BREAKING🚨The gestapo known as ICE (SS) just CAGED a singer who fled his father's killers to America, five weeks after he announced he was opening a coffee shop in Los Angeles. On September 21, ICE agents took Mark Mabasa, a 40-year-old singer and former finalist on The X Factor Philippines, when he landed back in Los Angeles after a September 19 show in Chicago. He has been held at the Adelanto ICE Processing Center ever since. His father was Percy Lapid, a hard-hitting radio broadcaster and a known critic of Rodrigo Duterte. On October 3, 2022, a gunman shot him dead at the gate of his subdivision in Las Piñas City. Four people have been convicted as accessories. The man accused of masterminding the killing, former Philippine prisons chief Gerald Bantag, has had a warrant out for his arrest since April 2023. He is still at large. The death threats against the family started soon after. The U.S. embassy was among the foreign governments that voiced grave concern about the murder and the threats against his relatives. Mark and the rest of the immediate family fled to the United States in February 2023 and applied for asylum that year, two years before Trump returned to office. That case is still pending. ICE's online detainee locator shows where he is being held. It gives no reason for holding him. "I'm still baffled as to why he's being detained," said his uncle, Roy Mabasa, who is also a journalist. He says he assumes Mark has a valid work permit. "You know how things are these days," he said. "They just arrest anyone without any reason." Mark's immigration hearing is set for October 2, one day before the fourth anniversary of his father's murder. In August, Mark had announced he was opening a Japanese-inspired coffee shop in Los Angeles while still singing. Nobody knows now what happens to it. The Philippine consulate in Los Angeles made a welfare visit after the family asked. Roy has had to move for his own safety. "I don't go out often anymore," he said.
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