How Trump’s ICE Is Locking Up Longtime Texans with Paths to Legal Status

Moizali Momin spent the final months of 2025 bouncing around immigrant detention centers in Texas, Louisiana, and Arizona.

Like tens of thousands of others who were spared deportation under former President Barack Obama, Momin, who came to the United States illegally 26 years ago and settled in the Houston area, where he has a U.S. citizen wife and two teenage children, was vacuumed up by the unprecedented immigration enforcement program of President Donald Trump’s second administration.

Momin was released two days before Christmas, about a month after a federal judge in California ruled against a Trump administration policy that mandates detention for anyone who entered the country illegally, regardless of when and irrespective of their ties to the community or whether, as with Momin, they’re in the process of obtaining legal status.

“I was saying to God, ‘Thank you so much,’” Momin, who’s originally from India, said in a January i...