Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

LightNews

Tanvi Misra

@tanvi.bsky.social

3.8K followers 1.8K following 440 posts

writer +/ journo covering migration, cities, justice etc. words in The Nation, Politico Mag, The Baffler, The Nation, The New Republic, etc. teaching @ CUNY’s Newmark School of Journalism. tanvim.05 on signal. Tanvim27 on insta.

Posts Media Videos Starter Packs

Pinned

Tanvi Misra @tanvi.bsky.social · 22d

All summer, I’ve been speaking to a Nigerian mom of two kids who won fear-based protection in an immigration court. Under a previous admin, she would have likely been released, but ICE refused to let her out and tried to deport her to Ghana -> @motherjones.com www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

They’ve won in court, but ICE is still detaining and trying to deport them

Inside the “psychological torture” regime targeting migrants who can't be sent home.

www.motherjones.com

Reposted by Tanvi Misra

Island of Reil - medicated, meddlesome, and quarrelsome @islandofreil.bsky.social · 9m

🧵

Tanvi Misra @tanvi.bsky.social · 2h

his summer, I went to Panama and met Jharana, a 33-year-old from Nepal who had been deported there in a group of 300 others — the 1st group to be sent to a third country. I wrote about what happened to her and others over the year for
@nymag.com -->

nymag.com/intelligence...

What Happened to The Migrants The U.S. Dumped In Panama?

Nearly 300 people were sent to a country they’d never lived in. The journey didn’t end there.

Reposted by Tanvi Misra

Dheepa Sundaram, PhD (she/her) @themodsisyphus.bsky.social · 30m

Must read:

“Among those who remained were women fleeing armed conflict in Cameroon, men who had escaped gang violence in Nigeria, Iranian women who had converted to Christianity and feared religious persecution, and Pakistani and Afghan migrants who were evading the Taliban.”

Tanvi Misra @tanvi.bsky.social · 2h

his summer, I went to Panama and met Jharana, a 33-year-old from Nepal who had been deported there in a group of 300 others — the 1st group to be sent to a third country. I wrote about what happened to her and others over the year for
@nymag.com -->

nymag.com/intelligence...

What Happened to The Migrants The U.S. Dumped In Panama?

Nearly 300 people were sent to a country they’d never lived in. The journey didn’t end there.

Tanvi Misra @tanvi.bsky.social · 1h

You can pay for whatever you want and skip whatever you want but please don’t think that you as a consumer of news are somehow exempt from what is a structural and societal problem. And please don’t send me a snarky message on a story I’ve worked for months on.

Tanvi Misra @tanvi.bsky.social · 1h

The press doesn’t exist in a vacuum — it’s not just on us to find a better way. Even nonprofits that aren’t paywalled and public radio are having their funding slashed by the govt and worker owned media also has a paywall.

Tanvi Misra @tanvi.bsky.social · 1h

I get that not everyone can afford a subscription. But paywalls help us run things so we don’t have to rely on billionaires/corps and pay staff and freelancers like me who are not getting benefits of a staff job and often doing just as much or more work to get a story published.

Tanvi Misra @tanvi.bsky.social · 1h

Now, she's waiting again -- this time in Mexico -- as those she has grown close to decide to splinter off into their own paths. Separations have become a constant in her life, she told me.

Tanvi Misra @tanvi.bsky.social · 1h

Jharana and her closest crew decided to leave for Mexico because their relatives could send them some more money but many others who wanted to join couldn't -- they had no money left and nowhere to borrow any more from.

Tanvi Misra @tanvi.bsky.social · 1h

By June, only 24 people were left at the shelter. The gym there, which was lined on three sides with mattresses at the beginning, started to look deserted. Here's some photos from when I was there:

The Fe y Alegria gym - deserted.

Games for migrants to play.

White board on which a migrant was learning/teaching Spanish and English.

Tanvi Misra @tanvi.bsky.social · 1h

After legal pushback and human rights critique, Panama released them. Around 60 moved into a shelter run by a Jesuit nonprofit. There they waited for certainty.

On their first day, they got a hot meal and some much-needed reassurance from Father Marco Tulio Gómez, director of Fe y Alegría’s Panama operations. “I told them, ‘You are free here,’” he said. The diversity of languages and disparate cultural habits posed some initial difficulties. But the staff went to great lengths to accommodate them: They made it possible for the women who were uncomfortable sleeping in the open, in the vicinity of men, to use private quarters. During Ramadan, they brought in a local imam for the Muslims. They took the Christians to church. Jharana, who is Hindu, could not avail herself of these benefits, but nevertheless she felt welcomed. For the first time since she arrived in Panama, “I felt like I was in my home with my family,” Jharana said.

“Two or so months went by just like this: waiting, waiting,” she said. By the third month, the outside visits became sparse and boredom set in.

Without jobs or expendable income, the migrants didn’t have much to do. Some formed their own routines. An Afghan man named Hidayat Zazai, who had served in the Afghan special forces alongside the U.S. military and fled when the Taliban took over Kabul, said that he walked for hours around the neighborhood every day — often returning at dusk. A Nigerian man who fled armed militants back home and, for that reason, only wanted to go by his initials D.R.O., said he tended to keep to himself: work out during the day and take online Spanish lessons in the evening on his phone. “I normally sit alone and maybe make friends with my phone — it gives me company,” he said.

The Nepali women walked to local stores for lotions and bright lipsticks; they played Uno nonstop for weeks, until they tired of that too; some days, they picked fights with each other just to have something to do. Jharana was gregarious and outgoing; she tried to find joy in the newness — strange fruit at the market or marveling at scenery. She passed time by making TikToks in the shelter kitchen or in the nearby parking lot of the Super 99 store under a palm tree, lip-syncing and dancing to Hindi and Nepali songs. “We’ve wasted so much time,” Jharana said. “Might as well get some laughs out of it.” She encouraged the others to “to go see things and talk to everyone” instead of stewing in their room, but they didn’t like being told this; they didn’t think there was any point.

The Panamanian government had given out 30-day permits to the migrants who remained in the country starting in March, with the option of extending for up to 90 days. These recurring, short-term deferrals created a cloud of protracted uncertainty over the shelter that was perhaps strategic, Father Gomez said. The limbo was meant to wear the migrants down, push them to leave Panama. And it worked. After the first four weeks, the first group that “couldn’t take it” anymore, departed the shelter — frequently traveling north. After that, every month, about ten more followed.

Tanvi Misra @tanvi.bsky.social · 1h

Upon arrival, she and the others were held at a hotel in Panama City--photos of them scrawling messages on the windows went viral--then moved to a camp in the Darien jungle that was so bad that "no one should have to experience something like that," Jharana told me.

Tanvi Misra @tanvi.bsky.social · 1h

Instead, she was put on a plane that she was not told would be going to Panama -- a country she passed through on her way up to the U.S. border. She was in a group of around 300.

Tanvi Misra @tanvi.bsky.social · 1h

Jharana had spent 2 years and tens of thousands to make it to the US to rejoin her husband. In her 22 weeks in CBP custody in the US, she was sustained by the hope that they'd finally be together. "I kept thinking, I’ve made it, I’m here, I’ll see him soon,” she said.

Tanvi Misra @tanvi.bsky.social · 1h

I was there in June when after months of mistreatment and then, waiting for certainty at a shelter in Panama, Jharana and a few others decided to head back up north.

n a humid evening in early June, Jharana Chhetri said good-bye to the group of people she had come to know intimately over her last three months in Panama.

Jharana had freshly showered and wore an orange and white T-shirt with a tie-dye design. She and a small group — two other Nepali women, one of whom was her closest friend, a Nepali boy she had taken under her wing, and a young woman from Afghanistan — were ready to leave what had been their home since March. It was already dark by the time their car backed into the dirt driveway of the migrant-reception center in the outer rim of Panama City. Jharana hugged each person who was staying behind. When some of the women started to tear up, she steadied their shoulders. “Be strong,” she said.

Tanvi Misra @tanvi.bsky.social · 2h

his summer, I went to Panama and met Jharana, a 33-year-old from Nepal who had been deported there in a group of 300 others — the 1st group to be sent to a third country. I wrote about what happened to her and others over the year for
@nymag.com -->

nymag.com/intelligence...

What Happened to The Migrants The U.S. Dumped In Panama?

Nearly 300 people were sent to a country they’d never lived in. The journey didn’t end there.

Reposted by Tanvi Misra

Jake Romm @jakeromm.bsky.social · 12d

The liberal international order is dying, the culmination of a trend that was put into overdrive by the so-called global war on terror.

What’s coming is something worse, unless we stop it

My latest for @thenation.com

www.thenation.com/article/worl...

Why Trump’s Venezuela Attacks Matter So Much

They signal a US empire increasingly willing to dispense with even the perfunctory legal legitimation that past presidents leaned on.

www.thenation.com

Reposted by Tanvi Misra

The Baffler @thebaffler.com · 11d

Writing about the climate crisis can tend toward abstraction or comforting techno-optimism. “Extraction: The Frontiers of Green Capitalism” does anything but. @materialistjew.bsky.social talks with @triofrancos.bsky.social about the knotty problem of the energy transition.

Schrodinger’s Element | Ajay Singh Chaudhary

In her new book, Thea Riofrancos homes in on the extraction of lithium—and the thorny problem of an ecologically sound energy transition

Reposted by Tanvi Misra

Truthout @truthout.org · 12d

Meta sent emails to 6 people informing them that ICE had served the company with a subpoena demanding extensive personal information about the users. The accounts, most notably StopIce.net, are part of a broader crowd-sourcing movement that works to publicly identify masked ICE agents.

Trump’s ICE Turns Its Target to Activists, Not Just Immigrants

ICE demanded Meta hand over personal information attached to Instagram accounts that track immigration raids.

Reposted by Tanvi Misra

Freedom of the Press Foundation @freedom.press · 12d

Student journalist Lucas Griffith faces trial today for covering a protest against the deportation of Ayman Soliman, who himself fled persecution for his journalism in Egypt.

Lucas did nothing wrong. This is a big deal and would be national news in normal times.

On trial for journalism in Kentucky.

Two months after their arrests while covering a protest, a pair of local reporters face criminal charges.

Tanvi Misra @tanvi.bsky.social · 21d

thanks for flagging - i'll ping the editor!

Reposted by Tanvi Misra

Tanvi Misra @tanvi.bsky.social · 22d

All summer, I’ve been speaking to a Nigerian mom of two kids who won fear-based protection in an immigration court. Under a previous admin, she would have likely been released, but ICE refused to let her out and tried to deport her to Ghana -> @motherjones.com www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

They’ve won in court, but ICE is still detaining and trying to deport them

Inside the “psychological torture” regime targeting migrants who can't be sent home.

www.motherjones.com

Tanvi Misra @tanvi.bsky.social · 21d

Lawyers and advocates working with such detainees worry about the complete erosion of due process.

For many detainees, the cumulative effect of the new policies is mandatory, indefinite detention, even after they’ve won in court. This is strategic, lawyers say. “ICE uses incarceration as a litigation strategy,” says Marty Rosenbluth, a Georgia-based immigration lawyer who represents several clients who remain detained after winning relief. The agency is hoping to wear the people it imprisons down until they “just give up and want to get sent back, rather than remain in these god-awful hell holes.”

Frances Kelley of Lousiana Advocates of Immigrants in Detention said that her organization has been in contact with least 10 people in their region who remained detained after winning two kinds of relief against being deported to their home country—a withholding from removal order and protection under the anti-torture convention, both of which have higher burdens of proof than asylum. One person was detained for eight months after their ruling. This indefinite detention and uncertainty about whether detainees can even remain in the country contributes “to the psychological torture of ICE detention,” Kelley says. “You don’t know the way out.”

Shortly after taking office, his administration started deporting swathes of people to countries where they had no ties, like Panama, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Estawini—and even, after a Supreme Court battle, to South Sudan, a country in the midst of conflict. The court’s June ruling OKing the South Sudan deportations was a “disaster,” says Norris of Immigrant Defenders—it rendered immigration court decisions providing protection from deportation “meaningless” if migrants could nonetheless be shipped “off to some far-flung, war-torn country.”

It almost happened to Adriana Quiroz Zapata, a 53-year-old former florist, who was granted protection from being sent back to Colombia after she proved it was very likely she would be tortured there. Zapata re-entered the US in 2022, fleeing rape and physical abuse inflicted by a former partner and his police officer friends. A Texas immigration judge ruled in February that these attacks took place with “the Colombian government’s willful acquiescence.” Despite the court ruling, ICE drove her to Mexico and tried to hand her off to authorities there...“Why did we bother to do a trial and win if you just were going to abandon her as an ‘illegal alien’ in another place?” says Zapata’s lawyer Lauren O’Neal.

Tanvi Misra @tanvi.bsky.social · 21d

The effect of all this:

An independent psychologist evaluated Laura in June and found her symptoms “far exceed[ed] the threshold” for depression, anxiety, and post traumatic stress disorders, and had “worsened considerably” over her year and a half in detention. Health records show that Laura’s chronic conditions—high blood pressure and a preexisting gastric ulcer—were inadequately treated. ICE treats you like a “living ghost,” she says from detention. “They don’t care if you die.” She cries frequently, during almost every phone conversation. She worries about the future of her children, currently in the care of a family friend, and how her prolonged detention has put immense financial strain on her sister in Canada. “It just goes on and on,” she says.

Tanvi Misra @tanvi.bsky.social · 21d

A few weeks later, they transferred her to Louisiana in the middle of the night—and despite a pending habeas petition in Pa, almost put her on a flight to Ghana. Thankfully, her lawyers got an emergency order blocking it.

Tanvi Misra @tanvi.bsky.social · 21d

At the end of summer (and this detail didn't make it into the piece) ICE put Laura in segregation after it pepper sprayed her and other women in her unit after an argument, saying it was her fault they used force and that it was for her protection that they were segregating her.

Tanvi Misra @tanvi.bsky.social · 21d

This is confirmed by a @politico.com story from yesterday: www.politico.com/news/2025/09...

Trump’s new detention policy targets millions of immigrants. Judges keep saying it’s illegal.

The administration says the sweeping detentions are a key prong of Trump’s deportation strategy.

www.politico.com