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Deportations Drop as Obama Pushes for New Immigration Law

By Michael C. Bender December 17, 2013

The Obama administration has cut back on deporting undocumented immigrants, with forced departures on track to drop more than 10 percent, the first annual decline in more than a decade.

In his first term, President Barack Obama highlighted record deportations to show he was getting tough on immigration enforcement, which Republicans and even some Democrats have demanded as a condition for overhauling existing laws.

The last fiscal year was different. The government deported 343,020 people in the U.S. illegally from Oct. 1, 2012, to Sept. 7, 2013, the most recent Immigration and Customs Enforcement data show. If that pace continued through the Sept. 30 end of the fiscal year, removals would reach a six-year low.

The drop, which comes as Obama faces growing criticism from Hispanics over deportations, is a result of a new policy of focusing limited enforcement resources “on public safety, national security and border security,” ICE spokeswoman Barbara Gonzalez said. “ICE has been vocal about the shift in our immigration-enforcement strategy,” she said. “Our removal numbers illustrate this.”

Legislation to revamp the U.S. immigration system is stalled because of resistance from Republicans in the House of Representatives. Republican lawmakers opposed to changes backed by both Obama and former President George W. Bush, including offering a path to citizenship to the country’s estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants, have demanded tougher enforcement before considering new legislation.

Pushing Back

Yet as deportations climbed to a record 409,900 in fiscal 2012, Obama has faced pushback from the Democratic Party’s Hispanic backers, who helped provide his victory margin in two elections. There have also been protests from immigration activists, most recently at a speech he gave last month in San Francisco.

“He’s going to continue to be confronted,” Representative Luis Gutierrez said of Obama, a fellow Illinois Democrat. “You can’t say you’re going to protect the undocumented and give them a pathway to citizenship, and then deport them in unprecedented numbers.”

Even with the recent decline, about 1.93 million people have been deported during Obama’s five years in office. That approaches Bush’s eight-year total and is almost as many as in the 108 years between the administrations of Presidents Benjamin Harrison, when Department of Homeland Security records begin, and Bill Clinton.

Contractors Benefit

What’s more, a decline in deportations doesn’t necessarily mean fewer people will be locked up.

In 2009, a Democratic-controlled Congress set a minimum on how many undocumented immigrants should be detained each day pending hearings. It’s now 34,000, up from about 20,000 in 2005.

Even a broad immigration bill approved by the Senate this year -- which creates a road to citizenship for undocumented workers -- would “increase the prison population by about 14,000 inmates annually by 2018” due to more spending on enforcement, a congressional cost-estimate projected.

That may have a positive effect on companies that the government increasingly relies on to detain those being held for deportation hearings, if it becomes law, said Kevin Campbell, who tracks private prison companies for Avondale Partners, a Nashville-based financial-services company.

“You think about immigration reform and you intuitively think that means less people prosecuted for immigration offenses, but it seems like it will be just the opposite,” Campbell said.

Policy Changes

The surge in deportations has benefited companies such as Boca Raton, Florida-based GEO Group Inc. (GEO:US), which runs prisons in five countries. ICE accounted for 17 percent of the company’s $1.48 billion in revenue (GEO:US) last year, up from 11 percent of $1.04 billion in revenue in 2008, according to company filings (GEO:US).

Campbell and ICE officials said the drop in deportations stems from changes the administration started making in 2011.

In a departure from Bush’s policies, which emphasized raids on businesses suspected of hiring undocumented immigrants, then-ICE Director John Morton said deportations should focus on “national security, public safety and border security.”

Morton discouraged agents from detaining young immigrants, crime victims and “individuals pursuing legitimate civil rights complaints.”

This “prosecutorial discretion” accounted for 16,300 immigration court cases being closed in 2013, according to data compiled for Bloomberg by Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. That’s up from 9,700 last year.

About 58 percent of deportations in 2013 were of “criminals,” ICE data show. In 2008, it was 31 percent.

More Exemptions

The list of exemptions has continued to grow.

In June 2012, five months before his re-election, Obama exempted from deportation certain undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children, known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals.

Last month, the Department of Homeland Security halted deportations for families of U.S. military members because of the “stress and anxiety” that possible forced removals puts on those in the Armed Services.

The change has provoked administration critics.

“These are policies that severely restrict ICE agents from arresting and charging illegal aliens,” said Jessica Vaughn, policy director at the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, which opposes increased immigration.

Beyond Limits

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, a Virginia Republican, said during a Dec. 3 hearing that the changes “push executive power beyond all limits.”

“President Obama is the first president since Richard Nixon to ignore a duly enacted law simply because he disagrees with it,” he said.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, a California Democrat, said she wants to “see action from the president” to halt deportations.

“If somebody is here without sufficient documentation, that is not reason for deportation,” Pelosi said in an interview with Telemundo, according to a transcript provided by her office.

The president isn’t ignoring the law, White House press secretary Jay Carney said yesterday.

“We have to enforce the law,” he said. “There is prosecutorial discretion, and that is applied. The focus is on those who’ve committed felonies.”

That approach, he said, is “not a replacement for comprehensive immigration reform.”

 

Do More

Advocates for the Senate bill want Obama to do more. This month, 29 House Democrats, including Gutierrez, signed a letter calling on Obama to suspend deportations.

That has backing from the AFL-CIO. The federation of labor unions with 13 million members spent at least $6.4 million supporting Obama in his 2012 re-election campaign, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.

“The president has the authority and the ability to ease this crisis,” said Ana Avendano, director of immigration and community action at the AFL-CIO.

Obama was interrupted at an immigration rally on Nov. 25 in San Francisco when Ju Hong, a college student standing on the riser behind him, yelled that the president has “power to stop deportations for all.”

“Actually, I don’t,” Obama replied. “If, in fact, I could solve all these problems without passing laws in Congress, then I would do so. But we’re also a nation of laws.”

 

Stalled Legislation

The bill that the Senate passed in June with bipartisan support has stalled in the House, where Republican Speaker John Boehner said on Nov. 13 that he has “no intention” of considering it.

That doesn’t mean attempts to change the law are dead. Boehner said he prefers passing parts of the legislation separately, and Obama has said he’s willing to support that approach.

Boehner this month hired Rebecca Tallent, who as the Bipartisan Policy Center’s director of immigration policy helped on immigration bills as a staff member for Senator John McCain and former Representative Jim Kolbe. The two Republicans supported easing immigration laws.

With an average of about 1,000 deportations a day this year, that means more than 165,000 immigrants have been removed from the country since the Senate bill passed.
 
“We just want the chance to be able to work,” said Rebeca Nolasco, a 21-year-old who received deferred action and whose mother, Diana Ramos, is in an Arizona detention center facing deportation. “It doesn’t harm anyone.”

Amid Steady Deportation, Fear and Worry Multiply Among Immigrants

By JULIA PRESTON

December 22, 2013

NEW ORLEANS — Karen Sandoval’s promising life in this city fell apart in one day last summer when she went to buy school supplies for her two daughters.

Ms. Sandoval, a Honduran immigrant here illegally, was riding with the man her girls have always called their father. Immigration agents, seeing a dilapidated car, pulled them over. They released Ms. Sandoval but detained her partner, a Nicaraguan also here illegally, and he was soon deported.

Now Ms. Sandoval, 28, is grieving her loss and scrambling to support her children without her partner, Enrique Morales, and the income from his thriving flooring business. She sees no future for the girls, who are both American citizens, in her home country or his. So Ms. Sandoval is facing the possibility that she may never see Mr. Morales again.

“It is very difficult to explain to two little girls that Daddy will not be with us anymore,” Ms. Sandoval said.

Since taking office, President Obama has deported more than 1.9 million foreigners, immigration officials announced last week, a record for an American president. The officials said they focused on removing criminals, serious immigration offenders and recent border crossers, with 98 percent of deportees in 2013 in those groups, while sparing workers and their families. Mr. Obama is also pressing for an overhaul of immigration laws with a path to citizenship for those here illegally.

But immigrant leaders say the enforcement has a broad impact on their communities, with deportations still separating bread-winning parents from children and unauthorized immigrants from family members here legally, including American citizens.

Administration officials say the deportation numbers — more than 368,000 this fiscal year — are driven by a congressional requirement that more than 30,000 immigrants be detained daily. They acknowledge that the lines are becoming harder to draw between high-priority violators and those with strong family ties.

For immigrants, the steady deportations have compounded their frustration with Congress, where the House took no action this year after the Senate passed a bipartisan overhaul bill in June. Increasingly advocates are turning their pressure on the president, saying he should use his executive powers to halt removals.

A 24-year-old South Korean, Ju Hong, brought attention to those demands when he repeatedly interrupted Mr. Obama during a speech in San Francisco last month, calling on him to stop deportations of all unauthorized immigrants in the country. In recent days, anti-deportation protesters blocked entrances to immigration detention centers in southwestern Ohio, Northern Virginia and downtown Los Angeles, with more than two dozen people arrested.

In New Orleans, street sweeps by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents this year also led to a protest. On Nov. 14, nearly two dozen demonstrators, including 14 immigrants without legal status, tied up midday traffic at one of the city’s busiest intersections for nearly three hours until the local police arrested them.

“Our people feel they can’t go to the store to buy food or walk their children to school,” said Santos Alvarado, 51, a Honduran construction worker who joined the protest here even though he has legal papers. “We couldn’t be quiet any longer.”

Many immigrants here have been stunned by the arrests, in which some people seemed to be stopped based solely on their Latino appearance, because they had been living here uneventfully since they came in the chaotic days after Hurricane Katrina in 2005 to work on reconstruction.

One of those workers, Jimmy Barraza, was unloading a carful of groceries on Aug. 16 when agents pulled up with pistols drawn, handcuffing him as well as his teenage son, a United States citizen. A mobile fingerprint check of Mr. Barraza, who is also Honduran, revealed an old court order for his deportation.

Mr. Barraza, 28, won release from detention but is still fighting to remain. His wife is a longtime legal immigrant, and he has two other younger children who are American citizens.

“If they deport me,” he said, “who will keep my son in line? Who will support my family?”

Another Honduran, Irma Lemus, was packing fishing rods for a day on the bayou when cruising immigration agents spotted her family and stopped. A fingerprint check revealed that Ms. Lemus, too, had a deportation order.

“They handcuffed me in front of my children,” she recalled, speaking of a son who is 2 and a daughter who is 4.

After she spent 18 days in jail, lawyers won her release with an ankle monitor while immigration prosecutors weigh their options.

Ms. Lemus, 35, had steady work here cleaning hotels and a stable family, including a Honduran son, Joseph, who is 9 and in treatment for an eye disease, and her younger children who are American-born citizens. So she might be eligible for prosecutorial discretion, a policy the Obama administration has applied extensively to suspend deportations.

But although Ms. Lemus — like Mr. Morales, Mr. Barraza and many other illegal immigrants — had no criminal history, she did have a civil immigration record because of an earlier brush with enforcement authorities. She had failed to appear at a court hearing after she was stopped in 2006 crossing the southwest border. The judge’s order gave agents the authorization to deport her speedily.

Taking her children to Honduras, with its rampant gang violence and poor medical care, is not an option Ms. Lemus wishes to consider. So they live in anxiety that she could leave them any day.

“I think it would be so sad for all of my family,” her son Joseph said.

Many Republicans say Mr. Obama is deporting too few illegal immigrants. Robert Goodlatte, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said the figures published last week, showing a 10 percent decrease from 2012, were “just more evidence that the Obama administration refuses to enforce our immigration laws.”

Administration officials said removal numbers were determined by a requirement, included by Congress in the immigration agency’s appropriations, to fill a daily average of about 34,000 beds in detention facilities. The mandate, which is closely monitored by oversight committees, amounts to about 400,000 removals a year.

“We are fulfilling the mandate,” John Sandweg, the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said in an interview. “We want to fill the beds with the right people, that is, public safety and national security threats and individuals we are required by law to detain.”

But he noted that agents were encountering many immigrants who fit those priorities but also had family connections that could make them eligible to stay by prosecutorial discretion.

“Many of these cases are very complex and not cut-and-dry,” Mr. Sandweg said.

In New Orleans, administration officials said, the immigration agency halted some operations after the protest. They had been part of an anti-gang campaign with the local police. But random stops of Latinos were not consistent with the agency’s guidelines, the officials said.

Saket Soni, the executive director of the New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice, said deportations had picked up again in recent days.

“If Congress doesn’t act, another 400,000 people will be deported,” said Mr. Soni, whose group helped organize the protest. “This suffering has to stop.”

Advocates argue that Mr. Obama could expand reprieves he gave to young undocumented immigrants last year. But White House officials say the only solution is for Congress to pass a path to citizenship. Cecilia Muñoz, the director of the Domestic Policy Council, said in an interview that Mr. Obama did not have the legal authority for a wholesale curb on deportations.

“There are not sufficient tools in his toolbox to address the heart of this problem,” she said.

White House won't rule out future executive action on immigration

November 26, 2013, 02:18 pm

By Justin Sink

The White House on Tuesday would not categorically rule out future executive actions to address immigration, while continuing to maintain "there is not" anything the president could do in lieu of congressional action on comprehensive reform.

“I don’t want to speculate about what sort of actions the president might or might not take," White House spokesman Josh Earnest told reporters.

Obama has come under pressure from immigration activists, who have challenged the president to act unilaterally now that a comprehensive immigration bill appears stalled in the House. The president was heckled twice during events in San Francisco on Monday while discussing immigration reform, with protesters each time demanding an end to deportations via executive order.

In 2012, the Obama administration announced it would stop deporting some illegal immigrants who entered the United States as children, assuming they met certain criteria.

But the White House has maintained that path is not feasible for the nation's entire immigrant population, arguing, as Obama did Monday, that the issue must be addressed legislatively.

"If, in fact, I could solve all these problems without passing laws in Congress, then I would do so," Obama told one of the hecklers who interrupted his speech at the Betty Ong Chinese Recreation Center. "But we’re also a nation of laws. That’s part of our tradition. And so the easy way out is to try to yell and pretend like I can do something by violating our laws."

But while the White House has ruled out a sweeping halt to deportations, it is unclear whether Obama could use his executive authority, which includes the ability to grant temporary work permits, to help some of those here illegally.

Still, Earnest stressed that the White House believed congressional action was the only way to fully address the issue.

“We have been very clear that the problem that the president is trying to solve here is one that can only be solved with the Congress, and that problem is an immigration system that everybody acknowledges is broken," he said.

Obama's immigration speech interrupted by hecklers

By Josh Richman

jrichman@bayareanewsgroup.com

 

President Barack Obama, left, has his speech interrupted by Ju Hong, right on stage, who heckled him about anti-deportation policies, Monday, Nov. 25, 2013, at the Betty Ann Ong Chinese Recreation Center in San Francisco. The young man shouted about his family being separated for Thanksgiving, and said Obama should use his executive power to stop this. "Stop deportations, yes we can," the man and other people chanted. The Obama stopped Secret Service agents who tried to remove the protesters. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

 

SAN FRANCISCO -- President Barack Obama on Monday urged Republicans in Congress to stop standing in the way of immigration reform, an issue he very dearly wants to return to the front burner of domestic policy and the headlines.

 

But the president's speech was dramatically interrupted by hecklers in a reserved seating section who urged him to halt deportations, of which his administration has conducted a record number. One young man shouted about his family being separated for Thanksgiving, and said Obama should use his executive power to stop this. "Stop deportations, yes we can," the man and other people chanted.

The president stopped Secret Service agents who tried to remove the protesters.

"I respect the passion of these young people," he said, noting they're fighting to keep their families together. "But we're also a nation of laws, that's our tradition."

"The easy way out is to yell and pretend I can do something" without addressing the laws that require such deportations, he said. "It's not just a matter of us saying we're going to violate the law."

"Ultimately, justice and truth win out," he said, returning to his exhortation for comprehensive reform.

"We look like the world -- you've got a president named 'Obama,'" he said somewhat wryly. "What makes us Americans is our shared belief in certain enduring principles, our allegiance to a set of ideas, to a creed, to the enduring promise of this country."

Obama, with his job approval ratings near the lowest point of his tenure amid the botched technology and political pressures of the new health care law's rollout, barnstormed the Bay Area to try to return immigration to the headlines and to raise money for Democrats.

Ju Hong, 24, of Alameda, who led the hecklers, said after the event it had been "a huge opportunity for me to be here and speak out."

 

"I wasn't impressed by his answer," said Hong, who came to the U.S. from South Korea at age 11. Halting deportation is well within the president's executive powers, he said, but instead "he's using political talking points to ease out the community members."

Janny Liang, 23, said most of the hecklers were DREAMERs affiliated with ASPIRE, Asian Students Promoting Immigrant Rights through Education.

"We needed to tell Obama we are sick of having our families deported and separated," said Liang, a Santa Rosa Junior College student.

She declined to comment on Obama's response to the protestors, or to the rest of his speech beyond saying that it was "expected."

Speaking to a crowd of about 400 invited guests at the Betty Ong Chinese Recreation Center on Mason Street in Chinatown, he mentioned the health care law only briefly, noting the federal enrollment website is getting better while California's has been far more successful from the start.
"States like California are proving the law works, people want the financial security of health insurance," he said.

He also briefly addressed the nuclear deal his administration has just brokered with Iran, which has met with mixed reactions at home and abroad. Along with ending the Iraq war, killing Osama bin Laden and next year's withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, this stands as a campaign promise kept, he said.

"We cannot commit ourselves to an endless cycle of conflict," and "tough talk and bluster" are no substitute for lasting security, he said.

But Obama spoke mostly on immigration reform, which he framed as a moral and economic necessity as the existing system isn't letting the nation reach its potential.

On Thanksgiving this Thursday, millions of American families will recall and retell their tales of immigration and self-sacrifice so their children could have better lives, Obama said. And though much of the political debate centers on the U.S.-Mexico border, he said, "we're blessed with immigrants from all the world who've put down roots in every corner of this country."

"The only thing standing in our way right now is the unwillingness of certain Republicans in Congress. There is bipartisan hope of getting it done" given passage in the Senate.

Reform includes eliminating the backlog of family visas, attracting skilled entrepreneurs, and providing a "pathway to earned citizenship for those living in the shadows" among many other things, he said.

"This isn't just the right thing to do, it's the smart thing to do," he said, though he acknowledged this doesn't mean it'll happen because "this is Washington... and everything is looked at through a political prism."

"I believe ultimately... good policy is good politics," he said.

Although House Speaker John Boehner said last week said last week that Congress must act on immigration reform, he has refused to let the bipartisan bill passed by the Senate in June come up for consideration in the House. Republicans remain split over whether reform should include providing a path to citizenship for immigrants who are already here without legal status.

"I believe the Speaker is sincere, I think he genuinely wants to get it done" as do some other House Republicans, Obama said Monday. "But its going to require some courage. There are some members of the Republican caucus who think this is bad politics for them back home."

"We can't leave this problem for another generation to solve," the president said. "If we don't tackle this now, we're undercutting our own future."

Introducing him at the speech was Geetha Vallabhaneni, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who immigrated to the United States from India 15 years ago. After working for 12 years to get a green card, she started Luminix, an enterprise software company.

See the entire article at http://www.mercurynews.com/immigrationdebate/ci_24598028/obama-san-francisco-calls-immigration-reform#

Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) Statistics

Controversial quota drives immigration detention boom

By Nick Miroff, Published: October 13

KARNES CITY, Tex. — In the past five years, Homeland Security officials have jailed record numbers of immigrants, driven by a little-known congressional directive known on Capitol Hill as the “bed mandate.”

The policy requires U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to keep an average of 34,000 detainees per day in its custody, a quota that has steadily risen since it was established in 2006 by conservative lawmakers who insisted that the agency wasn’t doing enough to deport unlawful immigrants.

But as illegal crossings from Mexico have fallen to near their lowest levels since the early 1970s, ICE has been meeting Congress’s immigration detention goals by reaching deeper into the criminal justice system to vacuum up foreign-born, legal U.S. residents convicted of any crimes that could render them eligible for deportation. The agency also has greatly expanded the number of undocumented immigrants it takes into custody after traffic stops by local police.

Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials say that they are not needlessly jailing immigrants to meet a quota and that they find plenty of candidates for detention and deportation by targeting criminals who pose a threat to public safety and border security.

But critics of the mandate note that the majority of ICE detainees are not violent offenders. Immigration judges eventually allow many to remain in the United States, but the detainees may spend months in costly federal custody, even when far cheaper alternatives are available, such as ankle bracelets and other forms of electronic monitoring.

With federal spending on immigration detention and deportation reaching $2.8 billion a year, more than doubling since 2006, the mandate has met growing skepticism from budget hawks in both parties, particularly after DHS officials told Congress during the “sequestration” debate in April that the agency could save money by lowering the bed mandate to 31,800 and relying on cheaper alternatives to jails. But House Republicans successfully pushed back, set the mandate at 34,000 detainees and ordered ICE officials to spend nearly $400 million more than they requested.

ICE operations are largely unaffected by the government shutdown, since the agency’s workers are among the federal employees considered essential, DHS officials have said.

Some of the additional money provided by Congress will be spent filling beds at places such as the brightly painted Karnes County Civil Detention Center, which opened here last year amid bobbing oil derricks on the rolling plains south of San Antonio. It holds more than 600 detainees, but ICE prefers not to call them that.

They are “residents,” guarded by unarmed “resident advisers,” and they sleep in air-conditioned, unlocked “suites” with flat-screen TVs overlooking volleyball courts and soccer fields. The low-security facility, built and operated on the government’s behalf by a private contractor, the GEO Group, offers computer labs, libraries and microwaves for making popcorn.

“This place is great,” said one young man from Honduras, strumming a government-issued bass guitar in a recreation room, along with newfound band mates from El Salvador and Guatemala.

Most detainees here are Central American migrants picked up along the border. Having requested asylum, they await an ICE interview to determine if they have a legitimate fear of returning home.
 

In the meantime, they can earn $3 a day working on cleaning crews or in the laundry room, and there are free English classes, “life skills” instruction and tutorials in Microsoft Word and Excel. They dine in a cafeteria cheerfully appointed with Southwestern art and Georgia O’Keefe prints.

The jail has become a showcase for improved detention conditions, especially as ICE relies less on the low-cost bed space offered by aging, rural county jails and signs contacts with for-profit private detention companies that include incentives such as guaranteed minimum-occupancy payments.

Congress’s expanding detention goals have been a boon to the contractors, especially Florida-based GEO Group and Tennessee-based Corrections Corp. of America.

The two companies have won hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of ICE contracts in recent years while lobbying Congress on immigration enforcement issues.

Former ICE director Julie Myers Wood, who led the agency from 2006 to 2008 under President George W. Bush, said a congressional mandate for ICE to maintain a minimum number of detainees was a reasonable guideline at the outset of her tenure, when the Border Patrol was making more than a million arrests per year.

But today, she said, “it doesn’t make sense.”

Defenders of the bed mandate say it remains a useful tool to compel ICE to devote the maximum amount of resources to catching and deporting illegal migrants and foreign-born legal residents who commit crimes, including dangerous gang members, rapists and other violent felons.

With an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States, they argue, there’s still a vast pool of potential deportees for the agency to pursue, or as Rep. John Abney Culberson (R-Tex.) put it, “plenty of customers.”

“We know ICE can fill more than 34,000 beds, so why would they use less?” said Culberson, a member of the House Homeland Security appropriations subcommittee, which ties ICE funding to its compliance with the mandate.

Four countries — Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador — accounted for 88 percent of all immigration detainees in 2011, the most recent year for which statistics were available.

Broad range of offenses

As illegal border crossings have declined, a growing portion of ICE detainees are legal U.S. residents who face deportation after completing a jail term or probation, targeted by ICE’s Secure Communities program.

Of the 33,391 immigrants held in federal custody on Sept. 7 — a single-day snapshot provided by ICE — 19,864 were convicted criminals, according to the agency.

Yet ICE’s definition of criminals includes a broad range of offenders, and a 2009 internal review found that only 11 percent of detainees had been convicted of violent crimes.

Jose Luis Vargas, a legal U.S. resident since 1986, was arrested by San Antonio police three years ago after neighbors reported a marijuana plant growing in his garden, among his tomatoes and prickly pear cactus.

Vargas, 52, said he had planned to make a poultice with the plant to alleviate joint pain from diabetes, which has left him with impaired vision and an amputated finger.

After two years on probation for the marijuana charge, ICE officials took Vargas into custody and tried to deport him to Mexico. He spent nearly three months in ICE’s South Texas Detention Facility until an immigration judge ordered his release.

“They didn’t treat me badly, but when I’d have to ride to the hospital, I’d miss lunch, and being in handcuffs so much was bad for my circulation,” Vargas said.

Immigrant rights advocates say detainees such as Vargas, who was two years shy of paying off the 30-year mortgage on his San Antonio home, should be allowed to remain under cheaper, less severe forms of ICE supervision, such as GPS-enabled electronic monitoring.

Those alternatives can cost less than $10 a day, they say, while the cost of keeping someone in immigration jail exceeds $150.

“The explicit purpose of ICE detaining people is to make sure they show up for their immigration hearings, so it would make sense to consider less costly, more humane alternatives that meet that same goal,” said Ruthie Epstein, legislative policy analyst for the American Civil Liberties Union.

Immigrant advocates and attorneys say the majority of detainees taken into ICE custody today have convictions for lesser offenses such as drug possession — or no criminal record at all.
Nearly 48 percent of the 350,000 immigrants over the past 16 months who triggered an “ICE detainer” — a request by the agency that local jails or police hold an individual until ICE can pick them up — had no criminal convictions, not even traffic violations, according to the TRAC Immigration Project.

Almost half of all potential deportees who appear in immigration court are allowed to remain in the United States, according to TRAC data.

But many end up spending months, even years, in ICE custody while they await a ruling.


Detention alternatives

ICE officials have testified to Congress that Alternatives to Detention programs — geared toward legal residents with family and community ties — have had compliance rates of 96 percent with court-ordered appearances.

Yet the agency’s budget for alternatives is less than $100 million, dwarfed by its detention budget. The comprehensive immigration bill approved by the Senate in June would expand use of these methods, but the legislation faces increasingly dim prospects in the House.

ICE officials also note that they have limited discretion over which detainees are eligible for alternative forms of supervision. The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 greatly expanded the scope of crimes that could trigger deportation.

More than two-thirds of the immigrants in ICE custody on Sept. 7, for instance, were “mandatory cases,” including drug offenders, violent offenders and anyone involved in prostitution-related crimes, among other violations that trigger automatic detention. Pending immigration legislation would give greater discretion to federal judges to assign detention on a case-by-case basis.

“We’re not forcing poor little people to be in there to meet a quota,” said Rep. John Carter (R-Tex.), chairman of the House Homeland Security appropriations subcommittee.

“The law is the law, and none of these people are being held contrary to the law,” he said.

The Heartache of an Immigrant Family

 

By SONIA NAZARIO

Published: October 14, 2013

LOS ANGELES — WHEN we talk about immigration to America, we tell a hopeful story about courage and sacrifice. But that story obscures the fact that, especially for the poor, immigration is often a traumatizing event, one that tears families apart.

Consider the experience of one family, originally from Honduras. In 1989, Lourdes Pineda was the single mother of a 5-year-old boy and a 7-year-old girl. She sold tortillas, plantains and used clothes door to door, but barely earned enough to feed her children, and feared not being able to send them to school past the sixth grade. So she made the painful decision to leave them behind in Honduras, and found work in the United States as a nanny, taking care of other people’s children.

Her daughter went to live with her maternal grandmother, her son — Luis Enrique Motiño Pineda — with his paternal grandmother. Enrique, whose story I followed for a book, was devastated. He was passed from relative to relative, left wondering, didn’t his mother love him enough to be with him? In 2000, when he was 16, he set off to find her. It took him eight attempts to cross through Mexico and into the United States — a journey of 122 days and 12,000 miles.

Enrique had left behind someone of his own: a girlfriend, María Isabel Carias Durón, whom he later learned was pregnant. She followed Enrique north a few years later, leaving their daughter, Katerin Jasmín, behind. Enrique was determined that his daughter not endure the long separation he had faced, so when Jasmín was 4, he sent for her to come to Jacksonville, Fla., where the family had established a home.

In the decade after Enrique came to the United States, more migrants arrived than at any time in the nation’s history, fueling a backlash. From 2005 to 2010, nearly a thousand laws were passed by State Legislatures addressing illegal immigration. In 2008, the federal government told all police departments to turn over any unlawful migrants they arrested to federal immigration authorities, a program called Secure Communities. A result: deportations nearly doubled between fiscal 2006 and 2012 to more than 409,000 a year.

And so immigrant families are being separated again, this time in reverse. Parents are being deported to Mexico and Central America, away from United-States-born children.

About 200,000 parents of children who are American citizens were deported between 2010 and 2012, and 5,000 parentless children are now in foster care because their mother or father was detained or deported. An analysis by the Applied Research Center estimates that more than 15,000 children would join them by 2016 if record numbers of deportations continued.

On Dec. 26, 2011, Enrique was partying with friends at a motel when police officers arrived. He had an outstanding arrest warrant for not paying a ticket for driving without a license. (All but 11 states prohibit unlawful immigrants from obtaining a driver’s license.) Enrique was arrested and handed over to federal immigration authorities to be deported. María Isabel was three months pregnant with their second child.

On a Sunday afternoon nearly a year later, Enrique’s mother, Lourdes, arrived at the jail with her grandchildren: Jasmín, then 11 years old, and the 3-month-old baby, Daniel Enrique. I sat with them before video screen No. 9 in a cinder-block visitation stall. The image of Enrique in an orange jumpsuit appeared on the screen.

Jasmín scooted her chair closer, and picked up the receiver to talk. Lourdes lifted Daniel Enrique, with chubby cheeks and tufts of black hair, up to the screen. “Say ‘Hello, Papi,’ ” Jasmín said to her brother. Enrique smiled at his son. “I am your father,” he said. “How is my boy?” Enrique had never been allowed to cradle his son. Later, Enrique told me that when he thought about him, he could feel his arms ache. If he were deported, he agonized, would both his children grow up without their father?

There are huge benefits to migration: mothers who go north are able to send money home so their children can eat and go to school. But there are consequences, too: many of these children deeply resent their mothers for leaving. They feel abandoned, and disproportionately join gangs or get pregnant, searching for the love they feel they missed.

The United States is spending billions on walls that don’t really keep migrants out (a University of California, San Diego, study showed that 97 percent of migrants who want to cross the border eventually get through), and on locking up and deporting people, many of whom return. Border enforcement, guest worker programs and pathways to citizenship haven’t addressed the problem. Instead they have sealed in many migrants who would have preferred to circle back home, attracted temporary workers who never left, and legalized migrants who then brought relatives illegally, causing the number of unlawful migrants to grow.

We can prevent this pain, and slow the flow of migrants permanently, only by addressing the “push” factors that propel migrants, especially women, to leave in the first place — and by helping families like Enrique’s avoid the heartache that his mother’s exodus began a quarter-century ago.

We can start by creating opportunities for women in just four countries: Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, which send three-quarters of all undocumented migrants here. The United States could increase aid to those countries to improve education for girls, which would lower birthrates. It could finance or promote microloans to help women start job-generating businesses. It could gear trade policies to give clear preferences to goods from these four countries. And it could work with hometown associations — groups of immigrants in the United States who want to help the towns they came from — to coordinate a percentage of the tens of billions of dollars that immigrants send home to Latin America each year toward investing in job-creating enterprises. (One Mexican hometown association helped build a factory in Oaxaca, which has employed many would-be immigrants.)

This targeted economic development would cost much less than the billions — $18 billion each year — we currently dole out for immigration enforcement.

For too long, American immigration policy has ensured access to cheap, compliant workers. This has helped spur our economy, but has come at a great cost to taxpayers, as well to the immigrants themselves. We must demand a different approach, one in line with the goal of keeping families intact.

In August, after a total of 14 months in jail, Enrique received a miracle: a visa to stay in the United States legally, thanks to two lawyers, Sui Chung and Michael Vastine, who agreed to represent him pro bono and tirelessly fought his case. Jasmín and María Isabel obtained similar visas two months earlier. Enrique will not be torn from his family.

But imagine the suffering they would have been spared, if Lourdes had never had to come here in the first place.

Sonia Nazario is the author of “Enrique’s Journey: The Story of a Boy’s Dangerous Odyssey to Reunite with his Mother,” recently published in a young adult version.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on October 15, 2013, on page A27 of the New York edition with the headline: The Heartache of An Immigrant Family.

Obama plans immigration push after fiscal crisis ends

According to Reuters, President Obama said that immigration reform would be a top priority once the fiscal crisis has been resolved.

Read the entire article here at Reuters: Obama Plans Immigration Push After Fiscal Crisis Ends
 

AILA: Government Shutdown and Shutout

http://ailaleadershipblog.org/2013/10/16/shutdown-and-shut-out/

10/16/2013

It has now been two weeks since the government shut down.  During that time, the media has spent a lot of time on closed national parks and Tea Party politicians storming barricades at the World War II Memorial–a recent addition to the National Mall, whose barricades are less daunting than those stormed in Normandy, France in 1943.  Yet the day-to-day machinery of the government has also closed in much less visually melodramatic ways.  The unsexy administration of justice has ground to a halt and hundreds of thousands of American businesses, employers, families and individuals await the resolution of the budget/health care impasse so that they can get on with their lives and their work.

As an immigration lawyer, my focus tends to run to the agencies that administer the immigration laws.  In fact, most of them are operating.  Customs and Border Protection, which guards the airports and the borders is unaffected by the shutdown.  U.S. Citizenship & Immigration Service, the decider of applications for status in the U.S., is open for business, due to the fact that it is funded by the immigrant applicants themselves and not the federal budget.  Immigration & Customs Enforcement, responsible for overseeing the removal of individuals from the U.S. and representing the government before the U.S. immigration courts, is also operating if not quite at full steam.  The deportation and investigation officers remain busy identifying those subject to removal, detaining them and removing them from the U.S.  However, the lawyers for the government who appear before the courts are furloughed and the courts they appear in front of are also offline.

The Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), the nation’s immigration courts, has received the brunt of the “funding hiatus,” as the voice mail messages of the furloughed employees say.  The immigration courts are largely shuttered. In courts around the country, that would normally hear thousands of cases a week, operations are suspended.  Courts continue to hear detained cases, but the vast majority of cases are not detained and those cases are not being resolved, adding to the court’s already notorious backlog.  When cases are not heard, people’s lives are upended.  Individuals are waiting for asylum hearings that may allow them to bring their family from danger abroad.  Many long-term residents look forward to having their day in court where they can remove the specter of removal which has haunted them for, in some cases, years.  For example, I have a client whose hearing was cancelled last week.  Now twenty years old, she has resided in the U.S. since she was three.  The government and the judge agree that she should receive her residence, yet a number of factors, none of them her doing, have conspired to leave this case in limbo.  Hurricane Sandy cancelled one hearing, the Congressional quota on visas in her category cancelled another and the budget/health care impasse has cancelled a third.  No one can say when she will get her hearing and she and her family will continue to wait while they figure out what will become of their lives.  The old axiom of “justice delayed is justice denied” has rarely been more true.

Yet, detention and removals continue.  Congress has mandated that 30,000 detention beds remain full.  Thus, ICE stacks up bodies in for-profit detention centers without regard for dangerousness or flight risk. The costs of detaining so many immigrants gets little attention and, as we face a budget showdown, it is amazing that no one in Congress has scrutinized the gross amounts of money paid to for-profit prisons to detain the non-dangerous.  One does not need to be a cynic to believe that the lavish contributions of the for profit prison industry to Congressional campaign put the kibosh on such inquiries.  The shutdown of the immigration courts while the removal machine goes on with barely a hiccup is a grotesque parody of the government’s love affair with enforcement while paying only grudging lip service to the administration of justice.

However, immigrants and their families will continue to dream. They, unlike Congress, will rise daily and do their jobs growing our food, caring for our children, and cleaning our cities.  In this shutdown, they will have little relief from the specter of sudden arrest, detention and removal, but also little hope that they will get a fair chance to prove why they deserve to remain.  That knowledge rarely diminishes the immigrant spirit.  Five hundred and twenty one years ago, intrepid explorers left Spain for the unknown and landed on this continent, forever changing the course of the world.  Every day, idealistic and entrepreneurial immigrants leave their homes and families in an effort to achieve the American dream, a process that goes on undaunted, no matter how much political dysfunction undermines those values.

By Andres Benach, Member, AILA Amicus Committee

**SI USTED ESTA PUESTO BAJO UN “HOLD” DE INMIGRACION O ESTA DETENIDO POR ICE**

 

1

No Firme Ningun Papel

Al firmar, puede estar renunciando su derecho a un abogado o su derecho a una audiencia con un juez.

2

No Acepte “Salida Voluntaria”

Consulte con un abogado de inmigración antes de aceptar “salida voluntaria.” Aceptar salida voluntaria resultare en que no tenga oportunidad de una audiencia con un juez. Tendrá que salir de los Estados Unidos, y dependiendo de las circunstancias no podrá volver a los Estados Unidos para obtener beneficios de inmigración

3

No Asuma Que Oficiales De Inmigracion Le Explicaran Sus Derechos

Oficiales de inmigración y jueces de inmigración pueden no explicarle todos sus derechos y opciones que tiene. No asuma que la información que le den sea correcta. Consulte con un abogado antes de decidir qué acción tomar.

4

Usted Tiene El Derecho A Un Abogado

Usted tiene el derecho de consultar con un abogado aunque este detenido. Tiene el derecho de ser representado por un abogado en todas audiencias antes un juez de inmigración, pero el gobierno no pagara su abogado, ni le darán uno. You have the right to consult with an attorney even when detained.

5

Consulte Con Un Abogado

Consulte con un abogado de inmigración y dele todo la información sobre su estado migratorio, y las circunstancias de su arresto. Debe de darle todo la información al abogado para que lo pueda representar completamente en su caso de inmigración. Es importante que su abogado entienda su circunstancia para poder determinar si usted califica para beneficios de inmigración.

6

Puede Pedir Que Lo Dejen Salir Libre O Bajo Fienza

Si usted es detenido por ICE, digale al official de inmigracion que quisiera que lo dejaran salir libre o bajo fianza. Si esta option no se la dan, dígale al oficial de inmigracion que quiere ver un juez. Recuerdo de no firmar salida voluntaria (únicamente si esta absolutament seguro que quiere salir de Estado Unidos).

**IF YOU HAVE BEEN PLACED UNDER AN ICE HOLD OR ARE IN ICE CUSTODY**

 

1

Do Not Sign Any Paperwork

By signing, you may waive your right to an attorney or your right to a hearing before a judge

2

Do Not Accept "Voluntary Departure"

Consult with an attorney before accepting "voluntary departure.” Signing a voluntary departure acceptance means you will not have a hearing before a judge. You will have to leave the United States, and depending on your circumstances you may not be able to return to the United States or obtain any immigration relief.

3

Do Not Assume Immigration Officials Will Explain Your Rights

Immigration officials and Immigration Judges may not fully explain your rights and options to you. Do not assume the information you are given is correct. Consult with an attorney before deciding on what action to take.

4

You Have the Right to an Attorney

You have the right to consult with an attorney even when detained. You have the right to be represented by an attorney in any hearings before an Immigration Judge, but the Immigration Service and the United States Government will not pay for your attorney, nor will they provide you one.

5

Consult with an Attorney

Consult with an immigration attorney and provide all the information regarding your status, and the circumstances surrounding your arrest. You must provide your attorney with all the information so the attorney can fully represent you in your immigration case. It is important for your attorney to understand your circumstances in order to determine if you have any immigration relief.

6

You May Ask for a Bond for Your Release

If you are detained by ICE, tell the immigration officer you would like to be released on your own recognizance or on bond. If this option is not extended to you, tell the immigration officer you would like to see a judge. Remember not to sign a voluntary departure/removal (unless you are absolutely sure you want to leave the US).