‘My client had a choice: co-operate with ICE or be deported with her family,’ says lawyer
Source: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/immigrant-rape-connecticut-ice-agent-wilfredo-rodriguez-honduras-a9170011.html
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The Article Was Written/Published By: Clark Mindock
Source: https://news.yahoo.com/ice-confines-detainees-mental-illness-084452997.html
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‘I thought it was a fitting time to scale it up’
Source: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/liberty-mural-vegas-ice-police-immigration-zevalking-a9059016.html
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The Article Was Written/Published By: Andrew Buncombe
Democratic Sen. Kamala Harris decried recent immigration raids as part of the Trump administration’s “campaign of terror” that will distort the upcoming 2020 census.
“This administration has directed DHS to conduct these raids as part of what I believe is this administration’s campaign of terror, which is to make whole, whole populations of people afraid to go to work,” Harris (D-Calif.) told NBC’s Chuck Todd.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raided seven Mississippi food-processing plants last week, arresting 680 workers in the agency’s largest raid in a decade.
Harris, a 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, described children and parents who are afraid ahead of the 2020 census in an interview on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that aired Sunday.
“We do this census every 10 years in America,” she said. “We make decisions about everything from electoral lines to where we’re going to put resources.“
Harris added that there are multi-generational households throughout the United States that include both documented and undocumented people.
“When that census-taker comes knocking at that door, they’re not going to answer the door,” she said. “And I know this administration knows that.”
President Donald Trump on Friday defended the raids in Mississippi, calling them “a very good deterrent.”
“I want people to know that if they come into the United States illegally, they’re getting out — they’re going to be brought out,” Trump said. “And this serves as a very good deterrent. If people come into our country illegally, they’re going out.”
But Harris on Sunday described how the raids will, in part, influence the U.S. census — “an extension of who we are as a democracy.”
“We say, ‘Every person matters. We count,'” Harris said. “We make decisions based on who’s here and what they need. And you and I will both suffer if that census count is flawed.
“And I’m telling you that, given the policies of this administration, that is going to be a flawed census.”
Article originally published on POLITICO Magazine
Source: https://www.politico.com/story/2019/08/11/kamala-harris-immigration-raids-2020-census-1456525
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The Article Was Written/Published By: ktamborrino@politico.com (Kelsey Tamborrino)
The largest single-state worksite immigration raid in American history took place today. Under orders from openly racist U.S. president Donald Trump, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agents arrested 680 Latinx people who worked at numerous food processing plants throughout the state of Mississippi.
US Atty Mike Hurst announces today’s immigration raids led to detention of approx. 680 people at 7 sites in 6 cities in MS, setting a new record in a single state. @MSTODAYnews pic.twitter.com/C4A3pDQ5oI
— Michelle Liu (@mchelleliu) August 7, 2019
The arrestees are identified as being Latinx.
The raids are racially targeted, but ICE denies it.
Think of the detainees’ children, spouses, grandparents, and other dependents tonight.
ICE clustered the raids in various small towns near Jackson, where the labor workforce is almost entirely immigrants from central America and Mexico. Communities that were raided today include the towns of Bay Springs, Carthage, Canton, Morton, Pelahatchie and Sebastapol.
“About 600 agents fanned out across the plants involving several companies, surrounding the perimeters to prevent workers from fleeing,” AP reports.
The raids, planned months ago, happened just hours before President Donald Trump was scheduled to visit El Paso, Texas, the majority-Latino city where a man linked to an online screed about a “Hispanic invasion” was charged in a shooting that left 22 people dead in the border city.
Workers filled three buses — two for men and one for women — at a Koch Foods Inc. plant in tiny Morton, 40 miles east of Jackson. They were taken to a military hangar to be processed for immigration violations. About 70 family, friends and residents waved goodbye and shouted, “Let them go! Let them go!” Later, two more buses arrived.
A tearful 13-year-old boy whose parents are from Guatemala waved goodbye to his mother, a Koch worker, as he stood beside his father. Some employees tried to flee on foot but were captured in the parking lot.
Largest ICE Raid in a Decade Nets 680 Arrests in Mississippi Food Processing Plants [AP via KTLA]
Saying this louder: Today’s immigration raids in Mississippi were the largest single-state ICE enforcement operation in history.
THIS IS NOT A DRILL.
Know your rights and share widely
https://t.co/q4GlaPcYR5 https://t.co/dH3OYG9Qmx
— ACLU (@ACLU) August 7, 2019
Autoridades migratorias federales arrestaron este #miércoles a 680 personas después de realizar #redadas en siete plantas procesadoras de alimentos de #Mississippi.https://t.co/q9Uzh6bS7K
— Héctor Jiménez LandÃn (@JimenezLandin) August 7, 2019
These people are horribly mistreated by their soulless employers for the privilege of living in a country where their kids will come home from Mississippi’s first day of public school to empty houses, like something out of a nightmare https://t.co/9uJyhSXNKD
— Sam Thielman (@samthielman) August 7, 2019
Source: https://boingboing.net/2019/08/07/ice-arrests-680-workers-at-mis.html
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The Article Was Written/Published By: Xeni Jardin
Questions are still swirling around the immigration raids that President Donald Trump said he launched over the weekend, but one thing is certain: Many immigrants caught in their net will be sent into a court system already crippled by a vast backlog of cases.
Frustrated with the slow pace of deportations from the courts, the Trump administration has taken aggressive steps to speed decisions and move people out of the country more quickly. But those measures have largely backfired, adding to the immense logjam of people awaiting life-changing decisions.
Officials blame the continued explosion of the court caseload on the increasing number of migrants, mostly from Central America, who are seeking asylum. But an analysis of court data by The Marshall Project shows that under the Trump administration, the immigration court backlog has grown much faster in one year than the inflow of migrants—at a rate almost three times that of new cases coming into the courts.
According to interviews with judges, lawyers and court staff, many of the moves by the administration—designed to accelerate the courts and eliminate policies from President Barack Obama—have slowed them even more, making it harder for judges to move cases efficiently, extending processing times and compounding a nationwide backlog that has grown by 68 percent under President Trump to nearly 877,000 cases.
The administration acknowledged that it hasn’t been able to control the spiraling caseloads when it announced a sweeping rule change on Monday that would effectively deny asylum to most migrants from Central America. It would require them to seek asylum first from any country they pass through on their way to the United States and would only offer American protection after those claims fail.
Trump administration officials used their exceptionally broad powers over the courts to impose the most far-reaching changes of any administration, in an attempt to push immigration judges to decide more cases more quickly and limit access to asylum for the influx of migrants from Central America.
The data reveal that the number of days it takes to complete a court case hit a 10-year high over the first two years of Trump’s presidency. In the busiest courts, including New York, Los Angeles and Houston, some judges are scheduling hearings to decide cases in 2023, since their calendars are entirely booked for four years out.
In a surge that peaked in June, record numbers of families have streamed to the border to plead for asylum, triggering a legal process that added tens of thousands of cases to be decided. So far this year, more than 314,000 people traveling in families, mostly from Central America, were caught at the southern border.
Even if the new asylum rule, which is likely to face legal challenges, succeeds in reducing the flow of cases into the courts, it would still take years at the current pace to reduce the backlog to manageable levels.
***
Some of the new policies were ordered by the president, while Justice Department officials, especially former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, made extensive use of their authority to intervene in the immigration courts.
The resulting overload is affecting courts across the country—like the one in Denver, which has one of the longest wait times for cases to be completed, an average of 962 days, according to data compiled by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.
Mauricio Basaves knows why. Basaves, who is 40, came to the United States from Mexico illegally 20 years ago. He started out clipping hedges. Today, he owns a trucking business in Denver, with four semi-trailers hauling freight for big chains like Walmart and Target, employing eight drivers, all American citizens. He is raising three children, all Americans by birth. His oldest daughter, who is 15, is a science honors student and runs track. She is already being recruited by colleges.
But in his effort to obtain legal papers, Basaves years ago fell prey to a common scam. A lawyer in Nebraska offered to get him a work permit. Basaves didn’t understand that the lawyer was applying for asylum, which provides work authorization while the case is being decided. He got the permit, but his asylum claim was doomed from the start, since it was presented long after the legal deadline. It eventually was denied and Basaves, to his shock, was ordered to appear in court for deportation hearings.
Before Trump, immigration prosecutors didn’t press for Basaves’ deportation. Obama established priorities for prosecutors, steering them to focus on immigrants who had serious criminal histories or presented some other security risk. Basaves, whose record consists of two traffic tickets, was not one of them. Prosecutors closed his case, taking it off the court’s active docket, requiring him only to check in once a year.
Under Trump, Basaves has become one more extended deportation case slogging through the Denver court.
***
In his earliest actions as president, Trump issued executive orders canceling Obama’s priorities and sharply restricting prosecutors from exercising discretion to suspend any deportation.
Sessions, as attorney general, went further. Using his power to overrule immigration judges—who are employees of the Justice Department, not an independent judiciary—Sessions issued an opinion eliminating judges’ authority to suspend or terminate cases. For years, judges say, they had routinely used that authority to set aside less urgent cases, allowing them to concentrate more efficiently on complex asylum or criminal cases.
An analysis of Justice Department figures shows that the administration’s orders have been followed. The use of suspensions has plummeted in the past two years.
Now prosecutors are instructed to pursue every deportation and judges have little choice but to proceed with almost every case. Basaves was hauled back to court, and he is fighting to the end. In two decades living in the United States, he consistently paid his taxes. His teenage son is being treated for a baffling illness. His lawyer, Brett Stokes, says Basaves has a strong case to win a humanitarian visa.
But in Denver, with its long delays, the first hearing date he could get was in March 2020.
“We see the government fighting every case,” said Ashley Tabaddor, a judge in Los Angeles who spoke in her capacity as president of the National Association of Immigration Judges union. “Instead of being an efficient use of our resources, it’s just a lot of chaos and counterproductive measures that undermine the ability of judges to use their expertise to help a case go through the system.”
Immigrants like Basaves are not the only ones affected. The new rules have also made it more difficult and time-consuming for American citizens to obtain green cards for immigrant spouses who are undocumented. Cases of migrant children abandoned by parents have become more convoluted and labor-intensive for judges.
And Sessions’ ruling also applies to about 330,000 cases that had been closed previously. Prosecutors have begun to reopen those cases, judges said, worsening the backlog.
Despite the spiraling case numbers, Justice Department officials insist the new rules have been effective.
“We’ve largely solved the problems on our side in terms of processing,” said James McHenry, director of the Executive Office for Immigration Review, the agency that administers the courts. “Right now, the challenge is driven primarily by our successes,” McHenry told a congressional hearing in March. He said the backlog was still growing only because more immigrants are trying to come to the United States.
One area of progress under Trump has been in hiring judges. After Sessions streamlined vetting procedures, the number of judges in 65 courts nationwide has increased to 424 as of April from about 290 in September 2016. With more judges, more cases are being resolved. Between last October and May, the courts completed more cases than they did in each of the last three full years under Obama, said Kathryn Mattingly, a Justice Department spokeswoman.
While the time to finish cases grew substantially under Obama, under the Trump administration it continued to grow by about 40 days, or 5 percent, reaching its decade peak even as administration officials said they were making cases go faster. And the Marshall Project analysis of case data shows that the influx of migrants does not come close to accounting for the expanding backlog.
“This is largely a problem they created for themselves,” said Robert Vinikoor, who served as an immigration judge in Chicago for more than 30 years before retiring in 2017, and still practices immigration law there. “They’re keeping every case on the docket and the judges’ hands are tied. They’re getting nothing accomplished.”
***
Manuel Bravo GarcÃa was walking through his home village in Colima, Mexico one day in 2017 when two strangers approached on a motorcycle and beckoned. Sensing danger, he tried to run. They opened fire, one bullet shattering his knee, the other piercing his stomach.
He spent two weeks in the hospital for multiple surgeries, with a policeman by his bed in case the shooters returned. Hobbling on crutches, he flew to Tijuana and limped across the bridge to the United States border station, pleading for asylum. Customs officers cut off his leg cast to make sure he wasn’t carrying narcotics.
Sent to a shelter for unaccompanied minors, Manuel, who was 17 at the time, was treated for his wounds and his nightmares. He was reunited with a half-sister, Ana Bravo, a legal resident in Denver who has lived in the United States for 17 years. Three months after he left Mexico, he learned that drug traffickers in Colima had murdered his mother, shooting her in the head. She was added to a family tally that included three cousins slain by drug gunmen. His mother was a drug user, Ana Bravo said, and likely had debts she failed to pay.
At one time, Manuel Bravo would have had a straightforward asylum claim, based on his fear of return to Mexico, which might have been decided relatively quickly.
But in a major decision in 2018, Sessions ruled that the asylum statute did not apply to victims of “private criminal activity.” In a clear reference to asylum-seekers from Mexico and Central America, the attorney general specifically cited victims of gang and domestic violence as generally ineligible for protection.
So Manuel, now 19, has to fight a difficult, elaborate legal battle to avoid deportation, his lawyer, Joshua Mitson, said. A hearing is set for March 2021, the earliest date the judge had available.
“Every time I think about Mexico,” Manuel said, “my stomach hurts.”
Judges said Sessions’ asylum decision did not in fact help them speed up their work on asylum claims from migrants in the current surge.
“These suddenly turned into very lengthy, complicated hearings,” said Jeffrey Chase, who served as an immigration judge and legal adviser to the appeals court for more than 20 years, before he retired in 2017. “People are not giving up. And if they lose they are taking an appeal.”
In a further twist, in December 2018 a federal judge struck down part of Sessions’ decision, ruling that it did not apply to interviews migrants must undergo, often at the border, to initiate an asylum claim. As a result, the vast majority of migrants who are fleeing violence in Central America are still passing the first test for asylum. Their cases continue to flood into the courts, even though it is less likely they will ultimately win.
***
Another Trump administration policy to increase deportations is adding cases like Alexa Espinoza’s to court dockets.
Alexa was barely a toddler when her parents brought her illegally across the border from Mexico, and she has no memory of the country. Growing up near Denver, she was chosen more than once for a leadership honor awarded in an assembly before her whole school. She is taking pre-med classes in high school.
Now 15, she would have been eligible for a legal work permit under a program known as DACA, which protects young undocumented immigrants known as Dreamers. But Trump canceled the program, and federal court decisions have allowed renewals but no new applicants.
Instead, Alexa has been summoned to court and faces the possibility of deportation.
Under the new policy, issued in June 2018 by the agency in the Department of Homeland Security that administers visas, any undocumented immigrant who applies for a visa and is denied will be issued a warrant to appear in immigration court for deportation. In the past, the visa agency did not routinely initiate such deportations.
Alexa’s grandfather, a longtime legal resident of the United States, applied years ago for a green card for her father, Arturo. Alexa and a sister, also a teenager, were included in the application. But in September 2017, when they went for their final interviews, the visa officer stunned Arturo by informing him he had a deportation order from an illegal crossing many years earlier. The officer denied Arturo’s green card and issued a warrant for him — and the two girls. Three more cases on the Denver docket.
“It’s scary,” Alexa said. “Me and my sister, we don’t know anything from over there. I’ll be like leaving my school here and my friends, my home, to start something over there I don’t want.”
Her lawyer, Andrew Bramante, said that before the new policy, the visa officer could have separated the two daughters from their father’s case and spared them the years-long court ordeal and real threat of expulsion. “An officer would have just said, ‘Get out of here, you can go,’” Bramante said.
Article originally published on POLITICO Magazine
Source: https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/07/16/trump-ice-raids-immigration-courts-arent-ready-227359
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The Article Was Written/Published By: Julia Preston and Andrew R. Calderon
President Donald Trump pledged Monday night to begin deporting millions of undocumented immigrants who have entered the U.S. illegally and offered uncharacteristic praise for Mexico’s efforts to stem the tide of Central American migrants surging across the southern border.
“Next week ICE will begin the process of removing the millions of illegal aliens who have illicitly found their way into the United States. They will be removed as fast as they come in,” Trump wrote on Twitter.
“Mexico, using their strong immigration laws, is doing a very good job of stopping people … long before they get to our Southern Border. Guatemala is getting ready to sign a Safe-Third Agreement,” the president continued. “The only ones who won’t do anything are the Democrats in Congress. They must vote to get rid of the loopholes, and fix asylum! If so, Border Crisis will end quickly!”
Trump’s tweet, which came one day before a planned rally in Orlando, Fla., to kick off Trump’s re-election campaign, was a departure from ICE‘s normal practice of keeping enforcement operations closely held until they’ve been executed.
The president’s ICE comment comes amid signs of rising concern within his administration about his ability to keep government secrets. One hour after the ICE tweet the president followed with another denying a June 15 New York Times report that Pentagon officials refrained from briefing him in detail on recent U.S. cyberattacks against Russia’s power grid “for concern over his reaction — and the possibility that he might countermand it or discuss it with foreign officials, as he did in 2017 when he mentioned a sensitive operation in Syria to the Russian foreign minister.”
Trump’s ICE comments publicized a planned Immigration and Customs Enforcement operation targeting Central American families and recent arrivals, according to three people familiar with the plan. They appeared to elaborate on a comment earlier this month by newly-installed acting ICE Director Mark Morgan that ICE will intensify enforcement against migrants already living in the United States, including families.
“We don’t exempt anybody,” Morgan said. “I don’t think you want the director of ICE exempting a demographic that is in violation of our immigration laws based on my own political, personal ideology or moral stance.”
The idea of targeting Central American families first surfaced publicly a little more than a year ago when then-acting ICE Director Thomas Homan broached it during a May 2018 House Homeland Security subcommittee hearing.
“Of course, I expect a lot of letters saying, ‘Why are we targeting families and not criminals?’” Homan said. “But if they’re given their due process and a federal judge makes their decision, if we don’t execute those decisions, there’s no integrity in the system.”
But Homan retired the following month, and the plan stalled under then-Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and Homan’s predecessor at ICE, Ronald Vitiello. White House senior adviser Stephen Miller agitated to move forward with the plan despite their reservations, according to a former DHS official familiar with the situation.
“Stephen wants to do things that are inconsistent with what’s operationally feasible,” the official said, and Nielsen was going to have to explain the policy to the public and to Congress. “She had reasonable questions about what it meant,” the person said.
Both Nielsen and Vitiello were jettisoned in April as part of a broader shakeup at the Homeland Security Department. Trump vowed at the time to go in a “tougher direction” at ICE before appointing Morgan, a former Border Patrol chief and Fox News commentator who in January said on “Tucker Carlson Tonight” that “I’ve been to the detention facilities where I’ve walked up to these individuals that are so-called minors, 17 or under. And I’ve looked at them and I’ve looked at their eyes, Tucker — and I’ve said that is a soon-to-be MS-13 gang member. It’s unequivocal.”
The administration of former President Barack Obama similarly targeted Central American families for deportation in late 2015 and early 2016, but those operations dealt with arrest totals in the hundreds, not the “millions” promised by Trump on Monday night.
Whether ICE could feasibly target millions remains unclear. The Trump administration has petitioned Congress in recent weeks for more than $300 million to expand ICE detention bed capacity as part of a broader $4.5 billion supplemental funding request to deal with the influx of migrants at the border.
Regardless of the scale, the optics of family arrests could be reminiscent of Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy, which split apart thousands of parents and children from April until June 2018.
“If they’re not careful how they do this, some of these images could be truly awful,” said a current DHS official. “I’m talking about having social services involved, I’m talking about detaining parents.”
Still, an operation that goes after recent Central American entrants who have exhausted their options to remain could send a message to prospective crossers, according to John Sandweg, a former acting ICE director during the Obama administration.
“If done right, it’s probably not a bad idea to ensure that there’s some integrity in the process,” he said.
But the arrests should focus on people who already “had a shot at their claims,” Sandweg said, and not migrants who were ordered deported because they didn’t appear for an immigration court hearing.
ICE doesn’t typically announce enforcement operations before they occur, and Trump has rebuked sharply those who give advance warning. In early 2018, the president criticized Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf, a Democrat, for releasing information about a planned immigration raid in her area. Trump later suggested that the Justice Department consider pressing federal charges against Schaaf.
Sandweg said ICE operations are kept secret for the safety of officers tasked with arresting migrants.
“If you’re doing an operation like this, the last thing you do is announce it,“ he said. “We wouldn’t even tell Congress for fear that it would leak.”
Trump’s praise for Mexico and mention of a broad asylum deal comes after U.S. and Mexican officials struck a June 7 agreement to increase border enforcement in both countries. The president had threatened to impose a slate of escalating tariffs on America’s southern neighbor if Mexico did not take more drastic measures to curb the flow of migrants traveling through Mexico and into the U.S. from countries including Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador.
The Trump administration announced in March that it would eliminate hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign aid to the three Northern Triangle nations. But the State Department said Monday it would reduce those cuts and provide roughly $432 million in aid previously allocated in fiscal year 2017.
The remaining sum of the aid will be withheld until the U.S. determines whether the Central American countries have acted sufficiently to address the mass migration, according to the Trump administration.
Article originally published on POLITICO Magazine
Source: https://www.politico.com/story/2019/06/18/trump-deportation-illegal-aliens-1367012
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The Article Was Written/Published By: qforgey@politico.com (Quint Forgey)
Move advocated by Donald Trump will affect some 15 million travellers every year
Source: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/us-visa-application-social-media-accounts-details-esta-check-a8940381.html
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The Article Was Written/Published By: Alessio Perrone
Source: https://news.yahoo.com/three-old-boy-found-alone-193916637.html
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This story continues at The Next Web
Source: https://thenextweb.com/politics/2019/03/13/report-ice-database-tracks-nearly-60-of-us-population-without-a-warrant/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheNextWeb+%28The+Next+Web+All+Stories%29
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The Article Was Written/Published By: Tristan Greene
