The incredible show of support and urgency you expressed shows that the fight for justice for every immigrant continues, and while Adolfo and Julio’s case was not stopped, there are many more who can or have been kept united with their families, thanks to your dedication and activism.

From the update on their Change.org petition:

Adolfo and Julio returned to Guatemala today as mandated by ICE

We thank everyone who signed the petition, made a phone call, posted a link, or passed the word to others to join the effort to stop their deportation. The issue went to the highest level of ICE and DHS. We are grateful and proud of the support so many people from our movement and people of good will offered. We believe that DHS and ICE did not stay the removal of Adolfo and Julio because it would require them to admit or infer that ICE agents assaulted them and that there was a cover up. The first step in reforming an institution is to admit you have a problem. The leadership of ICE and DHS circled the wagons to protect the institution from any serious self-examination and doubled down on the local ICE decision to remove these young men from the country. Although these two young men were deported, AI Justice and We Count!, pledge to continue to seek the truth about the raid, and justice for its victims. We look back not to dwell in the past but to fight for a better future.

“They will focus on cases of immigrants who have been arrested for deportation, but who are not being held in detention while their cases proceed. Immigrants who are deemed to qualify for prosecutorial discretion will have their cases closed, but not dismissed,” according to the New York Times’ report on the announcement.
DHS will also begin a nationwide training program for immigration agents to enforce the system and make criminal offenders high priority. The review process for Denver and Baltimore will continue through January 13.

If you are in these cities, and are concerned about your immigration status, please consult with an immigration attorney. Keep all immigration documents up to date, even if you do not have a court case soon. Although this process may close many cases, they can be reopened after the review — this will not be a path to citizenship, nor is it amnesty.

For more information and resources, please contact our partners:

For Baltimore – CASA de Maryland

For Denver – Colorado Immigrant Rights Coalition

The second stage (beginning December 4, 2011) DHS will work with the Justice Department to conduct six-week investigations into the cases of two pilot cities, Baltimore and Denver. This will be a thorough review of current cases in these cities, in order to clear the backlog of cases and start closing – but not dismissing – non-criminal cases.

What does today’s announcement mean? This is certainly not the end goal, but this is significant. If DHS actually delivers on this review, many new low-priority cases will be closed. Judges and ICE officers will be required to enforce the Morton memo — this could be the follow-through needed to crack down of rogue immigration officials who are ignoring prosecutorial discretion. The proof will be in the results.

Have you read or heard more on this announcement? Share your information in the comments.

Many people are asking whether this announcement means that they can apply to fix their status, or if it represents an opportunity for them to turn themselves in to immigration authorities, set things straight, and receive a work permit.

However, as pointed out in our last post, this announcement refers only to an administrative change on how current deportation cases will be addressed. So, it is extremely important to have the facts straight in order to be protected from dishonest individuals and immigration scams.

Here are some important tips that will help you avoid fraud:

• This announcement does NOT grant amnesty. It does NOT grant legal status.
• Do NOT believe anyone who tells you that they can sign you up for a work permit or get you legal status based on the August 18, 2011 announcement.
• Do NOT turn yourself in to immigration officers with the hope of obtaining a work permit. There is NO “safe” way to turn yourself in and apply for a work permit. There is NO guarantee that your case will be deemed “low priority “ and you may be putting yourself  at risk of being detained and even deported.
• Do NOT seek advice from immigration consultants or notaries. Consult an immigration attorney about your specific case.

For more information, check out stopnotariofraud.org, a website put together by our partners at the American Immigration Lawyers Association.

Click here to download a PDF on how to prevent notario fraud.

In DHSs announcement today, officials said that they are reprioritizing the deportation proceedings and now will heavily focus on their main goal: deporting criminals who pose serious threats.

What does that mean for the 300,000 individuals currently in deportation proceedings?

Each one of their cases will be reviewed by DHS. DHS will then identify “low-priority” cases that will be removed from the case load and individuals deemed “low-priority” will be able to apply for a work permit program.

While the new policies don’t grant relief to the entire 11.2 million population of undocumented immigrants in the US, the changes, the administration says, will prevent low-priority, non-criminal immigrants from facing deportation proceedings in the first place. These “low-priority” individuals include DREAMers, pregnant women, veterans, spouses (including LGBT spouses and partners), and individuals with significant ties to their community.

Marissa Graciosa, spokesperson for the Fair Immigration Reform Movement said:

This is a hugely important step in the right direction. We urge the Administration to enforce this policy vigorously and follow it through to its full logical and moral conclusion: suspend deportations of all those who work hard every day to create better lives for themselves and their families.

Representative Luis Gutierrez (D-IL) said:

Today is a victory not just for immigrants but for the American people as a whole because it makes no sense to deport DREAM Act students and others who can make great contributions to America and pose no threat. It is not in our national interest to send away young people who were raised in the U.S. and have been educated here and want only to contribute to this country’s success.

Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) said:

The Obama Administration has made the right decision in changing the way they handle deportations of DREAM Act students. These students are the future doctors, lawyers, teachers and, maybe, Senators, who will make America stronger. We need to be doing all we can to keep these talented, dedicated, American students here, not wasting increasingly precious resources sending them away to countries they barely remember. The Administration’s new process is a fair and just way to deal with an important group of immigrant students and I will closely monitor DHS to ensure it is fully implemented.

These Governors rejected the program citing concerns of the program’s impact on victims and witnesses of crimes. Three other states and the District of Columbia refused to participate in the program from the outset.

Today, the Department of Homeland Security announced it is terminating all Memorandum of Agreements with states, claiming that because the Secure Communities program is federal law, the original agreements are not necessary.

What does that mean? States don’t have an option to opt-in to SComm anymore and the program is now mandatory.

Around the country, immigrants’ rights groups expressed their outrage as yet another slap in the face from DHS.

From the Fair Immigration Reform Movement (FIRM):

[This] announcement [is] yet another example of the Obama administration’s turning a deaf ear to the extraordinary pain being caused in immigrant communities by their “enforcement only” policies.

From the Coalition for Human Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles:

California and Los Angeles is the home of immigrants and ICE has no business introducing this toxic organism into the Golden State. Rather than truly reforming S-Comm, ICE is busy spinning wool to put over the eyes of the community.

From Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights:

DHS has yet to provide clear legal authority to support its claim that “Secure Communities” is federally mandated. ICIRR questions whether any such legal authority exists, and believes that the program is vulnerable to legal challenge.

From Massachusetts Immigrant Refugee Advocacy Coalition:

It is clear that DHS and Immigration and Customs Enforcement have been misleading the public and state and local officials about this program from the start. Now they are continuing to force a program onto states that recognize its fundamental flaws. This is a situation which cannot and should not be tolerated.

We need your help to stop Secure Communities now. Call President Obama and demand he take administrative action to stop secure communities and end the mass deportations his administration has completed:

The drumbeat of criticism surrounding President Obama’s immigration enforecment strategy is growing louder by the day. America’s Voice released the video above earlier this week, to call out the “rogue tactics” currently in place. While the Service Employees International Union followed up with their own efforts to “Reign in ICE”.

On Wednesday, the Reform Immigration FOR America campaign joined the American Immigration Lawyers Association, the Service Employees International Union, the Center for Community Change and the National Day Laborer Organizing Network to call for an end to the 287(g) program and for drastic changes in the Department of Homeland Security’s policies and personnel. (Listen to a full audio recording of the press conference here).

In the absence of a comprehensive reform of our immigration system,  the task of enforcing our broken laws has fallen to local law enforcement agencies. The so-called 287(g) program, which gives state and local law enforcement agencies authority to enforce immigration laws, has been proven over and over again to be detrimental to public safety and the protection of civil and human rights.

Recently, it has become clear that Department of Homeland Security not only lacks leadership, but doesn’t even have it’s own staff or priorities in line. First there was the leaked policy memo that directly contradicting the President, then it was exposed that Haitian evacuees were rescued from the disastrous earthquake aftermath only to be thrown into detention centers upon arrival in the United States. And only one week later, the Inspector General issued a scathing report of the 287(g) program.

Alex DiBranco of Change.org has a good summary of the criticisms of the program:

Some of the key elements of the smack down: 287(g) is poorly managed, ineffectively organized, and arbitrarily implemented from place to place; ignores or actually provides false information to the public; fails to focus on non-citizens who pose a safety threat; gives shoddy training; and lacks oversight and has not terminated those local partners who have clearly violated the terms of the agreement — Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Arizona is, of course, the poster child for local law enforcement running amok in hunting down harmless undocumented immigrants. 287(g) also deters undocumented immigrants who witness a crime from coming forward and encourages racial profiling in which Latinos are “guilty until proven innocent.”

Instead of change, the Obama administration has delivered more of the same failed policies of the Bush administration.  In the wake of these revelations their silence is deafening.

Congress should conduct immediate oversight hearings to ensure accountability at the Department of Homeland Security, shed light on the outrageous actions of the Department’s enforcement and detention personnel, and to dismantle the fatally flawed 287(g) program. The developments over the last two weeks have put a spotlight on ICE’s serious credibility problem. Congress must step in to ensure that government is accountable to the public, using resources efficiently, and that it inspires public confidence. ICE does none of these, and must be held accountable. (Rich Stolz, RI4A)

Today, a New York Times article argues that the program is too broken to be fixed. And we couldn’t agree more.

]]> http://reformimmigrationforamerica.org/blog/blog/too-broken-to-fix-advocates-call-for-an-end-to-287g/feed/ 0 http://reformimmigrationforamerica.org/blog/blog/tip-of-the-iceberg/ http://reformimmigrationforamerica.org/blog/blog/tip-of-the-iceberg/#comments Mon, 05 Apr 2010 14:53:00 +0000 Rachel LaBruyere http://reformimmigrationforamerica.org/blog/?p=4868

By Mary Giovagnoli, originally posted on Immigration Impact.

The irony of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s acronym—ICE—has never been lost on anyone, including the agency itself. Shortly after its formation, posters appeared in government offices of an iceberg as big as the one that sunk the Titanic with the motto: ICE—What you see is just the tip of the iceberg. The idea was to emphasize just how much ICE did and how much of it went on quietly and behind the scenes.

Quietly and behind the scenes came back to haunt ICE with a vengeance this week. It began with last Friday’s Washington Post story of a leaked memo requiring ICE officers to boost deportations of non-criminal immigrants in order to fulfill quotas. Although ICE quickly backed away from the memo, the damage—in terms of broken families and broken promises—had already been done.

Next up, the New York Times broke the story that 30 Haitians evacuated to the United States by the government were languishing in detention because they had no authorization to come to the U.S.:

Almost at random, it seems, immigration jail was the ad hoc solution for these 30 survivors and for others still hidden in pockets of the nation’s sprawling detention network. Some of the 30 have already been transferred to more remote immigration jails without explanation.

Finally, the DHS Office of Inspector General issued a long-awaited report that offers a damning critique of the 287(g) program, confirming many of the criticisms levied against the program by community leaders, law enforcement officials, and immigration groups, including the Immigration Policy Center.

The report, The Performance of 287(g) Agreements, identifies numerous shortcomings that lead to abuse and mismanagement and raises serious questions about the wisdom of state and local immigration enforcement partnerships with ICE. The OIG found that the program was poorly managed and supervised, has no consistent guidelines for implementation, doesn’t track data necessary for evaluating the program, doesn’t have adequate outreach, and offers misleading and inaccurate information, among other things. Most importantly, the Inspector General determined that ICE fails to take action against law enforcement agencies that violate the terms of the agreement. Can you say Joe Arpaio, anyone?

In short, with ICE we really are only seeing the tip of the iceberg—and the more we see, the more disturbing it becomes. Law enforcement agencies create trust and safer communities through clear rules and transparency—items that ICE continues to lack, despite numerous political promises to improve performance.

There are already calls to scrap the 287(g) program, but it is unlikely that DHS will eliminate a program that has been a darling of conservative members of Congress. According to the OIG report, ICE has concurred in 32 of the 33 recommendations issued by the Inspector General. This means that the institutional emphasis will be on reform, not elimination of the program.

That’s a shame, as there is no evidence that 287(g) makes communities safer or improves our broken immigration system. In the rush to engage state and local law enforcement on federal immigration matters, ICE has created a program that lacks oversight, undermines community relations, and breeds mistrust. As proven time and time again, a deportation-driven strategy exacts a high toll on individuals and communities with little real impact in stopping illegal immigration

But this week demonstrates that the problems at ICE are not just tied to one particular program. The lack of oversight, the lack of transparency and openness, and the ability to hide behind “law enforcement sensitive” designations, are emblematic of an agency that can quietly go about its business of deporting people because no one is watching over them. Enacting comprehensive immigration reform will change that dynamic in many ways, but it won’t necessarily stop ICE from making the same mistakes. We all have to do that.

Among the many recommendations a group of immigration experts made to the Obama Transition Team was the creation of an ICE Ombudsman’s office. This would be a place where the public had a role and a say in how ICE conducts its business. Acting on that recommendation now would be a first step towards rebuilding trust in an agency that has lost its way.

By Frank Sharry, originally posted on the America’s Voice blog (also cross-posted on the Huffington Post).

Today, a group of grassroots leaders are demanding that the Obama Administration fire John Morton, the head of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) within the Department of Homeland Security.

Deepak Bhargava of the Center of Community Change, a lead organizer of the immigration rally in Washington, D.C. on March 21^st and a leader of FIRM (Fair Immigration Reform Movement), had this to say at today’s press conference:

“This agency has gone rogue and is operating in clear opposition to the direction President Obama has set.”

What gives?  It seems the stated priorities of President Obama may not be in sync with the cowboy tactics of ICE agents in the field.

The President gets it.  He has always gotten it.  In 2008 candidate Obama had this to say to theNCLR convention in San Diego:

“When communities are terrorized by ICE immigration raids, when nursing mothers are torn from their babies, when children come home from school to find their parents missing, when people are detained without access to legal counsel, when all that is happening, the system just isn’t working, and we need to change it.”

Little more than a week ago, President Obama told a gathering of over 200,000 activists that he heard their plea and was standing as a partner with them in fixing the “broken immigration system.” Here’s part of what Obama said, via video, to the marchers:

I’ve always pledged to be your partner as we work to fix our broken immigration system and that’s a commitment that I reaffirm today. Nobody knows the cost of inaction better than you. You see it in the families that are torn apart and the small business owners who try to do the right thing while others game the system. You see it in the workers, who deserve the protection of our laws and the officers who struggle to keep our communities safe while earning the trust of those they serve.

But this past weekend the Washington Post exposed a high-level ICE directive and internal ICE memos that reveals how wide the chasm is between administration rhetoric and on-the-ground reality.

Seeking to reverse a steep drop in deportations, U.S. immigration authorities have set controversial new quotas for agents. At the same time, officials have stepped back from an Obama administration commitment to focus enforcement efforts primarily on illegal immigrants who are dangerous or have violent criminal backgrounds.

The moves…differ from pledges by ICE chief John T. Morton and his boss, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, to focus enforcement on the most dangerous illegal immigrants. That approach represented a break from the mass factory raids and neighborhood sweeps the Bush administration used to drive up arrests.

What was ICE’s response to the Post’s expose?  Blame the memo’s author, recast “quotas” as “performance goals,” and issue a press release stating the memo has been “withdrawn and corrected.”  Forgive us skeptics for wanting to see the new policy in writing before we concur.

To make matters worse, just today the New York Times outlined the findings of a chilling new report by Texas Appleseed on the treatment of immigration detainees.  The report chronicles how mentally ill immigration detainees from northern cities like New York, “have often been moved to Texas without medication or medical records, far from relatives and mental health workers who know their histories.”  According to the Times:

Their mental incompetence is routinely ignored by immigration judges and deportation officers, who are under pressure to handle rising caseloads and meet government quotas.

There’s another reference to those pesky quotas that are not supposed to exist.

The back story is this: in the bad old days of the Bush Administration, ICE went from focusing on criminals to focusing on quotas; this in turn terrorized immigrant communities, led to tens of thousands of families being separated and led to a huge surge of Latino immigrant support for Obama.  Immigrants expected change, and when he was first appointed to his post, John Morton of ICE repeatedly said:

“In a world of limited resources, we need to focus on the worst of the worst first.”

It all sounded good, but it did not comport with the experiences on the ground.  Communities saw little change.  Instead, they saw an expansion of Bush-era tactics.  ICE excused SWAT-team tactics targeting undocumented workers in home raids.  They continued abysmal treatment of immigration detainees, and refused to be held accountable in the courts.  They expanded a program that authorized local police to apprehend those in the country illegally, despite concerns raised by police associations that it destroys community trust and undermines public safety.  They continued todeputize Maricopa County (AZ) Sheriff Joe Arpaio, despite the now-notorious Sheriff’s outrageous tactics and defiance of the law.  And they transitioned from massive worksite raids, such as the one carried out by the Bush Administration in Postville, Iowa, to even larger “paper raids” that cause enormous trauma and dislocation in immigrant communities.

Look, we’re not against enforcing immigration laws. We understand that every law enforcement agency sets priorities and ensures its agents adhere to them.  But it’s past due for the Obama Administration—from John Morton to Janet Napolitano to the President himself—to rein in the cowboys at ICE who put quotas and crackdowns ahead of smart enforcement and stated priorities.  It’s time for ICE to focus on the worst of the worst offenders—genuine security threats, dangerous criminals, smuggling syndicates, sex traffickers, and abusive employers who violate labor, immigration, and tax laws.  It makes more sense to put taxpayer dollars to use jailing and deporting bad guys instead of tearing apart the families of undocumented workers who are here to build better lives and contribute to our nation with their hard work.

Most of all, it’s time to fix the broken laws that got us into this mess.  Pandering to the extreme right wing with its insatiable – and unworkable –– appetite for deportation is a fool’s errand.  The time has come for the Obama Administration and the Congress to do what the President has repeatedly said he wants to do: work to pass comprehensive immigration reform this year.

By Michele Waslin, originally posted on Immigration Impact.

Over the last week, there has been a great deal of outrage, confusion, and backtracking on the issue of who and how many people the U.S. government deports.

Faced with a great deal of criticism for Bush-style enforcement, the Administration announced last year that it would no longer be conducting large scale worksite raids, and that worksite enforcement would focus on employers. At the same time, the Administration also stated that it would shift the focus of enforcement to “criminal aliens”—the “worst of the worst.” Programs like Secure Communities, which identifies immigrants who are in local jails and are deportable, have helped to make that shift—at least in rhetoric (whether or not immigrants identified as criminals are really criminals is another post).

On March 18, 2010, ICE Assistant Secretary John Morton was in the hot seat testifying before the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security. Morton testified that ICE has achieved record numbers of deportations while focusing on identifying and removing “criminal aliens.” Ranking member Rep. Harold Rogers (R-KY) took issue with the fact that ICE is focused on criminals and asked why ICE wasn’t pursuing noncriminals. Rogers stated, “we cannot allow a preoccupation with criminal aliens to obscure other critical ICE missions.” For Rogers, prioritizing criminals seems to be getting in the way of deporting lots of people.

Then on Saturday, the Washington Post ran the headline, “ICE Officials Set Quotas to Deport More Illegal Immigrants.” James M. Chaparro, head of ICE detention and removal operations, issued a memo in February that stood in direct conflict with the Administration’s stated goals of prioritizing dangerous criminal aliens. The memo stated that ICE had set a quota of 400,000 deportations for the year without regard to whether those individuals were criminals or not, and laid out strategies for doing so. In other words, it’s not about keeping us safe, it’s about achieving big numbers.

Later on Saturday, ICE was forced to issue a statement which stated that Chaparro’s memo did not reflect their policies and was sent without proper authorization. Furthermore, ICE remains “strongly committed to carrying out [its] priorities to remove serious criminal offenders first and [they] definitely do not set quotas.”

How embarrassing for ICE to have such public disagreement within its ranks. As AILA attorney David Leopold wrote:

As the director of all ICE detention and removal operations, Chaparro is not simply someone who follows policy but a high level official who sets policy. The fact that his memo was sent more than a month ago without any apparent corrective action by Morton or Napolitano further undermines ICE and DHS’s credibility and capability to implement reforms announced in the fall.

Currently there are 10-11 million unauthorized immigrants, countless legal immigrants who are deportable because of our harsh laws and who knows how many employers breaking the law by employing unauthorized workers. In addition, there are smugglers, traffickers, people who manufacture and sell fake documents, and the many others who profit from a broken system. Until we have comprehensive immigration reform, ICE is going to be saddled with an enormous list of targets, and many people watching to see how they’re going to tackle it. If they want big numbers, they can achieve big numbers. But that won’t make us any safer or make the system any better. In any case the Administration and ICE have to figure out what their enforcement strategy is, articulate it clearly and consistently, and resist the urge to change it on a dime to please “enforcement-only” types who will never support comprehensive reform.

Photo by martanoz.