavery Almanac in Boston, Sarah Roberts was denied entrance to school because of the color of her skin. Credit: Public Domain

Sarah Roberts, a 5-year-old Black American, entered an all-white school in Boston, only to be turned away. She wound up entering four more white schools, and each time she was shown the door. And so she found herself walking from home, passing five all-white schools on the way to an all-black school the city of Boston was forcing her to attend. 

This angered her father, Benjamin, one of the nation’s first Black American printers, and he sued the city. Robert Morris, one of the nation’s first Black lawyers, took up the case. 

“Any child unlawfully excluded from public school shall recover damages therefore against the city or town by which such public instruction is supported,” Morris wrote. 

He and co-counsel Charles Sumner argued that the Constitution of Massachusetts held all are equal before the law, regardless of race, and that the laws creating public schools made no distinctions. 

Sumner wrote, “Prejudice is the child of ignorance … sure to prevail where people do not know each other.” 

In 1850, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court upheld the racial segregation of public schools. The attorneys brought the issue to state lawmakers. In 1855, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts banned segregated schools — the first law barring segregated schools in the U.S.

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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State, MS Power extend life of coal unit to energize data centers

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mississippitoday.org – Alex Rozier – 2025-02-14 14:53:00

Last week, the state Public Service Commission unanimously approved a special contract that will extend the life of a Mississippi Power coal unit in order to meet energy demands for a recently announced data center project in Meridian.

Mississippi Public Service Central District Commissioner De’Keither Stamps, discusses current agency operations across the state during an interview at district headquarters, Friday, Feb. 23, 2024, in Jackson. Credit: Vickie D. King/Mississippi Today

Gov. Tate Reeves announced last month a $10 billion investment from Compass Datacenters. The Dallas-based company will build eight centers, and in exchange will receive multiple tax exemptions, Mississippi Today reported. The project will be located within the Mississippi Power service area. The utility, a subsidiary of Southern Company, serves 192,000 customers in the southern and eastern parts of the state.

Following a 2020 directive from the PSC to get rid of excess generation capacity, Mississippi Power initially planned to close the two coal-powered units at Plant Victor J. Daniel — in Jackson County, about 10 miles north of Moss Point — by 2027. In 2023, though, the utility pushed the retirement date back a year in order to support demand needs for its sibling company, Georgia Power, Grist reported.

Then on Jan. 9, Mississippi Power informed the PSC that, in order to power the Compass Datacenter facilities, it would have to delay closure of at least one of the coal units, as well as “potentially other fossil steam units,” until the mid-2030s.

Central District Public Service Commissioner De’Keither Stamps told Mississippi Today that the PSC’s job is to meet demand, and that until Mississippi Power has the option to include nuclear power in its arsenal, “we’re going to need all the power we can get in that service area.”

“We can’t stop economic development because we’ve got to wait, you know, 15 years for some nuclear power in the service area,” Stamps said.

Sen. Jeremy England, R-Vancleave.
Sen. Jeremy England, R-Vancleave. Credit: Mississippi State Senate

Throughout the last couple decades, the country has moved away from coal as an energy source because of its contribution to global warming but also because of air and water pollution associated with coal-burning facilities. A 2023 study from George Mason University, the University of Texas and Harvard University found that exposure to fine particulate pollutants known as PM2.5 from coal plants contributed to 460,000 deaths around the country between 1999 and 2020, twice the mortality rate of PM2.5 exposure from other sources.

Sen. Jeremy England, R-Vancleave, whose district includes Plant Daniel, called the facility a “fixture of our community” because of the jobs and tax revenue it provides. He said he wasn’t aware of any health concerns related to air emissions from the plant.

“I don’t hear from any constituents that say, ‘Hey, we don’t want this here,’” England said.

England added that Plant Daniel retiring units could potentially hurt its tax assessment, meaning less revenue for public needs like the local school district. He also pointed to emission “scrubbers” that Plant Daniel and other coal facilities have added in recent years. The same 2023 study found that scrubbers have dramatically decreased sulfur dioxide emissions as well as air pollution-related deaths.

In addition to Compass Datacenters, Mississippi Power also entered into a special contract to supply power for a plywood manufacturer, owned by Hood Industries, in Beaumont, Mississippi.

The two deals, a spokesperson for Mississippi Power said, necessitate keeping the coal and other units set for retirement alive.

“We are committed to keeping the Mississippi Public Service Commission and our customers up to date and will present additional details in our upcoming 2025 Mid-Point Supply-Side Update,” spokesperson Jeff Shepard said via email. “These incredible economic development projects will create a significant number of jobs and bring billions of dollars of investment to southeast Mississippi.”

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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Legislation to license midwifery clears another hurdle

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mississippitoday.org – Sophia Paffenroth – 2025-02-14 12:06:00

A bill that would establish a clear pathway for Mississippians seeking to become professional midwives passed the House after dying in committee several years in a row. 

“Midwives play an important role in our state, especially in areas where maternal health care is scarce,” said Rep. Dana McLean, R-Columbus and author of the bill. “I’m happy that House Bill 927 passed the House yesterday and urge our senators to join us in passing this much-needed legislation.”  

Despite the legislation imposing regulations on the profession and mandating formalized training, many midwives have voiced their support of the bill. They say it will help them care more holistically for women and allow them new privileges like the ability to administer certain labor medications – and will open the door to insurance reimbursement in the future. 

“We have so few midwives integrated in the system and so few midwives practicing in the state,” explained Amanda Smith, a midwife in Hattiesburg who went out of state to receive her professional midwifery license. “We believe that licensure really will help create a clear pathway so people know exactly how to become a midwife in Mississippi.”

It isn’t guaranteed that the bill would make midwifery more accessible to low-income women. But licensure makes it more likely. 

Currently, neither Medicaid nor private insurance reimburse for unlicensed midwifery services. Licensing professional midwifery wouldn’t necessarily mean that insurance companies would immediately start reimbursing for the services, but it’s the only way they might. 

A new federal program is seeking to make midwifery reimbursable by Medicaid. 

Mississippi is one of 15 states chosen by the federal government to participate in a new grant program called the Transforming Maternal Health Model, which began in January 2025 and will work to expand access and reimbursement for services – including licensed midwifery. 

The bill has historically faced opposition both from those who think it does too much, as well as those who think it does too little. 

To those who think it overregulates the profession, McLean says her loyalty lies with her constituents and making sure they have the most transparency when seeking birth options. Currently, anyone can operate under the title midwife in the state of Mississippi – with no required standard of training. 

“We are legitimizing (professional midwifery) … As a legislator, it’s my duty to try to protect the citizens of Mississippi,” McLean said. “And by putting this legislation forward, it helps to inform those clients that would want the services of a midwife but don’t know how to choose.”

As for those who think it does too little, McLean says the bill would leave the details up to a board – established by the bill and made up mostly of midwives – who would be able to decide requirements for professional midwifery better than a room full of lawmakers. 

“There’s a lot of men in here that know a lot about birthing babies,” McLean said during a lively floor debate Thursday.

The bill now advances to the Senate. 

This article first appeared on Mississippi Today and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.

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