Category: politics

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One Tomorrow

People have been asking me if I saw Obama’s inaugural speech. I probably should, just to be “informed.” My not having seen it has less to do with me being a cynic than my not wanting to be let down again. Ever since his victory speech in 2008, I’ve been riding a hot air balloon with a slow leak.

Today, idealistic feet planted fully on the ground, even with rumors of impending immigration reform, I prefer not to entertain illusions of quick fixes to my family’s problem of a 10-year exile in Central Mexico. Even so, I just don’t have the heart to reveal the full extent of my reservations to my 90-year old grandmother. Her grandparents were immigrants from Germany, settling to farm in Central New York, much in the same way my father’s side of the family immigrated from Mexico a couple generations ago.

Last week my grandmother told me she really wanted to read our book. I wish I could snap my fingers and a publisher would pick it up this week. More than giving her the satisfaction of reading her favorite granddaughter’s story, it would help explain the tangled tale of why whatever immigration reform the administration is plotting probably won’t benefit my family and me.

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The author and her grandmother “GG”

Last night, she asked me about the inaugural speech. Did I see it? It was great. I told her no, that I’d rather just hear about the new laws getting passed than getting my hopes dashed again. That I wish he would stand up to corporations trying to milk our country dry of every last taxpayer dollar. I’d much prefer to hear about new initiatives passed investing in solar power than hear that Keystone XL is getting new rein in the Lower 48. But when she told me she wanted to send a letter to our senator, Chuck Schumer, I thought to myself, what could Chuck do at this point? We’re not a Dreamer in a university town with several thousand signatures behind us. We’re an unlikely unit of three: one Mexican man with a junior-high education who just wants to have meaningful work, one Ivy-League educated thirty-something, years away from her career and a toddler who might never go to school in her second country of citizenship. But I kept silent, because who am I to knock a great-grandmother’s undying optimism?

I share my grandmother’s hope, and the hope of millions: I want meaningful immigration laws passed, the kind that would allow my husband, daughter and me to return home to the U.S. together as a family. I’d rather see this happen than hearing for the umpteenth time that immigration reform is in the news, or surmise that Latinos are simply pawns in another political game. Our story is a part of the book Amor and Exile because I wanted to share our voice and illustrate an incredibly complex subject in that way that only a personal tale can. In the event that we cannot get our book to the public before the immigration reform debate happens, I’ll need to find another way to contribute to this debate.

But I’ll admit, I’m struggling to figure out how to do more than what I’ve already done. Championing immigration reform is a bittersweet battle for me. Although millions of youth and families like ours—and the U.S. economy—stand to benefit from immigration reform, because our family is suffering from a draconian time bar, the likelihood that we will benefit is very slim.

Of course I do allow opportunities for inspiration. I listened to part of that speech today, to Richard Blanco’s inaugural poem. His message of unity, of vision beyond the things that separate us struck a chord of kinship in me, even released some tears to cleanse my eyes that are frankly too young to be so chronically pessimistic. With this choice of poet, with this message of hope, I look forward to some choice actions taking the place of choice words on Capitol Hill this year. And in listening to this poet’s work, I am inspired to rise to the challenge of communicating exactly why it is that I can’t go home, and how, in an ideal world, my fellow citizens could help get me back there. I’ve always been a willing soldier of idealism, and I know there is a lot of work to do.

Maybe if I get to go back home to the U.S. with my family as a result of this next presidential term, I will watch that inaugural speech after all.

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Romney meant self-departing, not self-deportation

Mitt Romney’s Jan. 23 Florida debate response that “the answer is self-deportation” is confusing on several fronts. What he really means is that he wants undocumented people to depart the country on their own. But anti-immigrant groups have adopted the term “self-deportation” in recent years to mean a sort of war of attrition on the “illegal immigrant” population.

Romney via DonkeyHotey @flickr

Others have already explained the concept: the idea, as Romney alludes to in the short clip below, is to make life so difficult for undocumented immigrants that they just up and leave the country. This explainer from Mother Jones and this parody from This American Life certainly help us understand what Romney thinks.

But immigration judges and immigration lawyers use the term self-deportation in another way. An immigration judge may permit an “alien” to “self-deport” within a certain timeframe after he or she has been ordered removed from the country. In that case, the person being deported could go home and arrange his or her affairs before leaving the country on their own recognizance, rather than being escorted to the border or flown home.

UPDATE: After discussing this again with a third, experienced immigration attorney, I need to clarify further. What I describe in the paragraph above is actually “voluntary departure.” Self deportation refers to people who leave the country on their own (without ICE officers removing them), while under a standing deportation order or order of removal or who leave after the time period for their voluntary departure has elapsed.

In Amor and Exile, I had been using the phrase “self-deport” to describe what many mixed-status couples end up doing: leaving the United States together, on their own terms, after failing to obtain a visa for the immigrant partner. This is what Nicole and Margo and many other couples have done.

In theory, I would like to take the definition a step further and say that the American citizen partner is also self-deporting. Even though it is technically a choice for them, the American spouses of immigrants for whom there is no path to legalization are also being excluded from the country. But I’ve found that coining new usages for technical terms can be a slippery slope, so I will have to come up with another term of art, I think—perhaps simply “departure” will suffice (though not Voluntary Departure, because that is something else altogether). *see UPDATE above

Presidential candidates should be more accurate as well when describing their policy positions. First off, Romney’s argument is naive and cruel—would he be willing to kick immigrant kids out of schools nationwide, shut off people’s utilities as occurred in Alabama and set up checkpoints on the roads to achieve his goal? But second of all, he is saying he does not want to deport 11 million people, but he wants them to self-deport, which as we’ve just seen, means they are really being deported.

I have a book that Romney and the other candidates ought to read if they want to better understand this stuff. We just have to finish it first.

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Uncomfortable contexts

Now that all the hype has died down from the proposed changes to immigration rules by the Obama administration, immigration has returned to its normal back burner location in the media. And those of us in exile, whose lives aren’t yet affected (or won’t ever be) by these small, potential policy alterations, simply go on with the daily reality of being detached from our home countries for an indeterminate amount of time. Not that I got too excited about the announcement in the first place. Sure, I think it would be great for the immigration process to be easier for families, but with the exception of the latest Keystone announcement, and especially demonstrated by the indefinite detention bill, Obama hasn’t had the greatest track-record at promise-keeping. The fact that this announcement was made in an election year, when he’s had the last four years to do it (or more, like not be the top deportation president) also makes me wonder if this is a popularity ploy.

But my point here is not to single out Obama as the cause of our immigration woes. The origin of that problem goes back way beyond him and also isn’t the point of this post. The dialogue that the rule-changes generated was good news to me, but I must confess I wasn’t inspired by the announcement, so I wasn’t compelled to comment on it. That was a good thing because I didn’t have the chance to do so. In fact it was probably a really good thing I was so busy training at my new job, because that way I didn’t have time to get too bummed out that the new rules would have zero effect on my husband’s and my case.

At the end of 2012, some personal situations developed, including a medical problem, that forced my hand economically and led me to take on part-time work that unfortunately means a temporary break from writing my piece for Amor and Exile. Since the beginning of this month, I’ve just been assisting Nathaniel with editing his chapters, hoping for moments like today to get back on our blog, but with sustained optimism that it won’t be too long before I can get back to finishing my chapters.

One of the only things that’s good about being so busy that you don’t have much time to think (much less write) is that disturbing thoughts, well, disturb you less. The prospect of a regular income also does enough for your panorama that it helps distract you from negativity that might otherwise cloud your focus. But that doesn’t mean that the disappointing fact that the proposed rule changes won’t help us didn’t get discussed. In fact, last night it came up in the kitchen, in the context of an edit I did of Nathaniel’s chapter on waivers. I’d mentioned to Margo that not one, not two, but three of the individuals profiled in the book are from the state we live in, Queretaro, and what a small world it is. He mulled this over and wondered aloud about another couple we know who’s in exile, spefically how their prospects for legalization compare to our own. I acknowledged that they had a long road ahead of them, and we chatted a bit about the arbitrary nature of immigration agents’ decisions on individual cases, and how when it comes down to it, your future fate in the U.S. has a lot to do with luck. Then we had dinner and put the topic out of our heads.

But some things are too disturbing to ignore, elbowing their way into your consciousness without even saying “excuse me.” That same night, perhaps inspired by chapter editing, I made time to pen a short post on my own blog as an update to my evolving personal situation. I mentioned the same friend whose fate we’d been contemplating while cooking dinner, and how we’d recently learned she was expecting and how I felt lucky to be able to provide her with some guidance and advice about impending motherhood in a foreign country. Right as I finished my post, though, that same friend messaged me: they’d just received some damning feedback about their immigration case, that they’d just gotten their FOIA back, that their attorney hadn’t represented them in the way they would have liked, that they’d have to stay here longer than they’d hoped, etc. She was completely distraught.

I tried to console her in the best way I knew how, drawing on the years that I’d lived in my own personal hell of being mentally consumed by not being able to live where I wanted to due to my husband’s legal immigration situation. But she was just so down that she was practically inconsolable, and I knew she just had to go through it herself. In the end it’s a deeply personal journey to the other side of accepting that, if you want to stay with your partner, you might have to live the rest of your life in a country that you never chose to live in. Going to bed, I thought about how much our situation has strained our relationship, how much I wish I had had someone in my shoes to talk to when I went through those worst moments of losing hope and my way. How people who observe our situation might think I am especially strong to be able to withstand the last 5 years of my life in a less than ideal professional and social situation, but how vulnerable I still feel.

I can sit back and watch the hype rise and fall when it comes to politically motivated legislative proposals. But when individual tragedies plague my mind, like those of our friend, who ultimately reminded me of the aspects of our own situation that I prefer not to think of daily, I feel driven to speak out. Knowing that the handful of compelling stories I’m personally acquainted with are so few, but so emblematic of a continent-wide problem (I might go so far as to even say tragedy—my friend graduated at the top of her class in her graduate school), it outrages me. So little of this comes out in the national dialogue on immigration. It deepens my commitment to share our story, to not let it get swept under the rug as yet another piece of collateral damage (read: deportations) in the war on culture, drugs, bilateral trade agreements, or whatever we deem as the root cause(s) of our broken immigration system. I don’t disagree that Mexico has a lot of its own responsibility, or that some deportation cases involve unsavory individuals that don’t deserve to stay in the U.S. But the vast majority of individuals seeking adjustment of status are just hard-working people who, like all immigrants who’ve built America, want a chance to continue contributing to society, legitimately. Further, how can we ignore that yes, immigrants, both undocumented and legal, do make a positive impact on our economy, especially at a time when that push is so needed?

Halfway into my period of de facto exile before we can apply to re-enter the U.S. as a family, I can’t say I am much clearer on how or why this system works the way it does. Or what it means for my life, like where I’ll be in five years. Like my friend, I’ve felt this uncomfortable context one too many times in the past, one in which our emotions, our lives, are at the mercy of politically-rooted government proposals and decisions, that appear and fade as arbitrarily as the wind blows. Also, like my friend, I want nothing more than to have a shred of control over our destiny. Ironically, this leads me closer to a point where I cease to allow my expectations about our case’s final outcome to have the power to determine my quality of life. I wish it could be the same for everyone in my situation, but I’m afraid we can’t depend on the politicians to take care of that problem for us.

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More answers on proposed immigration waiver changes

The Obama Administration announcement last week that it wants to allow some mixed immigration status families to remain together in the United States while they apply for hardship waivers was briefly turned into media debate fodder and then, apparently dropped because it is just too difficult to explain. But the few conservatives who cried foul, including Texas Republican Lamar Smith who wrote the 3- and 10-year bars into law in 1996, have very little ground to stand on here. As I reported last week, it has been in the works for a long time, it’s highly technical, it’s been suggested by multiple government and NGO reviews of the waiver process, it does not change any laws and it does not provide any new benefits for undocumented immigrants.

Houston immigration attorney Laurel Scott, who has written extensively about waivers, said the proposed rule actually improves compliance with the law. The waivers were originally intended to prevent the hardship of family separation, she said, and the proposed process would minimize the time that immigrant spouses and children of American citizens must spend abroad.

Still, the timing of the announcement and its provenance from the White House is clearly political and the pundits briefly made hay from this latest administrative decree. The moment in this news clip when CNN anchor Erin Burnett asserts to former American Immigration Lawyers Association president David Leopold that anyone who legitimately marries an American citizen can get a green card (then looks down, bites lip, blinks) highlights a huge problem for advocates of immigration reform.

Watch the clip at 2:12 for that moment:

Kris Kobach, the Kansas Secretary of State and crusading attorney who helped draft anti-immigrant legislation in Arizona and for state legislators across the country, skillfully puts the onus back on “illegal aliens, whether they decide to marry a U.S. citizen or not.” And Leopold is not quite able to counter what Moderator Burnett declares to be quite rational.

If the news that the Customs and Immigration Service will now process some “family unity” or family immigration waivers stateside accomplishes one thing, it should demonstrate to the American public once and for all that hundreds of thousands of American citizens have been living in the shadows with their undocumented spouses for the past decade.

Here’s the weird thing: Burnett is mostly right. Immigrants who marry U.S. citizens ARE generally eligible for a green card. Our national immigration system remains, technically, family friendly. BUT if they are in the United States illegally or face any of more than 60 different “inadmissibilities,” that green card may remain just out of reach.

There has been a lot of talk about this “catch-22” in the past week. USCIS puts it this way in the rule notice:The action required to regularize the status of an alien, departure from the United States, therefore is the very action that triggers the section 212(a)(9)(B)(i) inadmissibility that bars that alien from obtaining the immigrant visa.

Here it is in plain English: In order for an immigrant who entered the country illegally and then married an American citizen to get a green card, he or she has to leave the United States. But leaving triggers, in most cases, a 10-year ban (that Congress approved in 1996). To salve this catch-22, Congress crafted a series of pardons, or waivers, available for many, but they are complicated and time consuming and a bit risky to get. Applicants must show that if they are not granted a visa, their American citizen spouse or parent will suffer “extreme hardship.” Three quarters of the immigrants seeking waivers to enter the United States are from Mexico and require a visit to Ciudad Juarez, Mexico; I traveled there last January to see the process first hand.

Because these waivers are difficult to understand and a major financial and emotional and legal burden for many of the couples who need them the most, many, many couples choose to stay in the US, under the radar, rather than applying for green cards and facing the ban and subsequent waiver process.

Enter Candidate Obama. The USCIS is now proposing a tiny tweak in the process that could reassure many couples. They will be able to apply for the pardon BEFORE they leave the US to pick up their visa. This proposed rule (at this point it is still a notice of intent to publish a proposed rule) would provide provisional waivers to some couples so that when they return to the US Consulate or Embassy in their home country, they will be able to get the visa more quickly and efficiently and in fewer steps.

There are lots of waivers for lots of different violations. This rule change would apply to a VERY limited set: only people who “entered without inspection” and have a US citizen spouse or parent could get the provisional waiver. So if your fiancé is a citizen, you have to get married first and if your mom is a permanent resident, you won’t qualify for a provisional waiver.

Also, if you are like Nicole, whose husband has a permanent ban, and who is already living abroad, you won’t qualify. Bear in mind that the difference between a 3 year, 10 year and permanent ban is not that great. If you have been here illegally for 6-12 months, you get a 3-year-bar and if it’s more than a year you are barred for 10 years. In both cases you would be able to utilize the new provisional waiver before leaving the US to get an immigrant visa. But if you entered the US twice, say, after a trip home to see a sick grandparent or even to introduce your wife and kids to your family—even if not caught—you are banned permanently without an opportunity for a waiver. (In the case of this permanent bar, an immigrant may be able to reapply after waiting 10 years abroad, but only a few people have to tested this procedure to date.)

It is impossible to know how many couples in the US are currently eligible for a waiver of some type. Minneapolis immigration attorney Michael Davis said today that he’s gotten dozens of calls in the past week but many of the couples inquiring face a permanent ban and so the provisional waiver would not help them.  Still, Davis thinks that processing the waivers in the US will encourage many couples to apply, once the new rule is finalized, which is supposed to be  by the end of the year.

“I think it’s going to be an incentive for a lot of people to come out and do it,” he said.

In FY2011, USCIS received 23,262 I-601 waiver applications and approved 17,790, roughly a 76 percent approval rate. The approval rate in Ciudad Juarez was closer to 90 percent last year, according to a USCIS spokesman. More than 100,000 people have applied for waivers since 2006. But there are many more people out there who are unaware of the benefit or have been unwilling to take the risk and expense of applying.

One question that remains is what will happen to applicants who are denied a provisional waiver. They will still be in the United States without papers. On a USCIS stakeholders call yesterday, immigration officials did not answer this question, instead seeking suggestions from the public, but an FAQ on the USCIS site does adress the issue:

Q. What would happen to individuals who are denied waivers under the proposed process?

A.They would be subject to USCIS guidance and law enforcement priorities for issuing Notices to Appear (NTA).  For example, convicted criminals, public safety threats, and those suspected of fraud will receive NTAs.

In other words, many of the people denied, if not priority cases for ICE, would just be back to square one—undocumented and married to Americans. But at least they would be with their families in the States rather than separated or forced to move under duress. Going into 10 months of political campaigning, I am glad that Obama is at least signaling a willingness to discuss the deep relationships that Americans have with the undocumented population. While families and family values are a fine starting point, I continue to hope that the candidates will examine their own relationships with migrants, with Mexico in particular and  with our national stake in immigration reform.

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Can we really fight deportations one at a time?

In the last month we’ve seen a lot of exciting news on the political front regarding support for undocumented immigrants. Undocumented Dream Activists Jonathan Perez and Isaac Barrera turned themselves in at a Border Patrol office on November 10th in an effort to draw attention to conflicting policies in the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency—ICE is not following internal policy to prioritize resources by only detaining and deporting serious criminals.

A little over a week later, on November 21, actions by the Alabama Coalition for Immigrant Justice (ACIJ, One Family One Alabama Rally) brought together a number of elected officials from the states of California, Illinois, New York, Texas, and Arizona to hear from Alabaman elected officials, law enforcement and community members about how the draconian HB56 is undermining the economy, security, and collective spirit of goodwill and justice in their state.

Countless journalists and media outlets are cropping up increasing the amount of in-depth, well-balanced coverage that the subject deserves (see our blogroll) This is positive press, and a step in the right direction as far as I’m concerned. More and more people are questioning the increasingly intolerant environment that hardworking undocumented immigrants encounter in the U.S.  It’s more heartening than President Obama’s relative silence on the matter of being the one President who’s deported the most individuals (and his term isn’t even up). A perception of outrage and action is far better than the depressing panorama revealed by the competing Republican candidates for the 2012 elections with regard to immigration policy.

But there is one immigration and the media-related phenomenon that I feel like I ought to view as positive but that in reality I view as somewhat concerning. It is the amount of petition signing requests I’ve received regarding individuals on the brink of deportation in the last several months. Don’t get me wrong—ever since I became an environmental activist at 15, I learned the power of petitions for enacting change. And ever since I got Internet at my house where I live in exile with my husband (a former undocumented immigrant in Mexico), I dutifully sign on to these sites and sign the petitions. I don’t normally “state a reason” for signing the petition, but if I were to, I’d say something like, “Read the inscription on the Statue of Liberty” or “because this student wants to contribute to American society, and we need more people like him/her.” Then I think to myself, I hope they have better luck than we did, and go on with my day’s business. Some of them do, happily, end in victory.

It’s not that I’m not against getting signatures on petitions per se—the problem I see is that the cases aren’t letting up, much less ever ending. Today I read a tweet that we need to get someone home with their fiancee by Christmas. I think to myself, yes, we do, but how many other thousands of individuals besides this one person would also like to be home for the holidays with their loved ones? Last week I read an article by Valeria Fernandez about a woman from Michoacan whose husband is American and whose run of luck in the U.S. may be about to come to an end. She has all the same potential tragedy if she had to go back to Mexico as any of the petition requests I’ve received; she would be separated from her family, her business would be ruined, etc. But a quick search on change.org revealed no hits for Maria Teresa Fuentes. As I read the article, her story sounded more and more eerily like my husband’s previous situation, and the sense of helplessness we had when facing our final decision to take destiny into our own hands and move to Mexico. Her husband’s comment: “I just want to go to Washington D.C. (to) meet with someone there and see what we can do to help my wife,” he said. “This gives me so much grief. Someone has to listen.”

But every time I receive a petition benefiting a single person’s case, I can’t help but wonder if trying to win immigration reform case by case is the most strategic direction for the movement to go in. Even though I’m experiencing the direct effects of displacement by deportation, I have yet to feel fully entitled to make my strategy criticisms public, since I’m “only a spouse” and “not an expert” (hopefully I’ll get over that issue). But I ask anyways: what would happen if we combined all the energy spent on individual cases and petitions and used it to lobby for comprehensive immigration reform on Capitol Hill that we can rely on, that’s truly fair and just, and/or, in the case of ICE, agency-wide policy follow-through?

More than most people I know, I want to see undocumented students be able to complete their educations and go on to be successful professionals as legal U.S. residents. I want immigrant spouses to be able to stay with their American families on U.S. soil (or wherever they choose) without having to go through stressful forced relocations the way we’ve had to (or worse). But I am concerned about the current nature of the discourse and political action regarding immigration reform.

My most idealistic expectation is that we shouldn’t need to start a petition, or find a representative in Washington for every single case. More than just victorious immigration cases that boil down to luck or influence, opportunities are needed for people who don’t have access to sites like change.org but who still deserve a shot at legalization. I worry that today’s “good feeling” of one victorious petition campaign, despite making a positive but tiny dent, distracts us from the overall panorama—that millions of individuals are living in an undeserved underground due to a long detour in how our country values its immigrants of all skill levels and skin colors. We need to acknowledge the importance of all immigrants to American society, not just the wealthy, well-educated, or papered ones, and work to eliminate the knee-jerk biases that come with incomplete understandings of the system.

There is a lot of history to this movement that I’m not privy to, despite the fact that I’ve read and experienced much more about it than most of my friends and family. There have been all sorts of failed attempts at reform and even worse laws passed that have made things worse for immigrants and polarized the situation further. It’s a dog-eat-dog world, the U.S. immigration scene, the kind that pits descendants of undocumented immigrants against their brethren who don’t have the benefit of laxer laws or amnesty. It’s the kind of situation  that leaves activists with no choice but to split into factions and seek their best chances in Congress. Dream Activists may be uniquely suited for organizing around this issue, as students in a closer-knit collegiate setting. And it’s harder to argue with the idea that young children and students who arrived in the U.S. undocumented by no choice of their own ought to be extended the same rights as legal residents, vs. getting behind adults who, despite not having had “a line to wait in,” made an adult decision to seek economic refuge via illegal entry.

Perhaps that’s where the problem arises: the inherent lack of unity among the individuals affected by these policies (I’d argue, all of us).  It’s a difficult matter to speak frankly about, even in families with affected individuals. But it’s a matter we must address if we are to make any substantial headway in terms of comprehensive immigration reform.

And when it comes to activism that targets positive change in the lives of immigrants, I would hope that in addition to campaigns won by the individuals who manage to pull off major online mobilization or gain personal favor in Washington, public backlash will grow and coalesce against policies that unfairly target ALL individuals, students and adults alike, who frankly, the U.S. economy and many American families depend on.

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Americans, family members caught in Secure Communities dragnet

The airing of the PBS Frontline documentary Lost in Detention last week is part of a growing awareness across the country of the gravity of the Bush-Obama immigrant detention dragnet.

White House immigration advisor Cecilia Muñoz

I thought the film itself lacked focus and was dramatized in an unfortunate, made-for-television way. But the accompanying website, linked above is very useful and contains full text of the interviews that were obviously cut into sound bytes for the film, like this one of Obama Administration director of intergovernmental affairs and immigration advisor Cecilia Muñoz:

Frontline: Does President Obama believe that his aggressive policy in immigration and enforcement has been successful?

Cecilia Muñoz: The president has said a number of times, he swore an oath to uphold the law. It’s our responsibility to enforce the laws that we’ve got. Congress gives us resources to enforce the laws that we’ve got. But how we do it matters a lot. He’s talked about that as well.

And later in the interview, Muñoz picks up this same idea.

Muñoz: But at the end of the day, when you have immigration law that’s broken and you have a community of 10 million, 11 million people living and working in the United States illegally, some of these things are going to happen. Even if the law is executed with perfection, there will be parents separated from their children.

They don’t have to like it, but it is a result of having a broken system of laws. And the answer to that problem is reforming the law, making sure that we have an immigration system that works here. You can’t fix the heartbreaking things that happen as a result of immigration enforcement just through enforcement policy. You have to fix that by reforming the law, and that requires the Congress to act, which is why the president has been pushing them so hard.

It’s the same line that unnamed ICE officials have taken on a recent report from the UC-Berkeley Law School condemning Secure Communities for, among other things, possibly arresting some 3,600 American citizens.

ICE officials called the report “misleading and inaccurate,” saying Secure Communities has enhanced public safety and that the report failed to acknowledge ICE’s responsibility to determine who is in the country illegally.

“If there is a question about an individual’s status, ICE conducts appropriate follow-up. If the individual is a U.S. citizen, ICE takes no additional action. In exercising its civil immigration functions, ICE does not detain U.S. citizens,” the agency said in a statement released in response to the report.—Identical quote at San Jose Mercury News and Salon.com

The report in question expands on an American Immigration Lawyers’ Association survey that we wrote about in August. The University of California—Berkeley Warren Institute on Law and Social Policy completed a study of Secure Communities [full report .pdf]. Among the findings:

  • Approximately 3,600 United States citizens have been arrested by ICE through the Secure Communities program
  • More than one-third (39%) of individuals arrested through Secure Communities report that they have a U.S. citizen spouse (5%) or child (37%), meaning that approximately 88,000 families with U.S. citizen members have been impacted by Secure Communities
  • Latinos comprise 93% of individuals arrested through Secure Communities though they only comprise 77% of the undocumented population in the United States

Let me repeat that: based on extrapolations of a smaller data set that the law school obtained through the settlement of a lawsuit between ICE and the National Day Labor Organizing Network, 3,600 U.S. citizens may have been held by ICE since October 2008 and some 88,000 families with U.S. citizen members have been affected by Secure Communities.

“Overall, the findings point to a system in which individuals are pushed through rapidly, without appropriate checks or opportunities to challenge their detention and/or deportation. This conclusion is particularly concerning given that the findings also reveal that people are being apprehended who should never have been placed in immigration custody, and that certain groups are over-represented in our sample population.” —Warren Report

The most chilling line in the report, for me, is that the family connections of detainees to U.S. citizens are likely underestimates: “… as immigrants may fear disclosing personal information to immigration authorities, particularly if they live in mixed-status families and fear negative consequences for family members because many detainees do not want to implicate their families in their immigration cases.”

But it works the other way as well. The 88,000 or more American families caught in this system are often not able or willing to speak out on behalf of their detained relatives because of legal concerns, family complications, lack of access to media, advocacy groups or legal aid and their sheer need to survive while a spouse or parent is held and likely deported. And so we rarely hear their stories. Obama does not hear their stories. Republican presidential candidates do not hear the stories of American citizens detained by ICE or the American spouses of immigrants put in deportation proceeding because of a broken tail light.

That is the collateral damage that Muñoz calls inevitable in our democracy, a mere budget line item, and the cost of doing law enforcement.

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ICE’s “Secure Communities” and American spouses

Click to read AILA Report

The American Immigration Lawyers Association has just released a report that documents 127 cases of immigrants who were taken into Immigration and Customs Enforcement custody after minor interactions with local law enforcement officials. This often happens through the Department of Homeland Security’s “Secure Communities” program, which has come under intense scrutiny in recent weeks. Secure Communities provides immigration authorities with fingerprints from local jails, but DHS has several other means of scanning arrestees for immigration violations including 287g, which deputizes some local police and sheriffs to enforce immigration laws and the Criminal Alien Program, which screens inmates in select jails and prisons for immigration violations.

Perhaps most chilling, however, as documented in the AILA report, is the tendency of local law enforcement, including U.S. Forest Service rangers in one example, to call in ICE after routine traffic stops and hand the case over to them.

The opposition to Secure Communities and to the large numbers of deportations under the Obama administration that the program has facilitated, is still being led by fearless undocumented youth, as evidenced by demonstrations in Chicago and Los Angeles (see YouTube video below). But as the numbers of U.S. citizens or permanent residents with close relatives and friends caught up in this federal dragnet increase, a new opportunity for protest is on the rise.

Of the 127 cases the AILA report documents, at least 27 of the immigrants in deportation proceedings have U.S. citizen or permanent resident spouses or fiances. Four are dating American citizens. And even more have U.S. citizen children, siblings and parents. Imagine for a moment that you are driving with your husband in Florida, you get a ticket and when you go to court to challenge it, your husband is arrested by ICE agents and placed in deportation proceedings:

In 2010, a man in Florida was a passenger in a car driven by his wife, a U.S. citizen, when the car was pulled over. The wife was given a ticket for driving without a license. The wife went to traffic court to challenge the ticket because she had a valid driver’s license. The man accompanied her to court. Even though the wife was a U.S. citizen, she was not fluent in English because she had spent many years outside the U.S. However, plainclothes ICE agents were at the courthouse arresting people who needed an interpreter, and they arrested both the man and his wife. He has been placed in removal proceedings and has no relief other than voluntary departure. He was the sole source of support for his wife and two U.S. citizen children. He also helped support his wife’s U.S. citizen sister and her two children. —AILA Case Study #26

These cases are occurring all over the country at all times of day and night. Even Good Samaritans and VICTIMS of crimes are being caught in the dragnet:

In September 2007, a man called the police after being the victim of a hit and run car accident in New Mexico. The sheriff’s deputy who responded to the call repeatedly asked the man if he was “illegal.” When he finally admitted to being in the country unlawfully, deputy arrested him. He was held until ICE picked him up and was eventually deported to Mexico. His lawful permanent resident wife and their U.S. citizen child moved to Mexico as well. —AILA Case Study #83

I cannot see how President Obama, a student of the 1960s Civil Rights struggle can watch this type of injustice occur, much less sit idly by as “citizens”—and I use that term in the broadest way possible, as in good citizens—take to the streets over it.

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On Christianity and (immigration) politics

On the heels of the Rick Perry Jesus-fest in Texas, it’s nice to see some mainline Christian groups stepping up to the plate in Alabama and actually getting some press for it.

2006 Pro-immigrant march in Chicago | Edu-Tourist on Flickr
Alabama took the mantle from Arizona for most regressive state immigration law in the country when it passed H.B. 56 in June. The law, which goes into effect next month unless stopped in court, contains Arizona-like provisions for police stopping “suspected illegal immigrants.” But it also goes further in forcing public schools to check the residency status of students and making it a crime to transport or harbor undocumented immigrants. The Obama administration has sued to stop implementation of the law, as have at least 16 other nations.

But the latest opposition is coming from a several mainline Christian groups: Methodists, Episcopals and Catholics have actually sued for the right to minister to people regardless of immigration status. These groups have long been supporters of comprehensive immigration reform, but stepping into the spotlight and suing the state is a good move, and reminds us that the Christian right is not the only religious group out there mixing it up in the political realm.

That reminder is important. To non-Christians such as myself, it’s easy to lump all Christians into one big group. I know that Christians have always been on the left and the right side of American history; I know that Martin Luther King, Jr. and Cesar Chavez were both Christians and I occasionally read liberal Christian journals like Sojourners. And perhaps the Christian right—the prayer breakfast, God and Country, fundamentalist right—is more amplified here in Idaho. But it seems like the Christian right is just so much louder than the Christian left. So I’m heartened to see mainstream, liberal Christians raise their voices through this lawsuit.

Maybe they could also take a hint from their non-proselytizing Jewish and Muslim brothers and start preaching to their own co-religionists on the right who have lost their way, rather than looking far and wide for new Christians?