Obama’s plan to deport Central American immigrants, explained

IamAman · 12-28-2015, 01:10 PM

http://www.vox.com/2015/12/28/106734...grant-families

I said it when it happened and I'll say it again now, those people screwed us. They were told not to come and they did trying to piggy back in what was essentially a life raft for us, then many either lost their court cases or didn't bother showing up to their asylum hearing (since supposedly they were suffering from hardship and needed asylum), and now there is crying that they might actually get deported.

It's a long article so go to the site and read all of it. I can't post the whole thing here.

Quote:

The Obama administration has quieted down its immigration enforcement over the last couple of years. But according to an article published just before Christmas by the Washington Post's Jerry Markon and David Nakamura, that's about to change: the administration will start the new year with a bang.

According to the Post, the administration is finalizing plans for a nationwide wave of immigration raids starting in January 2016. The raids will target Central American families who came to the US in the last couple of years, but have been ordered to leave by a judge.

The administration's motivations are complicated. The plan is in part a response to a new surge of children and families into the US from Central America, after a yearlong lull. But it's also a continuation of the 2014 border crisis, which created deep political frustrations with the Obama administration on the left and right that still haven't been resolved. Even before the plan was leaked to the public, it was extremely controversial within the Obama administration (which is typically unified on immigration policy), and may be a last-ditch bid to keep the Supreme Court on its side. It's getting tremendous heat from immigrant rights activists. And it's almost certainly going to become a problem for the Hillary Clinton campaign.

What the Obama administration is actually planning to do, in less than 200 words

Since the beginning of 2014, about 100,000 families (mostly mothers with children) have arrived in the US from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador. Most of them have tried to get asylum in the US — these are among the most violent countries in the world, and many of them are being targeted by gangs.

While some of these families have been granted asylum, many have not — either because they've made their case in immigration court and lost, or because they simply didn't show up for their scheduled hearing before a judge. Some families (as many as 15,000) have stayed in the country after being ordered to leave.

The Obama administration plans to launch a big effort to deport those families starting in January 2016. And it's planning to raid residential neighborhoods to find and arrest the families — a tactic that a lot of immigrants and immigration advocates have traumatic associations with.

The raids are partly a reaction to a new spike of Central American children and families in the US

The "border crisis" basically ended in late summer and early fall of 2014, when the number of children and families entering the US dropped precipitously — thanks largely to the efforts of the Mexican government, which (with significant US assistance) caught many Central American children and families before they could get to the US. Public attention moved on, and the issue kind of drifted to the sidelines.

But as 2015 has drawn to a close, there's been another spike. In some ways, this spike is even more alarming than the 2014 one — that "crisis" happened during a time of year that's typically a high season for migration to the US from Latin America, while this is happening in the middle of winter, typically a slow time for migrations everywhere. According to the Post, the Obama administration's reaction to the new wave of Central American families appears to be to step up deportations of the last wave.

There is a policy rationale for this: government officials consistently said last year that the best way to deter children and families from making the dangerous trip from Central America to the US was to demonstrate that people who made the trip wouldn't be allowed to stay in the US. But this rationale only makes sense if people shouldn't leave their home countries and try to come to the US — in other words, if they're not really legitimate asylum-seekers in fear for their lives, but people trying to take advantage of the US immigration system to come here.

Is that true of the people trying to come to the US now? Border Patrol agents think so: they're circulating reports that most of the newcomers from Central America say they're coming to the US because they think they can get legal status here, not because they're afraid for their lives. But there's a reason that Border Patrol agents aren't in charge of evaluating asylum claims; they can be too dismissive of legitimate danger. And there is evidence that the "Northern Triangle" countries of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador are legitimately dangerous — even more so than they've been in the past.

For the families who could be deported under the new plan, this question is settled — at least legally speaking. They had a chance to receive asylum from an immigration judge, and have been ordered to leave the US instead. But there's an irony in the fact that they could be deported because of a new wave of entries into the US. If the new wave of entries is because Central America is getting more dangerous, the families denied asylum will be deported to countries where their lives could be more threatened than when they left.

This is particularly upsetting to immigration advocates, many of whom feel that many of these families shouldn't have been denied asylum to begin with — and that the administration has mistreated them from the very beginning.

The plan is renewing buried feelings from the 2014 "border crisis" — which sowed distrust of the Obama administration on both right and left

While the border crisis had national attention, the Obama administration struggled mightily to find a policy response that would please its critics on the right and left. Unsurprisingly, it didn't succeed.

Republican critics maintained that Obama's 2012 executive action granting protection from deportation to immigrants already in the US who'd arrived as children was acting as a magnet to draw more children and families to come. But when the administration responded to the crisis in summer of 2014 by detaining thousands of immigrant families and helping the Mexican government apprehend children and families before they arrived in the US, conservatives didn't exactly give the White House credit for the crackdown.

Immigration advocates, on the other hand, were enraged by the administration's response — they felt the administration was treating asylum-seekers who hadn't actually broken any laws as if they were criminals. Advocates dragged the government into a messy legal battle over detention of immigrant families; the courts have sided with advocates time after time, and ordered the government to release the families who are still being detained as quickly as possible. According to the Washington Post, the government's inability to keep families locked up in detention while their immigration cases are heard is one reason they're planning to start using raids to find and deport families instead.

But the new deportation plan is enraging immigration advocates anew. In other words, the Obama administration is in the exact same political bind it was in last year: inaction risked criticism from the right over "border security"; action creates criticism from the left.

The new plan is totally consistent with the Obama administration's deportation policy

The complaints of advocates might make it seem like the Obama administration is making some sort of huge change from its current immigration policy in order to crack down on this particular group of people. That's not exactly true. In terms of who the Obama administration chooses to deport, going after Central American families who've lost their asylum cases is totally in line with existing policy. But in terms of how they're being deported, the new plan does represent a big change.

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According to the Post, the Obama administration is only planning to deport Central American families who have been ordered to leave the US — in other words, families who would be a priority for deportation anyway. According to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, about 15,500 mothers with children from Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador have been ordered deported since July 2014 (when the Obama administration started speeding up court hearings for new arrivals). Some of those have probably already been deported or left on their own. The real number of Central American families who are still in the US, and therefore vulnerable to deportation under the new plan, is probably closer to 12,500: the number of Central American mothers with children who were ordered to be deported because they didn't show up to a court hearing.
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But the use of raids to round up families is a big — and controversial — shift

The Obama administration has conducted occasional immigration raids in the past, to round up convicted criminals or "immigration fugitives" (people who've been ordered deported but are still in the US). But in general, the administration's modus operandi hasn't been to actively hunt down unauthorized immigrants. Instead, they've used local law enforcement as a net: immigrants who come into contact with law enforcement, especially those who fit one of the priorities, get gathered up by the federal government for deportation. Because there's so much more coordination between local and federal agents about immigrants under the Obama administration than there was in the past, this has allowed the government to deport a lot of people (especially during Obama's first term) relatively quietly.

Under George W. Bush, on the other hand, immigration raids — whether on residential neighborhoods or in workplaces — were the centerpiece of immigration enforcement. They weren't as efficient in scooping up hundreds of thousands of immigrants as the later Obama tactics were (those programs were still being developed). But they were another way local law enforcement could help federal agents enforce immigration laws. And they were high-profile, media-friendly demonstrations that the Bush administration cared about tracking down unauthorized immigrants.

Raids also traumatized immigrant communities — decreasing trust in local police, local government, schools, etc. Unauthorized immigrants got the message the raids were designed to send: they weren't safe anywhere. And people who lived alongside unauthorized immigrants worried that, in the chaos of an ICE raid, they could be snatched up too.

Theoretically, the 2016 raids won't result in immigrants who've lived in the US for years getting rounded up and deported, including those who would qualify for protection from deportation if the administration's 2014 executive actions get upheld by the Supreme Court. But the administration has historically gotten a lot of resistance from ICE agents on the ground when agents apprehend unauthorized immigrants and then get told to let them go. And while the Obama administration appears to have gotten more control over recalcitrant field agents, it's not at all clear whether it will be able to keep that control when it's sending agents out on raids.

The Obama administration doesn't need to persuade Congress that it's enforcing immigration law — but it might want to persuade the Supreme Court

Every time the Obama administration has cracked down on immigration enforcement and infuriated advocates, there's been a political reason. During Obama's first term, the administration was trying to persuade Republicans in Congress that it could be trusted to enforce immigration laws, so that Republicans would come to the table and pass comprehensive immigration reform. It didn't work.

In 2014, the harsh response to the "border crisis" was motivated in part by fear of the midterm elections — Democrats in the federal government were very afraid of being seen as unable to protect the country's borders. That didn't work either.

The Obama administration appears to have given up on trying to persuade Congress of anything, and it doesn't have any more elections to worry about. But that doesn't mean it doesn't have anything to prove to anyone. Because the Supreme Court is currently trying to decide whether or not to take up the lawsuit between the federal government and dozens of Republican-led states over Obama's 2014 executive actions on immigration — which the administration sees as key to its legacy on the issue.

So far, the court case has gone against the Obama administration. Both the district court judge and the 5th Circuit put the administration's plans to protect millions more unauthorized immigrants from deportation on hold while the courts consider whether those plans are constitutional (which is a hint that, according to those judges, they probably aren't). The Supreme Court has always been more likely to side with the federal government in this case than the lower courts are, but that doesn't mean that the case is a slam dunk for the administration — or that the court will decide to take it up this year at all, rather than taking it up next session when Obama is already out of office.

One of the biggest legal questions about the administration's immigration policy is whether there's a "limiting principle" — in other words, whether there are any unauthorized immigrants the government actually feels it has to enforce the law against. Deporting thousands of mothers with children is certainly one way to demonstrate that the Obama administration really does feel it has to enforce the law in some cases. Furthermore, the 2014 memo that made immigrants with deportation orders a priority was part of the same set of executive actions as the programs the Obama administration is currently challenging in court. By making a big show of enforcing the priorities it set for itself, the administration is demonstrating that it takes that whole set of policies seriously — not just the parts that are nice to unauthorized immigrants. And it invites the court to do the same.

This is very bad news for Hillary Clinton
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Read full article

DACA-IR-DA · 12-28-2015, 05:33 PM

Does this help eDACA Supreme Court decision?

pink · 04:03 AM

I don't know why so many people are outraged about these recent raids, If immigrants keep pouring over the borders every time immigration relief is mentioned then we who are already here waiting for a break will all be f**Ked.

This is the exact argument the GOP is using against us, If The admin allows new immigrants to pour in at this point and they are allowed to stay -----we can kiss DAPA and extended DACA good bye.

The United states can't take in everybody, that's a No-Brainer & At some point we have to be rational in our thinking. Immigrant groups complaining about this should really just STFU and pick their battles carefully.

Cybore · 12-29-2015, 05:50 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by pink

I don't know why so many people are outraged about these recent raids, If immigrants keep pouring over the borders every time immigration relief is mentioned then we who are already here waiting for a break will all be f**Ked.

This is the exact argument the GOP is using against us, If The admin allows new immigrants to pour in at this point and they are allowed to stay -----we can kiss DAPA and extended DACA good bye.

The United states can't take in everybody, that's a No-Brainer & At some point we have to be rational in our thinking. Immigrant groups complaining about this should really just STFU and pick their battles carefully.

Yea, I know its a bit selfish to think I got my DACA so everybody else can go f* themselves, but there have to be some limitations and a degree of control to immigration. With DAPA and DACA hanging by a thread, the administration really cannot afford to be too lenient with the enforcement of immigration laws. With the recent hysteria caused by the attacks on Europe, there will be heightened concerns about who we are letting in.

I think the OBL can really be too irrational when it comes to immigration control, which does us no favors with the average voter. Its really a tough grey area to discuss where you draw the line. Again, I know it sounds hypocritical for a dreamer to say this, but we can't take everybody in.

Chyno · 12-29-2015, 10:22 PM

I am pretty sure the undocumented people with 5-10 years in the USA said the same stuff about us back in 2000-2008.

It is all a cycle.

IamAman · 12-30-2015, 12:16 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Chyno

I am pretty sure the undocumented people with 5-10 years in the USA said the same stuff about us back in 2000-2008.

It is all a cycle.

But we got nothing in 2000-2008 and neither should they. Besides, we're Dreamers.

Pianoswithoutfaith · 12-30-2015, 12:50 AM

heck, even the ones that came here legally visas were crying about us

its a cycle

Laterlater · 01-20-2016, 05:07 PM

It is difficult if not impossible for Dreamers to comment in favour of these deportations without expecting legitimate charges of hypocrisy. At the same time, Pink's main point is also correct. Such is the world.

It is indeed a cycle, that is long overdue to end.

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
1	2	3	4	5	6	7
8	9	10	11	12	13	14
15	16	17	18	19	20	21
22	23	24	25	26	27	28
29	30	31

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Obama’s plan to deport Central American immigrants, explained