Rubio hopes to pass DREAM Act alternative by end of summer


By Daniel Strauss
May 7, 2012

Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) aims to have his alternative to the DREAM Act proposal on paper in the next few weeks and passed by the end of the summer.

"Our goal is to pass something this summer in time for kids who plan to go to school this fall," Rubio press secretary Alex Conant said Monday.

Rubio's proposal would provide non-immigrant visas to illegal immigrants' children who attend college or serve in the military.

"So just like lots of people come to the United States on work visas or on student visas or tourism visas or whatever, this would be a non-immigrant visa, so it would be a temporary one," Conant said. "It wouldn't be permanent. But the intent here is if they choose to remain in the United States permanently that they could apply for permanent residence just like any other immigrant would."

Rubio's proposal is an alternative to the Democrat-backed DREAM Act, sponsored by Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), which would grant legal status to illegal immigrants who came to the U.S. when they were young and then go to college or serve in the military.

Conant said Rubio's legislation would not mean the immigrants would be deported after their visa runs out.

"They could apply for permanent residence after a certain amount of time without having to return to their country of origin," Conant said. "They'd be like any other immigrant except that they could wait while they're in the United States. The Democrats' DREAM Act doesn't have them leaving the country but, as I said, it creates a special pathway for them."

Rubio's office does not yet have an estimate on how many new visas would be issued under the proposal. Conant said it depends on what the qualifying age for the visas in the legislation will be.

A day earlier, Rubio defended the proposal against criticism that it was a form of amnesty.

"We use the existing immigration system to deal with a humanitarian issue. And that is these children who entered this country illegally or have overstayed visas illegally, through no fault of their own," Rubio said on Fox News Sunday. "These are children, they follow their parents. The parents put them in this predicament."

ICE Charges Criminal Activity in Fewer Deportation Proceedings

To see this entire story go to http://trac.syr.edu/immigration/reports/281/



ICE Charges Criminal Activity in
Fewer Deportation Proceedings

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is identifying fewer individuals as deportable owing to alleged criminal activity[1], according to the latest Immigration Court data on new deportation proceedings. During the most recent quarter (January - March 2012), ICE sought to deport a total of 5,450 individuals on criminal grounds. While this number is preliminary and is likely to increase once late reports are in, it represents a drastic decrease compared with 10,732 individuals against whom ICE sought deportation orders just two years ago (during the period January - March 2010). See Figure 1 and Table 1.
Figure 1. Deportation Orders Sought in Immigration Court Based on Alleged Criminal Activity

Table 1. Deportation Orders Sought in Immigration Court Based on Alleged Criminal Activity
Quarter and Year
ICE Filings in Immigration Court
Total Filings
Criminal Activity
Percent Criminal
Jan-Mar 2008
55,701
9,736
17%
Apr-Jun 2008
59,512
8,929
15%
Jul-Sep 2008
61,564
9,277
15%
Oct-Dec 2008
58,279
9,045
16%
Jan-Mar 2009
63,257
10,066
16%
Apr-Jun 2009
66,635
10,588
16%
Jul-Sep 2009
66,950
10,901
16%
Oct-Dec 2009
57,967
10,027
17%
Jan-Mar 2010
61,359
10,732
17%
Apr-Jun 2010
65,728
10,638
16%
Jul-Sep 2010
61,245
9,369
15%
Oct-Dec 2010
55,263
8,841
16%
Jan-Mar 2011
58,955
9,085
15%
Apr-Jun 2011
61,192
9,406
15%
Jul-Sep 2011
60,196
8,676
14%
Oct-Dec 2011
49,343
7,080
14%
Jan-Mar 2012*
37,659
5,450
14%

* Preliminary counts based on EOIR records as of 3/28/2012. Filings
can be expected to increase once late reporting is incorporated.

Court filings began dropping even before ICE Director John Morton issued his June 17, 2011 directive on prosecutorial discretion (PD), which outlined the manner in which enforcement activity could be focused on deporting serious criminals. Since that announcement, however, official court records show that rather than increasing, the number of deportations ordered on the basis of criminal activity has continued to decrease. Evidence from the most recent quarter show that the agency continues to be headed in the opposite direction from its stated goal. See Table 1.
The decline in the number of individuals charged with being deportable for criminal activity has been more rapid than the overall decline in court filings over the last two years. This means that those targeted on the basis of criminal grounds are not simply fewer in number, but they also make up a declining proportion of all Immigration Court cases. Quarterly trends over the past four years are shown in Figure 2.
Figure 2. Deportation Orders Sought in Immigration Court by Type of Criminal Activity
The colored bars in Figure 2 divide alleged criminal activity into two types. The proportion ICE claims are deportable as convicted "aggravated felons" are indicated by the lower red bars, while the upper brown bars represent the proportion alleged to have engaged in other criminal activity. A downward trend can be seen for both types, in absolute numbers and also when considered as a percentage of all deportation proceedings (see supporting data for Figure 2).
All of the above results are based upon analyses by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University of case-by-case records covering all proceedings filed in the Immigration Courts. These records were obtained by TRAC under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) from the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR). EOIR is the part of the Department of Justice which administers the nation's special administrative court system charged with deciding whether noncitizens should be deported or are legally entitled to remain in the country[2].
See also TRAC's previous report tracking the basis for deportation proceedings for the decade before 9/11 with the decade after 9/11, and contrasting Bush and Obama administration records.
Targeting Trends by Nationality
Table 2. Deportation Orders Sought in Immigration Court Based on Alleged Criminal Activity by Nationality
Nationality
FY 2011
FY 2012*
All Nationalities
15.3%
14.4%
Mexico
15.4%
14.8%
Guatemala
5.5%
4.3%
El Salvador
10.2%
8.4%
Honduras
7.7%
7.6%
China
1.6%
1.2%
* Through first six months of FY 2012
A reduced focus on criminal activity as a basis for seeking deportation orders was also revealed when the data corresponding to individual nationality groups was examined.
In the most recent quarter, just five countries — Mexico, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras and China — accounted for nearly four out of five (79 percent) of all new cases in Immigration Court. Of these, in FY 2011 Mexico had the highest proportion of those ICE sought to deport on criminal grounds (15.4 percent) and China the lowest (1.6 percent). In both cases, ICE cited criminal grounds less frequently during the first six months of FY 2012: for Mexico it declined to from 15.4 to 14.8 percent; for China it fell from 1.6 to 1.2 percent. See Table 2 and Figure 3.

Figure 3. Decline in the Proportion of Deportation Orders Sought
in Immigration Court Based on Alleged Criminal Activity

In FY 2011, the rates at which individuals from El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala were charged with being deportable for criminal activity — 10.2, 7.7 and 5.5 percent, respectively — were intermediate between those for Mexico and China. But again, for all three countries ICE sought fewer deportations of individuals charged with engaging in criminal activity during the first six months of FY 2012.
Specific details and trends for all nationalities (including these five) are available using TRAC's Immigration Court deportation proceedings tool which has been updated with data through March of 2012.
In addition to these overall trends, the deportation proceedings tool also allows the details for each nationality to be examined by Immigration Court and hearing location.



[1] References to criminal activity are for only those deportation order requests in which ICE cites such activity as at least one of its bases. ICE may choose to use other grounds in seeking the deporting of individuals with criminal convictions, but the number cannot be determined due to ICE's withholding of data on deportation orders.
[2] We used the term "deportation" in a generic sense — whether legally labeled as removal, deportation, or expulsion based upon inadmissibility grounds.


Obama proposes new rule for immigrant families


Illegal immigrants who are immediate relatives of citizens could stay in the U.S. while applying for permanent residency. The goal is to reduce a family's time apart.

To read this entire story go to latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-immigration-residency-20120331,0,1148661.story


By Brian Bennett, Washington Bureau
7:08 PM PDT, March 30, 2012

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is proposing to make it easier for illegal immigrants who are immediate family members of American citizens to apply for permanent residency, a move that could affect as many as 1 million of the estimated 11 million immigrants living here illegally.

The new rule, which the Department of Homeland Security will post for public comment Monday, would reduce the time illegal immigrants are separated from their American families while seeking legal status, immigration officials said. Currently, such immigrants must leave the country to apply for a legal visa, often leading to long stints away as they await resolution of their applications.

The proposal is the latest move by the administration to use its executive powers to revise immigration procedures without changing the law. It reflects an effort by President Obama to improve his standing among those Latino voters who feel he has not met his 2008 campaign promise to pursue comprehensive immigration reform.

The president's push to pass the Dream Act, a law that would have created a path to citizenship for young illegal immigrants enrolled in college or enlisted in the military, was defeated in the Senate in December. No reform legislation has been under serious consideration since, yet the U.S. has deported a record number of illegal immigrants under Obama.

Many immigrants who might seek legal status do not pursue it out of fear they will not receive a "hardship waiver" of strict U.S. immigration laws: An illegal immigrant who has overstayed a visa for more than six months is barred from reentering the U.S. for three years; those who overstay more than a year are barred for 10 years.

Lisa Battan, an immigration attorney based in Boulder, Colo., said the current process is "encouraging people to remain illegal."

The revised rule would allow illegal immigrants to claim that time apart from a spouse, child or parent who is a U.S. citizen would create "extreme hardship," and would permit them to remain in the country as they apply for legal status. Once approved, applicants would be required to leave the U.S. briefly, simply to return to their native country and pick up their visa.

The change could reduce a family's time apart to one week in some cases, officials said. The White House hopes to have the new procedures in place by the end of the year.

David Leopold, a Cleveland attorney and past president of the American Immigration Lawyers Assn., said the change was a "minor processing tweak, but it has great value to families."

Hundreds of thousands of the estimated 2.5 million illegal immigrants in California could benefit from the proposed change, according to immigration activists.

Republicans accused Obama of making an end run around Congress.

"President Obama and his administration are bending long-established rules to grant backdoor amnesty to potentially millions of illegal immigrants," Lamar Smith (R-Texas) said in a statement Friday.

U.S. immigration officials counter that the revision affects only how the applications are processed, not whether the legal status ultimately is granted.

"I don't think that criticism is warranted at all," said Alejandro Mayorkas, director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. "What we are doing is reducing the time of separation, not changing the standard of obtaining a waiver."

That the proposal is being announced in an election year has a whiff of political calculation, said Javier Ortiz, a Republican strategist.

"It looks like the president is pandering to Hispanic voters," said Ortiz, asserting that Obama could have proposed the change three years ago when he took office. "I would argue that Hispanics are smarter than that, and they know he has failed to bring forward comprehensive immigration reform."

The White House has previously made other administrative changes, such as a policy announced in June that gave prosecutors new authority to put on hold cases against immigration violators who have strong ties to the U.S. and no criminal record. The "discretion policy" encouraged immigration agents to focus on the removal of illegal immigrants who pose a threat to public safety or are repeat immigration law violators.

A program intended to cull so-called "low priority" cases from immigration courts began in Denver and Baltimore early this year and is being expanded to six other cities across the U.S. over the next four months, including Los Angeles and San Francisco.

The more-targeted approach hasn't reduced the total number of people being deported annually from the U.S. Last year, 396,906 people were deported, a record number for the third consecutive year, and many of the deportees were relatives of U.S. citizens. In the first half of last year alone, immigration officials deported more than 46,000 parents of U.S. citizens, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

For some immigrants, the danger of returning to their home country for a long period discourages them from seeking legal status. Mexican nationals are required by the State Department to apply for their hardship waivers at the U.S. consulate in Juarez, Mexico, a city plagued by drug cartel violence that saw about 2,000 homicides in 2011.

Abel Aguirre de la Cruz and his wife, Jessica Martinez, a U.S. citizen, were carjacked at gunpoint with their infant child in November 2010 in Fresnillo, Mexico, while going through the waiver application process, according to Battan, the Colorado-based lawyer, who represents the couple. On March 15, 20 months after the family first applied for a waiver, the consulate in Juarez requested more information.

After the administration's new proposal is posted in the Federal Register on Monday, the public will have 60 days to critique the change.

brian.bennett@latimes.com

Deported to Mexico, a father hopes for custody

Deported to Mexico, a father hopes for custody
WITHOUT A COUNTRY

His three boys are back in North Carolina, where foster parents want to adopt them. Social workers have expressed concern about reuniting them with their father.

To see this entire article go to http://articles.latimes.com/print/2012/mar/31/nation/la-na-nc-deported-dad-20120401


March 31, 2012
By Richard Fausset, Los Angeles Times

SPARTA, N.C. — — Felipe Montes can see no reason why he shouldn't be able to raise his three sons. He has a job and a house to live in. He has no known history of drug abuse. He has no criminal record, save for a mountain of traffic infractions.

The problem is that, after seven years of living illegally in North Carolina's Appalachian foothills, where he worked, married and became a father, Felipe was deported to his native Mexico.

Soon after, his American-born wife was deemed unfit to raise the children. They were placed with foster parents who now wish to adopt them, an option favored by the social services department in rural Alleghany County, N.C.

The children's fate may be settled at an April 5 family court proceeding in the county seat of Sparta, where Felipe will be represented by a court-appointed lawyer. But he is already learning that an international border, an immigration policy and 1,700 miles of pavement are not all that separates him from his kids. There is also the matter of custom, culture, and expectations — in particular, the differing ways First World and developing nations define what constitutes a good life for a child.

The North Carolina social workers have expressed concern about living conditions in Mexico, among them Felipe's rural home, with a concrete floor and no running water, shared with an uncle and four other family members. They also note that Felipe has neglected to try to obtain a temporary visa to return to the U.S.

Engineering a legal return in a case like Felipe's would be complicated, though not impossible, said Carl Shusterman, a veteran Los Angeles immigration attorney. Officials might be persuaded if Felipe could show his wife would face "extreme hardship" without him, Shusterman said.

But Felipe doesn't have the money to hire a lawyer.

It pains him to be stuck back in the hardscrabble peasant's life that he thought he had escaped in 2003, when he was smuggled by a coyote into the U.S.

But it pains him more to be away from Isaiah, 4, the son he calls "Big Boy," Adrian, 2, who used to gobble his made-from-scratch Mexican rice, and Angel, the toddler he has never seen, born just after immigration agents flew him over the border.

"I don't want my kids to be with somebody else's family," the 31-year-old father said in an interview one March evening over a staticky cellphone connection. "They're my babies."

While Montes' case is a relative novelty in North Carolina, authorities in California have regularly decided in favor of foreign-born parents, amid a rise in deportation cases involving split families. A recent report by the New York-based Applied Research Center, a liberal think tank, found that more than 46,000 mothers and fathers were removed from the U.S. in the first six months of 2011.

Los Angeles County child welfare officials have no data on how many such cases they have handled. They say that they require that a parent show a stable home and job to gain custody, and that they don't judge foreign housing by U.S. standards.

***

The story of the Montes family, like many family law cases, is complicated. Marie Montes, 31, has a record of petty crime and drug abuse; she says she suffers from mental health issues.

Born and raised in the Appalachian region, she was pregnant with her first child in the 9th grade. The baby, a girl, was one of four children she would bear before meeting Felipe. She had lost custody of all of them.

Felipe first saw Marie on the streets of Sparta one evening in 2006. She was walking home from the store. He was driving his pickup back from his job at the sawmill across the Virginia line.

Marie's hair is dyed red now, but then she was a blond, with spectral white skin and a faint resemblance to Jaime Pressly, the North Carolina-born actress. Felipe offered her a ride. She spoke some Spanish. Felipe's English was negligible.

"I think he acted like he knew what I was saying," she said, "but he didn't."

He drove her home, then kept coming around. Sometimes they would visit Marie's grandmother, who introduced Felipe to Southern-style home cooking: beans, corn bread and cabbage. Felipe would smile, and point to what he wanted.

He married Marie in 2006 at the magistrate's office. June Moxley, Marie's aunt, recalled that Felipe was good to her. He bought an expensive language program and learned passable English. For a while, he brought home a decent paycheck from the mill. But soon after they were married, he hurt his back. He tried to return to the sawmill, but he couldn't do the required lifting.

Felipe picked up a little seasonal Christmas tree work, and got a job as a landscaper working for one of Marie's relatives. But it wasn't enough.

The Alleghany County social services department had to assist the family on a regular basis with food, clothing, diapers and transportation, according to court documents.

The fact that Felipe required public welfare now forms part of the argument against letting him have his boys back. One social worker noted that he was "unable to show that he was able to properly provide for and care for the children" in the past.

By other accounts, Felipe doted on his boys. He woke them in the morning, cooked for them and took them to day care. "He really was the caregiver," Moxley said. "He was really good with those kids." Moxley, like Marie, thinks he deserves to have them back.

County court records show Felipe was constantly tangling with the North Carolina law. A concealed weapons charge, the most serious, was eventually dropped. Much of the rest amounted to the traffic-related woes of an illegal immigrant in the American countryside: driving without a license, without insurance, without registration, with a borrowed license plate.

One day in October 2010, while he was on probation for driving without a license, Felipe's probation officer asked him to come to the office to check in. Felipe dropped Isaiah and Adrian off at day care, went to the probation office, and was greeted by federal immigration officers.

He was taken into custody, and was held in detention for about two months.

Then he was gone.

"I left my wife pregnant with my poor baby," he says today. "I never saw my kid."

***

The county social services department did not return calls about the ensuing custody case. Court documents provided by Felipe's lawyer show that department officials tried to keep open the possibility of reunion with the mother. But they eventually determined she was not capable of handling them.

Felipe did not learn of his rights until around February 2011, when local lawyer Donna Shumate was appointed to represent him.

In June, a government agency in Mexico sent their study of Felipe's new home to North Carolina. It was short on details, but noted that the place had a refrigerator, microwave and television. Its overall status was listed as "good." In the space to describe nearby medical services, officials had written "ninguno." None.

In October, the court-appointed guardian of the boys recommended that the children, who were thriving with their foster parents, be adopted. The report went into great detail about Marie's precarious state. As for Felipe, it simply noted that he had been deported.

An attorney for the social services department argued to the judge "that deportation was similar to incarceration … that deportation alone had made this parent unfit," Shumate said. "But they had no law to support that position," she added. "There's not a case in North Carolina that says that deportation makes a parent unfit."

After District Judge Michael Duncan ruled that the department should step up efforts to reunify the children with Felipe in Mexico, social service workers spoke with Felipe and set up a plan meant to show he was worthy of the children.

They told him to provide information on how the kids could obtain dual citizenship, written verification of his income, and information on medical, dental, educational and mental health services for the kids. They told him to provide any criminal history of the people with whom he was living.

He was told to call Ollie's Small World Day Care in Sparta every Monday at 10 a.m. to speak with the older boys, Isaiah and Adrian. He was told to send them letters, gifts and money, if he could. He was told to call baby Angel's foster parents every week to speak with them about his son.

In February, the department and the court-appointed guardian determined that Felipe hadn't made progress on the paperwork. He called his kids, they said, but not at the designated time of day.

Felipe's answer, in effect, is that he is a jornalero, a day laborer, not the kind of life that lends itself to documentation.

North Carolina officials have correctly noted that his house has no street address. One simply drives to the closest village and asks after him.

Nor is it a life that conforms easily to bureaucratic schedules. He said he called his boys when he could, sometimes sneaking the calls in while on the job on a pecan farm, after pretending to need to relieve himself.

The other problem is money. On a $75-per-week salary, sending gifts would be a luxury. He also can't afford a lawyer to begin the visa application process.

Marie has told Felipe she wants to join him in Tamaulipas. But he has doubts. Through all of her many struggles, there's been an American safety net to catch her when she fell. "They don't give you nothing for free over here," he said of Mexico. "I don't think she'd last here for two or three days."

Felipe is not a voluble man, but in his phone interview he spoke about the things he wishes for most: To be back together with his children. To love them. To see them. To kiss them. If he doesn't win his court case, he says, he will be left with few options.

"Maybe I'll try to cross back," he says. He would be an illegal immigrant, but at least a present father. "I don't know what else I can do."


richard.fausset@latimes.com

Times staff writer Richard Marosi in San Diego contributed to this report.