DHS KAKISTOCRACY RIPS OFF VULNERABLE IMMIGRANTS AND THEIR FAMILIES!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/ice-is-holding-204-million-in-bond-money-and-some-immigrants-might-never-get-it-back/2019/04/26/dcaa69a0-5709-11e9-9136-f8e636f1f6df_story.html?fbclid=IwAR3vw-xzEXl2SSo2e-F0_kT54OSpZcckjBQz1WK26d2OBnsy0Rv6AADtniw&utm_term=.3a3765b59dfc

Meagan Flynn reports for WashPost:

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is holding on to more than $200 million in bond money that belongs to immigrants who have been in the agency’s custody, cash that has yet to be returned to thousands of immigrant families or the U.S. citizens who bailed them out, according to data obtained through open records requests.

The unreturned bond money stood at $204 million as of July 31, 2018, according to the data, which immigration law clinics at Stanford University and the University of California at Davis obtained and shared exclusively with The Washington Post. The pot of immigrant bond money grew by $57.3 million between September 2014 and July 2018, the data shows.

More than 18,000 bond payments went unclaimed in that four-year period, according to the data.

Though the trust fund — which the Treasury Department maintains — cannot be used for any other purpose, getting the money back to immigrants and their friends and families has proved a difficult and lengthy process. ICE officials said the agency makes multiple attempts to reach the people who posted the bond, but paperwork and checks mailed to them sometimes are undeliverable or receive no response, and it can be impossible to find the people if they moved out of the country. Those who do submit claims, ICE said, receive their funds within a month.

ICE did not provide data on average wait times to claim the money, and several lawyers and immigrants told The Post they have in some cases waited a year or longer after submitting for reimbursement.

Invisible walls: The lives altered by Trump’s crackdown on immigration

Numerous immigration attorneys said the system for reclaiming the funds is mystifying and nearly impossible to navigate without a lawyer or English-language proficiency, and some who pay the bonds are unlikely to see the money again. As bond amounts remain on the rise, lawyers said thousands of people are putting their life savings in ICE’s hands to secure an immigrant’s temporary freedom without any idea of when or if they’ll see the money again. Many immigrants say it takes far longer than a month to reclaim their funds.

“The toll on a poor family having to pay thousands of dollars in bond can’t be overstated,” said Jayashri Srikantiah, director of Stanford’s Immigrants’ Rights Clinic. “Clearly, something is breaking down when there are hundreds of millions of dollars sitting in an account that belongs to those immigrant families. If nothing else is clear, that is clear.”

Srikantiah and Holly S. Cooper, co-director of UC Davis’s Immigration Law Clinic, said they intend to push for congressional oversight of ICE’s bond system. They said the amassing of bond money indicates a serious problem and could amount to a massive theft from people who can least afford it.

Marco Antonio Torres Rojas, a father of three from Mexico, won his immigration case in August, but it took roughly seven months for ICE to return the $25,000 bond his family and friends paid to gain his release — seven years ago.

When he was detained in 2012 — for overstaying an H-2B work visa — an immigration attorney assured his family that paying the $25,000 bond would be the only way to stave off deportation. But for Rojas, a landscaper and snowplow driver in Minnesota, the sum appeared impossible. He and his wife had just a few thousand dollars in savings.

“We felt a sense of desperation,” Rojas said.


A Guatemalan migrant and his 10-year-old son look at the Miami cityscape outside an immigration courthouse in January. Some immigrants who are required to pay bond have to make difficult decisions about posting the cash payments, knowing they might not see the money back for years. (Brynn Anderson/AP)
Pay legal fees, or bond fees?

While criminal defendants typically can pay a bondsman 10 percent of the set bail amount to gain release, in the immigration system about 90 percent of bonds require cash for the whole amount upfront.

ICE initially sets bonds on a “case-by-case basis,” the agency said, though not everyone is eligible for bond or release.

For those who are eligible, bonds have been steadily rising since the second half of the Obama administration, after an influx of Central American immigrants. The average bond set by a judge was $3,000 to $5,000 for years, but it rose to $8,000 in fiscal year 2016, according to data from the Executive Office of Immigration Review. Bonds have remained at that level or slightly higher into the first months of fiscal year 2019.

“I hear from people who call me asking, ‘Should I use the money to pay legal fees or pay the bond fees?’ ” Cooper said. “ ‘I only have one truck. If I sell it, it’s $5,000.’ ”

Once the money is raised — often from numerous people in each case — only a U.S. citizen or legal permanent resident can post the bond. Because many immigrants don’t have a close relative who fits the definition, they sometimes turn to acquaintances or neighbors, said Michelle N. Mendez, an immigration attorney at the Catholic Legal Immigration Network in Silver Spring, Md. That person, according to ICE policies, is the only one who will ever get a copy of the bond paperwork.

Mendez said many immigrants don’t know that once the bond is posted, only the person who posted the bond can get it back.

The person who posted the bond money might move across the country or even out of the country; they might lose the original paperwork required to reclaim the money back, creating additional hurdles; the obligor might die.

Gloria Contreras Edin, an immigration attorney in Minnesota, said she had one undocumented client whose obligor was on the brink of dying of cancer. Before the man died, her client wheeled him into her office so he could sign over the bond responsibilities to someone else. Her client, Anibal El Verengue, a Guatemalan who lives in Minnesota and was ordered removed in 2015 for entering the country illegally, said he would not have known to do this if he did not have an attorney to advise him.

“One friend who I owe money won’t even speak to me, because he doesn’t trust me anymore,” El Verengue said, whose application for asylum is pending.


María Sosa washes dishes in her apartment in the Panorama City neighborhood of Los Angeles. Her husband won his immigration case in October, and it took five months to get his bond payment back from the federal government. (Ivan Kashinsky for The Washington Post)
Money just sits there

Mendez said she discovered how dire the problem was in 2009, two years after a well-publicized immigration raid at a Baltimore 7-Eleven resulted in numerous deportations. When Mendez checked in on some of the families of the deported men, she discovered they were living in poverty.

“I wanted to make sure that when the breadwinner got deported, the family would have some money,” Mendez said. “Those were the cases where I started to think: How do we get this money back? Nobody really knew . . . At that point, they’re really so far removed from the bond posting — thinking, ‘Oh well. I lost my case. I’m not entitled to anything’ — that they just let it be.”

“ICE does not notify the alien for whom the bond was executed, because its contract is with the obligor,” ICE said in a statement.

ICE makes three attempts to locate the person, but if the person who posted the bond did not file paperwork indicating a change of address, it might not be possible to find them.

And even those who follow the procedures said the process is rife with delays.

María Sosa, a legal permanent resident in California, said her husband won his immigration case in October but that she did not receive a bond cancellation notice from ICE until January. Unable to speak English, she made numerous visits to an ICE office to understand what she needed to do to get her money back; she received it on March 29.

She said she and her husband could not afford to attend his funeral.

“The whole system is created in a way that doesn’t foster the accessibility to those funds,” Contreras Edin said. “And so many times the money is left and just sits there.”

ICE pays interest on bond money while unclaimed, up to one year. After that, the funds are transferred to the Treasury Department. The Treasury Department said it does not know what year the $204 million began accumulating. The U.S. government is not allowed to use the money unless immigrants fail to adhere to bond conditions and forfeit it, otherwise known as a bond breach.

Bonds can be breached for reasons such as failure to show up in court or failure to turn the immigrant over to authorities if ICE asks the obligor to do so. But there can also be mistakes. Mendez recalled a case in which ICE breached her client’s bond for failure to show up to be deported — but her client was still appealing the removal order, and ICE had apparently missed that information, according to 2015 correspondence with ICE she provided to The Post.

About $34.5 million in bonds are forfeited each year, money that ICE uses to defray detention and apprehension costs.

Advocates at Stanford and UC Davis argue that the arrangement creates a conflict of interest.

“They obviously have incentive to not exercise discretion favorably and to breach more bonds,” said Emily Child, who worked on the Stanford and UC Davis research with Cooper. “That money goes right back into their pockets.”

ICE said that all breach decisions can be appealed to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service. When breaching bonds, agents consider whether the violation was an accident or intentional and whether the obligor or immigrant was acting in good faith, ICE said in a statement.

‘An incredible amount’

Rojas was getting nervous. It was March, and he had been waiting seven months for a check that would be addressed to his brother’s wife, the U.S. citizen who posted his bond.

He called his attorney, Contreras Edin, expressing his fear that something had fallen through the cracks. The lawyer’s office contacted ICE bond specialists. A few weeks later, the check arrived.

Cooper and Srikantiah said they believe that working with an attorney is crucial to recovering the bond money, and many immigrants and those who post the bonds don’t have lawyers or can’t afford one.

They argue that ICE’s systems are outdated and cumbersome, and they believe immigrants should receive copies of their bond paperwork in a language they can understand, something that could mitigate the possibility of fraud and ensure that those who pay bonds receive the money back when they are entitled to it.

“While something like $5,000 or $10,000 might not be a lot of money to the federal government, to an individual family that has pulled all of their money together in order to get a loved one out of detention, it’s an incredible amount,” Srikantiah said. “With detention growing at the rate it is, we think this is a really good time for Congress to provide some oversight and actually investigate why this is happening.”

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My favorite comment:

“So, we steal their children and their money.  How contemptible.”
Says it all!
PWS
04-28-19

HUMAN SMUGGLING TRAGEDY IN SAN ANTONIO — 9 DIE, 17 OTHERS SUFFER LIFE-THREATENING INJURIES!

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2017/07/23/texas-tragedy-8-dead-including-children-found-locked-in-hot-truck-in-suspected-smuggling-case/?hpid=hp_rhp-top-table-main_pn-texas-9am-retest%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.6a18d3474065

Eva Ruth Moravec and Todd C. Frankel report in the Washington Post:

It began with a desperate request for water and a Walmart employee’s suspicions about a tractor-trailer parked outside. That led officials on Sunday to discover at least 39 people packed into a sweltering trailer, several of them on the verge of death — their skin hot to the touch, their hearts dangerously racing — and eight men already dead. Another would die later at a hospital.

Authorities think they found an immigrant smuggling operation just 2½ hours from the Mexican border that ended in what San Antonio Police Chief William McManus described as a “horrific tragedy.” The victims, as young as 15, appeared to have been loaded like cargo into a trailer without working air conditioning during the height of the Texas summer. It was unknown how long they had been in the trailer or where their journey started, but 30 of the victims were taken to area hospitals and 17 had life-threatening injuries. Federal authorities said the victims were “undocumented aliens.”

Reyna Torres, consul of Mexico, confirmed in Spanish that Mexican nationals are among those dead and in the hospitals and said the consulate is interviewing the survivors.

City Fire Chief Charles Hood said some of the victims appeared to have suffered severe heatstroke, with heart rates soaring over 130 beats per minute. In the worst cases, Hood said, “a lot of them are going to have some irreversible brain damage.”

Even more people were thought to have been inside the trailer before help arrived, police said. Survivors at six area hospitals told investigators that up to 100 individuals were originally in the tractor-trailer.

Walmart surveillance video showed cars stopping and picking up people as they exited the back of the trailer. But suspicions were not raised until an employee noticed a disoriented person, who asked for water. The employee then called police, authorities said. Then, a chaotic scene unfolded outside the Walmart on the city’s southwest side, as ambulances and police cars arrived and people were carried away, leaving behind shoes and personal belongings strewn across the asphalt and trailer floor.

The truck’s driver, identified as James M. Bradley, 60, of Clearwater, Fla., has been arrested and is expected to be charged Monday morning, said the U.S. attorney’s office for the Western District of Texas.

The grisly discovery in San Antonio comes as the Trump administration is calling on Congress to increase funding for border security and to expand the wall on the southern border with Mexico.

It also illuminates the extreme risks immigrants face as they attempt to elude border agents in the searing summer heat. Some try to slip through legal checkpoints undetected, while others sneak illegally across the border. Often, they are fleeing violence and poverty in Latin America, advocates say.

Many have died attempting to enter the United States, drowning in the Rio Grande, lost in the desolate ranch lands of south Texas, or collapsing from exhaustion in the Arizona desert.

Two weeks ago, Houston police discovered 12 immigrants, including a girl, who had been locked for hours inside a sweltering box truck in a parking lot, banging for someone to rescue them. Three people were arrested. A Harris County prosecutor said the migrants were at imminent risk of death.

In May, border agents discovered 18 immigrants locked in a refrigerated produce truck, with the temperature set at 51 degrees. Passengers were from Latin America and Kosovo.

One of the deadliest smuggling operations occurred in 2003, when 19 people died after being discovered in an insulated trailer abandoned at a truck stop in Victoria, Tex. The truck driver in that case, Tyrone M. Williams, was sentenced to nearly 34 years in prison.

. . . .

Later Sunday, moments after Mass ended at the historic San Fernando Cathedral, two dozen people held a gathering in Main Plaza to show their support for immigrants. A handful of people made speeches­ and said prayers in Spanish and English, using a megaphone, to a crowd of about 50 people. Children played in the splash pads nearby while adults wandered in and out of the crowd, many taking photographs and videos.

“Hold your family extra tight tonight,” said Barbie Hurtado, the statewide organizer for ­RAICES, which organized the event, “and keep the people that lost their lives in your thoughts, in your prayers.”

Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-Tex.), a San Antonio native, addressed attendees at the end of the hour-long service.

“This represents a symptom of a broken immigration system that Congress, of which I am a part, has had the chance to fix but has not,” he said. “That’s a colossal failure that has a human cost.”

Another San Antonio native, Debbie Leal-Herrera, 55, said she was in town visiting from New Mexico this week and wanted to come to the plaza because “it touches­ me as a Hispanic.”

Leal-Herrera, an elementary school teacher, said she knows several people who have immigrated to the United States illegally and has taught many students whose parents are undocumented.

“It reminds me of how much we truly take for granted,” she said. “What a beautiful gift it is to be an American.”

Advocates for immigrants in Texas are still reeling from the recent passage of the tough new immigration law, set to take effect Sept. 1. The deaths marked yet another blow.

Maria Victoria De la Cruz, who is originally from Mexico, publicly urged federal officials not to deport the immigrants who were found Sunday.

“As an immigrant, I feel destroyed,” she told the group in Spanish. “It’s not fair to return them to the place they have fled.”

During the vigil, a somber group quietly approached the consul from Mexico to ask about a relative. Juan Jose Castillo, who said he is from the Mexican state of Zacatecas but lives in the United States, said he was relieved that his 44-year-old brother was among the survivors.

“He came out of necessity,” Castillo said in Spanish. “It’s very bad.”

*****************************************

Read the full story at the link.

One way of saving some lives: reform the immigration system to 1) allow more individuals to immigrate legally, and 2) provide full due process adjudications of asylum and other claims for protection under U.S. law, with reasonable access to counsel and no detention unless required by individualized circumstances, to individuals who present themselves at the border. This would encourage individuals who seek to to migrate to or seek refuge in the U.S. to do so in an orderly fashion, with complete screening, through our legal system.

Militarizing the border and creating a detention empire might or might not reduce undocumented migration in the long run. But three things are certain: 1) smuggling fees will go up; 2) methods used by smugglers will become more risky; and 3) more individuals will die attempting to enter the U.S.

PWS

07-21-17