“Where Is Due Process? Where Is Democracy? Who Is Standing Up?” Immigration Policy In Trump's America

"Political and economic groups always saw Fernando as an inconvenient figure for their interests": A Conversation with Verónica Sarauz

When Ecuador’s centre-right president Guillermo Lasso dissolved the country’s National Assembly amid a second impeachment proceeding against him in May 2023, he triggered a general election in which he did not run but which would choose his replacement. Throughout the early part of the campaign, polls often showed what seemed to be a scramble for the presidency among three contenders: Luisa González of the Movimiento Revolución Ciudadana of former president Rafael Correa; Jan Topić, a businessman with a colourful background that included training with the French Foreign Legion; and Fernando Villavicencio, a well-known journalist who had been a representative in the Nation Assembly and who had been forced into exile during Rafael Correa’s tenure as president amid repeated attacks by his government. Worrying aloud that Ecuador was on its way to becoming a narco-state, Fernando Villavicencio promised a strong response against the country’s gangs and corruption and by August 2023, he was publicly sharing threatening messages his team had received via the messaging app WhatsApp that he said originated with José Adolfo Macías Villamar aka Fito, the boss of Ecuador’s Los Choneros criminal network. With a post on X, Villavicencio responded, saying that “Despite the new threats, we will continue fighting for the brave people of our Ecuador.” On August 9th, 2023, however, in a crime that shocked the nation, Villavicencio, who had survived a previous assassination attempt in 2022, was murdered following a rally in Ecuador’s capital, Quito. The alleged 18 year-old hitman, from the Colombian city of Cali, was himself gunned down at the scene. Six other Colombians were arrested and charged with roles in the killing. All six were subsequently murdered during a prison riot that October. In the aftermath of the killing, Carlos “Invisible” Angulo, a grandee of the Los Lobos criminal organization, was convicted for his alleged role in the killing, and, in September 2025, Ecuadorian prosectors charged Rafael Correa’s former Minister of the Interior, José Serrano, Ronny “King Reaper” Aleaga, a member of the Latin Kings street gang and a former congressman, and businessman Xavier Jordan (who had been accused of being part of the money-laundering network of the slain Ecuadorian narco Leandro Norero) with being the “intellectual authors” of Villavicencio’s murder. Things remain very murky, however, and in an April 2025 video posted on X, Villavicencio’s widow, Verónica Sarauz, who has relentlessly pushed for justice on behalf of her late husband, accused then-Attorney General Diana Salazar of a “cover up” of the truth in her husband’s murder, claiming that Salazar had presented her with “false” information designed to make her publicly accuse Correa of the crime. She went on to say that it had “become clear” to her that neither Salazar or Ecuador’s President, Daniel Noboa “would allow the truth to come out” and that she “suspected” that both were “part of the sinister network surrounding my husband’s case.” The leader of Los Lobos, Wilmer “Pipo” Chavarría faked a death certificate claiming he had died from Covid-19 in February 2021, and, for good measure, also was claimed to have been killed in a prison riot the same month. Fleeing Ecuador, he was apprehended in the city of Málaga in southern Spain in November 2025 after having arrived from Morocco with false identity papers. In February 2026, from a prison cell in Spain, Pipo accused Daniel Noboa of ordering Villavicencio’s killing, claiming the killing was ordered “out of fear that Villavicencio would win the 2023 elections.” To decode this complex political and legal situation, we are joined on Notes From the World today by Verónica Sarauz, who has never stopped advocating for justice in the case.

"What you basically have in Venezuela is the same dictatorship in place"

Juan Forero is the South America bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal. Based in Bogotá, Colombia, he worked for both the New York Times and National Public Radio before joining the Journal, and he has been reporting on Latin America for more than 20 years. He joined us on Notes From the World today to discuss the state of Venezuela - now five months after the seizure of Venezuela’s then-president, Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores by U.S. forces - and that of Colombia, as the presidential tenure of Gustavo Petro draws to a close and the country prepares for presidential elections at the end of this month.

“Where Is Due Process? Where Is Democracy? Who Is Standing Up?” Immigration Policy In Trump's America

Since Donald Trump returned to the White House in January 2025, immigration policy in the United States has undergone profound changes. Masked, anonymous agents from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), both operating under the purview of the United States Department of Homeland Security, have roamed U.S. cities and towns, shattering car windows and dragging people from their vehicles, seizing high school students, chasing terrified U.S. citizens into their homes and stalking courthouse halls where immigrants are reporting for hearings in New York, Miami and elsewhere. The past January, in Minneapolis, United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent Jonathan Ross gunned down poet and mother Renée Good and Border Patrol agent Jesus Ochoa and Customs and Border Protection officer Raymundo Gutierrez murdered nurse Alex Pretti. As more and more people disappeared into the maw of a detention regime spanning from Florida to Louisiana to Texas, cases such as that of Emmanuel Damas became ever-more coming. Damas, a 56 year-old, had a pending asylum claim, and entered the U.S. from Haiti via the Biden-era humanitarian parole program but was taken into ICE custody in Boston in September 2025 and died this past March while in custody in Arizona due to complications from an infected tooth. He was one of at least 17 people in ICE custody, who, according to reporting from the San Francisco Chronicle, died after medical staff delayed or failed to provide critical medical care that might have saved their lives. To discuss the U.S. government’s current immigration policies and the conditions those detained under them are currently living under, we are joined on Notes from the World by three guests today: Ruby Powers, a Houston-based attorney who has represented clients detained at Camp East Montana, an immigrant detention facility located on the Fort Bliss U.S. Army base in El Paso, Texas; Lomi Kriel, a statewide investigative reporter for the Texas Tribune who has extensively reported on both Camp East Montana and the Dilley Immigration Processing Center in Frio County in South Texas; and Abigail Philips, a Miami-based attorney who has represented clients detained at the South Florida Detention Facility, the immigration detention facility located inside Florida’s Big Cypress National Preserve and better known as Alligator Alcatraz.

Democratic Republic of Congo: “There Is Definitely a Strong Sense of Fear”

As large as Western Europe or the United States east of the Mississippi River, the Democratic Republic of Congo remains a place where Africa’s greatest potential and most wrenching tragedies are frequently lived out. Its first Prime Minister, Patrice Lumumba, was kidnapped and killed with the connivance of former colonial ruler Belgium in 1961, and for more than three decades afterwards, Congo - for a time during this period renamed Zaire - groaned under the kleptocratic rule of Mobutu Sese Seko. After Mobutu’s ousting in 1997 by an armed rebellion backed by the Rwandan government, Congo saw the rule and assasination of Mobutu’s successor, Laurent-Désiré Kabila, the great Second Congo War from 1998 until 2003, the long presidency of Laurent Kabila’s son, Joseph Kabila, and ongoing violence and unrest, particularly in its eastern regions abutting Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi. The nation of Rwanda, ruled by Paul Kagame’s Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) since 1994, has been particularly involved in Congo’s troubles, sponsoring a series of rebel groups and sometimes intervening directly with its military in the country. Most recently, Rwanda has supported the Mouvement du 23 Mars (the March 23rd Movement or M23) rebels, who launched a rebellion from 2012 until 2013 and then again beginning in late 2021 until today, during which it has seized a wide swathe of the eastern provinces of North and South Kivu. Since 2019, DR Congo itself has been ruled by Felix Tshisekedi, who has hewed to an ever-more authoritarian path as he pursued his political and military goals. Tshisekedi’s predecessor as president, Joseph Kabila, was sentenced to death for his alleged conspiring with the M23 and has since resurfaced in the M23-controlled eastern city of Goma. This past December, Tshisekedi and Rwandan President Paul Kagame signed a peace deal in Washington, DC to end the fighting, though it still continues to this day. To discuss the complex situation in Congo today, we are joined on Notes from the World by the journalist Emmet Livingstone, who has lived in and reported from the country since 2022, and Clémentine de Montjoye, senior Great Lakes of Africa researcher at Human Rights Watch.

"We keep pushing away the very people who would help us accomplish our foreign policy goals"

Luis Moreno was born in New York City and graduated with a BA in History from Fordham University and an MA in Education at Kean College before joining the foreign service. In a long and varied career he held, among other posts, the role of refugee coordinator and the deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassy in Haiti; the narcotics affairs director at the U.S. Embassy in Bogotá, Colombia from 1997 to 2001; U.S. consul general in Monterrey, Mexico; deputy chief of mission at the U.S. embassy in Israel; political-military affairs minister counselor at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad; and U.S. Ambassador to Jamaica. Today, he is a member of The Steady State, an organization of nearly 400 former national security officials who remain committed to their oaths to “defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic” and which was formed in 2016 in response to rising authoritarian tendencies and the erosion of U.S. credibility and alliances.” On today’s Notes from the World, we spoke about his experiences and the state of U.S. diplomacy today.