After over 60 days in detention, ICE complied quickly with a judge’s order to release immigrant rights activist Xóchitl Santiago on Wednesday, October 1.
“Xochitl is a lifelong organizer and fighter and her freedom today is only possible because her community organized and fought for her,” wrote Free Cata Now, a social media page dedicated to the fight for Santiago’s release. “Today we celebrate but we will not forget the injustice Xochitl experienced nor the thousands of others who remain in detention.”
US District Judge Kathleen Cardone ordered ICE to release Santiago, who is a recipient of the Obama-era temporary protection program DACA, on Wednesday. Cardone wrote in her decision that the Trump administration “did not present any evidence indicating that Santiago has endangered anyone during her twenty years at liberty, including her thirteen years under DACA. Tellingly, they have failed to even articulate an individualized reason for which she should be detained.”
Santiago was detained at the airport in El Paso, Texas on August 3, detaining her for questioning without a warrant, despite Santiago being protected from deportation due to DACA. According to a petition organized by the immigrant rights group Cosecha, Santiago is a “lifelong community organizer who has fought for the dignity and respect of the immigrant community for over a decade.”
Part of Santiago’s many years in the struggle for immigrant rights included fighting for the passage of the Dream Act in 2017, which ultimately did not pass but would have provided a pathway to citizenship for DACA recipients like Santiago.
DACA, or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, was a policy implemented by US President Barack Obama using executive power – which Republican Party leaders denounced as an overreach. The program protects certain young people, now known popularly as “Dreamers” who were brought to the US as children without legal status. Obama implemented the policy in 2012, but there has been a struggle over the span of more than a decade to provide a pathway to citizenship for DACA recipients, who are only provided with temporary protection. The Trump administration has made numerous attempts to eliminate or undermine existing DACA protections.
Trump’s deportation drive
On September 23, Trump’s Department of Homeland Security announced that over 2 million undocumented immigrants have been either forcefully removed or “self deported” since Trump came into office for his second term. Trump’s mass deportation operation, which he has used to terrorize immigrant communities as well as target individual activists such as Mahmoud Khalil or Rumeysa Ozturk, has generated waves of mass protest throughout the country.
Chicago in particular has become a focal point of the immigrant rights struggle after Trump launched Operation Midway Blitz, a high-profile and heavily politicized immigration enforcement surge in the midwestern city. On Tuesday, September 30, ICE agents conducted the largest raid in the operation thus far, in the neighborhood of South Shore – detaining at least 37 people including multiple US citizens.
Trump’s heightened immigration enforcement, as the administration attempts to carry out what was promised to be the largest mass deportation operation in US history, has proved deadly for many of those targeted. As of September 2025, 15 immigrants have died in ICE detention, nearly double the 8 deaths recorded in all of 2024, and the highest toll in ICE custody since 2020. Cases of immigrants dying while being hunted by ICE agents have generated mass outrage, including the cases of farmworker Jaime Alanís, who fell nearly 30 feet from a greenhouse roof when ICE raided the farm he was employed at.
The post ICE releases immigrant rights activist Xóchitl Santiago after over 60 days of detention appeared first on Peoples Dispatch.
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