I remember meeting Ya’akub Vijandre a little more than two years ago. We were at the first Dallas protest held in the aftermath of Israel’s bloody siege of Gaza following the Oct. 7, 2023 attack by Hamas. This was back when I was still working with Dallas Weekly and Ya’akub was gathering content for his already-lush social media presence. Like always, we were there to record history.
When we saw each other again at subsequent demonstrations, we exchanged the kind of pleasantries that are typical between protest photographers: comparing shots, guessing crowd sizes, etc. Ya’akub is a great photographer; I usually asked him for pointers.
Before I knew it, a year had passed, and we’d embrace upon seeing each other.
Ya’akub is a relatively short 38-year-old guy with massive energy. This isn’t to say that he’s loud or domineering. In fact, he’s quiet, considerate, honorable, genuine, and respectful. What makes Ya’akub’s presence feel large is a sense of substance — a weight of purpose.
He’s become one of my most trusted colleagues, and he texted to check in, as a support, when my mom was in the hospital with health issues. Our jobs have brought us closer together. As Ya’akub is a human rights advocate and photojournalist and I’m a civil rights and criminal justice reporter, our work has considerable overlap.
Ya’akub, whose legal name is Jacob Ira Azurin Vijandre, is a native of the Philippines. His parents brought him to the U.S. in 2001 when he was 14, under his father’s H-4 nonimmigrant visa. He was granted protection under Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals for the first time in 2013. He is a martial artist, he used to breakdance when he was younger, and his taste in clothing and fabrics is immaculate. He’s a big Bruce Lee fan, a teacher, and a skilled creative.
On Oct. 7, Ya’akub was arrested by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agents steps outside his home in Arlington. At least six vehicles with armed officers arrived as he was leaving for work, according to a statement from his attorneys. In a recorded call from the Dallas ICE office, Ya’akub explained that, after leaving his home, he was greeted with a handgun drawn in his face before being taken into custody. Ya’akub was taken to Bluebonnet Detention Facility near Fort Worth.
No judicial warrant, just a swift arrest.
Ya’akub isn’t being accused of breaking immigration law — his DACA protection doesn’t expire until May 2026. In fact, Ya’akub’s lawyers say he hasn’t been accused of any crime.
Rather, the Trump administration is alleging he’s “glorifying terrorism” via social media posts. However, Ya’akub’s online history instead reflects a consistent belief in favor of human rights and solidarity through community activism.
Just the day before he was detained, Ya’akub had recorded and participated in a city council meeting in the Dallas suburb of Richardson, where he spoke out in support of local community leader Marwan Marouf who was detained by ICE, according to a court filing from his legal team last week.
In a video posted to his Instagram account on the day of his arrest, Ya’akub captured emotional testimony by another community member from the city council meeting. Soft-spoken in a blue button-up and wire-frame glasses, the man invoked Mark Twain’s words, “It’s never the wrong time to do the right thing,” in a plea for Marouf’s freedom.
The Department of Homeland Security has moved to terminate his DACA status — his lawyers said that a notice of intent to terminate dated Sept. 22 was found in his mailbox after his arrest — and issued a statement saying he “was a subject of interest in the Dallas Joint Terrorism Task Force following social media posts glorifying terrorism.”
The notice alleged Ya’akub supported “organizations and individuals who are known to engage in acts of terrorism,” which “presents public safety, national security concerns, and is a significant negative discretionary factor under the totality of the circumstances analysis,” according to his legal team’s habeas filing.
However, Ya’akub’s legal team has countered that DHS is conflating supporting terrorism with Ya’akub’s “opposition to U.S. foreign policy, the policies of the Israeli government, and abuse of prisoners,” according to the filing.
“What Respondents characterize as support for terrorism actually consists of opposing perceived violation of detainee rights, including at black site prisons like Guantanamo Bay and Bagram Air Force Base,” the habeas petition states. “Equating such speech to ‘terrorism’ to justify detention would risk criminalizing a broad array of protected speech critical of U.S. government policy engaged in by citizens and non-citizens alike.”
The government’s targeting of Ya’akub wasn’t a complete shock, as Trump’s DHS has expressed outright disdain for DACA. In July, DHS encouraged DACA recipients to self-deport, with DHS assistant press secretary Tricia McLaughlin saying recipients “are not automatically protected from deportations.”
Additionally, the Trump administration has made no bones about its suppression of free speech.
Just look at the detention of Mahmoud Khalil for his role in the Columbia University protests; Tufts University’s Rümeysa Öztürk, who spent six weeks in ICE detention over an op-ed in the student newspaper; or British commentator Sami Hamdi’s detention in the middle of his speaking tour, for pro-Palestine advocacy.
The Trump administration has laid a continuous groundwork to establish a legal precedent against Palestinian activists — and anyone who supports them. This suppression has only grown in recent months, to encompass any expression of speech that is critical of the federal government and its allies. The U.S. State Department announced last month that it had revoked the visas of six individuals from Argentina, South Africa, Mexico, Brazil, Germany, and Paraguay, over social media posts following the death of Charlie Kirk.
Ya’akub’s arrest is not unlike the arrest of Marouf, the Palestinian community leader, just weeks earlier. The PR and fundraising director for the Muslim-American Society of Dallas was surrounded by ICE agents after dropping his son off at school in Richardson, the same day his legal team says that his green card was denied.
The federal government later filed a civil complaint against Marouf, alleging that he supported a terrorist organization because he donated to the Holy Land Foundation in 1994 and 2001. The Holy Land Foundation was a charitable organization that was found guilty of terrorism after a lengthy legal battle in the early 2000s. During the trial, the government pointed to the organization’s operations providing financial sponsorship to Palestinians as proof of support for Hamas. Human Rights Watch has criticized evidence submitted in the case as hearsay, as well as a lack of a direct link to violence in the prosecution’s argument.
In Ya’akub’s case, like in Marouf’s, the government specifically pointed to his alleged support of the Holy Land Foundation. Ya’akub has echoed the same skepticism expressed by Human Rights Watch over the Holy Land Foundation case. He’s also interviewed Holy Land member Shukri Abu-Baker’s daughter, Nida, about her father’s imprisonment.
Along with posts regarding the Holy Land Foundation, the government also pointed to posts expanding on the story of Aafia Siddiqui as indicative of support for terrorism. I take offense to this, especially because one of the videos on Siddiqui is cross-published between mine and Ya’akub’s Instagram pages.
Siddiqui is a Pakistani neuroscientist who is serving an 86-year prison sentence in Texas after she was found guilty for the attempted murder and assault of military officers, despite forensic evidence contradicting military accounts. Her case is intertwined with the aftermath of 9/11 — she’s even been called the racist moniker of “Lady al Qaeda.” She was accused of terrorism, and her lawyers say, one of the few women subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques at various CIA blacksites. The Pakistani government has repeatedly called for her release, and an increasing number of supporters have called her imprisonment one of the great mistakes of the U.S.’s war on terror.
Both Ya’akub and I have pointed out discrepancies in the government’s case against Siddiqui, who is now imprisoned at FMC Carswell in Fort Worth, where she’s said she’s been subjected to repeated sexual assault.
This is journalism. Full stop.
Washington Post journalist Karen Attiah was fired for quoting Charlie Kirk’s own words. In Chicago, ICE officers allegedly shot pepper bullets into a CBS reporter’s vehicle unprompted, causing her to vomit. In New York, they shoved journalists to the floor, resulting in at least one hospitalization.
White reporters that were born in the U.S., like myself, are not currently under as great a threat of arrest for journalism and advocacy work. Current examples are scarce, though they do carry significant implications. Steven Held, an independent reporter and co-founder of Unraveled Press was briefly detained after filming an arrest during a protest in Broadview, Illinois. Protest photographer Alexa Wilson was charged for a felony hate crime for her social media coverage of vandalism of the New York Times building.
It’s becoming clearer to me that the government is attempting to lay a foundation for dissenting political beliefs as grounds for terrorism.
And people like Ya’akub — non-white, non-Christian — have been made its primary examples. Both journalists; like Mario Guevara, an Emmy Award-winning Atlanta-based Salvadoran reporter who was deported last month; and civilians, like Leqaa Kordia, who has remained in detention for over 230 days after her participation in protests at Columbia University.
“They see the media as an enemy,” Guevara told The Freedom of the Press Foundation. “They have the power. They can do everything they want. It can be dangerous for us.”
You may have missed the trial of Bangladeshi-American activist Raunaq Alam.
The state accused Alam and two other protesters of a hate crime for spray painting “Fuck Israel” on the side of a non-denominational church in Euless that was raising funds for the Israeli military. What was initially a graffiti charge blew up into a case that attracted national attention, as the prosecution argued that criticism of a foreign country could be grounds for hate speech, elevating the potential sentence to 10 years in jail. The state failed to convince the jury, however, and Alam was found guilty on a lower charge of criminal mischief and granted probation.
Covering Alam’s trial for the Texas Observer opened my eyes to the way this administration is further twisting legal principles to punish dissent. And make no mistake, Ya’akub’s detention is about his opinion, in favor of human rights, diverging from that of the U.S. government.
Ya’akub says that the FBI approached him in 2023 and tried to persuade him to become an informant. According to the habeas filed by his lawyers, agents told Ya’akub he was “a poster child for the way you’re supposed to do it.” He declined.
The First Amendment exists in order to protect our ability to criticize the government — whether you’re a citizen or not.
Yet somehow, a man who was the “poster child” for immigration and community activism is now in danger of deportation and facing accusations of supporting terrorism.
When I told Ya’akub’s team that I had written a first draft for this piece, I asked them what I could include to convey the full gravity of what’s happening to him. One of his lawyers, Maria Kari, told me it was about instilling fear.
“In so many ways, we’re facing the same overreach post-9/11 that led to individuals being detained without warrant, without evidence, and indefinitely held in black sites,” Kari told me. “The very stuff that Ya’akub talked about, the same stuff that led to his being jailed. It’s like being in the upside-down.”
Marium Uddin, director of Muslim Legal Fund of America and a member of his legal team, said the conditions of Ya’akub’s detention are not only “cruel and inhumane” but also “calculated to break his spirit — a spirit that only ever sought to illuminate.”
“In this situation, who is the person committing the crime?” she continued. “And, why must he pay this price for telling the truth? What, then, is the cost of truth in America today?”
“We can talk about the law and politics all day long, six ways to Sunday, but the essential question is whether or not truth itself has lost its standalone value,” said Uddin. “These are not rhetorical questions. They are the measure of our moral decline.”
Ya’akub’s legal team says that the government is testing its limitations by attempting to restrict the speech of a noncitizen. And that has very real and drastic implications for the free speech rights of the rest of us.
After finishing my first draft for this, Ya’akub was transferred to Folkston ICE Processing Center near Jacksonville, Georgia. His legal team wasn’t given a reason.
If the Trump administration removes Ya’akub from the country, he’ll be the second journalist deported from Folkston, following Atlanta’s Mario Guevara.
Ya’akub’s potential deportation breaks my heart.
The thought of not seeing him again at a protest leaves me horribly dispirited and, to put it plainly, depressed. But beyond this, Ya’akub’s freedom of speech being disregarded so flagrantly indicates something incredibly dangerous: An effort from this administration to slowly dismantle every protection of the First Amendment, as well as the progression of immigrant rights in the United States.
Reporters should be terrified. But it’s bigger than that. Every single person in this country will be affected by these policies, whether direct or peripheral.
So for his sake and the sake of all of us: Free Ya’akub Vijandre now.