A Gas Station, a School Gate, a Traffic Light: Where People Were Actually Taken This Week

Read this page from the top and you will notice something that the word “raid” hides. Almost nobody we wrote about this week was taken in a raid. One man was stopped in his car on the way to work. A pastor was putting gas in his car with his wife beside him. Two parents were arrested a block from their children’s elementary school, minutes after drop-off. A student was arrested at an intersection beside his campus. Others walked into an appointment they had been told to keep and came out wearing a monitor on their ankle. These are ordinary places on ordinary mornings, and that is the single most useful thing this site can tell you today — because you can decide in advance what you do in an ordinary place, and almost nobody can decide anything during a raid.

Below is every place this site verified this week, the government’s version beside the witnesses’ where the two do not agree, what has not changed, and four things a family can finish before Monday.

The car, on the way to work

A 50-year-old man who had spent 21 years around West Palm Beach told Rezo Nòdwès at Cap-Haïtien airport on Thursday night that agents stopped his car as he left for work, asked for his papers, and arrested him when the papers turned out to be expired. His permission to work had ended with TPS. He said he was held about six weeks and then put on the plane.

A second man on the same flight told the same reporter he was arrested on Sept. 8 and was in Haiti two days later, and that his wife and their two children — one born in Brazil, one born in the United States — were sent back with him. Both men spoke anonymously and ICE has confirmed neither account.

Six weeks and two days are the same lesson at two speeds. The plan has to exist before the stop, because after the stop there may be no week in which to make one. A traffic stop is also where what you say is most clearly up to you: hand over the driver’s license, and say calmly that you do not wish to answer questions about where you were born or how you entered the country, and that you want a lawyer. Know your rights keeps the words on one page.

The gas station

The Rev. Kazy Hinds, a Presbyterian pastor serving congregations near Springfield, told the Presbyterian News Service this week how Pastor Joubert Adrien was taken: he was getting gas, with his wife. Adrien has not lived in Haiti for more than 20 years, has worked for Ohio employers and filed federal taxes since 2021, and — according to the advocates who have been asking for his release since August — has no criminal history. He is still in detention. We searched again today for any dated report of a release or a bond hearing and found none.

A block from the school

ICE officers stopped a car a block from John Marshall Elementary School in San Diego at about 8:45 a.m. on Wednesday, minutes after drop-off, and arrested James Mervil and Josselene Polidor, the parents of a 2-year-old and a 5-year-old at that school. With nobody immediately available to collect the children, the school arranged a stand-in guardian.

Here the two versions do not agree, and both belong on this page. DHS says this was a targeted enforcement operation; that the couple entered lawfully in 2022 but overstayed, without saying how; that they ran when agents began a traffic stop; and that Polidor ignored commands and bit an officer while resisting. People who know the couple told ABC 10News that they held TPS until late July and have a pending asylum case. Nothing published so far resolves which account is right, and this site is not going to pretend otherwise. The father was released late Wednesday night wearing an ankle monitor; the mother remained in custody.

What is not in dispute is the gap between 8:45 a.m. and the moment somebody could come for two small children. That gap is closable this week, by anyone, in about fifteen minutes.

Beside the campus

ICE agents arrested Renatho Kemsley Casseus, a San Diego City College student, at 16th and C streets beside campus at about 9:30 a.m. on Tuesday. The passenger riding with him, another Haitian student, ran onto campus for cover. DHS says Casseus entered the country on May 12, 2023 through El Paso, was released by the previous administration, and that “all of his claims will be heard by an immigration judge and he will receive due process.” Neither DHS nor the college has said whether he ever held TPS. Under California law, campus police and community-college employees may not take part in, assist, or coordinate immigration enforcement — so if someone you know is taken near a school, ask the district in writing what its staff did, and start the detainee locator the same night rather than waiting for a phone call.

The appointment

Hinds also described spending two full days taking Haitian neighbors to their immigration appointments — appointments the report describes as a choice between wearing an ankle monitor and being detained. She sat beside a woman who had dressed carefully for hers, the two of them talking through a translation app, and held her afterward while she cried because the monitor showed under her dress.

Read that honestly: a companion changed nothing about what the officers decided. The people Hinds sat with still came out wearing monitors. What a companion does is simpler and still worth arranging — somebody outside the building knows where you went and what was said in the room. If you have a letter telling you to report, read this first and talk to a lawyer before the date on it.

The workplace

One more doorway belongs here, from outside this community. The Associated Press published its analysis this week of body camera video from a September 2025 factory raid in Cato, New York, released in a lawsuit: officers lined workers up, separated U.S. citizens from everyone else, and told workers who said they would not answer without a lawyer that they would be arrested. The AP names no country for those workers and describes nobody in that raid as a TPS holder. Say the sentence anyway — it did not stop the questioning on that video, but it is what a lawyer works from afterward, and one worker’s criminal charge was later dismissed after she argued her Fourth Amendment rights had been violated.

What has not changed

• TPS for Haiti and Syria is terminated, effective July 27, 2026, and the work permits that came with it expired the same day. That is USCIS’s own page, stamped 09/09/2026, and it has not moved.
• No TPS notice for any country has published in the Federal Register since Sept. 1. We re-checked the documents API and the public-inspection list again this morning. Anyone telling you a new decision has come down is describing something that does not exist on the record.
• Losing TPS is not a deportation order. It is the loss of a protection. Removal is a separate process with its own decisions in it, and people are still winning some of them.
• A pending asylum application is not legal status. That is ICE’s own guidance, and it is the belief most likely to get someone hurt right now. Filing something is not the same as being protected by it.
• A child who is a U.S. citizen cannot be deported — but a parent who is being removed can be asked to decide, in a few minutes at a counter, whether that child goes too.
• A letter from a member of Congress is a request, not a change. Two went out this month — Rep. Greg Landsman’s to DHS on Sept. 3, and one from hundreds of Ohio clergy delivered to Gov. Mike DeWine on Friday, both asking that the ankle monitors end. Nothing about anyone’s monitor, status, or check-in date is different because of them, and nobody may charge you a fee to “sign you up” for either.

Four things to finish before Monday

1. Name the person who collects your children — in writing, and on the school’s own list. Not in your head, not in a text message. The school office can write the name down the same day you ask. Our family plan takes about fifteen minutes and produces the page you hand over.
2. Write down your A-number, your lawyer’s number, and the name of that pickup person, and leave a copy with one trusted person outside your household. Every account above involved a phone that stopped answering. Somebody else needs the numbers.
3. Decide today what you say in a traffic stop, and say it out loud once. “I want to remain silent. I want to speak to a lawyer.” A sentence you have practiced is a sentence you can find at 7 a.m. with a flashlight in your window.
4. If an ankle monitor is cutting or blistering your skin, photograph it the same day. The Rev. Julia Joyce-Miesse of Granville said a man she accompanied to a check-in later sent her photographs of open wounds the device left after he wore work boots over it. Get a doctor’s finding in writing, give a copy to a lawyer rather than only to the officer at the window, and report it at every check-in with the date. Do not try to remove the device yourself.

If someone has already been taken, start the same night: find someone who has been detained walks through the locator and what to do when it comes back empty, and free legal help lists the organizations that take these cases without charging.

None of this is a prediction about you. It is a list of doorways, and the point of the list is that you get to decide, at your own table on a Sunday, what you do when you reach one.