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April 21, 2026

5 entries on this date.

ICE detained two Congolese teenage brothers on lawful student visas outside their Mississippi home

On April 21, 2026, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents detained brothers Israel Makoka, 18, and Max Makoka, 15, nationals of the Republic of Congo, as the teenagers left their guardians' home in Diamondhead, Mississippi to catch the school bus. The brothers held F-1 student visas that had lapsed after they transferred from a private boarding school to a public high school that could not host visa holders; agents dismissed their guardians' court-granted guardianship papers and moved the teenagers to separate detention facilities in Louisiana and Texas. The Department of Homeland Security said the brothers had violated their visas by failing to attend classes at their original school.

NY1 investigation found 132 noncitizens deported before immigration judges issued required final removal orders

On April 21, 2026, the New York news channel NY1 published an investigation finding 132 cases in which noncitizens were physically deported and received a final removal order from an immigration judge only afterward — the reverse of the legally required sequence. Immigration attorneys in New York, Louisiana, Texas, and Illinois and a former Justice Department chief immigration judge told NY1 the practice was illegal. The report documented Mario Mata Cruz, a Salvadoran man with Special Immigrant Juvenile status and a pending green card, whom ICE arrested on Long Island and deported to El Salvador without a final removal order.

DOJ concealed from courts and states its plan to vet voter rolls against DHS citizenship data, internal emails revealed

On April 21, 2026, a coalition of voting-rights groups led by Common Cause sued the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington, D.C.; the filing, alongside roughly 1,200 pages of internal DOJ communications obtained through FOIA litigation, revealed the department had spent nearly a year collecting states' unredacted voter rolls to cross-check against the Department of Homeland Security's SAVE citizenship system while withholding that intent from courts and Democratic election officials. In a November 2025 email, DOJ Voting Section leader Eric Neff advised telling states only that the department would "use the data in a manner consistent with Federal law" and to "say nothing more," asserting that "no judge will have authority to limit us beyond a promise of Federal law compliance." The department had also sued 31 election chiefs to compel production of unredacted voter registration data.

DOJ indicts Southern Poverty Law Center on 11 counts of fraud over $3M informant payments

On April 21, 2026, a federal grand jury in Montgomery, Alabama returned an 11-count indictment against the Southern Poverty Law Center, charging the 55-year-old civil-rights organization with wire fraud, false statements to a federally insured bank, and conspiracy to commit concealment money laundering over a covert program in which the SPLC says it paid confidential sources to infiltrate violent extremist groups. The indictment came after the FBI under Director Kash Patel had severed its long-running relationship with the SPLC, and amid publicly expressed presidential pressure on the Justice Department to pursue prosecutions of political opponents. SPLC interim CEO Bryan Fair said the organization was "targeted" by the administration and that its informant work "saved lives."