Peter Holley reports in the WashPost:
“Stories such as Beristain’s — in which law-abiding parents are deported because of their immigration status — have inundated the news media in recent months. The Twitter account “Trump Regrets” has amassed nearly 260,000 followers by retweeting disappointed and angry Trump voters.
“Previously,” as The Post’s Samantha Schmidt and Sarah Larimer reported last month, “the Obama administration prioritized the deportation of people who were violent offenders or had ties to criminal gangs. Trump’s executive order on Jan. 25 expanded priorities to include any undocumented immigrants who had been convicted of a criminal offense.”
“Personally, I think the president should be giving him a handshake,” Flora said. “Either Trump was lying when he said we were only deporting bad guys, or Trump’s view of bad guys is so expansive it can literally include every single immigrant.”
Days after Beristain’s arrest, Flora said, he filed a “stay of removal” to prevent deportation, but it was rejected March 15.
“Once the case is finalized and done, there’s really no reason to keep him around in their eyes,” Flora said, referring to ICE. “They think, ‘Why take up jail space for no reason if all the legal options have been exhausted?’ ”
Flora said the decision to deport Beristain is a “wildly disproportionate” response when measured against the law he broke nearly two decades ago.
“If you asked 100 people to paint you a picture of a bad guy, no one would draw anyone remotely resembling Roberto,” he said.
Helen Beristain told the Tribune that — in their effort to get her husband U.S. citizenship — the couple has had 10 attorneys over the past 18 years. Many of those attorneys, she said, told them that they had no choice but to wait for immigration laws to change.
Instead of changing in the couple’s favor, the laws evolved to make her husband more vulnerable to deportation, a development the Beristains never expected. She told the Tribune that Trump’s deportation measures — the one’s she thought her family would be exempt from — are harming “regular people.”
“I understand when you’re a criminal and you do bad things, you shouldn’t be in the country,” Helen told the CBS TV affiliate WSBT. “But when you’re a good citizen and you support and you help and you pay taxes and you give jobs to people, you should be able to stay.”
“We were for Mr. Trump,” she added. “We were very happy he became the president. Whatever he says, he is right. But, like he said, the good people have a chance to become citizens of the United States.”
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And, folks can thank restrictionist, white nationalist “fellow travelers” like then-Senator, now Attorney General Jeff Sessions, egged on by the likes of current Presidential Advisors Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, for blocking sensible immigration reform efforts in Congress. So, we’re spending taxpayer money and Government resources to make American a worse place by deporting members of the business community who have done nothing but good things for the country and those around them. You’d have to reside somewhere deep in the bowels of the “GOP Swamp” to make sense of this type of policy.
PWS
03/26/17