Fusion
By Tim Rogers
January 7, 2016
Donald
Trump’s bilious blather about immigrants reminds us—more often than
most people need reminding—that words matter. But the Obama
administration’s recent wave of
police-state raids on Central American women and children, whose only
crime is poverty and a lack of proper paperwork, reminds us that actions
matter too.
When
it comes to getting tough on immigration, Republican candidates talk
the talk, but Obama walks the walk. President Obama has deported more
people than any U.S. president
before him, and almost more than every other president combined from
the 20th century.
Immigration-flow
numbers are staggering in both directions. In 2014, it’s estimated that
more than 200,000 Central Americans tried to emigrate to the United
States without
documentation. But the Obama government has been deporting them as fast
as it can.
Since
coming to office in 2009, Obama’s government has deported more than 2.5
million people—up 23% from the George W. Bush years. More shockingly,
Obama is now on pace
to deport more people than the sum of all 19 presidents who governed
the United States from 1892-2000, according to government data.
And
he’s not done yet. With the clock ticking down his final months in
office, Obama appears to be running up the score in an effort to protect
his title as deporter-in-chief
from future presidents. To pad the numbers, Homeland Security is now
going after the lowest-hanging fruit: women and children who are seeking
asylum from violence in Central America.
“This
is the only time I remember enforcement raids on families of women and
children who are fleeing some of the most violent places on the planet,”
says Royce Bernstein
Murray, director of policy for the National Immigrant Justice Center.
The
families came to the U.S. looking for a hand, but they got the boot.
Since Saturday, Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement
(ICE) has netted at least
121 family members, primarily in Georgia, Texas, and North Carolina. No
one knows how long the dragnet will continue. Homeland Security won’t
say, and rights activists fear it could be the start to a prolonged
operation.
Most
of the people detained during the past week are women and children from
Central American, and all of them had pending deportation orders. But
that doesn’t mean these
people have “exhausted appropriate legal remedies,” as Homeland
Security secretary Jeh Johnson said on Monday.
At
the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas, where all
the families are being processed for repatriation, rights activists are
finding that many of the
Central American immigrants—most of whom don’t speak English, and some
of whom don’t even speak Spanish—never had access to proper legal
representation.
A
group of immigration lawyers for the CARA Family Detention Pro Bono
Project spent Tuesday interviewing eight Central American families in
detention, and succeeded in
getting emergency stays of deportation for half of them. The more
families they talked to, the more people they found who had been screwed
by the system.
“Our
interviews revealed that these families have bona fide asylum claims,
but were deprived of a meaningful opportunity to present them at their
hearings in immigration
court,” Katie Shepherd, Managing Attorney for the CARA Project, said in
a statement. “It’s beyond shameful that these families, who risked
everything to seek protection in the United States, were being forcibly
returned to the violence and turmoil they fled
in Central America.”
Many
of the other immigrant families awaiting deportation are presumably in a
similar situation—they just haven’t had a chance to tell anyone about
it.
“Some
of the people in detention didn’t get the opportunity to apply for
asylum because they were confused about the process. And none of the
people we talked to have
filed appeals, because they don’t know about the appeals process,” said
Lindsay Harris, of the American Immigration Council. “They’re trying to
comply with a legal system that they don’t understand and which nobody
has oriented them to.”
The
situation has also provoked the ire of Democratic presidential hopeful
Bernie Sanders, who earlier today fired off a heated letter to Obama and
Johnson and ICE director
Sarah Saldaña.
“Raids
are not the answer. We cannot continue to employ inhumane tactics
involving rounding up and deporting tens of thousands of immigrant
families to address a crisis
that requires compassion and humane solutions,” Sanders wrote in his
Jan. 7 letter.
Both
Sanders and fellow Democratic hopeful Martin O’Malley have called on
the government to offer the Central American immigrants Temporary
Protected Status (TPS), a status
that has already allowed thousands of Hondurans and Salvadorans to
remain lawfully in the United States after natural disasters in those
countries.
Fearing
an extended roundup is underway, the embassies of Guatemala and El
Salvador have warned their nationals to not open their doors to anyone
without a warrant. Some
lawyers are taking that advice a step further by urging immigrants to
not open their doors to any ICE official, even if they wave a warrant in
front of the peephole.
That’s
because the Warrant of Removal that ICE agents are carrying is a simple
administrative pick-up order, not the type of warrant that authorizes
officers to kick down
doors and enter private property without permission. So vampire rules
apply: ICE agents can’t get into a house unless invited in.
“ICE conducts civil immigration enforcement; a warrant is only issued in criminal cases,” says ICE spokesman Bryan Cox.
This
is what a Homeland Security removal warrant looks like. It's signed by
ICE officials, not a judge. That means it can't be used for
unauthorized entry into someone's
home
This
is what a Homeland Security removal warrant looks like. It's signed by
ICE officials, not a judge. That means it can't be used for unauthorized
entry into someone's
home
Then
again, there’s only so long you can listen to government agents ringing
your doorbell before you go insane. It’s unrealistic to expect
immigrants facing deportation
to hide in their homes for the rest of their lives, and Homeland
Security will eventually nab them when they step outside. But the
waiting game is costly, slow and ineffective. Most ICE agents would
rather make their apprehensions quickly and be done with
it.
That’s
why many government agents are allegedly misrepresenting themselves at
people’s front doors in an attempt to fast-talk their way into people’s
living rooms and
execute the pick-up order, according to immigration lawyers and rights
activists involved in the cases.
I
interviewed half a dozen immigration lawyers this week and they all
told me similar tales of ICE agents using dirty tricks to get inside
people’s homes ,or lure them
out into the yard. Some of the ICE officers allegedly posed as local
police officers searching for a fictitious person of interest, while
others told immigrants they are there to fix a malfunctioning ankle
bracelet. One agent allegedly tried to lure his marks
outside by pretending to have car troubles.
“This
whole thing is unlawful, but it’s hard to hold anyone to account,”says
Mark Fleming, National Litigation Coordinator for the National Immigrant
Justice Center. “The
advantage that the government has is that the people they apprehend are
fast-tracked for deportation.”
“These are rogue agents who are not following due process,” echoed another immigration lawyer in California.
Homeland
Security declined to comment on the matter. “We don’t discuss specific
enforcement tactics or techniques as a matter of policy,” Cox told
Fusion.
Secretary
Johnson insists Homeland Security is taking “a number of precautions”
due to the “sensitive nature of taking into custody and removing
families with children.”
But those precautions seem to be limited to deploying “female agents
and medical personnel to take part in the operations,” according to
Johnson’s statement on Monday.
Perhaps
the most stomach-churning aspect about the whole Central American
roundup is that Homeland Security is targeting a group of vulnerable
people who tend to be compliant
and trusting of authority. Many of the Central American women they’ve
collared in the past week are people who turned themselves in to U.S.
law enforcement voluntarily to plea for protection for their children.
These
are people who were in regular contact with U.S. authorities, and kept
current addresses on Homeland Security’s database. In other words, they
weren’t hiding from
the law, they were trying to get right by it. But they still got
treated like criminals, pulled from their homes by men with guns.
Now
they’re getting sent back to Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, where
they’ll again be forced to hide in their homes as the victims of of
failing institutions in
both the United States and Central America.
For them, the nasty, xenophobic future that Trump promises is already here.
“The
president is much more of a threat and danger to immigration
communities than Donald Trump,” says Olga Tomchin, a lawyer at the
National Day Laborer Organizing Network.
“Trump is just verbalizing what Obama is already doing.”
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com
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