San Quentin News

Written By Incarcerated - Advancing Social Justice

Judges overwhelmed with immigration case backlogs makes it difficult for them to work

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The Trump administration’s controversial strategy to reduce the growing back- log of immigration cases has failed, according to a university study. The average wait for an immigration hearing is now more than two years, The San Diego Union Tribune reported.

The plan to reduce the backlog of immigration cases by forcing judges to take more cases was implemented in October 2017. Since then, the number of pending cases has grown from 655,932 to 830,000, according to Syracuse University’s Transactional Access Records Clearinghouse, which tracks data from immigration courts.

The backlog is likely worse than figures provided by Syracuse University due makes it difficult for them to work to the 35 day-government shutdown in December and January, the Feb. 21 story said. That resulted in the cancellation of roughly 60,000 hearings because around 400 immigration judges were absent or furloughed. Thousands of cases were rescheduled, thus extending the already long wait times.

The plan was described as a “comprehensive strategy for significantly reducing the caseload by 2020.” It was intended to reverse the growth of the caseload and reduce it, according to the Executive Office of Immigration Review (EOIR), which administers immigration courts

The plan “has not only failed to reduce the backlog, but has eroded the court’s ability to ensure due process,” according to the American Immigration Lawyers Association, a group made up of more than 15,000 lawyers and professors.

The group said the administration has failed by pressuring judges to rule “at a breakneck pace” on whether an immigrant should be deported.

In defense, the Trump administration stated, “Policy changes in recent years have slowed down the adjudication of existing cases and incentivized further illegal immigration that led to new cases.”

Trump administration officials said illegal border crossing were encouraged by former President Barack Obama’s attempt to deport immigrants with serious criminal records and defend immigrants known as Dreamers who were brought to the U.S. as children.

Another argument regarding the aggravated situation was brought up by Stephen Legomsky, Homeland Security’s chief counsel for immigration.

“Immediately upon taking office, President Trump essentially advised Border Patrol agents and ICE officers that they were to begin removal proceedings against anyone they encounter that they suspected of being undocumented, without sufficiently increasing resources for immigration judges,” Legomsky said.

Another aspect of the immigration equation is the need for autonomy of the immigration judges. Immigration judges are not independent, in contrast to the regular court judges. The immigration judges are part of the Justice Department, which means that the attorney general is both the chief prosecutor in immigration cases and the boss of the judges, who are classified as government attorneys, The Union-Tribune reported.

The National Association of Immigration Judges has called for Congress to end the built-in conflict of interest and to create an immigration court apart from the Justice Department.

“As long as we continue to allow the court to be used as a law enforcement tool, you are going to get these kinds of backlogs and inefficiencies,” said Ashley Tabaddor, president of the National Association of Immigration Judges.

The Trump administration increased the number of immigration judges by 74 percent to 414 by the end of 2018. House Democrats requested an investigation by the Justice Department Inspector General’s office based on the suspicion that hiring was politically motivated.

The Immigration Lawyers Association wrote, “The current administration has taken advantage of the court structural laws by introducing numerous policies… that dramatically reshape federal immigration law and undermine due process in immigration court proceedings.”

Noncitizens allowed to vote in local San Francisco elections

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San Francisco became the largest city in the nation to allow noncitizens to vote in local elections, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Noncitizens were only allowed to vote Nov. 6 for a single school board race. That was widely criticized by conservatives. The Times reported that only a little more than 40 noncitizens had registered to vote by Oct. 28.

The change carries symbolic force, according to Louis Desipio, a professor of political science at the University of California at Irvine.

He said, “It will speak to that sort of sense that change is coming to the United States and that change is being done extra-legally somehow.”

The chance to vote as a noncitizen is a result of a measure that passed in San Francisco in 2016.

“Noncitizen voting is a very contentious issue,” said opponent Robin Hvidston, executive director of We the People Rising, a Claremont organization that lobbies for stricter immigration enforcement. “The move to extend voting rights to those illegally residing in San Francisco has the potential to backfire among citizens with a moderate stance on illegal immigration.”

Shamman Walton, a San Francisco Unified School District commissioner, presented a resolution in support of the measure in 2016 and told the Times that he doesn’t buy the rhetoric from the right.

“At the end of the day, for me it’s important that families who have children in our schools… have a say,” Walton said.

There is no record of how many students and parents in the school district are non-citizens. But according to the district’s website, 29 percent of its 54,063 students are English-language learners. Additionally, a 2017 Pew Research report estimated 35,000 people without legal status live in San Francisco.

Joshua A. Douglas, a professor at the University of Kentucky College of Law who specializes in election law and voting rights, said that San Francisco’s expansion of voting rights is part of a greater resurgence to allow noncitizens to vote in more local races.

Douglas said Takoma Park in Maryland has allowed noncitizens to vote in local elections for years. Allowing noncitizen voting has a long history in the United States, according to Douglas. “Noncitizen voting was not considered all that radical until a backlash during post World War I,” he said.

10-year-old girl with cerebral palsy arrested by ICE

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After a 10-year-old girl with cerebral palsy left a Texas hospital for treatment in October 2017, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrested her, The Guardian reported.

The arrest happened because five days after Donald J. Trump took office, he signed an executive order that changed the focus of ICE deportations from undocumented immigrants with criminal records to every undocumented immigrant.

The result of the policy is that ICE is arresting more people with no criminal record than ever before, according to The Guardian.

In October 2017, the number of those arrested by ICE with no criminal record was almost 40,000. The year before then it was less than 20,000. As of June 30, 2018, it’s 58 percent of the now al- most 45,000 people held by ICE, The Guardian reports.

“Why would you take that budget that’s limited and not use it to say we’re going to go after the worst people who are illegal and here?” said Alonzo Peña, former ICE deputy director, and its predecessor, the U.S. Customs Service, since 1984.

Peña raised a question, “The target goal (for ICE to arrest) is the 12 million people who are here illegally. Why are you going to target a little girl with cerebral palsy?

“Most of the 20,000 ICE employees oppose some of Trumps immigration policies, such as family separation.”

Another undocumented immigrant arrested by ICE was New York City resident Pablo Villavicencio, a father of two who worked as a pizza delivery man.

Villavicencio had applied for a green card but when he went to deliver a lunch order to an Army base, ICE arrested him. The case was fast-tracked for deportation but dropped after it received media attention, The Guardian reported.

“The idea is to try to send the message to communities that everybody is at risk of deportation by arresting all sorts of people who are no kind of threat,”said Omar Jadwat, director of the ACLU Immigrants’ Right Project.

The ICE tactics have made it a target by lawyers, said The Guardian.

“What they would like to do is deport people and skip the whole legal process right,” said ACLU’s Jadwat. “That was the idea initially behind this and I think their legal position is still they can sweep these people up and put them on a plane and they’re gone before you know it.

“It’s only because we and other lawyers have stepped up and said you have to provide some due process before you ship someone to a place where their lives could be in danger that they haven’t been able to kind of send people abroad immediately.”

A lawsuit was also filed on behalf of 1,900 Cambodian refugees by the Asian Law Caucus, Asian Americans Advancing Justice Los Angeles (AAJC) and Sidney Austin LLP.

Gang violence in El Salvador often cited as reason for asylum

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Rampant gang violence in El Salvador is forcing many people to flee the country, according to an article in the Wall Street Journal. 

Two gangs, MS-13 and Barrio 18, regularly murder and extort people in their own neighborhoods, the Nov. 2 story reported. 

This is one explanation for the waves of migrants seeking to enter the U.S. either by petitioning for asylum or by entering illegally, the newspaper stated. 

“As a worker and as a human being you can’t live in this country in peace,” explains El Salvadoran Jose Gualberto Claro Iglesias. “You spend all your time and energy trying to defend your business and your family.” 

One gang set fire to Claro’s truck while he and his family were inside because he refused to pay extortion fees, the article reports. 

He then sent his wife and four children to live in Los Angeles in 2015. 

Claro was caught trying to cross the US-Mexico border in 2017, held for nearly 13 months in a U.S. immigration detention center, and finally deported back to El Salvador. 

He said he now plans to sell his property in El Salvador and may move his family to Panama. 

Many youth in El Salvador have bleak prospects for employment and are attracted to gangs as an alternative to traditional employment, the story noted. 

“The only opportunities they have are working at the market nearby where they can unload or load trucks. It’s either that, or they can join one of the gangs,” said school Principal Amilcar Rivera, “You can earn $300 a week doing manual labor or you can get $1,000 a week from extortion. Which one do you think these young people will choose?” 

Poverty affects one-third of El Salvadorans, according to World Bank Data. 

The government of El Salvador attempted to address the problem by brokering a truce between the two gangs. 

As a concession by the government, gang leaders who were incarcerated were moved from solitary confinement or maximum security prisons to more permissive custody arrangements. Although the homicide rate the year after the truce was brokered fell by 42 percent, many business leaders, lawmakers and voters accused the government of bowing down to the gangs by not enforcing laws. 

The government ended the truce after pressure by the U.S. government. 

“The government’s credibility was destroyed by the truce,” said Martin Rogel, an auxiliary judge who sits on El Salvador’s Supreme Court. “It was as if El Salvadorans stopped believing in God. Salvadorans have stopped believing in the rule of law.” 

After the truce ended, the homicide rate rose to 60.1 per 100,000, nearly 12 times the rate in the U.S. and the highest in the world, according to the United Nations. 

“The highest cost is human,” said a successful El Salvadoran businessman, Javier Siman. “We’re losing the best people we have. They either flee the country, they get killed or they are constantly forced to move around. They have to pay the gangs just to enter the neighborhoods where they live and work.” 

Immigrants face challenges after they are released by the US government

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Immigrants face challenges long after they are released by the U.S. government. Tens of thousands of migrant adults, including most asylum-seekers, are required to wear electronic tracking bracelets around their ankles at all times.

One asylum-seeker, whose lawyer asked to have his name withheld, has been required to wear an ankle monitor for more than a year. The monitor needed to be charged three times a day to prevent a loud “low battery” warning. He was fired from his job at a construction site after his boss heard his monitor go off during work. His boss feared that it put undocumented employees at risk for deportation, according to the Texas Tribune.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has dramatically expanded its use of ankle monitors to ensure that pretrial migrants appear for their scheduled court hearings, according to research by Pew Charitable Trusts.

The ankle monitors are an integral part of the Intensive Supervision Appearance Program (ISAP), which has a 99 percent success rate for ensuring that migrants show up to court, according to ICE.

The device costs about $5 a day per immigrant and is cost-effective, according to ICE spokesperson, Matthew Bourke. However, immigrants wearing ankle monitors and advocates alike have expressed concerns.

Jose Santos Garcia, a 27-year-old asylum-seeker from El-Salvador who is enrolled in the ISAP program is one of them. “At least for me, it’s humiliating…it’s like some prisoners on house arrest,” he said. “Just for entering another country, looking for opportunity, I have to carry this.”

The ISAP program is administered by BI Incorporated, a subsidiary of the for-profit GEO Group, through a five year contract worth tens of millions of dollars. Bourke said that immigrants can follow up with their case officer after the initial fitting if they experience any subsequent discomfort or physical injuries.

Hector Hernandez, a 38-year-old migrant, confirmed that an ISAP worker asked him if he wanted his monitor loosened around his ankle.

Bourke also clarified that ankle monitors are not assigned to children, pregnant women, or people with certain medical conditions.

Back in 2016, a coalition of advocacy groups filed a civil rights complaint reporting that the ankle monitors caused problems such as bleeding, electrical shocks and discomfort.

While people on both sides agree ankle monitors are a better solution than immigration detention, civil rights advocates would like to see the return of a previous successful case-management program. According to Bourke, the ICE spokesman, the family case-management program costs $36 a day per immigrant.

Immigrants detained or released from ICE

In 2017, the Trump administration discontinued that program which paired immigrant families with a social worker to assist them with the asylum-seeking process.

Both the ankle monitors and the case-management program are less expensive than immigration detention centers. Yet the Trump administration is actively expanding the detention centers, as part of a larger crackdown on illegal immigration, according to the Texas Tribune.

Immigrant requests for asylum face four year backlog

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President Trump


President Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement program is failing due to a four-year asylum hearing backlog, an opinion article in The Hill contends.
It is the immigration enforcement program’s policy to deport undocumented im- migrants to their country of origin, unless they express a “credible fear” of returning. An asylum officer assigned to the claim determines whether “credible fear” is present in individual cases, said Nolan Rappaport, the article’s author. If the officer denies the claim, applicants can request an administrative review of the decision, which will be performed by an immigration judge. If the judge then rejects the claim, the immigrant is deported.
According to the article, an ongoing shortage of immigration judges has contributed to the backlog.
As of July, 330 immigration judges presided over 58 immigration courts with a combined backlog of 733,365 cases, the article said, amounting to approximately 2,200 cases per judge.
Claimants wait on average 717 days, nearly two years, for a hearing. If the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) abruptly stopped arresting undocumented immigrants, it still take four years to eliminate the backlog, according to Rappaport.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions clarified the asylum eligibility requirements to make it easier to screen out immigrants who do not have a legitimate persecution claim. Though this might stop the backlog from growing larger, it can’t reduce it, Rappaport said.
In January, Trump instructed the DHS to expand the use of expedited removal proceedings as a way to reduce the backlog. Expedited proceedings affect undocumented immigrants who have been in the United States for less than two years and were not formally admitted into the country.
Rappaport argued that Trump will need a legalization program to eliminate the backlog entirely, as many of the immigrants in removal proceedings have been physically present for at least two years.

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Migración Asistencia a con-nacionales Mexicanos deportados

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En la comunidad de habla hispana que se encuentra en las prisiones de California, impera la incertidumbre sobre la travesía que les espera una vez que sean deportados al salir de prisión. En el año 2018, siete hispanos con sentencias de cadena perpetua que se encuentran en la prisión Estatal de San Quentin, obtuvieron la libertad condicional (por medio de la audiencia de libertad condicional); seis de ellos, de nacionalidad mexicana, tienen orden de deportación.

Flag of Mexico


Sobre el apoyo que aquellos quienes son deportados reciben por parte de las autoridades mexicanas, no hay mucho que decir; y esto porque la información es escasa. Eleaazar Cuaei, preso por más de 30 años, comenta: “lo que me han dicho a mí es que la migra te deja en el puente; en la pura pasada para México. De ahí si uno no lleva dinero suficiente para irse a su lugar de origen, dicen que hay muchas iglesias que lo pueden ayudar.” Manuel Murillo, quien recientemente fue transferido a un centro de detención para posteriormente ser deportado, dice lo siguiente: “lo que yo sé y me han dicho, es que existe una casa en Tijuana que se llama La Casa del Migrante donde te dan de comer, puedes hacer una llamada y te puedes quedar a dormir. Pero otras personas me han dicho que ya cerraron esa casa”.
Así como en el caso de Cuaei y Murillo, muchos presos de habla hispana que enfrentan una futura deportación, están poco o nada informados: hay mucha información falsa y muchas veces la “información” son sólo rumores. Por ello, San Quentin News se dio a la tarea de contactar al consulado mexicano en San Francisco California, para que nos proveyera de información confiable y certera.
Si es deportado por las autoridades de Estados Unidos, a su llegada a México será recibido por personal del Instituto Nacional de Migración (está ubicado en la frontera Norte y en el Aeropuerto Internacional de la Ciudad de México). Ellos le darán la bienvenida y le brindarán los beneficios que “SOMOS MEXICANOS”.
“SOMOS MEXICANOS” es una estrategia del gobierno de México, coordinada por el Instituto Nacional de Migración y que tiene como objetivo acercar a los deportados a los servicios y apoyos de las instituciones para facilitar su reintegración al país. SOMOS MEXICANOS ayuda a todos los mexicanos que han sido repatriados o que planean regresar de manera voluntaria.
Las personas repatriadas serán recibidas por personal del Instituto Nacional de Migración en las siguientes fronteras:

Frontera de Baja California – Tijuana, Mexicali.

Frontera de Sonora – San Luis Rio Colorado, Nogales.

Frontera de Chihuahua – CD. Juárez, Ojinaga.

Frontera de Coahuila – CD. Acuna, Piedras Negras.

Frontera de Tamaulipas – Nuevo Laredo, Reynosa, Matamoros.

Aeropuerto de la Ciudad de México.

Le brindaran los siguientes beneficios:

Constancia de repatriación.

Servicios básicos de alimentación y salud.

Comunicación (podrás hablar vía telefónica con tus familiares).

Traslado local y apoyo para transporte foráneo.

Albergue (en caso de requerirlo).

Opciones laborales.

Servicios financieros (depósitos en efectivo, recibir remesas, cambiar divisas y acceder a otros productos como micro seguros).

Orientación en materia educativa.

Si desea obtener apoyo adicional una vez que llegue a su lugar de origen, contacte a “Enlace” de SOMOS MEXICANOS del Instituto Nacional de Migración.
Algunos de los apoyos disponibles son:

Recuperación de pertenencias y valores

Bolsa de trabajo

Servicios de energía

Programas de empleo

Opciones para continuar con sus estudios

Números de teléfono del Instituto Nacional de Migración en los diferentes Estados de México (llamando desde el extranjero):

Aguascalientes: 01 52 (449) 918-2464 ext. 210

Baja California: 01 52 (664) 682-3218 / 01 52 (664) 973-0054

Baja California Sur: 01 52 (612) 124-6349

Ciudad de México: 01 52 (555) 387-2400, exts. 18753 y 18612

Guanajuato: 01 52 (477) 716-9352, ext. 61606

Jalisco: 01 52 (33) 3942-0290, ext. 245 y 219

Michoacán: 01 52 (443) 317-1845, ext. 60711

Nayarit: 01 52 (311) 210-0773 / 213-1720 ext. 200

Nuevo León: 01 52 (81) 8486-1574 al 77 ext. 229

Sinaloa: 01 52 (669) 982-3904 ext. 224

Sonora: 01 52 (631) 312- 1755 ext. 61183

Tamaulipas: 01 52 (867) 712-3147 / 712-8393 / 712-1177 ext. 14439

 
Si necesita información u orientación puede encontrarnos en el correo electrónico:
atencionsomosmx@inami.gob.mx
http://sanquentinnews.com/desplazados-centroamericanos-asilo-mexico/

Consulado Mexicano visita San Quentin

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San Quentin News & Wall City Merchandise

Robot Chatbot Lawyer for Refugees

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FATE v. WISDOM

Robolawyer-chatbot tool to complete anti-deportation and immigration paperwork.

The use of robolawyer-chatbots promises to be a significant advance in social justice, its supporters say.

As with Airbnb and Uber, new artificial intelligence technologies have transformed many industries in the past few years. Now they are seeking to transform legal dealings with government as well. 

From traffic tickets and renter rights to immigration, DoNotPay has a free artificially intelligent chatbot that guides users through the legal appeals process to challenge improper parking tickets, evictions or deportation orders. 

“My hopes are that it will level the playing field. There is so much inequality in the law with the richest people in society getting advantages in the legal system. My hope is that one day everyone can have the same standard of legal protection as a billionaire,” said Joshua Browder in a Stanford Daily interview. He is a British teenager, Stanford University student and DoNotPay’s creator

DoNotPay first launched a free artificially intelligent parking-ticket-fighting chatbot that guides users through the appeals process for parking fines. 

With a success rate of more than 60 percent, this bot “has helped more than 215,000 people beat traffic and parking tickets in London, New York and Seattle,” according to The Atlantic.

“215,000 people beat traffic and parking tickets in London, New York and Seattle.”

Now DoNotPay has created a chatbot for people seeking entry into the U.S., U.K. and Canada, or seeking to fight deportation.

This new chatbot is a game-changer as “It works with almost every device making it accessible to over a billion people,” Browder told The Guardian.   

“Every legal-aid group has to turn people away because there isn’t time to process all of the cases,” said Roland Vogl, the executive director of the Stanford Program in Law, Science and Technology.

Immigration lawyer Sophie Alcorn added, “I can see the major benefits that leveraging sophisticated chatbot technology will have in the asylum application process…. Asylum seekers want to follow the laws and do everything properly, and this technology will help them do so.”

The Facebook Messenger chatbot asks users a series of questions to determine whether they are eligible for asylum protection. If they appear to be, then it will ask more questions and use the answers to auto-fill the necessary paper work.

Too many people lack access to the legal services they need, usually because they cannot afford them, according to the Brennan Center for Justice. The center found that “80 percent of low- income people have trouble obtaining legal representation or otherwise accessing the civil court system to protect their property, family and livelihood.”

This new technology can help meet other unmet legal needs of the poor, according to its inventor.

**For more information go to www.DoNotPay.co.uk or Facebook Messenger with a search “DoNotPay.”

http://sanquentinnews.com/optionb-org-support-group-overcoming-effects-incarceration/

Deportation Crimes Explained

Immigration assistance


Boatwright

Study shows government uses distorted data to justify policies

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A recent study by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) explains how the government uses distorted data to justify its policies.

The study focused on the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), which is cited by elected officials and the media as a legitimate source of information.

The Center was founded by White nationalist John Tanton and serves as an anti-immigrant think tank, reported the SPLC.

“Oh, I’m convinced that he’s wrong about all the facts and issues. They’re wrong about the impact of immigration on the U.S. economy and on U.S. society,” said Alex Nowasteh, an immigration policy analyst at the CATO institute on NPR in early 2017.

The Intercept recently published a series of internal emails from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) during immigration raids earlier this year which substantiates the report’s findings that elected officials and media organizations embellish details in order to criminalize the immigration population in the U.S. and justify political policies.

“CIS research is always questionable because they torture the data to make it arrive at the conclusion they desire, which is that immigrants are criminals and a burden on the U.S. and our economy. It is the worst kind of deception, but politicians, the conservative media and some Americans eat it up because it always looks somewhat legitimate at first glance,” said Illinois Rep. Luis Gutierrez, according to the SPLC report.

Emails reveal that in February ICE officials were instructed by an ICE executive in Washington to highlight, for the media, the three most notorious cases in each city where a raid was performed in order to support the administration’s immigration agenda, reported The Intercept.

“They’re wrong about the impact of immigration on the US economy and on US society”

However, according to the emails, ICE officials had a hard time finding the heinous criminal immigrants that President Donald J. Trump’s administration had promised to target, according to The Intercept.

“I think what those emails make very clear is that we have a federal law enforcement agency that’s willing to lie, just like Trump is willing to lie, in order to continue the criminalization of immigrant communities,” said Austin City, Texas, councilmember Greg Casar.

In February, ICE arrested 51 undocumented immigrants in Austin, Texas. Of those detained 28 had no criminal record, which had many in the community wondering why the city was a political target, The Intercept reported.

In November of 2016, Sally Hernandez, Travis County sheriff-elect, had promised to make Austin a sanctuary city.

“The sheriff’s office will not be part of a deportation force that sacrifices hundreds and thousands of people, our neighbors, to a broken federal immigration system,” said Hernandez.    

The issue of politically motivated immigration raids resurfaced in September when ICE officials targeted sanctuary cities in Operation Safe City, The Intercept reported.

“Yet again, the Trump administration is attempting to terrorize immigrant communities, keep families in fear, and undermine the trust immigrants have in cities that refuse to subsidize federal immigration enforcement,” said Ana Maria Archila, co-director of the Center for Popular Democracy, according to The Intercept.

ICE officials claim that they have to conduct more at-large arrests in regions that refuse to uphold ICE detainers, which direct local agencies to keep undocumented immigrants beyond their original sentence. That makes sanctuary cities like Austin and San Francisco targets for ICE.

California Governor Jerry Brown signed Senate Bill 54, which makes the state a sanctuary for undocumented immigrants. The law’s intent is to promote public safety by alleviating immigrant fears of deportation when they need to interact with local law enforcement agencies.

“(The law) reaffirms what we have held since the beginning, which is that California law enforcement should not be used to assist in mass deportations,” said Ed Medrano, president of the California Police Chiefs Association.

Deportation Crimes Explained

Immigrant rights groups express concern about sanctuary city raids

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Immigrant rights groups are concerned that the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) is targeting sanctuary cities.

Sanctuary regions are jurisdictions in which local law enforcement agencies focus on public safety instead of on immigration enforcement.

In late September, ICE arrested 498 undocumented immigrants in a nationwide operation that focused on sanctuary cities, or cities and counties that refuse to employ peace officers as immigration agents, according to Orange County Register.

ICE officials said that they were targeting criminal aliens. However, of those detained during the sanctuary city raids, 181 did not have criminal records, reported the Orange County Register.

In Boston, city officials had told the community that immigration raids would not happen. However, ICE rounded up 50 undocumented individuals throughout Massachusetts. Of the individuals detained, 20 had no criminal record, reported WBUR News.

“Our communities are facing a crisis in the U.S. We are tired of that dynamic and rhetoric that is telling us that all immigrants are criminals,” said Patricia Montes, the executive director of Centro Presente, an immigrant advocacy organization located in East Boston.

ICE officials specified that they targeted cities that refuse to cooperate with the president’s immigration policy, reported the Orange County Register.

“They are targeting criminal aliens, and they are focused on high populations of individuals that are here illegally,” said Robin Hvidston, the executive director of We the People Rising, an anti-illegal immigration group in Claremont.

However, immigration advocates across the country say that the raids are doing more harm than good because innocent people are getting caught in the net.

“I know a lot of people that don’t have papers, so it’s kind of sad that they’re afraid of going out of the house,” said Bernice Maldonado, a hairdresser from Boston. “They’re afraid of going to work. They’re afraid of taking the kids to school. They’re afraid of being outside of the house.”

In Los Angeles there were more than 100 arrested. Although ICE officials said that they were targeting immigrants with criminal records, opponents claim there is a political agenda, according to the Orange County Register.

“ICE is operating as a politicized security force … arresting 498 people in cities that represent the political opposition to what is an unconstitutional federal overreach on immigration,” said Salvador Sarmiento, a campaign coordinator for the Los Angeles-based National Day Laborers Organizing Network.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte had introduced the “No Sanctuary for Criminals Act” earlier this year. It would have punished sanctuary jurisdictions for interfering with President Trump’s campaign promise of mass deportations and border security, according to The Atlantic. The act would have cut some federal grants from sanctuary cities.

ICE Acting Director Tom Homan said that the agency is forced to use more resources to conduct large arrests in the communities because sanctuary city officials often do not cooperate with them, according to the Orange County Register.

“Instead of criminalizing and scapegoating immigrants, Congress should be offering workable comprehensive reforms that actually strengthen our economy and national security,” said Democratic Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey, according to The Atlantic. “Until then, we will continue to be a firm wall of resistance—using all tools at our disposal—to prevent Republicans from blindly trying to sanction this administration’s mass deportation agenda.”

 

Deportation Crimes Explained

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