Did he attempt to apply for some type of immigration relief and get denied, this is the first one I come across where it looks like he had no prior criminal background and was deported for being an overstay.
Pretty scary if this is their new normal going after anybody, even visa overstays with no criminal record.
Just before 7:30 one Friday morning last March, Alejandro said goodbye to his wife Maria and his two small daughters and headed off to work. He didn’t make it far. Four blocks from his home near Bakersfield, Calif., two unmarked vehicles, a white Honda and a green Mazda pickup truck, pulled up behind him at a stop sign. Plain-clothes Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents spilled out. They wore vests emblazoned with the word POLICE.
Alejandro dialed Maria from his cell phone and told her what was happening. Her heart dropped. She said later that she knew it wouldn’t matter that Alejandro had no criminal record, not even a speeding ticket. Or that he’d driven these same roads every day for the past decade, picking grapes, pistachios and oranges in California’s Central Valley. Since 2006, when Alejandro overstayed his visa, he had been considered a “fugitive alien,” in ICE parlance, and therefore subject to immediate deportation to Mexico. Now he was arrested on the spot.
Michele Asselin for TIME
The family’s experience—including the fear of being targeted if their names were not changed in this story—has become increasingly common during the Trump Administration. While President Obama told ICE to focus on violent offenders and recent border crossers, among others, President Trump has cast a much wider net. In early 2017, his Administration issued a series of edicts to ICE agents, prosecutors and immigration judges: any and all of the estimated 11 million people in the country illegally are now a priority for deportation. “There’s no population that’s off the table,” Thomas Homan, the acting director of ICE, told reporters in December. “If you’re in the country illegally, we’re looking for you.”
The new approach has led to a surge of new arrests. Between 2016 and 2017, apprehensions of undocumented immigrants jumped by a third. That increase was driven primarily by arrests of people like Alejandro with no prior criminal record . In 2017, President Trump deported more than double the number of noncriminals than Obama had the previous year. The detainees prioritized by Trump’s approach included community leaders, doting parents and children: a 10-year-old girl with cerebral palsy in San Antonio; a grandmother described as the “backbone” of a Navy veteran’s family; a father of two in Detroit who had lived in the U.S. since he was 10 years old.
A number of recent research papers have reported that the prospect of losing one’s parent can inflict psychological damage on a child. “These kids are under constant, extreme levels of psychological stress that other children don’t have to endure,” says Zayas, whose academic research on the American-born children of undocumented immigrants is included in his book Forgotten Citizens. “It affects the child’s educational performance, their developmental trajectories, how they achieve things. It affects the entire neurobiology of a child.”
The architecture of all this fear is not incidental. It’s the result of policy. The agents who pulled over Alejandro were acting within the bounds of U.S. law. So the question surrounding his arrest is not whether it was legitimate; it’s whether it was a good use of resources. Why choose him, a family man with no criminal record, over any of the 11 million other undocumented people in America?
In a statement to TIME, Danielle Bennett, an agency spokeswoman, said that “national security threats, immigration fugitives and illegal re-entrants” remain priorities for deportation. The agency has also said that it does not “unnecessarily disrupt the parental rights of alien parents and legal guardians of minor children.” In its 2017 report, ICE also stated that 92% of its arrests in 2017 were criminals. Its definition of criminal includes those with civil offenses, like non-DUI traffic stops, and those whose only crimes are immigration-related.
