More than 120 people who are in the United States illegally were arrested over the weekend by federal authorities and face immediate deportation as part of a renewed crackdown on illegal immigration, Homeland Security officials said Monday.
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“With the Supreme Court poised to take up the case, the administration’s argument about focusing on deportation priorities rings more true if they are really focusing on their priorities”, Rosenblum said, noting that the recently arrived families were “a named priority”.
The Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson released a statement saying that the campaign to deport people “should come as no surprise”.
The focus of the operation, he said, were adults and their children who were apprehended after May 1, 2014 after crossing the southern border illegally, were issued orders of removal by an immigration court and have exhausted “appropriate legal remedies”.
This isn’t the first or the biggest ICE, or Immigration and Customs Enforcement, raid: George W. Bush’s administration is infamous for its raids on residential areas and workplaces, and Obama has deported 2 million undocumented immigrants during his time in office so far. “We are very likely to see raids, if we haven’t already”, she said.
The Obama administration disclosed in late December that in the 2015 budget year, the USA deported the fewest immigrants since 2006.
One of the churches considering opening its doors is Shadow Rock United Church of Christ in Phoenix, which previously offered sanctuary to Guatamalan Eleazar Misheal Perez Cabrera for 110 days after a judge issued a deportation order. The Bureau of Immigration Appeals is a Justice Department agency.
Those arrested over the weekend of January 2 are primarily from Georgia, Texas, and North Carolina, but immigrant rights groups are urging Inland residents to be vigilant and report any presence of immigration officials in their neighborhoods.
The raids are designed as a deterrent to discourage more Central American border crossers, immigration analysts told VICE News, along the lines of DHS’s use of family immigrant detention.
Immigrant advocates have questioned prioritizing nonviolent migrants for deportation and whether the facilities that hold them are suitable for minors. “Even people with green cards are anxious”, he said to Fox News Latino.
“As I have said repeatedly, our borders are not open to illegal migration; if you come here illegally, we will send you back consistent with our laws and values”, Johnson said in a written statement Monday. She’s a 32-year-old mother from Usulután Province, El Salvador, who says she fled because murderous gangs threatened her family. They accuse the government of trampling over the migrants’ rights.
Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, told The Washington Post that the raids were “enforcement theater”, amounting to just a “drop in the bucket compared to the number they’ve admitted into the country”. The declarations to the Board of Immigration Appeals included the women’s affadavits explaining why they feared returning to their home country.
As the raids become better known within immigrant communities, Ms. Tramonte said Hispanic voters may end up punishing the Democrats’ presidential nominee by staying home in November as an expression of frustration with Mr. Obama.
“But, we must enforce the law consistent with our priorities”.
At a shelter home in East Austin, the raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, have terrified immigrants here who lost their cases and await deportation.
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“[There is] fear that they are going to separate us from our children, and what are our children going to do without us?” she said. “Many of these mothers and children had no lawyers because they could not afford them”. I said I wanted to call my lawyer.
