February 27, 2017 "Information
Clearing House"
- "LA
Times"
- Whenever U.S. Immigration and Customs
Enforcement insists it is just doing its job,
Americans should take a closer look at what is
happening.
With an executive order signed in his first week
in office, President Trump has “taken the
shackles off” ICE and Border Patrol officers,
according to the White House, expanding the
priorities for deporting immigrants. Homeland
Security Secretary John Kelly claims his agents
will focus on those convicted of or charged with
crimes, but immigrant advocacy groups and the
news media already have documented arrests,
detentions and deportations of immigrants who in
no way represent a threat to public safety.
From 2006 through early 2010, I reported on
Immigration and Customs Enforcement. What I
learned was that no matter the ostensible
priorities of federal agencies — or even settled
law — ICE was an agency prone to overreach.
In those days, immigration agents liked to roll
out press releases touting the successes of
their “fugitive operations.” The releases
detailed how violent gang members, sexual
predators and other criminals were taken off the
streets. Time and again, I pressed the agency
for detailed information on those arrested only
to discover the detainees were neither fugitives
nor serious criminals.
Some people will shrug and say that if you’re in
this country illegally you should be...sent
packing. But enforcement is always a matter of
priorities.
Instead, I found longtime green card holders who
had been convicted decades earlier of minor
offenses. Or who were ordered deported in
absentia, in some cases because they had moved
or the wrong paperwork had been filed. Among the
detainees without green cards, many simply
didn’t come close to fitting the description
“danger to society.” They were street vendors,
construction workers, janitors and small
business owners, albeit without papers.
Enforcement efforts outside the fugitive program
had problems as well.
One case I reported on involved a U.S. citizen
who had once before been wrongly deported to
Mexico. When I met him, he was a candidate for
deportation after he’d been convicted of drug
possession. Again and again he told ICE he was
an American, born in California’s Madera County.
His family produced a birth certificate, but
neither the agents nor the immigration judge
were convinced. Instead he was threatened with
an added charge: impersonating a U.S. citizen.
It took publishing a newspaper story about his
plight to gain his release.
In another case, agents attempted to deport a
Senegalese man who had a legal stay from a
federal court allowing him to remain in the U.S.
while his case was adjudicated. ICE dealt with
him under a covert program that forcibly drugged
immigrants with powerful psychotropics so they
wouldn’t resist as they were loaded onto
commercial airliners for the trip “home.” At
LAX, airline officials refused to transport him.
He eventually succeeded in court and is now a
legal permanent resident.
|
Break
Free From The Matrix
|
Victoria Arellano, a 23-year-old HIV-positive
transgender woman, was stopped at a DUI
checkpoint and eventually turned over to ICE.
She was held in a federal detention center and
denied the life-saving drugs she took daily
despite clear case law that says denial of care
is unconstitutional. When Arellano died, she was
bound to a hospital bed even though she was too
weak to raise her arms to hug her mother, who
had feared visiting her daughter because of her
own immigration status.
ICE also detained green card holders with mental
illnesses and sent them to a network of private
hospitals where they were illegally held
incommunicado. Once they were deemed stable — in
the cases I covered, such judgments were
questionable — they had to appear in immigration
court, often without representation despite laws
that require the state to provide the mentally
disabled with legal help. One such green card
holder was detained because of a domestic
violence conviction. I spoke to him shortly
before his hearing. He couldn’t focus, he told
me, because of the voices in his head. Days
later, his mother called sobbing. Her son had
been deported to Mexico, a country he barely
knew and where no one could take care of him.
I found another case in Haiti. David Gerbier, a
green card holder with two U.S. citizen
children, was deported to the Haitian capital,
Port-au-Prince, in 1999 after an immigration
court illegally bumped up a minor drug charge to
an aggravated felony. A federal appeals court
ruled that Gerbier’s offense was indeed a
misdemeanor and tossed out his deportation
order. Nonetheless, U.S. officials in
Port-au-Prince repeatedly denied Gerbier reentry
into the United States. It took 10 years and a
pro bono lawsuit before he was finally reunited
with his family.
Given ICE’s disturbing track record for ignoring
legal limits, the excesses we’re hearing about
now shouldn’t come as a surprise. There’s the
young man in Washington state with Deferred
Action for Childhood Arrivals status. He was
rousted from bed and accused of being a
deportable gang member. His lawyers say the
charge is only supported by doctored documents.
On Wednesday, federal agents removed a
Salvadoran woman, reportedly scheduled for
emergency brain surgery, from a Texas hospital
bed.
Some people will shrug and say that if you’re in
this country illegally you should be detained
and sent packing. But enforcement is always a
matter of priorities. The Trump deportation
guidelines are extreme in their scope compared
with the priorities set as far back as the late
1990s. And anyone on U.S. soil — citizen or not
— ought to be entitled to due process. The
president says he will keep our country safe.
ICE appears to have decided that when it cannot
find serious criminals, it will protect us from
the depredations of students, nannies and
strawberry pickers
Sandra Hernandez is the vice president for
communication at the Mexican American Legal
Defense and Educational Fund. She covered
criminal justice and immigration for the L.A.
Daily Journal.
© 2017 The Los Angeles Times
