Latest Developments Regarding Immigration Changes By Michael H. Markovitch, Esq
By Michael H. Markovitch, Esq on February, 22, 2017
Who Will Be Deported
Under the new directives, the government “no longer will exempt classes or categories of removable aliens from potential enforcement.”
Immigration agents can now focus on picking up and removing anyone charged with or convicted of any criminal offense, even minor ones, as well as anyone already ordered deported, regardless of whether they have a
criminal record.
No Option To See A Judge
Two decades ago, Congress passed a law allowing the government to quickly deport undocumented immigrants who have not been in the United States very long, without allowing them go before a judge.
In practice, the government has used this process, called “expedited removal,” relatively narrowly because of concerns about whether it violates constitutional rights of due process that are granted to anyone in the United States, regardless of immigration status. Since 2002, expedited removal has been applied only to immigrants who have been in the country less than two weeks and were caught within 100 miles of the border. That is because the Supreme Court has held that such immigrants can still be considered “in transit” and not here long enough to qualify for due process protections.
The Trump administration is now planning to use expedited removal as extensively as the original law allows, saying that limits on its use had contributed to a backlog of more than half a million cases in immigration court.
Children Traveling Alone
One of the memos issued acknowledges that children who arrive at the border alone — “unaccompanied alien children,” in government parlance — are entitled to special protections: Unlike other border crossers, whom border patrol agents may deport without a legal hearing, these children must appear before an immigration judge and be interviewed by an asylum officer. Children have surged across the border in recent years, many fleeing violence and destitution in Central America.
But the memo turns a sterner face to their parents, who, under the new policy, may be subject to deportation or even prosecution for enabling their children to come into the country.
Some 750,000 people who were brought into the country as children were issued work permits and temporary protection from deportation under an Obama program known as
Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA. Even President Trump said last week that the subject “is very, very difficult” for him and that he promised to “deal with DACA with heart.”
So far, the Trump administration has left the program alone. But this may not be the actual case for the community of “Dreamers,” as DACA recipients are known, with the recent arrest of a 23-year-old Mexican immigrant in Washington State, Daniel Ramirez. Immigration agents arrested him when they went to his house to detain his father, a convicted drug trafficker. They said Mr. Ramirez admitted to having gang affiliations, which cancels the protection offered under DACA. But Mr. Ramirez denies having made the admission, and his lawyers are fighting his deportation.
No Privacy
In January 2009, the departing Bush administration extended some Privacy Act rights, which American citizens and legal permanent residents already had, to
undocumented immigrants. That meant that information obtained by one agency, like the Internal Revenue Service or Citizenship and
Immigration Services, could not generally be shared with other agencies, like Immigration and Customs Enforcement. One rationale for the move was to protect the personal information of immigrants who might one day become citizens covered by the Privacy Act.
The Trump administration has now rescinded those privacy protections. One of the memos released on Tuesday said that those protections had been detrimental to the families of the victims of crimes committed by undocumented immigrants, because those families could not get information about such defendants’ legal status, or whether they had been deported, leaving victims “feeling marginalized and without a voice.”
The Department of Homeland Security said it would develop new rules on the sharing of undocumented immigrants’ private information. But advocates for unauthorized immigrants said they feared that immigrants who had applied for legal status — in the process divulging they were not here legally — were now in danger of having that information used to deport them.
15,000 Additional ICE Agents force
The memos released repeat Mr. Trump’s demand in his executive order for a larger enforcement force that can speed up the removal of millions of undocumented immigrants from the United States. In practice, that may play out more slowly than the president might prefer as it will take many months of training before ICE agents can actually go out in the field.
Conclusion
Under the current administration, every day brings significant changes regarding immigration policies and regulations. Unfortunately, it is not of the positive nature. The Law Offices of Michael H. Markovitch will provide clients with updates as well as to how best navigate and deal with this upheaval.
