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🌂Grab an umbrella just in case showers materialize. A cloudy day with highs in the 60s. Sunset is at 8:12 p.m.

Today we have a look at how ICE detentions are changing in immigration courts.

Four Things to Know

1. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents confirmed that they arrested people in Martha’s Vineyard and on Nantucket this week with cooperation from the FBI, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Coast Guard.

ICE agents described the people they detained as “documented members of the notorious MS-13 street gang, and at least one child sex offender.” Officials did not release the detainees’ names. Local newspapers the MV Times and the Vineyard Gazette got video footage of agents stopping work vans and asking people inside for documentation of their legal status.

2. Harvard will give over ownership of the earliest known photographs of enslaved people in America — black-and-white daguerreotypes of a man named Renty Taylor and his daughter Delia taken in 1850 — to Renty Taylor’s great-great-great-granddaughter, Tamara Lanier, after a six-year-long legal case.

Lanier said the photos will move to the International African American Museum in South Carolina. “This is more than a legal resolution, it’s a reckoning. It’s reparations,” Lanier said. “For the first time in the history of this country, a major American institution has offered a tangible remnant to atone for its legacy of slavery and the profound harm it has inflicted.”

3. A federal judge ordered that Kseniia Petrova, a Harvard Medical School scientist born in Russia who has been in immigration detention in Louisiana since February, be released from custody. Petrova was detained at Logan Airport on her way back from vacation in France because she did not declare frog embryos she was carrying for her lab.

Her attorney informed the court that Petrova fears she would be in danger if deported to Russia, as she has spoken out against the war in Ukraine. “Evidence supports a conclusion that the samples she brought into the United States are wholly non-hazardous, non-toxic, nonliving and posed a threat to no one,” District of Vermont Chief Judge Christina Reiss said, adding that Petrova’s work furthers the United States’ “interest in finding a cure and treatment for cancer.”

4. A Massachusetts nonprofit designed motorized tricycles now being used as ambulances in rural Ghana, shuttling people in labor from their homes and villages to hospitals. Isaac Amoah Quansah, the startup’s CTO, said the tricycles can transport pregnant people tohospitals in half the time compared to other options.

“Sometimes, you can see the joy a mother expresses or a family expresses because Moving Health was in this community to carry their relatives to the hospital,” Quansah said. “They always appreciate what we do.”

ICE begins detentions at immigration courts in Boston and Chelmsford

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested at least three people at immigration courts in Boston and Chelmsford, immigration lawyers and advocates told GBH News reporter Sarah Betancourt. This seems to follow a national pattern, with other cases reported by the Associated Press and other outlets: an immigrant shows up for a hearing and attorneys for the government ask the presiding judge to drop their existing case. Then federal agents detain the person.

Here’s a closer look at one of the three cases, as described to GBH News by the attorneys involved. ICE did not respond to a request seeking comment, and GBH News was not able to independently verify the lawyers’ accounts.

An attorney for a woman detained in Boston said 10 agents in plainclothes put her client in handcuffs outside the courtroom, going against an order an immigration judge had just issued to keep her case active.

“I pushed back and said, ‘on what basis?’” recounted Christy Rodriguez of the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute. “They said, ‘we’re going to put her into expedited removal proceedings.”’

In expedited proceedings, federal officials can deport people without getting approval from a judge.

Rodriguez’s client is a woman from Colombia married to a U.S. permanent resident. She came to court Tuesday for a hearing about her immigration status, her attorneys said. At the hearing, an attorney for ICE’s Office of the Principal Legal Advisor asked to dismiss her case, and Rodriguez asked the judge for a continuance — an extension that keeps the case active and keeps the woman out of expedited deportation proceedings, Rodriguez said.

The judge granted the request for a continuance and ordered that the woman not be placed in expedited removal, allowing her case to remain within the immigration court system. About 10 federal agents approached her, however, outside the courtroom and put her in handcuffs over Rodriguez’s objections.

Rodriguez and another attorney, Benjamin Tymann, said they do not know where the woman is now. Tymann filed a petition in federal court — separate from immigration court — saying the agents violated the woman’s due process rights. District Court Judge Leo Sorokin ordered that federal officials not deport the woman or move her out of state.

“ICE detained her immediately following that hearing and said they were seeking to put her into expedited removal regardless of what had occurred in the courtroom moments before,” Tymann said.

Read Sarah Betancourt’s full reporting here.