Us Deportations Of Europeans Could Exceed Last Fiscal Year
BOSTON Europeans often hid in plain sight as Latin Americans, Asians and others living illegally in America were sent packing. But now theyre starting to realize they are not immune to President Donald Trumps crackdown on illegal immigration, and theyre worried.
The number of Europeans deported this federal fiscal year from the United States could surpass last fiscal years total, according to figures provided to The Associated Press by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
From Oct. 2, 2016 through June 24, more than 1,300 Europeans have been removed, compared with 1,450 during all of federal fiscal year 2016 the last under President Barack Obama. The agency didnt provide estimates broken down by calendar year.
In San Jose, California, an HIV-positive Russian asylum seeker faces possible deportation after overstaying his visa. In Chicago, Polish and Irish community groups say theyre seeing inquiries about immigration and citizenship-related services surge as people seek legal protections.
And in Boston, John Cunningham, a well-known Irishman who had overstayed his visa by 14 years, was sent back to Ireland last week, sending shivers through the citys sizeable Irish expat community.
People are very, very concerned and lying low, says Ronnie Millar, of the Boston-based Irish International Immigrant Center. The message is that if it can happen to John, it can happen to anyone.
The Trump Administrations Deportation Policy Is Spreading The Coronavirus
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On March 28th, two days after he was deported to Guatemala from a detention center in Arizona, a twenty-nine-year-old man, from a village in the countrys western highlands, became known as Patient 36. Up to that point, there had been thirty-five registered cases of COVID-19 in Guatemala, and Patient 36 was the first returning deportee to test positive for the illness. He had been put on a planepart of a deportation fleet known as ICE Airwith forty other passengers, most of whom, like him, had spent several weeks in detention. After landing, they were briefly held in Guatemala City and evaluated, but, because the authorities claimed that he showed no symptoms, he was allowed to travel to his familys home, in Momostenango, Totonicapán, where six other relatives, including a nine-month-old baby, lived. By the time he got there, he had a fever and a cough. A local health official told the newspaper El Periódico that the mans wife had known that he was ill before he left the capital. She alerted a medical clinic in town, which tested him. Almost a week later, the Guatemalan government announced that another deporteea thirty-one-year-old man from Mazatenango, about eighty kilometres south of Momostenangohad also tested positive, making him Patient 49.
What Are The Public Safety And Financial Costs Of Zero
Zero-tolerance policies require enormous resources from federal prosecutors and courts, the Department of Justice, the US Marshals, and the Bureau of Prisons. In 2011, the chief judge of the US District of Arizona declared a judicial emergency in part due to the strain of immigration cases. A 2012 report estimated incarceration costs alone for those sentenced for illegal entry and reentry reached $1 billion in 2011. Individuals serving sentences for illegal entry and reentry are an important source of the burgeoning federal prison population. The number of people serving prison sentences for immigration offenses grew 762 percent from 1990 to 2015.
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‘all Of Them Are Fighting Their Cases’
The U.S. government might have valid reasons to be suspicious of Madjitov, but officials declined to say what they are.
According to federal court filings that do not name Madjitov, his wifes brother, also an Uzbek immigrant, traveled to Syria in 2013 to join the al-Nusra Front, an extremist group with ties to al-Qaeda. Saidjon Mamadjonov was killed shortly thereafter. And the FBI later accused Madjitovs other brother-in-law, Sidikjon Mamadjonov, of hiding what he knew about Saidjons death during interviews with federal investigators.
But no one ever accused Madjitov or his wife, Madina Mamadjonova, of wrongdoing.
The couple settled in Windsor, Conn., where Madjitov worked as a home health aide and Mamadjonova gave birth to two boys.
Madjitov planted a garden of tomatoes, cucumbers, eggplant and apple trees in the familys yard. On Fridays, they would go to the mosque together, and on weekends they would go to the park and out for pizza or Chinese food.
I always worked with my lawyer wherever I lived I always notified DHS where I lived, and they always gave me a work permit, Madjitov said.
We were a very happy couple, said Mamadjonova, who said she has struggled to support the family since his arrest and has been battling depression. He was very affectionate, a very kind and caring father.
He is still in captivity.
At The Border Despite Chaos And Some Changes Trump
The main U.S. border policy during Mr. Biden’s presidency has been an emergency rule put in place in March 2020 by the Trump administration. Known as Title 42, it allows U.S. border agents to quickly expel migrants to Mexico or their home country without screening them for asylum.
Despite criticism from advocates, the Biden administration has defended the expulsions in federal court, arguing they are needed to curb the spread of the coronavirus inside detention sites.
Officials have enforced Title 42 longer under Mr. Biden than under the Trump administration, carrying out over 1 million expulsions, most of them of single adult migrants, in 11 months, government figures show. During just over nine months under Mr. Trump, roughly 400,000 expulsions were carried out.
The Biden administration has, however, refrained from expelling migrant children who enter U.S. custody without their parents. Instead, unaccompanied children from Central America are being transferred to government shelters.
The administration has also applied Title 42 to a smaller percentage of families than the Trump administration, partly because Mexican officials have refused to accept Central American families with young children. However, the number of families encountered in 2021 increased by 1,200% from 2020.
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What Are Other Pending And Proposed Changes To The Immigration System
Categorically ending asylum: The administration continues to propose multiple rules and policy changes that seek to shrink the scope of the asylum system including limiting eligibility criteria, eroding due process pathways, and creating administrative and financial obstacles when applying for asylum. Lear more about the specific proposed changes to the asylum system.
Attacking DACA and TPS: Trump has worked to strip legal status from more than one million people. Despite a Supreme Court ruling to uphold Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals , has since undermined the Supreme Courts decision and is continuing to dismantle the program- again jeopardizing the futures of more than 700,000 people who came to the U.S. as children and the 300,000 who could have qualified for DACA. And by ending Temporary Protected Status for most countries, Trump is ending legal status for hundreds of thousands of people and creating a new population of unauthorized immigrants subject to the threat of deportation. A recent court ruling reversed a previous decision that protected TPS holdersand in as little as six months, deportations could begin. Read more about TPS and DACA.
Changing the structure of the refugee resettlement program: The administration also issued an executive order that permits state and local officials to block resettlement in their cities and states. In January 2020, a judge issued a temporary injunction that halts the policy for now.
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Barack Obama Deported More People In His First Term Than Trump
United States
More people were deported and interior removals were higher under Obama, but more people were apprehended at the border under Trump.
According to the Washington Post, the Obama administration deported 1.18 million people in his first three years. The number of deportations has been a little under 800,000 until 2019 under Trump. The Post further noted that the Obama administration deported 409,849 people in 2012 alone, while the Trump administration has yet to deport more than 260,000 people in a year. In 2012, immigrant advocates had dubbed Obama as the ‘deporter in chief.’
According to the pew research center, the number of migrant apprehensions at the U.S.-Mexico border rose in fiscal 2019 to its highest annual level in 12 years. The increase in apprehensions has come as a growing number of migrants seek asylum.
Both Customs and Border Protection and Immigration and Customs Enforcement carry out removals or deportations. In fiscal 2018, CBP and ICE together carried out 337,287 removals of unauthorized immigrants, a 17% increase from the previous year. But removals remained below the levels recorded during much of the Obama administration, including three years between fiscal 2012 and 2014 when there were more than 400,000 per year.
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Low Priority For Deportation
Madjitov was born in 1981 into a family of musicians in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, which was then part of the Soviet Union. His father taught him to play the karnay, a long, hornlike instrument, and he joined an ensemble of traditional musicians.
The family was religious, and as a young man in 2005, Madjitov joined thousands of others in a mass protest of the brutal regime of Uzbek President Islam Karimov, who was infamous for his persecution of political dissidents and the devout. Government forces opened fire on the crowds, killing hundreds, and they arrested scores of others, including Madjitov. After being released from prison weeks later, Madjitov resolved to leave Uzbekistan.
A music festival in Austin several months later provided the ticket out. Madjitov and a dozen other folk musicians landed there in 2006, on P-3 temporary visas for entertainers.
He traveled from the festival to live with friends other Uzbek immigrants in Kissimmee, Fla. He found a job working at a Disney hotel and applied for asylum.
His application was rejected, so he appealed it. And when the appeal was rejected, he appealed that, his case bumping along through the dense bureaucracy with hundreds of thousands of others.
Madjitov received a final order of removal in 2011. But with no criminal conduct on his record, he was deemed a low priority for deportation by the Obama administration.
Madjitov was taken into custody in 2017.
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Who Is Being Prosecuted
Under the current and earlier zero-tolerance policies, criminal prosecution is not reserved for those with serious criminal histories. Even organizations that advocate for increased immigration enforcement acknowledge that many of the people who are criminally prosecuted today for illegal entry are not dangerous criminals, but regular folks, dishwashers, landscapers.
The change in the criminal histories of people prosecuted for felony reentry is particularly dramatic. In 2002, about 50 percent of people sentenced for illegal reentry had convictions serious enough to be counted in Criminal History Categories IV-VI . In 2017, with over twice as many people sentenced, only 24 percent of people convicted of reentry had convictions in these most serious categories. As more people have been prosecuted, fewer of them have had serious criminal histories.
As a result, the US government has prosecuted people with no prior criminal histories like Rosa Manriquez, a grandmother who had lived her entire life in the US, who was desperate to return to her citizen children and grandchildren and Brenda R., a mother who fled Mexico when police warned her to stop investigating the murder of two of her sons.
As prosecutions increase under Trump, even fewer people are likely to have serious criminal histories.
Comparison With Past Administrations
Professor Kevin Johnson, writing in the Santa Clara Law Review in 2017, described that defenders of the Trump administration’s immigration policies have claimed that the policies were a continuation of the previous administration’s policies under Barack Obama. Johnson refuted this by asserting that the Trump administration’s policies “differ in important respects” from the Obama administration’s. Immigration policies under Obama featured both “tough enforcement” and some “generosity”. Trump has employed “systematic efforts to dramatically escalate immigration enforcement”, while his administration has reduced or possibly removed “more generous treatment of immigrants subject to possible removal from the United States”. Professor Johnson and Professor Rose Cuison-Villazor wrote for Wake Forest Law Review in May 2019 that the Trump administration’s immigration policies are “tougher” than that of previous administrations under “any modern president”. While the Reagan and Obama administrations employed detention of migrants, the Trump administration had mandatory detention, and “no previous administration resorted to the separation of families as a device to deter migration from Central America”.
Judith Greene, stated in 2018’s Social Justice that the Trump administration was no longer implementing “national detention standards” established in 2000 and improved upon by the Obama administration.
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We Sit In Disbelief: The Anguish Of Families Torn Apart Under Trumps Deportation Policy
Many American families struggle with steep financial decline after a breadwinners deportation as Trump broadened targets to include immigrants with no serious criminal records
Before her husband was deported, Seleste Hernandez was paying taxes and credit card bills. She was earning her way and liking it.
But after her husband, Pedro, was forced to return to Mexico, her family lost his income from a commercial greenhouse job. Seleste had to quit her nursing aide work, staying home to care for a disabled son. Now she is trapped, grieving for a faraway spouse and relying on public assistance just to scrape by.
She went, in her eyes, from paying taxes to depending on taxpayers. Im back to feeling worthless, she says.
Across the country, hundreds of thousands of American families are coping with anguish compounded by steep financial decline after a spouses or parents deportation, a more enduring form of family separation than Donald Trumps policy that took children from parents at the border.
Trump has broadened the targets of deportation to include many immigrants with no serious criminal records. While the benefits to communities from these removals are unclear, the costs to devastated American families and to the public purse are coming into focus. The hardships for the families have only deepened with the economic strains of the coronavirus.
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You got something wrong, Seleste insisted. What has changed?
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