"The Voice of the New Due Process Army" ————– Musings on Events in U.S. Immigration Court, Immigration Law, Sports, and Other Random Topics by Retired United States Immigration Judge (Arlington, Virginia) and former Chairman of the Board of Immigration Appeals Paul Wickham Schmidt. To see my complete professional bio, just click on the link below.
The attitude of President Trump toward federal law enforcement is, to put it mildly, mixed. The FBI refused to bend to his will. So the special counsel team is composed of “hardened Democrats” engaged in a “WITCH HUNT.” The FBI was, according to Trump, too preoccupied with the Russia investigation to prevent the Parkland, Fla., school shooting. The agency’s reputation “is in Tatters — worst in History!”
But Immigration and Customs Enforcement has passed the loyalty test. ICE’s enforcement surge “is merely the keeping of my campaign promise,” the president tweeted. Referring to ICE acting director Thomas Homan, Trump said, “Somebody said the other day, they saw him on television. . . . ‘He looks very nasty, he looks very mean.’ I said, ‘That’s what I’m looking for!’ ”
This is territory more familiar in political systems of personal rule. The agency that defies the ruler must be discredited. The agency that does his bidding is viewed as a kind of Praetorian Guard.
Most of the professionals working in ICE would surely deny this characterization, pointing to an important legal role independent from any individual president. But they need to understand that their work is now being conflated with Trump’s nativism.
ICE’s 40 percent increase in arrests within the United States after Trump took office is now closely associated with the president’s political priorities. His sweeping executive orders on immigration broadened the focus of enforcement beyond serious threats to public order. Arrests of immigrants without criminal convictions have spiked. Routine “check-ins” with ICE officials can end with handcuffs and deportation. “Sanctuary cities” — a recurring presidential political obsession — are being targeted with additional personnel. Hundreds of children have been removed from parents seeking asylum and detained separately — compounding their terrible ordeal of persecution and flight. ICE recently announced a new policy that makes it easier to detain pregnant women. Asylum seekers have often been denied “humanitarian parole” while their cases are decided, effectively jailing them without due process.
Officials of the agency insist that their nonpolitical mandate hasn’t changed. But Homan has praised the Trump administration for taking “the handcuffs off law enforcement.” Whatever their intention, ICE agents are being used by the president to send a message of callousness. And they are tying themselves to Trump’s political fortunes in the process.
The job performed by ICE is essential to American security, and not easy. Agents must prevent some truly dangerous people from entering and staying in the country — gang members, drug dealers and terrorists. But it is also their job to deal with asylum seekers — men, women and children fleeing from gangs, targeted for death by drug cartels and oppressed by terrorist states. Some of the worst people in the world, and some of the most sympathetic people in the world, are processed by immigration officials. It takes care and discernment to make this distinction.
ICE is not an agency famous for its care and discernment. In releasing an immigration activist detained by ICE early this year, U.S. District Judge Katherine B. Forrest said, “It ought not to be — and it has never before been — that those who have lived without incident in this country for years are subjected to treatment we associate with regimes we revile as unjust. . . . We are not that country.”
Accusations of abuse in ICE custody are numerous and serious, and they preexisted the Trump era. An investigation by ProPublica and the Philadelphia Inquirer reported cases of racial profiling, fabricated evidence and warrantless searches — all given little scrutiny by overwhelmed immigration courts. During the past few years, there have been hundreds of accusations of sexual abuse, racial slurs, abusive strip searches and verbal harassment in ICE jails, prisons and detention centers. For an institution that claims “zero tolerance” for such practices, it seems to get a lot of serious complaints. One asylum seeker, Gretta Soto Moreno, has called the facilities worse than normal prisons because ICE “feels like it can treat immigrants any kind of way.”
This is the bitter fruit of dehumanization — in a facility, in a system, in a country. It is unclear whether Trump would even regard such a reputation as undesirable. He has effectively given permission for bullying.
This is an issue ripe for more rigorous congressional oversight — even an independent commission to investigate charges of physical and sexual abuse in the ICE system. But this would require a critical mass of elected Republicans to give a damn about the rights and dignity of migrants. It is a distant dream.
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Dehumanization of migrants, who are among the most human of all among us, is certainly one of the most insidious aspects of the Trump/Sessions/Nielsen,/Homan regime. When we allow individuals like these who have both forgotten their proper roles in a democratic republic and arrogantly checked their humanity at the door, we essentially dehumanize ourselves.
Not surprisingly, migrants grow in moral stature as we shrink, individually and collectively. And the restrictionist (occasionally, as in the case of folks like Rep Steve King (R-IA) “neo-Nazi”) wing of the GOP is certainly a prime enabler of this reprehensible conduct. As even some GOP commentators have noted, there is a disturbing “empathy and humanity gap” evident when GOP politicos speak in dismissive and derogatory terms about migrants.
Only time will tell how soon we will be able to remove these unworthy public officials from the positions they now hold and replace them with responsible public servants who treat others with dignity, respect, humanity, and reasonableness. But, the speed and decisiveness with which we act will say much about America’s future prospects as a nation.
The Trump administration has unshackled ICE, making all undocumented immigrants fair game for deportation — even those with no criminal records, who have sunk roots into their communities. Nowhere has this new era of enforcement been more ruthless than in Pennsylvania. This is a collaboration with the Philadelphia Inquirer.
ICE’s Philadelphia office is fanning out into communities across its three-state region and making more “at-large” arrests of immigrants without criminal convictions than anywhere else in America.
by Deborah Sontag and Dale Russakoff for ProPublica
The Trump administration encouraged prosecutors to seek felony charges against those who re-enter the U.S. after being deported. In the case of this Bucks County gardener, government employees felt halfhearted about turning an immigrant into a criminal.
by Deborah Sontag
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Powerful support for my oft stated position that under no circumstances should Congress authorize any additional unneeded enforcement agents for DHS without a complete accounting for what is being done with the current positions and without requiring evidence of real changes in training, policy, and supervision to eliminate the types of abuses described in these articles. Otherwise, we’ll be handing the Trump Administration an unrestrained, untrained, out of control “internal police force.” I can’t think of anything much worse for individual rights under our Constitution. It’s also making the argument for the complete abolition of ICE in its current structure look more and more reasonable.
“The architecture of all this fear is not incidental. It’s the result of policy. The agents who pulled over Alejandro were acting within the bounds of U.S. law. So the question surrounding his arrest is not whether it was legitimate; it’s whether it was a good use of resources. Why choose him, a family man with no criminal record, over any of the 11 million other undocumented people in America?
Even operating full tilt, ICE has nowhere near the manpower or money to enforce U.S. immigration laws against everyone in the country illegally. Experts estimate that the agency has the capacity every year to deport roughly 4% of all undocumented immigrants. So the real challenge is to establish clear priorities about who should be at the top of the list. In theory, all DHS employees, from ICE officers on the street to prosecutors in immigration court, have the power— known as “prosecutorial discretion”—to determine when and whether to enforce immigration laws. But in reality, those decisions are shaped from the top. Presidents determine what immigration policy will look like.
Both the Obama and George W. Bush Administrations assumed this responsibility. They directed DHS employees to use their prosecutorial discretion to prioritize the deportation of certain criminal groups. They also outlined clear factors like old age, U.S. military service or a lack of criminal record that might mitigate enforcement.
Illustration by Michele Asselin for TIME
The Trump Administration has not issued similar prerogatives. In January 2017, Trump signed an Executive Order calling for the enforcement of immigration laws against “all removable aliens,” and in February 2017, DHS rescinded all previous Administrations’ priorities and restrictions. Then DHS Secretary John Kelly replaced them with new guidance so broad that employees were effectively instructed to “prioritize” the deportation of all undocumented immigrants. The only listed exception were those who qualified for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, a now uncertain program shielding those who were brought to the U.S. as children.
“Prosecutorial discretion shall not be exercised in a manner that exempts or excludes a specified class or category of aliens from enforcement of the immigration laws,” wrote Kelly in a memo to staff. The Administration also eliminated Obama-era moratoriums on certain types of enforcement, including what’s known as “collateral arrests,” which is when ICE agents detain not only an intended target, but also anyone else “deportable” nearby.
Immigration hard-liners, like Attorney General Jeff Sessions, have cheered the change. The new policy, they say, restores the enforcement of U.S. immigration law “as written.” But critics argue that this doesn’t track. Congress has not given DHS more money or enforcement officers, so there can’t simply be more enforcement. The difference is who is being enforced against. Despite the President’s frequent talk of “rapists and murderers,” the most influential shift in 2017 was that ICE agents arrested 146% more noncriminals, compared with the year before. In 2016, 14% of the people whom ICE arrested had no criminal record. In 2017, close to 26% were. “There’s the sense that they’re just going after low-hanging fruit,” says Pratheepan Gulasekaram, a constitutional and immigration law professor at Santa Clara University.
The effect is an implied war on all undocumented immigrants. It’s a move that unravels decades of state, federal and local policies designed to establish a level of relative security among immigrant communities, experts say. That security, in turn, encourages broad social benefits—like people reporting crimes to police, rather than avoiding all officers, or enrolling children in government health programs. Under Trump, that’s all up for grabs.
Take Amenul Hoque, for example. The Bangladeshi father of three, who overstayed a visa in 2005, had lived in Newark, N.J., with his wife and three kids for the past 14 years. In 2011, ICE officials granted Hoque a temporary stay of removal, requiring that he check in regularly with ICE, which he did. His next check-in was scheduled for March, according to local news. But on Jan. 17, ICE agents showed up at the fried-chicken restaurant where he works, detained him for nearly a month and then loaded him onto a flight to Bangladesh. Hoque’s wife Rojina Akter, who is also undocumented, is now in deportation proceedings as well.
This decision to create “a culture where enforcement appears to happen randomly,” Gulasekaram says, is not an accident. It has the effect of discouraging new immigrants from coming to the U.S. and encouraging existing ones to leave. The Trump Administration deported fewer immigrants last year largely because fewer people were attempting to cross the border.
In a statement to TIME, Danielle Bennett, an agency spokeswoman, said that “national security threats, immigration fugitives and illegal re-entrants” remain priorities for deportation. The agency has also said that it does not “unnecessarily disrupt the parental rights of alien parents and legal guardians of minor children.” In its 2017 report, ICE also stated that 92% of its arrests in 2017 were criminals. Its definition of criminal includes those with civil offenses, like non-DUI traffic stops, and those whose only crimes are immigration-related.
Undocumented immigrants in communities across the country are struggling to gauge the threat. Maria, who is now caring for three U.S.-citizen children on her own, feels trapped. She can take her kids back to a country where she has citizenship rights but where they have none. Or she can stay in the U.S. and live in fear. Because she’s already here illegally, she has no easy path to legal status. Trump uses terms like anchor babies and chain migration to describe how families supposedly bring their relatives into the country, but it doesn’t actually work that way, says Laura St. John, legal director at the Florence Immigrant and Refugee Rights Project. “It’s a myth.”
St. John says Maria’s American-born children can’t petition DHS to give her legal status until the eldest turns 21. That’s in 2036. Someone in Maria’s position would need to obtain a federal waiver, a process that often takes up to 10 years and could require that she return to Mexico to wait it out, St. John explains. Maria’s brother, a U.S. citizen, could also petition for her, but that too would likely require Maria to return to Mexico, for an even longer period of time. The State Department is so backlogged that it’s currently processing visa requests for Mexican siblings filed on Nov. 15, 1997. “To people who practice immigration law, ‘anchor babies’ and all that just sounds ridiculous,” says Erin Quinn, an attorney at the Immigrant Legal Resource Center in San Francisco. “There’s really no legal mechanism for people like [Maria] to leave and come back legally. It just doesn’t exist.”
For now, Maria will stay in the U.S., pick grapes and care for her children in the country of their birth. But when she imagines raising her girls without their father, tears slide down her cheeks. “It’s the worst thing that you can do to a family,” she says. Every day, when Alejandro calls on FaceTime, Isabella, who’s 2½, lights up. “Papi?” she asks, reaching for Maria’s iPhone. A thousand miles south, in Sonora, Mexico, Alejandro holds his screen close to his face. “Papi!” Isabella squeals. “I love you!”
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Read Edwards’s much longer complete article at the above link.
What an ugly, cruel, inhumane, dishonest, and often just plain nasty group of individuals we now have in charge of our immigration policies! Random acts of cruelty never bode well for a nation’s future. And, there is a clear record being made of what’s happening that should put the “Trump Cabal” and all of those who have enabled them firmly in the company of history’s most notorious human rights abusers.
James Hohmann reports in the Washington Post “Daily 202:”
Jeff Sessions attacked Oakland’s mayor in a speech last week in Sacramento. An ICE spokesman has resigned over what he says were false statements by the attorney general. (Rich Pedroncelli/AP)
— “The San Francisco spokesman for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has resigned over what he described as ‘false’ and ‘misleading’ statements made by top-ranking officials, including Attorney General Jeff Sessions and ICE Acting Director Thomas D. Homan,”Meagan Flynn reports. “The now-former spokesman, James Schwab, told news outlets late Monday that his resignation stemmed from statements by Homan and Sessions that potentially hundreds of ‘criminal aliens’ evaded ICE during a Northern California raid in February because Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf warned the immigrant community in advance. Schwab said he pushed back on that characterization — but said ICE instructed him to ‘deflect’ questions from the press.”
“I quit because I didn’t want to perpetuate misleading facts,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle. “I asked them to change the information. I told them that the information was wrong, they asked me to deflect, and I didn’t agree with that. Then I took some time and I quit. … I didn’t feel like fabricating the truth to defend ourselves against her actions was the way to go about it.”
It’s not like James Schwab and James Hohmann are the only ones calling out Trump & Sessions for their consistent lies and misrepresentations about immigration. As reported by the always amazing Tal Kopan @ CNN last week, California Governor Jerry Brown essentially issued the same warning that you can’t believe much of anything that comes out of our Attorney General’s mouth:
“California Gov. Jerry Brown fired back at Attorney General Jeff Sessions and President Donald Trump on Wednesday after their lawsuit challenging the state’s immigration laws, calling the administration “full of liars” and repeatedly referencing the special counsel investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 US election.
The Democratic governor was speaking on the heels of Sessions’ visit to Sacramento to announce a lawsuit against California for its so-called sanctuary policies of non-cooperation with federal immigration enforcement.
In slamming Sessions’ appearance as a “political stunt” that was full of “lies” and untruths, Brown needled Sessions personally and his relationship with the President, which is famously fraught.
“I do think this is pure red meat for the base, and I would assume — this is pure speculation — that Jeff thinks Donald will be happier with him and I bet Donald will be tweeting his joy with this stunt,” Brown said.”
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You can read both Hohmann’s and Tal’s complete articles at the links.
Sadly, the Trump Administration as a whole, and Jeff Sessions in particular, have made lies, misrepresentations, and knowingly false narratives a staple of their tortured and often illegal immigration policies. I think that, rather than “biased Federal Judges” as disingenuously claimed by Sessions, has led to an impressive string of losses for the Administration and the DOJ in the lower Federal Courts on immigration issues.
I predict that the losing has just begun. If and when Sessions follows through on his apparent plan to destroy the U.S. Immigration Court System, literally thousands of cases are likely to be sent back or permanently blocked by legal rulings in the Circuit Courts.
Although Sessions arrogantly claims that a majority of the Supremes are “in the Administration’s pocket” and therefore can be counted on to overrule the Circuits, fact is that the Supremes can’t and won’t take every big immigration case the Government loses. So, Trump and Sessions better get used to “living with defeat.” It’s going to become a way of life, as our immigration and justice systems deteriorate under this Administration’s toxic leadership.
The call to abolish ICE is, above all, a demand for the Democratic Party to begin seriously resisting an unbridled white-supremacist surveillance state that it had a hand in creating. Though the party has moved left on core issues from reproductive rights to single-payer health care, it’s time for progressives to put forward a demand that deportation be taken not as the norm but rather as a disturbing indicator of authoritarianism.
White supremacy can no longer be the center of the immigration debate. Democrats have voted to fully fund ICE with limited fanfare, because in the American immigration discussion, the right-wing position is the center and the left has no voice. There has been disturbing word fatigue around “mass deportation,” and the threat of deportation is so often taken lightly that many have lost the ability to conceptualize what it means. Next to death, being stripped from your home, family, and community is the worst fate that can be inflicted on a human, as many societies practicing banishment have recognized. It’s time to rein in the greatest threat we face: an unaccountable strike force executing a campaign of ethnic cleansing.
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Read the rest of McElwee’s well-written and very provocative article at the link.
Not going to happen! Yet the out of control misconduct by ICE and its leadership during this Administration certainly helps McElwee make a powerful moral, if not practical political, case for elimination. Definitely worth a read.
During four days last February, Immigration and Customs Enforcement targeted Austin, apparently in retaliation for Travis County Sheriff Sally Hernandez’s justified refusal to honor some warrantless detainers. Despite claims by ICE that its operation targeted “public safety threats,” most of those arrested had no criminal background and most of those who did committed only relatively minor offenses.
ICE was not straightforward about its operation. Only through Gus Bova’s Texas Observer Freedom of Information Act request did I learn that ICE had apprehended almost three times the number initially disclosed to me. And, of those, many were also law-abiding residents. I still await answers from ICE concerning whether its deceit extended beyond Austin and has continued.
One “dreamer” reported that for weeks following these raids, her parents would leave home only one at a time for fear of leaving their children without any caregiver.
Indiscriminate raids make immigrants fearful of assisting local law enforcement. ” but the Trump administration does not conduct these for safety. Its objective is to instill fear and to intimidate immigrants into leaving. And this is the same treatment that dreamers could receive beginning next month if House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) continues to block a vote to secure their status.
ICE raids on the innocent rip apart families, devastate communities and satisfy only President Trump’s anti-immigrant hysteria.
Lloyd Doggett, Washington
The writer, a Democrat, represents Texas’s
35th District in the House.”
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“Right on,” Lloyd!
Almost every day, America’s most despised and least trusted police force “earns their chops” with cruel, inhumane, dishonest, and ultimately senseless acts of “Gonzo ” enforcement.
“We can diminish ourselves as a Nation, but it won’t stop human migration!”
“A week after he won the election, President Trump promised that his administration would round up millions of immigrant gang members and drug dealers. And after he took office, arrests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers surged 40 percent.
Officials at the agency commonly known as ICE praise Trump for putting teeth back into immigration enforcement, and they say their agency continues to prioritize national security threats and violent criminals, much as the Obama administration did.
But as ICE officers get wider latitude to determine whom they detain, the biggest jump in arrests has been of immigrants with no criminal convictions. The agency made 37,734 “noncriminal” arrests in the government’s 2017 fiscal year, more than twice the number in the previous year. The category includes suspects facing possible charges as well as those without criminal records.
Critics say ICE is increasingly grabbing at the lowest-hanging fruit of deportation-eligible immigrants to meet the president’s unrealistic goals, replacing a targeted system with a scattershot approach aimed at boosting the agency’s enforcement statistics.
ICE has not carried out mass roundups or major workplace raids under Trump, but nearly every week brings a contentious new arrest.
2:42
Trump said he would deport millions. Now ICE is in the spotlight.
The White House has said they are focused on deporting undocumented immigrants who “pose a threat to this country.”(Monica Akhtar/The Washington Post)
A Virginia mother was sent back to El Salvador in June after her 11 years in the United States unraveled because of a traffic stop. A Connecticut man with an American-born wife and children and no criminal record was deported to Guatemala last week. And an immigration activist in New York, Ravi Ragbir, was detained in January in a case that brought ICE a scathing rebuke from a federal judge.
“It ought not to be — and it has never before been — that those who have lived without incident in this country for years are subjected to treatment we associate with regimes we revile as unjust,” said U.S. District Judge Katherine B. Forrest, reading her opinion in court before ordering ICE to release Ragbir.
“We are not that country,” she said.
Immigrants whose only crime was living in the country illegally were largely left alone during the latter years of the Obama administration. But that policy has been scrapped.
Those facing deportation who show up for periodic “check-ins” with ICE to appeal for more time in the United States can no longer be confident that good behavior will spare them from detention. Once-routine appointments now can end with the immigrants in handcuffs.
More broadly, the Trump administration has given street-level ICE officers and field directors greater latitude to determine whom they arrest and under what conditions, breaking with the more selective enforcement approach of President Barack Obama’s second term.
Trump officials have likened this to taking “the shackles off,” and they say morale at ICE is up because its officers have regained the authority to detain anyone they suspect of being in the country illegally.
1:36
ICE arrests chemistry professor in U.S. for 30 years
Syed Ahmed Jamal was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents Jan. 24 after living in the United States for more than 30 years.(KCTV5)
Officers are detaining suspects in courthouses more often, and ICE teams no longer shy from taking additional people into custody when they knock on doors to arrest a targeted person.
“What are we supposed to do?” said Matthew Albence, the top official in the agency’s immigration enforcement division, who described the administration’s goal as simply restoring the rule of law. If ICE fails to uphold its duties to enforce immigration laws, he added, “then the system has no integrity.”
In addition to arresting twice as many immigrants who have not been convicted of crimes, ICE also arrested 105,736 immigrants with criminal convictions, a slight increase. That figure includes people with serious or violent offenses as well as those with lesser convictions, such as driving without a license or entering the country illegally.
ICE’s arrest totals in Trump’s first year in office are still much lower than they were during Obama’s early tenure, which the agency says is partly because it is contending with far more resistance from state and local governments that oppose Trump’s policies. And the president’s repeated negative characterizations of some immigrant groups have created an atmosphere in which arrests that were once standard now erupt as political flash points.
Obama initially earned the moniker “deporter in chief” because his administration expelled hundreds of thousands of immigrants, including people with no criminal records. But when Republicans blocked his effort to create a path to citizenship for millions living in the country illegally, Obama curtailed ICE enforcement, especially for those without serious criminal violations. Those measures incensed Republicans — and eventually helped to propel Trump into office.
An estimated 11 million people are living in the United States without legal residency, and the new era of ICE enforcement has shattered the presumption that their social and economic integration into American life would protect them.
Because immigration records are generally secret, it is difficult to independently verify how federal agents decide to make arrests. Immigrant advocates and ICE often clash over immigration cases, and both sides frequently present incomplete versions of an immigrant’s case.
Last month, a college chemistry instructor in Kansas, Syed Ahmed Jamal, was taken into custody on his lawn while preparing to take his daughter to school. He arrived from Bangladesh 30 years ago and built a life in the United States. More than 57,000 people signed an online petition asking ICE to stop his deportation, describing him as a community leader and loving father.
An immigration judge placed a temporary stay Wednesday on ICE’s attempt to deport him, but the agency’s account of Jamal’s case is starkly different. ICE said he arrived in 1987 on a temporary visa. He was ordered to leave the United States in 2002, and he complied, but three months later, he returned — legally — and overstayed again. A judge ordered him to leave the country in 2011, but he did not. ICE said agents took Jamal into custody in 2012. He lost his appeal in 2013.
At first glance, Albence said, many of ICE’s arrests may seem like “sympathetic cases — individuals who are here, and who have been here a long time.”
“But the reason they’ve been here a long time is because they gamed the system,” he said.
Defenders of the tougher approach applaud ICE’s new resolve and say it is U.S. immigration courts — not ICE — that are determining who should be allowed to stay. And they reject the idea that the longer someone has lived in the country, the more the person deserves to be left alone.
“As someone who has practiced law for 20-plus years, I find strange the idea the longer you get away with a violation, the less stiff the punishment should be, and that your continued violation of the law is basis for the argument that you shouldn’t suffer the consequences of that violation,” said Matthew O’Brien, director of research at the Federation for American Immigration Reform, or FAIR, which backs Trump’s approach.
No statute of limitations
The furor that has followed recent ICE arrests reflects a deeper disagreement — not unlike the fight over young, undocumented “dreamers” — about the consequences that those in the country illegally should face.
Living in the United States without legal status is generally treated as a civil violation, not a criminal one. And many Americans, especially Democrats, do not view it as an offense worthy of arrest and deportation once someone has settled into American life.
But in the hyper-politicized atmosphere of the immigration debate, where the merits of these arrests are increasingly litigated in public, partisans now argue over each immigrant’s perceived worthiness to remain in the country, even when a full grasp of the facts is lacking.
When a 43-year-old Polish-born doctor in Michigan who came to the United States at age 5 was arrested last month, supporters rushed to his defense. ICE justified its decision by saying the doctor, who was a permanent legal resident, had had repeated encounters with local police and two 1992 misdemeanor convictions for destruction of property and receiving stolen items, crimes that under U.S. immigration law are considered evidence of “moral turpitude.”
Others who committed crimes long ago and satisfied their obligations to the American justice system have learned there is no statute of limitations on ICE’s ability to use the immigrants’ offenses as grounds to arrest and deport them.
When Ragbir, the New York immigration activist, was detained last month during a scheduled check-in with ICE, his supporters accused the agency of targeting him for retaliation.
But Ragbir is the type of person who is now a top priority for ICE. After becoming a lawful U.S. resident in 1994, he was convicted of mortgage and wire fraud in 2000.
Ragbir served two years in prison, then married a U.S. citizen in 2010. Immigration courts repeatedly spared him from deportation, but his most recent appeal was denied, and ICE took him into custody eight days before his residency was due to expire.
Ragbir was so stunned that he lost consciousness, court records show, and was taken to a hospital.
Former acting ICE director John Sandweg, who helped draft the 2014 memo that prioritized arrests based on the severity of immigrants’ criminal offenses, said the agency has resources to deport only about 200,000 cases a year from the interior of the United States.
“The problem is, when you remove all priorities, it’s like a fisherman who could just get his quota anywhere,” Sandweg said. “It diminishes the incentives on the agents to go get the bad criminals. Now their job is to fill the beds.”
Albence said the agency’s priority remains those who represent a threat to public safety or national security, just as it was under Obama. The difference now is that agents are also enforcing judges’ deportation orders against all immigrants who are subject to such orders, regardless of whether they have criminal records.
“There’s no list where we rank ‘This is illegal alien number 1 all the way down to 2.3 million,’ ” he said.
Albence said ICE prioritizes its caseload using government databases and law enforcement methods to track fugitives. But in the vast majority of cases, ICE takes custody of someone after state or local police have arrested the person.
This approach dovetailed with ICE’s enforcement emphasis on targeting serious criminals, and at first, the Obama administration and other Democrats embraced it. But activists protested that ICE was arresting people pulled over for driving infractions and other minor offenses at a time when Congress was debating whether to grant undocumented immigrants legal residency. Advocacy groups pushed cities and towns to become “sanctuary” cities that refused to cooperate with ICE.
ICE’s caseload far exceeds the capacity of its jails. In addition to the 41,500 immigrants in detention, according to the most recent data, the agency has a caseload of roughly 3 million deportation-eligible foreigners, equal to about 1 in 4 of the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants nationwide.
More than 542,000 of those are considered fugitives, meaning they did not show up for their immigration hearings and were ordered deported, or they failed to leave the country after losing their cases. Nearly 2 in 3 were not considered a priority for deportation under Obama. They are now.
An additional 2.4 million undocumented immigrants are free pending hearings or appeals, or because the agency has not been able to deport them yet and the Supreme Court has ruled that such individuals cannot be jailed indefinitely. Nearly 1 million of this group have final deportation orders, including 178,000 convicted criminals.
They include the Michigan doctor and Ragbir, the New York activist.
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“It’s true that all these people are deportable, but that doesn’t mean they should all have equal value,” said Cecilia Muñoz, a former policy adviser to Obama who helped shape the administration’s tiered enforcement approach.
“By crowding the courts with all kinds of people, you’re creating a resource problem,” Muñoz said.
“If you apply that logic to local police forces, you’re saying that every robber and rapist is the same as a jaywalker. And then you’re clogging your courts with jaywalkers.”
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The Trump/Sessions/DHS “Gonzo” enforcement program that claims to be targeting criminals but actually busts lots of “collaterals” who are residing here peacefully and contributing to our society is a total sham. It has nothing to do with the “Rule of Law” or real law enforcement.
Unnecessary cruelty, wasting resources, arbitrariness, terrorizing communities, overloading already overwhelmed courts, and undermining the efforts of local politicians and law enforcement are not, and never have been, part of the “Rule of Law,” nor are they professional law enforcement techniques. They are part of the White Nationalist agenda to “beat up” on Latinos and other minorities, lump all immigrants in with “criminals,” stir up xenophobia, and throw some “red meat” to an essentially racist Trump/GOP “base.”
“By crowding the courts with all kinds of people, you’re creating a resource problem,” Muñoz said.
“If you apply that logic to local police forces, you’re saying that every robber and rapist is the same as a jaywalker. And then you’re clogging your courts with jaywalkers.”
Couldn’t have said it better myself!
As I say over and over, ICE under Trump is well on its way to becoming the most distrusted and despised “law enforcement” agency in America. That damage is likely to hamper their mission of legitimate enforcement well beyond the Trump era.
As some commentators have suggested, the only long-term solution might well be eventually dissolving ICE and turning the functions over to a new agency that will operate within the normal bounds of reasonable, professional law enforcement, rather than as a political appendage.
In the meantime, those who believe in American values and the true “Rule of Law,” should resist the out of control DHS at every step. While Trump and the GOP appear unwilling to place any limits on the abuses by the “ICEMEN,” Federal Courts have proved more receptive to the arguments that there are at least some outer limits on the conduct of law enforcement.
“For the better part of a decade, an agency that bilked Chinese immigrant investors out of nearly $50 million operated in plain sight from a storefront in the front lobby of the bustling Hilton San Gabriel hotel.
Their crimes came to light last year after a task force of San Gabriel police and federal immigration officials tracked transactions between Chinese and U.S. banks, conducted cross-border surveillance operations, launched an undercover sting and sought information from the Chinese government.
San Gabriel Valley police departments often use federal partnerships to tackle crimes like these — many of which target vulnerable new immigrants — because they lack the necessary resources, skills and technology to pursue them.
But the largely immigrant communities that they police are starting to protest these partnerships in the wake of aggressive, Trump-era immigration enforcement that has stoked widespread fears over deportations.
On Tuesday, San Gabriel city leaders rescinded a Police Department agreement with immigration officials, citing doubts about the arrangement’s necessity and heightened fears about deportations.
The memorandum of understanding, signed by Police Chief Eugene Harris in December, designates a San Gabriel police detective to act as a customs officer on a task force that investigates various types of immigration-related crimes.
Although the memo states that the designated officer does not have the authority to enforce administrative violations of immigration law, city leaders said the decision should have been brought before the City Council.
The partnership sends the wrong message about the city’s stance toward immigrants, Councilman Jason Pu said. The city’s population is 61% Asian and 25% Latino, and more than half of of all residents are foreign-born. He also asked the City Council to consider a “sanctuary city” resolution at a later meeting.
“The city of San Gabriel embraces our immigrant communities. If the message becomes ‘Come to San Gabriel and get deported,’ it would be devastating to our community and to our businesses,” Pu said.
Harris said the partnership with Homeland Security Investigations was designed to fight crimes, not deport immigrants. Contributing an officer to an HSI task force allowed the department to access federal databases, among other resources.
Councilman John Harrington voted against canceling the agreement and accused other council members of playing politics.
“This sends the message that politics are more important than residents’ safety,” Harrington said.
The news of the agreement was met with alarm in San Gabriel.
Advocacy groups and residents chanted slogans and waved signs before the Tuesday night meeting, which was so crowded that the city was forced to relocate it from City Hall to the nearby San Gabriel Mission Playhouse.
San Gabriel’s agreement was one of dozens that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials have struck with local agencies across Southern California, including jurisdictions as small as Monterey Park and as large as the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department.
The documents lay out terms for information-sharing, compensation for labor costs and, in some cases, the designation of a local police officer to work on a task force with Homeland Security Investigations, ICE’s criminal investigations arm.
Jurisdictions around the state are scrutinizing these agreements and other local collaborations with ICE — and in some cases canceling them.
Pasadena city leaders recently voided an agreement signed by Police Chief Phillip L. Sanchez, saying that it required the signature of the city manager.
Santa Monica also canceled its Police Department’s arrangement with ICE in a letter from the city manager last year, citing concerns about “implied or inadvertent involvement in civil immigration enforcement by the SMPD.”
Oakland city leaders canceled their agreement with ICE after activists learned that two Oakland police officers had stopped traffic during a raid that resulted in the arrests of two people. One was placed in deportation proceedings. Federal officials said the operation was targeting a human trafficking ring, but no criminal charges have been filed.
In Santa Cruz, a criminal investigation targeting gang members also brought about the arrests of several non-gang members for immigration violations. The city police chief, Kevin Vogel, said he was never informed about the possibility of collateral arrests.
“They misled my department as to the actual scope of the operation. I feel like I was lied to,” Vogel said.
ICE officials said they told Vogel that collateral arrests of non-gang members could occur during the operations several days before the raids, which Vogel disputes.
Though Santa Cruz had no agreement with ICE, Vogel warned other police departments to clarify the terms of their cooperation with ICE up front.
“I’m not in a position to tell authorities which laws to enforce,” said Vogel, a 30-year veteran of the Santa Cruz Police Department who retired in June. “But you have to be straight with me if you’re going to come into my city for an operation.”
A detective in San Gabriel has been assigned to an HSI task force since June. The group has arrested two people it says were posing as immigration attorneys in order to charge exorbitant fees for fraudulent legal services. It has also investigated a counterfeit driver’s license and passport operation, and is looking for the owners of 30 Chinese passports discovered in a package.
These cases are typically too small to draw the attention of state and federal law enforcement agencies but too complicated for local police departments to handle with their own resources, Harris said.
Police departments and immigration authorities say these partnerships are strictly for criminal investigations.
But advocates say it may be impossible to ensure these partnerships won’t include what the Trump administration has called “collateral arrests,” or arrests of immigrants who are in the country illegally but are not the target of criminal investigations.
“Even if the original intent is to investigate a crime, if they find neighbors, bystanders that they believe are removable, they will also arrest and detain them,” said Angela Chan of Advancing Justice — Asian Law Caucus, a coauthor of Senate Bill 54, the sanctuary state bill.
Of the 111,000 immigration arrests reported by ICE between Jan. 20 and Sept. 30 of last year, about 8% were collateral arrests. And last year, ICE’s acting director, Thomas Homan, warned that more collateral arrests might be one result of California’s passing a sanctuary state bill.
Agreements like San Gabriel’s, immigrant rights advocates say, often are broadly worded and rarely include any mention of collateral arrests or consequences for violating the agreement, said Ana Muñiz, assistant professor of criminology at UC Irvine.
“On one hand, ICE and HSI can technically comply with agreements, but on the other hand, there are rhetorical and technical loopholes,” Muñiz said.
Police officers working with HSI task forces are “not authorized” to arrest people for administrative violations of immigration law, said Jennifer Reyes, assistant special agent in charge for Homeland Security Investigations Los Angeles. But immigration officers working on HSI task forces have no such restrictions.
“HSI special agents, however, have the authority to make administrative arrests during criminal investigations as part of enforcing our nation’s laws,” Reyes said.
Harris said he thinks proper oversight of joint operations with immigration authorities could ensure that no local resources are used to enforce immigration law.
Federal, state and local agencies work together to emphasize that public safety is a shared goal across all law enforcement agencies, Harris said.
But cities are increasingly wary of the perception of endorsing the Trump administration’s immigration policies. And some city leaders, like Pu, don’t see ICE and HSI as trustworthy law enforcement partners.
“The bottom line is, you just can’t trust ICE during the Trump administration,” Pu said.”
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Yup. Declaring “open season” on law-abiding undocumented members of the community (treating them basically the same as criminals and gangsters) and picking fights with local officials is one of the dumbest “law enforcement” strategies I could imagine. Even after the “Trumpsters” eventually depart, ICE might never be able to re-establish trust and credibility in many communities.
Ted Sherman reports for NJ Advantage Advance Media for NJ.com:
“A federal judge in Newark on Friday issued a temporary restraining order halting the deportations of two Indonesian Christians taken into custody last week while they were dropping their daughters off for school.
U.S. District Judge Esther Salas issued the order after the ACLU went to court, arguing that the summary deportation of the men violated their due process and deprived them of the opportunity to argue their case for asylum.
“These community members, our neighbors, are entitled to argue their case with the protections of due process, especially when the stakes are life-and-death,” said ACLU-NJ Executive Director Amol Sinha.
Gunawan Liem of Franklin Park and Roby Sanger of Metuchen, who both had pending removal orders, were arrested a week ago without warning by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, as part of an increasingly aggressive enforcement effort by the Trump Administration targeting illegal immigration.
A third man, Harry Pangemanan, was not home when ICE agents showed up at his house and he sought sanctuary at the Reformed Church of Highland Park, where Rev. Seth Kaper-Dale has long been championing the cause of the Indonesian Christian community.
“This case involves life-and-death stakes and we are simply asking that these longtime residents be given opportunity to show that they are entitled to remain here,” said Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project. “As in other recent similar cases in Detroit, Boston, Miami and Los Angeles involving mass deportations, we are asking the court to make clear that the fundamental protections of due process apply to non-citizens.”
ICE officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Earlier this week, a federal judge in a similar case in Massachusetts also ordered the government to halt the removal of another group of Indonesian Christians, according to the ACLU, which filed that case too.
The judge ruled that they needed more time to file and receive decisions on motions to re-open their immigration cases over their claims of increasingly perilous conditions for Christians in Indonesia, a predominately Muslim nation.
A sign reads “Let the stay” at The Reformed Church of Highland Park. (Jody Somers | For The Star-Ledger)
According to court documents filed in the New Jersey case, the ACLU sought stays of removal for Liem, Sanger and others to give them a reasonable period of time “to compile and present evidence that would permit them to file motions to reopen their removal cases, including evidence of recent changes in country conditions that make Indonesia increasingly dangerous for Christians.”
In its the complaint against ICE, its Newark director for enforcement and removal, and the Department of Homeland Security, the ACLU said most of those facing detention had U.S. citizen children, and argued their removal would rip apart families.
“They are devout and extremely active in their churches, some in official roles. Many volunteer their time to help disadvantaged members of their local community and beyond: participating in disaster relief efforts and volunteering through their churches,” they said in the complaint.
In a statement, Farrin Anello, senior staff attorney for the ACLU of New Jersey, said the Constitution and laws recognizes that people must not be jailed or deported without an opportunity to seek court review of those harsh actions.
“We are extremely heartened and relieved that Judge Salas has ruled that these families may not be deported while she reviews their case,” she said.
Ted Sherman may be reached at tsherman@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @TedShermanSL. Facebook: @TedSherman.reporter. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
A federal judge in Newark on Friday issued a temporary restraining order halting the deportations of two Indonesian Christians taken into custody last week while they were dropping their daughters off for school.
U.S. District Judge Esther Salas issued the order after the ACLU went to court, arguing that the summary deportation of the men violated their due process and deprived them of the opportunity to argue their case for asylum.
“These community members, our neighbors, are entitled to argue their case with the protections of due process, especially when the stakes are life-and-death,” said ACLU-NJ Executive Director Amol Sinha.
Gunawan Liem of Franklin Park and Roby Sanger of Metuchen, who both had pending removal orders, were arrested a week ago without warning by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, as part of an increasingly aggressive enforcement effort by the Trump Administration targeting illegal immigration.
A third man, Harry Pangemanan, was not home when ICE agents showed up at his house and he sought sanctuary at the Reformed Church of Highland Park, where Rev. Seth Kaper-Dale has long been championing the cause of the Indonesian Christian community.
“This case involves life-and-death stakes and we are simply asking that these longtime residents be given opportunity to show that they are entitled to remain here,” said Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project. “As in other recent similar cases in Detroit, Boston, Miami and Los Angeles involving mass deportations, we are asking the court to make clear that the fundamental protections of due process apply to non-citizens.”
ICE officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Earlier this week, a federal judge in a similar case in Massachusetts also ordered the government to halt the removal of another group of Indonesian Christians, according to the ACLU, which filed that case too.
The judge ruled that they needed more time to file and receive decisions on motions to re-open their immigration cases over their claims of increasingly perilous conditions for Christians in Indonesia, a predominately Muslim nation.
A sign reads “Let the stay” at The Reformed Church of Highland Park. (Jody Somers | For The Star-Ledger)
According to court documents filed in the New Jersey case, the ACLU sought stays of removal for Liem, Sanger and others to give them a reasonable period of time “to compile and present evidence that would permit them to file motions to reopen their removal cases, including evidence of recent changes in country conditions that make Indonesia increasingly dangerous for Christians.”
In its the complaint against ICE, its Newark director for enforcement and removal, and the Department of Homeland Security, the ACLU said most of those facing detention had U.S. citizen children, and argued their removal would rip apart families.
“They are devout and extremely active in their churches, some in official roles. Many volunteer their time to help disadvantaged members of their local community and beyond: participating in disaster relief efforts and volunteering through their churches,” they said in the complaint.
In a statement, Farrin Anello, senior staff attorney for the ACLU of New Jersey, said the Constitution and laws recognizes that people must not be jailed or deported without an opportunity to seek court review of those harsh actions.
“We are extremely heartened and relieved that Judge Salas has ruled that these families may not be deported while she reviews their case,” she said.
Ted Sherman may be reached at tsherman@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @TedShermanSL. Facebook: @TedSherman.reporter. Find NJ.com on Facebook.
issued the order after the ACLU went to court, arguing that the summary deportation of the men violated their due process and deprived them of the opportunity to argue their case for asylum.
“These community members, our neighbors, are entitled to argue their case with the protections of due process, especially when the stakes are life-and-death,” said ACLU-NJ Executive Director Amol Sinha.
Gunawan Liem of Franklin Park and Roby Sanger of Metuchen, who both had pending removal orders, were arrested a week ago without warning by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, as part of an increasingly aggressive enforcement effort by the Trump Administration targeting illegal immigration.
A third man, Harry Pangemanan, was not home when ICE agents showed up at his house and he sought sanctuary at the Reformed Church of Highland Park, where Rev. Seth Kaper-Dale has long been championing the cause of the Indonesian Christian community.
“This case involves life-and-death stakes and we are simply asking that these longtime residents be given opportunity to show that they are entitled to remain here,” said Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project. “As in other recent similar cases in Detroit, Boston, Miami and Los Angeles involving mass deportations, we are asking the court to make clear that the fundamental protections of due process apply to non-citizens.”
ICE officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Earlier this week, a federal judge in a similar case in Massachusetts also ordered the government to halt the removal of another group of Indonesian Christians, according to the ACLU, which filed that case too.
The judge ruled that they needed more time to file and receive decisions on motions to re-open their immigration cases over their claims of increasingly perilous conditions for Christians in Indonesia, a predominately Muslim nation.
A sign reads “Let the stay” at The Reformed Church of Highland Park. (Jody Somers | For The Star-Ledger)
According to court documents filed in the New Jersey case, the ACLU sought stays of removal for Liem, Sanger and others to give them a reasonable period of time “to compile and present evidence that would permit them to file motions to reopen their removal cases, including evidence of recent changes in country conditions that make Indonesia increasingly dangerous for Christians.”
In its the complaint against ICE, its Newark director for enforcement and removal, and the Department of Homeland Security, the ACLU said most of those facing detention had U.S. citizen children, and argued their removal would rip apart families.
“They are devout and extremely active in their churches, some in official roles. Many volunteer their time to help disadvantaged members of their local community and beyond: participating in disaster relief efforts and volunteering through their churches,” they said in the complaint.
In a statement, Farrin Anello, senior staff attorney for the ACLU of New Jersey, said the Constitution and laws recognizes that people must not be jailed or deported without an opportunity to seek court review of those harsh actions.
“We are extremely heartened and relieved that Judge Salas has ruled that these families may not be deported while she reviews their case,” she said.
Ted Sherman may be reached at tsherman@njadvancemedia.com. Follow him on Twitter @TedShermanSL. Facebook: @TedSherman.reporter. Find NJ.com on Facebook.”
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Wasting tax dollars, hurting families, dividing communities, teeing off Federal Judges, what more could you ask from the “New American Gestapo?”
From right, Rene Bermudez wipes away tears as he holds his 4-year-old daughter Danyca during a protest on behalf of his wife Liliana Cruz Mendez on May 23.
Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images
“Donald Trump hasn’t created the massive “deportation force” he promised as a candidate for president. But he has done the next best thing—boosting, bolstering, and unleashing the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, giving it broad authority to act at its own discretion. The result? An empowered and authoritarian agency that operates with impunity, whose chief attribute is unapologetic cruelty.
Under President Obama, who ramped up immigration enforcement even as he sought to protect large categories of unauthorized immigrants from deportation, ICE was a controversial agency whose practices came under heavy scrutiny from activists and some fellow Democrats. But in the year since Trump’s election, ICE has become something far more sinister: a draconian force for harassing and detaining people who pose no threat to the United States or its citizens.
And in keeping with one of President Trump’s first executive orders, which drastically expanded who the federal government considered a priority for deportation, the most striking aspect of ICE under this administration has been its refusal to distinguish between law-abiding immigrants, whose undocumented status obscures their integration into American life, and those with active criminal records—the “bad hombres” of the president’s rhetoric.
Erasing that distinction is how we get the arrest and detention of Lukasz Niec, a Polish immigrant and green card holder who was brought to the United States as a young child. Last week, ICE agents arrested Niec at his home in Michigan, citing two misdemeanor convictions for offenses that were committed when he was a teenager, according to the Washington Post. Although one of the convictions had been scrubbed from his record, it can still be used to remove him from the country. A practicing physician, Niec now sits in a county jail, awaiting possible deportation.
Niec’s standing as an affluent professional makes him an unusual case. More typical is the plight of Jorge Garcia, a 30-year resident of the United States who was recently deported to Mexico after his arrest by ICE. Married with two American-born children, Garcia was brought to the country as a child. He was working to secure legal status when, following Trump’s election, he was ordered to leave the country. In a statement to CBS News, ICE explained that anyone violating immigration laws “may be subject to immigration arrest, detention and … removal from the United States.” Despite its ability to exercise discretion, ICE has opted for an indiscriminate approach to immigration enforcement, arresting and detaining unauthorized residents regardless of whether they pose a threat to the public.
In its drive to remove as many undocumented residents as possible, ICE has begun deporting immigrants who make routine check-ins to their offices, even if those people are simply awaiting visas or green cards that would allow them to stay. Vice News recounts the story of Andre Browne, a Barbados native married to an American citizen. At a recent check-in with ICE agents, he was “arrested and forced to surrender all personal belongings.” He was jailed and now faces deportation. Similarly, in Virginia, a mother of two, Liliana Cruz Mendez, was detained following her regular check-in with immigration officials. Her offense? A traffic misdemeanor.
ICE’s tactics can have life-changing effects, even when its targets are spared deportation. The New Yorker tells of Alejandra Ruiz, brought to the United States as an infant. Last March, she was arrested by ICE agents citing a deportation order issued when she was a toddler. She was shackled and sent to an immigrant-detention facility operated by a private-prison firm. Ruiz was eventually released—she had filed a motion to reopen her childhood case for asylum—but it came at the cost of her livelihood: She lost her job as a senior care worker.
In addition to these activities, ICE is ramping up its mass raids in an effort to spread paranoia and uncertainty in cities with large undocumented populations. The agency is deliberately targeting these “sanctuary cities,” hoping to compel cooperation with their newly aggressive enforcement operations. This is all part of a larger strategy to create an atmosphere of fear and desperation for unauthorized immigrants. It’s behind President Trump’s decision to rescind Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals and end deportation protections for immigrants from Haiti and El Salvador. Vox’s Dara Lind describes it as “a combination of policy and messaging to keep the threat of deportation hanging over immigrants’ heads” meant to make sure “they don’t get too comfortable here because they could be taken at any minute.”
Anti-immigration hard-liners describe these incidents in the bloodless language of “immigration enforcement,” but that obscures the violence and trauma of what’s happening on the ground: ICE is whisking people away to jails or private prisons and then exiling them from their homes and communities with little chance of recourse or recompense. And the pace is only increasing. While the overall number of “border removals”—those caught trying to cross the border—dropped last year, as a result of economic trends and Trump’s hard-line policies, the proportion of “interior removals” undertaken by ICE increased. Most deportations still involve immigrants from a handful of Latin American countries, but “[t]he number of deportees from other nations rose 24 percent in Trump’s first year,” reports NPR.
The administration is still hoping to increase those efforts. A proposal released by the White House last week asked Congress to grant additional funds to hire more ICE agents as part of an overall increase in “border security” that would be effectively traded for a path to citizenship for more than 1 million Dreamers.
It will be up to Democrats to block those additional funds and, perhaps, to build a broader case against ICE and its tactics. Some high-profile Democrats, like Sen. Kamala Harris of California, have already publicly condemned the agency. “ICE raids across the country have torn mothers apart from their children. The raids lack transparency, spread fear, and harm public safety,” she said last year in a Facebook post. More recently, following a report that ICE was planning raids in retaliation to a new California law limiting cooperation between local law enforcement and federal immigration authorities, Harris said that such raids would be “an abhorrent abuse of power.”
Given the extent to which Democrats have helped build the architecture for today’s ICE, Harris’ statements—as well as similar ones by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi—may mark the beginning of a new and needed skepticism toward the agency. And if so, then the logic of their critique doesn’t just point toward reform—it points toward a fundamental rethinking of immigration enforcement and a move away from the authoritarianism of ICE as it exists.
What the country needs, in other words, is an honest discussion about whether ICE can be effectively reformed or if it must be abolished and replaced by an agency that can carry out its mission in a more effective and humane way.”
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Meanwhile, over in the Southern District of New York, U.S. District Judge Katherine B. Forrest had enough of ICE’s “Gonzo” tactics following the mindless arrest of immigration activist Ravi Ragbir. She blasted ICE’s actions in ordering Ragbir’s release to say good-bye to his family and wind up his affairs. Judge Forrest characterized ICE’s actions in detaining Ragbir as “unnecessarily cruel.”
Here is a copy of Judge Forrest’s order in Ragbir v Sessions:
Useless, counterproductive removals, waste of Government enforcement resources, irrationality, and unnecessary cruelty are, of course, at the heart of the Trump/Sessions/Miller immigration enforcement program. Certainly, the performance of ICE under Trump — not especially good at removing real criminals and threats or any other type of legitimate law enforcement — much better at busting minor offenders and law-abiding community members and sowing terror in ethnic communities — provides a compelling argument that DHS does not need any additional enforcement agents.
Indeed, I have hypothesized that what Trump, Sessions, Miller, and the White Nationalists are really doing is building the DHS into an internal security police force that will be used against all of those the Administration fears or views as opponents of their “Totalitarian-Wannabe State.”
In the meantime, arbitrary use of force and calculated unnecessary cruelty are likely to remain staples of the DHS under Trump. That’s why ICE is fast becoming American’s most loathed, mistrusted, and unprofessional police force. Bouie might well be right. Assuming that America recovers from the Trump regime, unfortunately not necessarily a given, ICE might well need to be abolished and “replaced by an agency that can carry out its mission in a more effective and humane way.”
“IMMIGRATION AND CUSTOMS Enforcement, the federal agency whose deportation agents have been unshackled by the Trump administration, has intensified its efforts to such a degree that cruelty now seems no impediment to its enforcement decisions, and common sense appears to play a diminishing role.
Recent months have brought news of one senseless detention and deportation after another. From all appearances, the agency seems to have embraced the idea that it is just to sunder established families and separate immigrant parents from their U.S.-born children — even in cases involving garden-variety technical violations of immigration rules.
Yes, the Obama administration also deported some longtime residents who had committed no serious offenses, but its deportation efforts were focused on criminals. By contrast, detentions of immigrants with no criminal records more than doubled in the first year of President Trump’s administration — to 13,600 in 2017 from 5,498 in 2016. Evidently seized by a vainglorious notion of its mission, ICE too often discounts basic decency as a guiding tenet.
How else to explain the detention and imminent deportation of a 27-year-old Ohio man, arrested for driving without a license, who is the only means of financial support, and one of just two trained medical caregivers, for a 6-year-old paraplegic boy (who also happens to be a U.S. citizen)? How else to explain the deportation of a construction worker in Michigan, the father of 10- and 3-year-old U.S.-born boys, who provided critical help to police in Detroit in their investigation of a shooting?
How else to explain the airport arrest and deportation of a 22-year-old female college student from Spain, visiting the United States for a vacation at the invitation of a librarian at Oregon State University, on grounds that she would give Spanish lessons to the librarian’s young son for a few weeks — work for which she lacked the right visa? How else to explain the deportation of a 39-year-old landscaper living in the Detroit suburbs, a father and husband of U.S. citizens, who had lived in the United States since age 10 and whose record was so unblemished that it didn’t even feature a traffic violation? How else to explain the Israeli undergraduate at the University of California at San Diego, a “dreamer” studying legally in the United States, who was detained upon trying to cross back into the United States minutes after his roommate made a wrong turn on the highway, unintentionally driving into Mexico?
In its boilerplate communiques, the agency defends its actions by insisting that it prioritizes bona fide threats to national security and public safety but exempts no category of “removable alien” from enforcement. Which raises a question: Have discretion and humanity been dropped from the attributes that Americans can expect of their law enforcement agencies?”
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In answer to the Post’s question: YES, thanks exactly what has been happening in America since the very beginning of the Trump regime — starting with the “Muslim Ban” and continuing with a consistent White Supremecist agenda! Many of us have been saying that all along!
We already have the “New American Gulag” — expanded “civil” immigration detention in substandard, potentially even deadly conditions, in obscure “out of sight, out of mind” locations. There, individuals, many deserving legal protection from the US under our laws, are denied fair access to counsel and railroaded out of the country in what essentially are “mock court” hearings conducted by “judges” controlled by notorious White Nationalist Jeff “Gono Apocalypto” Sessions.
Sessions and his minions encourage the judges to view individuals in removal proceedings as “production numbers, possible fraudsters, and potential terrorists,” rather than as vulnerable human beings deserving of fairness, respect, and due process.
To complement the “New American Gulag,” we now have the “New American Gestapo,” headed by Acting Chief ICEMAN Tom Homan. It’s an internal police force that operates without rules, rhyme, reason, or humanity — in other words arbitrary “Gonzo” enforcement intended to terrorize ethnic (primarily Latino) communities.
And, in case you haven’t read about it, ICE now has the capacity to electronically track the whereabouts and driving patterns of every license plate in America —- including YOURS! Of course they say that they will only use it for “legitimate” law Enforcement purposes.
But, for the “New American Gestapo” everything is “legitimate” — boundaries on law enforcement conduct and misconduct went out the widow when the Trumpsters crawled in. Remember, Gonzo essentially told local police forces he really didn’t care what they were doing to the civil rights of African-Americans and other minorities as long as they were enforcing the law and bringing crime rates down!
This is why ICE is well on its way to becoming the most hated, distrusted, and least respected police force in America.
Had enough of the Trump Administation’s trampling on Constitutional rights, civil rights, human rights, and just plain old human decency in America! Join the resistance!
The “New Due Process Army” (“NDPA”) is out there every day fighting for the Due Process and the legal rights of everyone in America and standing up against the excesses of the Trump Administration. Join their effort today!
“A federal judge on Wednesday likened a group of Indonesian Christians facing possible deportation by the Trump administration to Jewish refugees trying to escape the Nazis.
Judge Patti B. Saris compared the plight of the Indonesians, who are in the country illegally, to Jews fleeing the Third Reich in a boat — an apparent reference to the infamous case of the St. Louis, an ocean liner that left Germany with 937 passengers, most of them Jews, and was turned away by the US government in 1939. Hundreds of the Jews were later killed during the Holocaust.
The Indonesians argue they will be tortured or killed because of their religion if forced to return to their Muslim-majority homeland. The Trump administration insists they have not proven they would be harmed if they returned to Indonesia.
“We’re not going to be that country,” Saris said Wednesday at a hearing in US District Court in Boston. “We don’t want to put them on the ship unless someone” can review their contention that deportation back to Indonesia is “a really bad situation for them.”
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Read the complete story at the link. Thanks to my good friend Kevin Roche from Boothbay Harbor (summer) and Boston (winter) for sending this my way.
More wasteful litigation, more abuse of authority, more cruel, unnecessary, and unproductive “Gonzo” enforcement from the Trump Administration! They seem determined to repeat all of the worst mistakes of American history. But, then again, the Trumpsters pride themselves on ignorance of history, disregard of facts, and anti-intellectualism. So, why should we be surprised that they act more like “third-world thugs” than representatives of an enlightened Western Democracy?
All of this supports my observation that DHS doesn’t have enough real law enforcement functions to keep its current workforce busy. They clearly don’t need any additional agents. Just different leadership and smarter, more humane and sensible policies.
“U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents blitzed dozens of 7-Eleven stores before dawn Wednesday to interview employees and deliver audit notifications, carrying out what the agency said was the largest operation targeting an employer since President Trump took office.
ICE said its agents showed up at 98 stores and made 21 arrests, describing the operation as a warning to other companies who may have unauthorized workers on their payroll.
“Today’s actions send a strong message to U.S. businesses that hire and employ an illegal workforce: ICE will enforce the law, and if you are found to be breaking the law, you will be held accountable,” said Thomas D. Homan, the agency’s top official, in a statement.
Homan characterized the operation as a new front in the Trump administration’s broader immigration crackdown and its effort to increase deportations. ICE agents have made 40 percent more arrests in the past year.
“Businesses that hire illegal workers are a pull factor for illegal immigration and we are working hard to remove this magnet,” Homan’s statement said. “ICE will continue its efforts to protect jobs for American workers by eliminating unfair competitive advantages for companies that exploit illegal immigration.”
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Read Nick’s complete article at the link.
It’s not clear whether the 21 folks arrested were undocumented workers, store managers, or both. This does indicate an interesting new initiative by the Trump Administration to enforce employer sanctions against major U.S. chains like 7-Eleven. We’ll see how it “plays,” however, if and when some fat-cat GOP execs/donors get caught up in the enforcement net.
“Immigration and Customs Enforcement chief Thomas D. Homan and a vocal labor union that represents part of the agency’s workforce are both big fans of President Trump’s tough deportation policies. But they are increasingly at odds with each other.
Tensions spilled over in November when Trump nominated Homan to serve in the role permanently. The National ICE Council went public with allegations that the agency is “grossly mismanaged” and urged Trump to investigate. An ICE spokeswoman called the union’s claims “baseless” and said agency morale has increased nationwide since Homan took the helm in January.
Seeking to quell the controversy, Trump reached out to union president Chris Crane to set up a meeting. But the White House also says it steadfastly supports Homan, who is awaiting a Senate confirmation hearing and has backing from Republicans in Congress.
“The president nominated Tom Homan for his decades of experience and steadfast commitment to enforcing the law,” said Raj Shah, a White House spokesman. “He has earned the strong support of the rank-and-file ICE officers and will make an outstanding director.”
The dispute pits two of Trump’s loyal supporters against each other — the union that endorsed him for president and the top ICE official who defends his hard-line views. It is erupting as the White House is urging Congress to significantly expand the agency.
2:42
Trump said he would deport millions. Now ICE is in the spotlight.
(Monica Akhtar/The Washington Post)
Critics dismiss the union’s complaints as part of a long-running power struggle and say the allegations are either unsubstantiated or amount to isolated incidents in the sprawling federal agency. But union leaders, who represent 6,000 employees, say they are frustrated by what they call a failure by Homan and other top managers to stem misconduct in an agency that has little public oversight.”
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Read the complete article at the link.
DHS appears to be an agency where the line cops have seized control of policies and basically do whatever they feel like doing in arresting folks and starting removal cases. No wonder there is a backlog in the U.S. Immigration Courts!
Interestingly, neither Trump’s nor Homan’s willingness to pander to “gonzo” enforcement appears to have appeased the troops. I have little doubt that there is unpunished “misconduct” at DHS.
For example, several recent reports by the DHS IG paint a picture of an agency suffering from bureaucratic incompetence and occasional lawlessness. But, that doesn’t seem to concern Trump and his followers. Indeed, several recent articles indicate that there have been nearly unprecedented internal attempts to suppress certain parts of the report on the implementation of the original Travel Ban and to impede the information from getting to Congress.
“Washington (CNN)The administration’s top immigration enforcement official on Tuesday said his agency will vastly step up crackdowns on employers who hire undocumented immigrants — a new front in President Donald Trump’s hardline immigration agenda.
Acting Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Director Tom Homan spoke at the conservative Heritage Foundation and was asked whether his agency would do more to target not just undocumented workers, but their places of work.
Homan said he has instructed Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), the investigative unit of ICE, to potentially quintuple worksite enforcement actions next year.
He said he recently asked HSI to audit how much of their time is spent on work site enforcement, and said he has ordered that to increase “by four to five times.”
“We’ve already increased the number of inspections in work site operations, you will see that significantly increase this next fiscal year,” Homan promised, saying the goal is to remove the “magnet” drawing people to enter the US illegally.
And he said his agency would approach the task in a way that’s “a little different” than in the past, by going just as aggressively after employees.
“Not only are we going to prosecute the employers that hire illegal workers, we’re going to detain and remove the illegal alien workers,” Homan said.
“When we find you at a work site, we’re no longer going to turn our heads,” Homan elaborated after the event. “We’ll go after the employer who knowingly hires an illegal alien … but we’re always going to arrest a person who is here illegally. That is our job.”
ICE still has posted the previous administration’s policy on work site enforcement, which prioritizes targeting employers that use undocumented labor as a business model, engage in human smuggling, mistreat employees, commit identity fraud, launder money or are otherwise involved in criminal activity.
ICE spokeswoman Liz Johnson said the strategy “continues to address both” employers and employees.
“While we focus on the criminal prosecution of employers who knowingly hire illegal workers, under the current administration’s enforcement priorities, workers encountered during these investigations who are unauthorized to remain in the United States are also subject to administrative arrest and removal from the country,” Johnson said.
According to a 2015 Congressional Research Service report, ICE arrested 541 individuals on immigration charges and 362 individuals on criminal charges in work site actions in 2014, continuing a downward trend in actions from a peak in 2011.”
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Been there, done that, likely to be just as unsuccessful and wasteful as ever. Indeed, back in the late 1970’s while I was INS Deputy General Counsel we developed the famous (or infamous, depending on which side one was on) “Blackie’s Warrants” (referencing the then well-known but now defunct Washington, D.C. eatery “Blackie’s House of Beef” a noted employer of undocumented workers) for entry into workplaces for civil immigration enforcement purposes. Workplace operations were a fertile source of Federal Court litigation, alleged constitutional violations, some class actions and injunctions, but not many final orders of removal.
Compounding the problem — lots of the employers whose workers will be hauled off in cuffs are likely to be GOP donors who aren’t going to like it when the law is enforced against them, rather than just food cart operators and lawn mowers. My recollection is that politicos of both parties weren’t too happy either, particularly when key industries like tourism, restaurants, and hotels were hit during “prime season.” But, why not keep repeating the same failed “strategies” over and over again just to prove that they still don’t work?
Let’s see, with 630,000+ pending cases in U.S. Immigration Court and counting, some of these new “employee cases” might come up for trial by the end of 2020, with luck. That is, unless under Sessions the DOJ does yet another round of “ADR.” But, since many of the folks now working in the U.S. probably have at least arguable avenues for relief, most cases probably will take even longer. And, of course, in a “saturated” court system, every “low priority” case mindlessly placed on the docket displaces another case, which might be older or higher priority. But, that’s what “Gonzo enforcement” and wasting Government resources is all about.
Oh yeah, we also happen to have extremely low unemployment. That probably means that no “other U.S. workers” are going to be rushing in to fill those jobs supposedly vacated by Homan’s operations. Been there, done that too — never saw it work successfully in the long run — particularly since the Trumpsters seem determined to cut off or diminish legal work visa opportunities.
