Ice secretly deported Pennsylvania grandfather, 82, after he lost green card

An 82-year-old man in Pennsylvania was secretly deported to Guatemala after visiting an immigration office last month to replace his lost green card, according to his family, who have not heard from him since and were initially told he was dead.

According to Morning Call, which first reported the story, long-time Allentown resident Luis Leon – who was granted political asylum in the US in 1987 after being tortured under the regime of the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet – lost his wallet containing the physical card that confirmed his legal residency. So he and wife booked an appointment to get it replaced.

When he arrived at the office on 20 June, however, he was handcuffed by two Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) officers, who led him away from his wife without explanation, she said. She herself was kept in the building for 10 hours until relatives picked her up.

The family said they made efforts to find any information on his whereabouts but learned nothing.

Then, sometime after Leon was detained, a woman purporting to be an immigration lawyer called the family, claiming she could help – but did not disclose how she knew about the case, or where Leon was.

On 9 July, according to Leon’s granddaughter, the same woman called them again, claiming Leon had died.

A week later, however, they discovered from a relative in Chile that Leon was alive after all – but now in a hospital in Guatemala, a country to which he has no connection.

According to Morning Call, the relative said Leon had first been sent to an immigration detention center in Minnesota before being deported to Guatemala – despite not appearing on any Ice detention deportation lists.

The first video of Earth’s surface lurching sideways in an earthquake offers new insights into this force of nature

During the devastating magnitude 7.7 Myanmar earthquake on March 28 this year, a CCTV camera captured the moment the plate boundary moved, providing the first direct visual evidence of plate tectonics in action.

Tectonic plate boundaries are where chunks of Earth’s crust slide past each other – not smoothly, but in sudden, violent ruptures.

The footage shows Earth’s surface lurching sideways, like a gigantic conveyor belt switched on for just a second, as the fault slips.

What we’re seeing is the propagation of a large earthquake rupture – the primary mechanism that accommodates plate boundary motion at Earth’s surface. These shear fractures travel at several kilometres per second, making them notoriously difficult to observe.

These rare events, separated by centuries, have shaped our planet’s surface over millions of years, creating features such as Aotearoa New Zealand’s Alpine Fault and the Southern Alps.

Until now, seismologists have relied on distant seismic instruments to infer how faults rupture during large earthquakes. This video sheds new light on the process that radiates seismic energy and causes the ground to shake.