What Gets Written Down

Three separate things became public on Wednesday. A federal watchdog reported that ICE officers still decide for themselves when their body cameras are recording, and that the Department of Homeland Security refused to change it. Lawyers for a man an ICE officer shot in upper Manhattan filed a court petition saying the officer never identified himself before he broke the car window and fired. And a Haitian pastor who was deported three weeks ago published an account of the detention centre he wrote while he was still inside it.

They are not one story, and no source connects them. But they ask one question between them, and it is a practical question rather than a political one: when something happens to you, who writes down what happened?

Before anything else, the thing that is true for almost everyone reading this: nobody has to leave the country, and losing TPS is still not a deportation order. Most people whose Temporary Protected Status ended on July 27 do not have an immigration judge’s order telling them to leave. This article is not a prediction about you.

The headlight

Molis Augustave is the pastor this page has followed since Sept. 14. He was stopped over a headlight in York County, Pennsylvania, held in a detention centre in Louisiana, taken off a Sept. 17 flight to Haiti at the last minute, and then deported on Sept. 24 anyway. Religion News Service, which published his letter on Wednesday, says he is still in Haiti, and that Homeland Security did not answer its request for comment.

A traffic stop is the most ordinary doorway there is, and it is the one that took him. Nothing about that is a reason to stop driving to work. It is a reason to have the ordinary papers in ordinary order before the stop happens, because the minutes at the window are not when anyone thinks clearly.

What a household can finish this week: put a photograph of every document you hold — passport, any work permit, any receipt or notice with an A-number on it — somewhere a person you trust can reach it without you. Leave the paper copies with that person too. Write down the names and phone numbers of two people who would need to be called, and keep that list where a passenger could find it, not only in your own phone.

The parked car

On Oct. 8 an ICE officer fired into a car in Marble Hill with a child in the back seat. This page has carried that since the day it happened. On Wednesday the man’s lawyers, from the Legal Aid Society, filed a petition in federal court in Brooklyn seeking his release, and their account is now on the record: that he had picked up his son from school and was looking for a parking spot when a masked man came up to the car with a gun drawn, that “the men did not identify themselves, show any documents or otherwise communicate with Oscar in any substantive way,” and that he did not learn they were ICE officers until he woke in the hospital.

Homeland Security tells it differently. Officials have said the officers opened fire only after the car struck two government vehicles and “accelerated toward other officers,” and that they believed their lives were in danger. The department would not comment on the filing, saying the matter is under investigation.

Nothing resolves which account is right, and this page is not going to pretend otherwise. Police security-camera video released last week shows part of it and settles none of it — the moment the shots were fired is not on those cameras. The man is Oscar Belgal, 28, a Dominican national, and the reporting names no Haitian and no Syrian. It is here because of what the week showed about the record itself.

Inside, where the answers are not

The most useful sentence in Augustave’s letter is not the frightening one. It is this: “When we ask immigration questions, workers sometimes tell us they are not ICE and cannot answer them.”

That is worth knowing before you need it. The people in front of a family at a detention facility — the ones answering the phone, the ones in the visiting room — are often not the people who hold the case, and frequently cannot see it. A family that spends three weeks asking them is not being refused so much as asking at the wrong window.

The right window is free. The Executive Office for Immigration Review runs an automated line, 1-800-898-7180, open 24 hours a day, which will give the next hearing date and any immigration judge’s decision from an A-number. Two honest limits travel with it: it answers in English and Spanish only, and if the person has never had an immigration court case, it will find nothing at all — which is a fact about the records, not about the person. Our page on finding someone detained carries the other routes.

Who is supposed to be recording

This is where the week’s three stories meet. The Government Accountability Office, the investigative arm of Congress, reported on Wednesday that ICE and Customs and Border Protection need better oversight of their officers’ body cameras. It made seven recommendations. Homeland Security accepted six and refused the seventh — that ICE move from its present rule, where an officer chooses when to switch a camera on, to automatic activation. Customs and Border Protection already has automatic activation: the camera starts when a weapon is drawn or emergency lights go on. ICE does not.

The department’s reason was that automatic recording could capture informants, victims or bystanders. The GAO called the answer insufficient, and wrote that without reliable controls, “ICE risks gaps in documentation and video evidence that can make reviews of incidents more challenging.” It also found that most offices at both agencies have never written down how their own people are supposed to use the cameras at all.

The GAO counted 4,800 body cameras issued by ICE as of April, split evenly between its deportation arm and its investigative arm, and about 11,500 issued by CBP in June, mostly to Border Patrol. Those are the watchdog’s figures, not an agency announcement, and they count cameras handed out — not cameras worn, and not cameras switched on.

Put beside the Marble Hill case, the practical meaning is plain enough. Almost everything known about that encounter came from cameras that were not the officers’ own: a police security camera, body-camera footage from the NYPD, and people on the street with phones. Do not assume an official recording exists. Do not assume it will be released if it does.

So the instruction is the ordinary one, and it is worth doing properly. If you can do it safely — and only if you can do it safely — record what is happening. Either way, write down the date, the time, the exact place, how many officers there were, what they said, and whether they showed anything in writing. Keep your own copy. Give it to a lawyer, and not only to the officer.

What has not changed

TPS for Haiti and Syria has been terminated since July 27, 2026, and the work permits expired the same day. USCIS still says so on its own page, re-checked this week. None of Wednesday’s news moves that date, reopens anyone’s case, or creates anything to apply for — and nobody may charge you a fee to sign you up for something that does not exist.

One dated thing does change tomorrow, and it is worth five minutes today. USCIS says the new inflation-adjusted fees take effect Friday, Oct. 16, 2026, and that “any request postmarked on or after Oct. 16, 2026 without the proper filing fee will be rejected.” If an envelope is sitting ready to go, check the amount against the fee schedule before it goes in the post, and keep a copy of what is inside it.

And the clause that has to travel with all of it: ending TPS is still not a judge ordering you personally to leave — but if an immigration judge has already ordered your removal, that order did not go away, and this is the week to see a lawyer.

What to finish this week

1. Photograph your papers and leave copies with someone who is not in your household. Nothing on this list matters more.
2. Call 1-800-898-7180 with your own A-number and write down what it says, including the date you called. If it finds nothing, that is information too.
3. Make the family plan — who collects the children, who holds the copies, who gets called first. There is a one-page version at tools and checklists.
4. Read the stop and the door once, out loud, with the people you live with, so it is not new on the day: know your rights.
5. If someone in the house wears an ankle monitor, never take it off yourself, and put every complaint about it in writing with the date — the fuller version of that instruction is in this page’s Oct. 5 entry.

If you need a lawyer and cannot pay, start at find free legal help. If you saw enforcement activity and want it on a record other than your own, report ICE activity.