When showing your papers is not enough
by Tom Sullivan
via Wikimedia Commons (Public domain)
My corner of the U.S. is still reeling from recent Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids. Locals collected food for Latino families afraid to go to the grocery store for fear of arrest. The raids in eastern Tennessee received more attention, but the emotional effect is widespread.
This is nuts:
This video was just sent to me from Syracuse showing Customs and Border Patrol intimidating people as they get on their buses and trains.
On my way right now to Syracuse to talk about this. pic.twitter.com/k19nROR9zU— Cynthia Nixon (@CynthiaNixon) April 26, 2018
The Los Angeles Times posted an important story about how capricious some of the ICE arrests can be. If they’ve decided you are not a citizen, showing your papers is not good enough:
Since 2012, ICE has released from its custody more than 1,480 people after investigating their citizenship claims, according to agency figures. And a Times review of Department of Justice records and interviews with immigration attorneys uncovered hundreds of additional cases in the country’s immigration courts in which people were forced to prove they are Americans and sometimes spent months or even years in detention.
Victims include a landscaper snatched in a Home Depot parking lot in Rialto and held for days despite his son’s attempts to show agents the man’s U.S. passport; a New York resident locked up for more than three years fighting deportation efforts after a federal agent mistook his father for someone who wasn’t a U.S. citizen; and a Rhode Island housekeeper mistakenly targeted twice, resulting in her spending a night in prison the second time even though her husband had brought her U.S. passport to a court hearing.
They and others described the panic and feeling of powerlessness that set in as agents took them into custody without explanation and ignored their claims of citizenship.
The wrongful arrests account for a small fraction of the more than 100,000 arrests ICE makes each year, and it’s unclear whether the Trump administration’s aggressive push to increase deportations will lead to more mistakes. But the detentions of U.S. citizens amount to an unsettling type of collateral damage in the government’s effort to remove illegal or unwanted immigrants.
The errors reveal flaws in the way ICE identifies people for deportation, including its reliance on databases that are incomplete and plagued by mistakes. The wrongful arrests also highlight a presumption that pervades U.S. immigration agencies and courts that those born outside the United States are not here legally unless electronic records show otherwise. And when mistakes are not quickly remedied, citizens are forced into an immigration court system where they must fight to prove they should not be removed from the country, often without the help of an attorney.
That’s nice. Ain’t America great again?
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