Julian Hattem

For the first time in about 70 years, net immigration to America could be zero. Beneath the noise of tariff and budget fights, migration may well be the biggest economic story of 2025.

My latest for @economist.com: Welcome to Zero Migration America

Link: www.economist.com/finance-and...

🧵 below

U.S. used a transnational crime unit to secretly target campus protesters A Tufts University graduate student was among those targeted after the Trump administration created a “tiger team” to investigate pro-Palestinian activists.

The US government assigned a special immigration enforcement team to target college students involved in protests against the war in Gaza.

It assembled more than 100 reports on protesters
www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2025/...

"the effort in Washington shows how migrants stopped by local law enforcement for low-level infractions can swiftly be detained by ICE — a boost for an agency struggling to meet the White House’s demands for higher arrest numbers."

"While many of those detained have immediately declared their U.S. citizenship to officers, they have routinely been ignored.." In some cases citizens were handcuffed and held in detention overnight

Shelter from the Storm - The New Press A Literary Hub Most Anticipated BookAn urgent wake-up call about the coming large-scale human displacement caused by climate change, from one of the world’s leading experts Mere decades from now, mil...

You can preorder the book from The New Press here, or whenever you buy books. It will be published on January 6. I can't wait to put it out into the world
thenewpress.org/books/shelte...

Very smart and kind people whom I respect very much called Shelter from the Storm "troubling and powerful," "forceful and vivid," "with masterful storytelling and insightful explanations."

"A must read for everyone concerned with climate change and migration."

But the book isn't sensationalist

People have always moved for all sorts of reasons, and will continue to do so. What's new about climate change is not that people are moving, but that many are doing so in a harried, haphazard manner for which our legal systems are entirely unprepared

I've been working on the book for several years. It's got reporting from multiple continents, including drought-stricken Guatemalan coffee farmers & Bangladeshi families whose houses were wiped out by cyclones

Many have already begun to move somewhere more accommodating

I am so incredibly thrilled to say that my book is coming out in January!

Shelter from the Storm is a deep, sprawling overview of the ways that climate change is creating a new era of human migration

For those deterred by Trump, can the American dream become the Mexican dream? Not only are Trump’s policies pushing many migrants to request asylum in Mexico, but US aid cuts are making their integration there even harder.

"Before, we didn’t see children enrolling in school... There is more permanence now.”

Deterred from the US, more asylum seekers and other migrants are starting to build new lives in Mexico

www.thenewhumanitarian.org/news-feature...

Chart shows Detention Population, Among Those Arrested by ICE in the Interior, by Criminal Record. The chart shows three lines; Prior conviction, pending criminal charges, and no criminal record. From 2019 through September 2025, the largest group is people with criminal convictions, with much further down people with pending charges. But starting in January, those without criminal records spikes dramatically. In July it crossed pending charges and in the latest data it jumps above criminal convictions.

🚨NEW: For the first time in history, the single largest group of people arrested in the interior and sent to ICE detention is people with NO criminal record.

As of yesterday's data release, 40%(!) of those arrested in the interior and detained by ICE had no prior conviction or pending charges.

“Spoiler alert: we found that public institutions in large, Republican-leaning states are disproportionately affected by the policy.”

one reason these courthouse arrests/confrontations are so common now is bc authorities do administrative two-steps to toss out ongoing deportation cases (which take a long time) & deport people thru fast-track expedited removals (which can take a couple hours)
www.migrationpolicy.org/article/trum...

just discovered this dashboard of climate mobility legal cases internationally, which is a super cool resource

www.global-council.org/climate-data...

Ghana becomes latest African nation to accept US deportees The West African country said it had accepted 14 migrants deported from the US as part of a bilateral agreement with Washington.

Ghana becomes latest African nation to accept US deportees

www.semafor.com/article/09/1...

Exclusive: Trump administration plans push at UN to restrict global asylum rights President Donald Trump's administration plans to call for sharply narrowing the right to asylum at the United Nations later this month, documents show, as it seeks to undo the post-World War Two framework around humanitarian protection.

the Trump administration reportedly wants to sharply limit the international right to asylum at the UN

www.reuters.com/world/africa...

The costly failure of the CBP Home self-deportation app According to an NBC News analysis, in the five weeks following its implementation, only 356 people used it to voluntarily leave the country, and no further data has been published since then

The costly failure of the CBP Home self-deportation app

According to an NBC News analysis, in the five weeks following its implementation, only 356 people used it to voluntarily leave the country, and no further data has been published since then

english.elpais.com/usa/2025-09-...

Fabrizio Romano-ing NATO action

"Some neighborhoods will retreat and others will be protected, and still others – often lower-income communities – may be left behind."

This is, in essence, the story of climate migration worldwide at every scale: Some people get new seawalls, other people move, and the worst off get stuck in place

40% of shadow docket cases under Trump have been about immigration

A significant factor for everything that has happened the last 9 months

How a Top Secret SEAL Team 6 Mission Into North Korea Fell Apart

amazing story

trying to imagine what would happen if a bunch of north korean soldiers showed up on a rocky beach in california and killed three people in the middle of the night

www.nytimes.com/2025/09/05/u...

As this blog notes, this move is almost surely at least in part an economic one, aimed at bringing in diaspora money/investment

Even before the start of President Trump's surge, D.C. had the most police per-capita of any U.S. city. By a quite a bit.

And that's just counting the city's force, not the huge array of other police agencies here. The Capitol Police, also in D.C., is bigger than Baltimore's police department.

the notion of "remigration," now rising on the US right, has a longer history in Europe, where it has a specific meaning linked to removing immigrants of a non-European ethnicity

In his famous 1968 Rivers of Blood speech, Powell explicitly pointed to the US as a warning for UK immigration

850,000 Syrian refugees have returned home since Assad's fall, UN says An official with the U.N. reguee agency UNHCR says that since the fall of Bashar Assad’s government in December, some 850,000 Syrian refugees have returned home from neighboring countries.

UNHCR, the UN refugee agency, expects the 1 millionth Syrian will return to their origin country in the next few weeks, less than a year after Assad's ouster

apnews.com/article/syri...

5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE NORTHERN DISTRICT OF CALIFORNIA GAVIN NEWSOM, et al., Plaintiffs, Case No. 25-cv-04870-CRB OPINION GRANTING INJUNCTIVE RELIEF V. DONALD J. TRUMP, et al., Defendants. Congress spoke clearly in 1878 when it passed the Posse Comitatus Act, prohibiting the use of the U.S. military to execute domestic law. Nearly 140 years later, Defendants President Trump, Secretary of Defense Hegseth, and the Department of Defense deployed the National Guard and Marines to Los Angeles, ostensibly to quell a rebellion and ensure that federal immigration law was enforced. There were indeed protests in Los Angeles, and some individuals engaged in violence. Yet there was no rebellion, nor was civilian law enforcement unable to respond to the protests and enforce the law. Nevertheless, at Defendants' orders and contrary to Congress's explicit instruction, federal troops executed the laws. The evidence at trial established that Defendants systematically used armed soldiers (whose identity was often obscured by protective armor) and military vehicles to set up protective perimeters and traffic blockades, engage in crowd control, and otherwise demonstrate a military presence in and around Los Angeles. In short, Defendants violated the Posse Comitatus Act.

BREAKING: Trump, Hegseth violated the Posse Comitatus Act with their troop deployment to Los Angeles, Judge Charles Breyer rules after trial. storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

Judge blocks Trump’s broad expansion of expedited removal of migrants A federal judge ruled the Trump administration cannot fast-track the deportations of undocumented migrants inside the country without offering them due process.

www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/...

Cut to the bone: The cost of ration cuts and delivery delays in Kenya's refugee camps New research demonstrates the overwhelming impact reducing rations has on local camp economies and people’s survival.

Researchers working in Kenya's Kakuma refugee camp documented a development that everyone should have expected: when US aid gets cut, people go hungry

www.thenewhumanitarian.org/analysis/202...

Inside a Virginia ICE office: One meal a day, 40 people in a room and no bathing for days "The situation is getting worse by the day," warns Amy Fischer, an organizer with Migrant Solidarity Mutual Aid. "It is an office; it is not intended to detain people."

NEWS: ICE's Chantilly office is a "black box" where conditions are increasingly dire, attorneys & a relative of person detained tell @msnbc.com
- 1 meal a day = a single burrito
- some 40-90 ppl crammed into room, sleeping on concrete
- Some held as long as 7 days
www.msnbc.com/msnbc/news/v...