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| Prayer vigil in Morristown, TN, elementary school after raid. Photo: CNN |
Update 4/26/18: At an April 25 congressional hearing, Jeff Sessions announced that he had changed his mind and wouldn't suspend the Legal Orientation Program, at least for now.
In a
major
raid on April 5, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents detained
97 employees at a family-owned meat-processing plant in Bean Station,
Tennessee. The detentions devastated the rural area’s immigrant community.
Local sources reported that some
600
children failed to attend school the next day, and churches were providing
shelter for dozens of minors left without caregivers. More than
1,000
people gathered at a local elementary school on April 8 to show support for
the detainees’ families. This was reportedly the largest workplace raid since
the administration of George W. Bush, which carried out a number of massive
raids, culminating in the
May
2008 detention of 389 workers at a meat-processing plant in Postville, Iowa
The dramatic raid in Tennessee was hardly more than a blip
in most national media. Immigration coverage that week had been overwhelmed by
a burst of
incoherent
and fact-free rants from Donald Trump about borders and what he called
“ridiculous liberal (Democrat) laws like Catch & Release.” But the raid is
an important example of the extent to which the Trump administration has
already been able to implement a hard-line anti-immigrant agenda without the need
for Congressional approval—and without attracting a lot of attention from the
media or the groups that focus on lobbying and electoral politics.
Making Bad Courts Worse
One area where the administration has concentrated its efforts is
the immigration court system.
Despite the name, these courts aren’t part of the U.S.
judiciary system; they’re administrative courts operated by the Department of
Justice. In other words, an immigration judge is employed by the same executive
branch which comes to the court seeking an immigrant’s deportation. This
essential unfairness has been detailed neatly by TV satirist
John Oliver. But now
Attorney General Jeff Sessions is working to make the system even worse.
The immigration courts suffer from a massive backlog of more
than 650,000 cases, one
aggravated by the administration’s decision to step up detentions and
deportations. Congress has provided funds to hire 100 additional immigration
judges to help with the backlog, but this isn’t enough for Sessions. In a memo
sent out at the end of March, the attorney general set a quota for immigration
judges: starting in October each judge is expected to clear
700
cases a year. What this will produce is “an assembly line, not a judicial
system,” according to a
Los Angeles Times editorial, with “the
very real risk of subverting due process rights as individual judges place
their job security ahead of justice.”
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| Jeff Sessions. Photo: Mark Wilson/Getty Images |
Since the cases brought before immigration courts are civil,
not criminal, the government isn’t required to provide the immigrant defendants
with lawyers. Since 2003 the Justice Department has sponsored a program (the Legal
Orientation Program,
LOP) which gives
some relief by offering legal advice to about 50,000 immigrants each years.
A 2012 Justice Department study found that the LOP actually saves the government money and
helps reduce the courts’ backlog, but as of April 10 the department had
suspended the program, ostensibly in order to audit its cost-effectiveness.
“This is a blatant attempt by the administration to strip detained immigrants
of even the pretense of due-process rights,” Mary Meg McCarthy, executive
director of the National Immigrant Justice Center, told the
Washington Post.
Sessions is also working to reduce the independence of the
immigration court system’s appellate unit, the Board of Immigration Appeals
(BIA). The attorney general has the authority to rule on cases and even to
overturn BIA decisions, but Sessions’ predecessors used the powers
sparingly. In contrast, the current AG has
taken over three cases this year alone and has already decided one in a way
that threatens the due process rights of asylum seekers. Stephen Legomsky, a
former lead counsel for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, calls the
attorney general substituting his decisions for those of the BIA “analogous to
a prosecutor in a criminal case deciding the case.”
Republican “Family
Values”
The executive branch also has a great deal of leeway in how
it handles the detention and deportation of immigrants it targets. There have
been many abuses of this power in the past, but the present administration
seems on track to set a record.
On April 10 the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU)
filed
a class action suit in federal court in Boston challenging what it charged
was a pattern of the government detaining immigrants as they were applying
to the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to gain legal
status as spouses of U.S. citizens. The suit cites seven cases in January alone
of immigrants arrested while they were visiting USCIS offices in Massachusetts
or Rhode Island while engaged in the application process.
The government can be equally harsh in the way it treats
immigrants once they are detained. Before last December, immigration
authorities released most pregnant immigrants while their cases were pending.
The Trump administration ended the policy in December, and
506
pregnant women were placed in detention during the first three months of
this year. Meanwhile, advocates say the Border Patrol has instituted a policy
of
separating
the families of asylum seekers, leaving even very small children in
isolation from their parents.
The Department of Homeland Security
denies
that there is a policy “that encourages the separation of parents from their
children as a punitive or deterrence measure,” but advocates say there are “
hundreds
of cases.” This is from an administration led by a political party claiming
that “
family is
the bedrock of our nation.”
“Thank You for Your Service”
But Trump’s immigration apparatus follows policies still
more incompatible with his party’s supposed values. Sometimes it’s hard to see
any motive for the government’s actions other than an eagerness to meet arrest
quotas—or maybe just nastiness on the part of empowered bureaucrats.
The president claims to want
“merit-based”
immigration, but his immigration agents seem to have no problem targeting
well-educated professionals who are already living here. In early April ICE
seized a New Jersey physics teacher named
Ahmed
Abdelbasit and threw him into detention. If deported, Abdelbasit would face
a death sentence in his native Egypt resulting from political activism. Earlier
in the year ICE agents detained
Syed
Jamal, a chemistry teacher in Kansas, and an Illinois doctor,
Lukasz
Niec. Both are longtime residents with U.S. citizen children.
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| Deported veteran Miguel Perez |
Republicans routinely call for “supporting our troops,” but
this apparently doesn’t include
Miguel
Perez, a Mexican-born green card recipient, who served two tours in
Afghanistan.
Diagnosed
with PTSD after his return, Perez fell into drug abuse, was convicted for
an attempted cocaine sale, and served half of a 15-year sentence. The Obama
administration began deportation proceedings against Perez in 2016, but the
Trump administration finished the job—despite pleas from supporters, including
Senator Tammy Duckworth (D-IL). The veteran was deported to Mexico on March 24 with little more than the clothes on his back.
And what about the president’s claim to be protecting U.S.
citizens from the MS-13 gang? In 2015 a Salvadoran youth on Long Island decided
to quit the gang and help the authorities
arrest other members. We might expect the U.S. government to shield the
teenager, possibly putting him in the witness protection program in order to
encourage future cooperation from others. Instead, immigration authorities
placed him in detention and are now attempting to deport him to El Salvador,
where he feels sure he’ll be murdered as an informant.
Such practices have of course met a great deal of
criticism. Last year White House chief of staff John Kelly, then the DHS head,
had an
answer for critics in Congress: “If lawmakers do not like the laws
they’ve passed and we are charged to enforce, then they should have the courage
and skill to change the laws,” he said. “Otherwise, they should shut up and
support the men and women on the front lines.”
