"White House adviser optimistic on immigration overhaul; Plouffe less sure on gun controls" by Kevin Freking | Associated Press, January 21, 2013
WASHINGTON — White House Senior Adviser David Plouffe made the rounds on Sunday talk shows, outlining the president’s agenda for the months ahead....
Beyond the economy, Plouffe said that two social issues will be a focus at the outset of the president’s second term: immigration and gun control....
When it comes to overhauling the nation’s immigration laws, Plouffe said he believes there’s broader support from Republicans nationally than there is from Republicans in Congress.
Still, he said, ‘‘the stars are aligned’’ for a bill to include beefing up border security as well as giving those already in the United States illegally a path to citizenship....
I now despise that term because of the Mayan calendar fraud. What it really means is an amnesty bill is going to be shoved up our asses.
I now despise that term because of the Mayan calendar fraud. What it really means is an amnesty bill is going to be shoved up our asses.
On gun control, he mixed statements of optimism with an acknowledgment of political realities. Republicans control the House, and even some Democrats in the Senate have been extremely cautious in addressing the issue....
Republican Senator John Barrasso of Wyoming underscored that point. He said he doubted supporters could get 60 votes in the Senate for legislation allowing universal background checks for gun purchasers and for limiting gun magazines to 10 rounds.
‘‘The debt and spending. That’s where people are focused,’’ Barrasso said on CNN....
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"Obama crafting overhaul of immigration system; Citizenship path expected as part of massive bill" by Julia Preston | New York Times, January 13, 2013
WASHINGTON — President Obama plans to push Congress to move quickly in the coming months on an ambitious overhaul of the immigration system that would include a path to citizenship for most of the 11 million illegal immigrants in the country, senior administration officials and lawmakers said last week.
Obama and Senate Democrats will propose the changes in one comprehensive bill, the officials said, resisting efforts by some Republicans to break the overhaul into smaller pieces — separately addressing young illegal immigrants, migrant farmworkers, or highly skilled foreigners — that might be easier for reluctant members of their party to accept.
Obama and Democrats will also oppose measures that do not allow immigrants who gain legal status to become US citizens one day, the officials said.
Even while Obama has been focused on fiscal negotiations and gun control, overhauling immigration remains a priority for him this year, White House officials said. Top officials have been quietly working on a broad proposal. Obama and lawmakers from both parties think that the early months of his second term offer the best prospects for passing substantial legislation on the issue.
Obama is expected to lay out his plan in coming weeks, perhaps in his State of the Union address next month, administration officials said. The White House will argue that its solution for illegal immigrants is not an amnesty, as many critics insist, because it would include fines, the payment of back taxes, and other hurdles for illegal immigrants who would obtain legal status, the officials said.
The president’s plan would also impose nationwide verification of legal status for all newly hired workers; add visas to relieve backlogs; allow highly skilled immigrants to stay; and create some form of guest worker program to bring in low-wage immigrants in the future.
Related: Issue more H-1B visas now
Meanwhile, we are told there is a jobs crisis in this country. WTF?
A bipartisan group of senators has also been meeting to write a comprehensive bill, with the goal of introducing legislation as early as March and holding a vote in the Senate before August.
As a sign of the keen interest in starting action on immigration, White House officials and Democratic leaders in the Senate have been negotiating on which of them will first introduce a bill, Senate aides said.
‘‘This is so important now to both parties that neither the fiscal cliff nor guns will get in the way,’’ said Charles E. Schumer, a New York Democrat and a leader of the bipartisan discussions.
A similar attempt at bipartisan legislation early in Obama’s first term collapsed amid political divisions fueled by surging public anger about illegal immigration in many states. But both supporters and opponents say conditions are significantly different now.
In the November presidential election, Hispanics, the nation’s fastest-growing electorate, turned out in record numbers and cast 71 percent of their ballots for Obama. Many Hispanics said they were put off by Republicans’ harsh language against illegal immigrants.
Related: Post-Election Aftermath: The Changing Face of the GOP
After the election, a host of Republicans, starting with Speaker John Boehner, said it was time for the party to find a more positive, practical approach to immigration. Many party leaders say electoral demographics are compelling them to move beyond policies based on tough enforcement.
Supporters of comprehensive changes say that the elections were nothing less than a mandate, and that they are still optimistic that Obama is prepared to lead the fight.
‘‘Republicans must demonstrate a reasoned approach to start to rebuild their relationship with Latino voters,’’ said Clarissa Martinez de Castro, director of immigration policy at the National Council of La Raza, a Latino organization. ‘‘Democrats must demonstrate they can deliver on a promise.’’
This is the one they are going to deliver?
Since the election, Obama has repeatedly pledged to act on immigration this year. In his weekly radio address Saturday, he referred to the urgency of fixing the immigration system, saying it was one of the ‘‘difficult missions’’ the country must take on.
Parallel to the White House effort, Schumer and GOP Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina have been meeting with a group of at least four others to write a bill.
Republicans who have participated include John McCain of Arizona, who has supported comprehensive legislation in the past; Jeff Flake of Arizona, newly elected to the Senate; and Mike Lee of Utah. Senator Marco Rubio of Florida participated in a meeting last month.
Democrats in the meetings include Richard Durbin of Illinois, the No.2 Senate Democrat; Robert Menendez of New Jersey, and Michael Bennet of Colorado. Basic tenets for the bill, Schumer said, were that it would be comprehensive and offer eventual citizenship.‘
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So what do you think they are using for a template behind closed doors?
"Canada-Mexico effort viewed as model guestworker program" by Nick Miroff | Washington Post , January 20, 2013
OJOCALIENTE, Mexico — When Oscar Reyes heads north for seasonal work every spring, he no longer pays a smuggler to sneak him through the desert past the US Border Patrol.
He takes Air Canada.
Reyes earns $10.25 an hour tending grapes and spraying pesticides at a vineyard in British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley, working eight months straight, seven days a week.
He was one of nearly 16,000 temporary workers from Mexico imported by Canada last year, in a government-to-government agreement that Mexican officials view as a potential model for an expanded guestworker program in the United States.
‘‘I come home loaded with money, and I don’t have to worry about anything,’’ said Reyes, who is back home for the winter with his family.
With President Obama’s reelection in November, and the overwhelming support he received from Hispanic voters, expectations are high that he will take up the nettlesome cause of US immigration reform in his second term.
If so, the most contentious issue may be the fate of the 11 million or so illegal immigrants living in the United States. But the debate is expected to include a proposed expansion of temporary worker programs to meet future US demand for legal, low-skilled labor.
And high-skilled.
The United States gives out about 50,000 seasonal agricultural visas per year, nearly all of them to Mexican workers. But US farmers, immigrant advocate groups, labor unions, and Mexican officials say the current US program is a mess: inefficient, bureaucratic, and vulnerable to abuses by shady recruiters who charge workers thousands of dollars to find jobs and prepare visa applications.
The frustrations have left many looking north, to Canada, where government officials partner with their Mexican counterparts to recruit workers, expedite visas, guarantee health and safety standards, and coordinate travel arrangements and pay.
They also go to extraordinary lengths to make sure the workers go back to Mexico at the end of the season, raising criticisms that the arrangement treats them as little more than human machines.
Mexico’s President Enrique Peña Nieto said that he has told Obama that his administration is keen to ‘‘contribute’’ to a push for US immigration reform.
Such talk would have been too politically sensitive just six years ago, when the volume of Mexican migrants crossing the border was seen as out of control with more than a million Border Patrol arrests a year.
Last year, the Border Patrol made 340,000 arrests, the lowest level since 1971, the result of a tighter US job market, stiffer US enforcement, and widespread fears in Mexico of the kidnapping and drug gangs.
So the problem is easing but it's now an urgent priority?
Overall, nearly as many Mexicans are now leaving the United States, whether voluntarily or as deportees, as the number who arrive, a trend that has raised alarms of labor shortages in industries such as food service and farming.
I'll tell you, there are plenty of people out of work.
Farm laborers already tend to earn minimum wage or more, experts say, so employers would not necessarily have to pay higher wages to guestworkers than they currently pay illegal migrants.
That's what this is all about.
Still, some US farmers and other employers fear that if the illegal workforce is granted legal status many of those workers will seek jobs in less arduous occupations.
Under the current US program for seasonal agriculture workers, there is no cap on the number of visas that can be issued. But many US employers prefer not to use it because the system is slow.
When the US recession hit and demand for seasonal workers fell, Zacatecas officials said they stopped working with the US Consulate.
Now they work exclusively with Canada and plan to triple the number of workers who go north, where they earn hourly wages of at least $10, as much as they would make in a day back home.The recruits are screened by Mexican officials.
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Some they never send home:
"Another free pass for Ivan the incorrigible; Despite more than 100 criminal charges, Ivan Vaclavik has dodged deportation for nearly four decades. He contends he can’t be sent home because his homeland no longer exists" by Maria Sacchetti | Globe Staff, January 27, 2013
As Ivan Vaclavik tells it, he is a man without a country, an emigre from the former communist-ruled Czechoslovakia who can never be deported no matter how badly he behaves in his adopted United States. His homeland, he points out, no longer exists, washed away in the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Vaclavik has certainly put his theory to the test. Since 1976, when the United States first ordered him deported, he has been charged with more than 100 crimes in Massachusetts, from petty shoplifting to felony theft, and has been imprisoned at least three times. Highlights of his criminal career include assaulting a complete stranger at a Starbucks on Beacon Hill in 2005, breaking into the Charles Hotel in 2007, and accosting an 11-year-old girl near a hotel pool in Waltham in 2009. “Come in here and see your daddy,” he told the frightened child.
Vaclavik has also left a trail of nasty disputes with roommates, landlords, and neighbors, including one woman who took out a restraining order against him after he allegedly tried to enter her bedroom clad only in his underwear.
This long-running spree of crime has led US immigration officials to try, at least three times in the past 12 years, to detain and deport Vaclavik. But each time he has challenged the effort with a lawsuit — and each time immigration has backed off and set him free.
“If you’re not going to enforce immigration laws, then people can get away with this stuff and there’s no recourse,” said Chris Pedersen, the owner of Charles Street Liquors in Boston, one of Vaclavik’s many shoplifting victims who did not realize Vaclavik had been ordered deported but never left. “Sometimes you’ve got to stand up and be counted at some point and say I’m not going to tolerate this anymore.”
Right. They don't enforce the laws we already have, so -- like the gun debate -- why do we need more?
The story of Ivan Vaclavik speaks volumes about how, even in a time of near-record deportations from this country, the federal immigration system continues to return some of the most undesirable illegal immigrants to US streets to resume their criminal ways....
Rather than clash openly with the Czechs over Vaclavik, US immigration officials did what they have done with more than 8,500 other convicted criminals here illegally since 2008 — they let him go. Each time Vaclavik sued to get out of detention, immigration officials let him go before a judge could even rule on his claim....
And how many good, decent Americans are railroaded into prisons?
Cases such as Vaclavik’s generally get little public notice because US immigration officials refuse to identify the immigrants they release or deport, saying it would violate the immigrants’ privacy.
And yet this government is scooping up our telecommunications and monitoring the e-mails of its citizens. Un-frikkin'-real.
Usually, it’s only when illegal immigrants commit sensational crimes — such as a Chinese citizen who stalked and eviscerated a New York woman in 2010 — that the public learns of the missed opportunities to deport the perpetrator.
Ivan Vaclavik is so well-versed in English and the US justice system that he sometimes writes his own legal motions.
The Globe reported last month that immigration’s reluctance to release even basic information about detainees jeopardizes public safety, prompting the newspaper to file a lawsuit against US immigration officials to disclose the names of criminals who have been released after their home countries would not take them back. Currently, immigration officials notify few crime victims when a criminal is released instead of deported, leaving them unable to protect themselves.
Vaclavik came to America for a legal three-week stay in 1974 and never left, according to Ross Feinstein, spokesman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Immigration agents have repeatedly tried to deport him, starting in 1976, but they always released him instead, most recently because the Czech Republic did not provide the necessary travel documents. The Supreme Court has ruled that immigrants generally cannot be detained for more than six months while awaiting deportation....
But alleged Muslim terrorists that are nothing more than convenient foils and patsies can be detained forever.
Nations that refuse to take criminals back suffer few consequences. Theoretically, the State Department can punish a country by refusing to allow its citizens to visit the United States. But the agency has denied visas to countries that don’t repatriate their deported citizens only once since 2001, to tiny Guyana in South America. Members of Congress have submitted legislation that would force the department to take more action, but no such bill has ever been enacted....
Also see: Bill has penalty for nations that bar deportation
Vaclavik, a diminutive, silver-haired man of 65, declined a request for an interview, and little of his personal story is known except that he came here in his 20s and grew old alone, often renting cheap rooms in houses where he frequently battled with his neighbors. He calls himself an architect, but has never had a license in Massachusetts and neighbors say they’ve never known him to have a job, so it’s unclear how he paid the rent and drove an Audi, which he registered for years in New Hampshire. In court, he has sometimes claimed to need public assistance to pay for a lawyer....
I'm thinking drug dealer or intelligence agent, aren't you?
It’s unclear how hard or how often US officials tried to deport Vaclavik because immigration records, unlike criminal records, generally are not public. Some attempts are public only because immigrants file lawsuits or motions in the regular federal courts to get out of jail....
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Others who have been released:
"Many freed criminals avoid deportation, strike again; The vast and secretive US prison system for immigrants, stymied when it tries to deport some criminals, has quietly released thousands, including killers, a Globe investigation shows" by Maria Sacchetti | Globe Staff, December 09, 2012
FLUSHING, N.Y. — Wu is just one casualty of an immigration system cloaked in a blanket of secrecy that the Founding Fathers could not have imagined, a blanket that isn’t lifted even when life is at risk.
No, there is much the Founding Fathers could not have imagined happening to the Republic they fought so hard to establish. We have become what they fought against, Americans.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement and its sister agencies have emerged as the largest law enforcement network in the United States since the Sept. 11 terror attacks, and they are increasingly dealing with criminals, but they play by very different rules than the local police, prosecutors, or even the FBI.
I had originally intended to cut the article there and give you the link to the horror stories, but I then perused the rest of the article and decided to post them here.
Qian Wu thought the man who brutally attacked her was gone forever.
She was sure that Huang Chen, a Chinese citizen who slipped into America on a ship and stayed in the country illegally, would be deported as soon as he got out of jail for choking, punching, and pointing a knife at her in 2006.
But China refused to take Chen back. So, after jailing Chen on and off for three years in Texas, immigration officials believed they were out of options and did what they have done with thousands of criminals like him.
They quietly let him go.
Nobody warned Wu, or prosecutors, or the public. The petite, 46-year-old woman learned Chen was still here when he stormed into her unlocked apartment one day in January 2010 and announced, “I bet you didn’t expect to see me.” Terrified, she called the police, and he fled. But for two weeks, Chen was free to stalk her and finally, to catch her as she hurried home with milk and bread one afternoon.
Chen then finished what he had started earlier, bashing Wu on the head with a hammer and slashing her with a knife. As she lay crumpled in a grimy stairwell, he ripped out her heart and a lung and fled with his macabre trophies.
“She lived in horror in the last two weeks of her life,” said Yongwei Guo, Wu’s widower, through an interpreter in New York. “She knew there was somebody coming to kill her and we asked the police for protection, and also the government, but they did nothing.”
That's not the narrative I've been given regarding the greatest government on the face of the planet.
Immigration officials do not notify most crime victims when they release a criminal such as Chen, and they only notify local law enforcement on a case by case basis. And even though immigration officials have the power to try to hold dangerous people longer, that rarely occurs.
The Globe also found that the pattern of secrecy extends to the treatment of immigrants who end up behind bars, though they have no criminal records. Foreigners in immigration detention have fewer rights than ordinary criminal suspects and limited ability to get word to the outside world about their plight. Even their names are kept secret, purportedly for their own protection, and many never get a public hearing to make their case.
In other words, they are treated just like "terrorists."
Taken together, the system produces a litany of consequences: A young Lynn woman with no criminal record died in immigration custody from a heart ailment without a chance to ask a judge for medical help; a father of five in Texas disappeared from his family for several days after he was detained; a Cuban man in a wheelchair languished for an extraordinary 14 years in immigration detention, invisible to the world outside.
It is also a system in which — as Wu would learn in her final days of terror — Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, routinely releases dangerous detainees to the streets of America without warning the public. Over the past four years, immigration officials have largely without notice freed more than 8,500 detainees convicted of murder, rape, and other crimes, according to ICE’s own statistics, mainly because their home countries would not take them back.
Deporting illegal immigrants requires more than simply putting them on an airplane to their own country. People being deported need travel papers — such as a passport — like anyone else who travels abroad. If their native country refuses to issue the necessary papers , the United States cannot send deportees there. And the Supreme Court has said ICE cannot hold the immigrants forever; if immigration officials cannot deport them after six months, the court said, they should generally set the immigrants free.
When the Globe requested the names of the released criminals under the Freedom of Information Act, federal immigration officials refused, saying it would be a “clearly unwarranted invasion” of the immigrants’ privacy. Officials said public interest in their names was “minimal” anyway.
Are you guys f***ing kidding? It looks to me like they have more rights than some American prisoners.
“In the absence of any identified public interest or explanation as to how the disclosure of the arrestees’ information will advance that interest, the personal privacy interests will prevail,” Matthew Chandler, spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees immigration, said in a written statement to the Globe.
But a disturbing number of foreigners have been arrested after their release, including some for heinous crimes. Abel Arango, an armed robber who was released when his native Cuba wouldn’t take him back, shot and killed a Fort Myers, Fla., police officer who responded to a report of a loud fight between Arango and his girlfriend in 2008. Binh Thai Luc, an armed robber from Vietnam, couldn’t be deported either, so he was released. In March, he allegedly massacred five people in a San Francisco home.
See: Sick San Francisco Slaying
McCarthy Larngar, a Liberian national who served several years in prison for shooting and wounding a man in Rhode Island, was released in 2007 when Liberia would not take him back — even though a Boston immigration official had described him in court records as “a danger to the community.” After multiple brushes with the law, Larngar was arrested last year and charged with tying up and robbing a man and a woman in a bizarre kidnapping in Pawtucket. His lawyer said in court documents that he is not guilty, and he is now in a Rhode Island jail on a violation from an earlier crime.
In New England, immigration officials have released as many as 10 convicted murderers since 2008.
They include Hung Truong, a robber who repeatedly stabbed a bound and gagged 15-year-old Everett girl during a 1989 kidnapping that left the girl and her mother dead. Massachusetts released Truong on parole about 20 years into his life prison sentence in hopes that he would be deported to his native Vietnam in 2010. But ICE could not deport him because Vietnam has refused to accept deportees who came to the United States before 1995. Now, he’s back in prison after failing a drug test that was part of his release deal with the state Parole Board.
As part of its investigation, the Globe filed more than 20 different public records requests to obtain more detailed information about the people held — and released — by the immigration system. Many requests were rejected or the responses were heavily censored, prompting the Globe to file a lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security in November. But this much is clear from the available documents: Federal officials are releasing people that they regard as dangerous and doing little to force recalcitrant countries to take their citizens back.
But this government cares so much about our safety!
Related: Boston Globe sues for names of released criminals
You know, on second thought, scrap the disarming gun control agenda. I'm going to need a piece to defend myself from the cretins this government is releasing.
More than 20 governments from Jamaica to China routinely block deportation of their citizens, even dodging calls from US immigration officers seeking to expedite the process, and critics say they suffer few consequences. Some, such as US Representative Ted Poe, a Texas Republican, argue that the United States should stop accepting diplomats from countries who do not repatriate their citizens, but the State Department has shown little interest, preferring to work through diplomatic channels to deport immigrants. Federal officials have refused to issue visas to only one nation, tiny Guyana in South America.
Even when foreigners cannot be deported, immigration officials, under a 2001 Supreme Court ruling, could seek to hold them longer on the grounds that they are a danger to the public. Immigration officials say the legal standard for holding an immigrant longer for that reason is very high, limiting their ability to use it. They point out that immigrants are detained for civil immigration violations and not crimes.
Treating them like bankers now?
But the Globe found that immigration officials almost never try to declare a detainee dangerous: In the past four years, immigration officials have released thousands of criminals, but court officials say they have handled only 13 cases seeking to hold immigrants longer because they are dangerous.
Translation: the government just flat-out lied, and there is nothing new there!
Too dangerous to release
Immigration agent Earl DeLong and his colleagues wasted little time in trying to put Shafiqul Islam on a plane back to his native Bangladesh two years ago. As soon as he finished his prison term in New York for taking pictures of himself sexually abusing a 12-year-old girl when he was 17, immigration agents called the Bangladeshi consulate in Manhattan.
Initially, the Bangladeshis were reassuring and a consular official, Mamunur Rashid, said he sent the agent’s request for clearance to deport Islam to authorities in Dhaka. But as time dragged on, the cooperation waned.
Whenever DeLong and others called the consulate over the next few months, Rashid was increasingly unavailable. The receptionist said he was not in. He was on vacation or out to lunch. Sometimes, a person at the consulate answered the phone and just hung up. Other times, the phone rang but nobody answered.
“Spoke to a person at the consulate four different times, never able to speak with Mamunur Rashid,” one agent wrote in a secret federal log that became public as part of a lawsuit.
US officials had seen stalling tactics from Bangladesh before: The impoverished Asian nation typically took several months to provide passports for criminals being deported last year — if they provided the documents at all, according to federal statistics.
Foreign countries are understandably reluctant to accept criminals, especially those such as Islam who were raised in the United States, and they have little incentive to do so since the United States rarely takes action against them, such as refusing to issue them visas.
State Department officials acknowledge that they try to avoid reaching the point of sanctions with nations like Bangladesh, but insist that they do apply diplomatic pressure.
“It is a matter we take very seriously, and consistently raise it at high levels with all countries where this is a concern,” said department spokesman Ken Chavez.
Hoping Bangladesh would clear Islam’s return, US immigration officials told Islam in April 2011 that they were going to continue to hold him even though more than six months had passed since Islam’s sexual abuse sentence ended. Islam responded with a lawsuit, charging that immigration could not continue to detain him because it was unlikely that Bangladesh would take him back. In the lawsuit, he pointedly noted that the consulate appeared to be dodging the immigration agent’s calls.
Islam’s lawsuit made public a host of immigration documents that are normally kept secret. The documents revealed both immigration officials’ concerns that Islam is dangerous and their frustrating attempts to contact the Bangladeshis.
But there is no evidence in the file that immigration officials requested an immigration court hearing to determine if they could continue to hold him as a threat to public safety.
Instead, the records show that on Oct. 3, 2011, immigration officials gave up and released Islam.
Seven weeks later, Islam was at Lois Decker’s door.
Everyone loved the retired school lunch lady, a friendly 73-year-old grandmother who taught Sunday school and lived her whole life in Hillsdale, N.Y., a rural hamlet just across the border from the Massachusetts line. Decker raised five children, but she lived alone in the house her daughter bought for her on Cold Water Street.
Sheriff’s deputies say they are unsure what drew Islam to Decker’s house that day, but family members said she had planned to rent out an apartment in the basement. Islam had a construction job in the Berkshires.
Hours after Islam visited Decker’s house, police arrested him in a traffic stop in a nearby city. He had stolen Decker’s white Hyundai, crashed it, and then tried to steal the truck of good Samaritans who had stopped to help him. He finally stole yet another truck, but did not get far. When police arrested him, he was spattered with blood, and had Decker’s credit card in the truck.
Sheriff’s deputies discovered a gruesome scene at Lois Decker’s house. The woman had been strangled, court records showed, and her face and throat were slashed. Officials found Islam’s semen on a sheet in the house, though officials did not find bodily evidence that Decker was sexually assaulted.
Columbia County officials were incensed and demanded to know why ICE had let such a dangerous person go free. They had convicted the high school dropout on sex abuse charges in 2008. Now he’s serving 20 years to life for Decker’s murder.
Paul Czajka, the silver-haired district attorney and a former judge in Columbia County, said immigration officials should have argued that Islam was dangerous enough to hold longer.
“He was a child abuser and registered sex offender, therefore by definition he was a danger to the community,” said Czajka. “It would not have been a difficult hearing to make that case.”
But ICE spokesman Ross Feinstein said the agency had little choice but to release criminals such as Islam and Chen because the courts have made it difficult to hold even mentally ill immigrants longer without new criminal charges against them.
“For this reason, the agency’s ability to utilize the continued detention of removable aliens . . . is extremely limited,” Feinstein said.
Lois Decker’s grieving relatives say they’ve been told very little about how Islam gained his release and was able to kill her. Until a Globe reporter contacted the family, they had no idea that Islam had filed a federal lawsuit to get out of jail.
“It’s crazy to me that we don’t know this information,” said Decker’s daughter Diane Demarest, a veterinarian who lives in Oregon.
Some US and Bangladeshi officials involved with Islam’s case did not even realize he had killed Decker until contacted by the Globe.
Gail Y. Mitchell, an assistant US attorney in New York who defended ICE against Islam’s lawsuit to get out of jail, said the case ended because immigration officials released him. She would not say why they didn’t pursue the case and did not know that Islam had gone on to murder Decker.
Bangladesh consul M. Shahedul Islam said he did not know that Islam had killed Decker either. “This guy?” the consul said, raising his eyebrows and pointing to four passport-sized photos of Islam in a file with letters from US immigration officials asking for help with deportation.
The Bangladeshi consulate said Bangladesh did not approve Islam for return because they could not verify he was a citizen of their country.
“We always cooperate with Homeland Security,” said the consul, who is not related to Shafiqul Islam, and he apologized if his staff hung up on ICE agents.
But, for Decker’s family, the conflicting explanations don’t help.
“How could someone not have stopped him along the way?” asked Demarest.
Light sentences for heavy crimes
The uncertainties of the deportation process have another little known effect: Some foreigners get reduced prison sentences when they are convicted of crimes because judges believe they are sure to be deported after their sentence is over. Federal immigration officials warn against the practice, saying that deportation is not a 100 percent certainty even for the worst offender.
No one knows that better than the man Antonino Rodrigues allegedly shot between the eyes this year.
Rodrigues, a convicted drug dealer in the country illegally from Cape Verde, was facing almost four years in federal prison in October 2010 for possessing a stolen, loaded weapon. New Bedford police had caught him: They knew Rodrigues had outstanding arrest warrants and they were pleased when a detective spotted him bar-hopping on the city’s south side.
When Rodrigues appeared for sentencing before US District Judge Douglas P. Woodlock in Boston for the latest in a string of convictions, federal guidelines called for 37 to 46 months in prison.
But defense lawyer Syrie Fried argued that Rodrigues deserved a lighter punishment because he was going to deported anyway. She told the judge Rodrigues had “no prospect of release back into our society.”
Woodlock went along, giving Rodrigues just two years in prison with credit for time served, clearing the way for Rodrigues to finish his prison sentence in March 2011.
“Given the defendant’s near certainty of deportation, the sentence is sufficient but not greater than necessary,” the judge ruled.
But Cape Verde officials did not take Rodrigues back, so immigration officials released him late last year. The Cape Verde consulate in Boston did not respond to questions about why they did not accept Rodrigues.
On June 17, 2012, Rodrigues resurfaced outside an apartment on New Bedford’s Walnut Street, where police say he shot Monzes Goncalves in the forehead with a .22-caliber gun. Goncalves miraculously survived and identified Rodrigues as the shooter.
Rodrigues denied shooting Goncalves and turned himself in to police because he heard they were looking for him.
Fried, the lawyer who helped Rodrigues win a shorter prison sentence in 2010, said she was surprised to learn that her client was still in the United States. She said she did not stay in touch with him because, typically, foreigners who are convicted of serious crimes leave the country.
“I was under the impression . . . that he was going to go straight from serving his jail sentence and be deported,” she said.
The fact is, Rodrigues’ case is not unusual. In Massachusetts over the past four years, the Parole Board has granted early release to 22 immigrants convicted of second-degree murder or manslaughter, several times stating that their willingness to free the prisoner was influenced by his expected departure from the United States. Some prisoners told the board they planned to leave voluntarily for a job in Sierra Leone or a place to live in Cambodia.
However, at least five of the 22 were still here as of July, and, it’s unclear what happened to the other 17. One of the five still here under state supervision is Hung Truong, the Vietnamese national who helped murder an Everett mother and her daughter. Truong had been disciplined more than 30 times in prison, but the board said his behavior had improved — and Truong was possibly leaving anyway.
“It is the judgment of the board that he should be paroled [to federal immigration officials] for possible deportation,” wrote the parole board in its unanimous vote on Sept. 24, 2010.
More than two years later, Truong is still here — in MCI-Shirley, a Massachusetts prison, after flunking a drug test he was required to take as a condition of his release.
No one has to tell Qian Wu’s widower about immigrants getting light sentences for heavy crimes. Yongwei Guo’s wife was killed by an illegal immigrant who prosecutors said was initially sentenced to only 30 days in prison for attacking her the first time. Immigration officials ultimately detained Huang Chen off and on for more than three years in hopes of deporting him, but it wasn’t enough.
“They are not taking responsibility,” Guo said. “They can’t let such a dangerous man free merely because China won’t take him.”
No warning for victims
Long after her assailant went off to prison, Qian Wu kept an eye out for him in her Flushing, N.Y., neighborhood, scanning the crush of pedestrians flowing into the markets, the take-out joints, and the massage parlors nearby. She quizzed the fruit vendors on the street. Nobody had seen Huang Chen. Nonetheless, Wu kept a restraining order out against him — just in case.
Wu had a tough exterior, but those close to her said her attitude masked her fear. She was thin and walked with a limp from injuries she suffered in a car accident years ago. She hardly spoke English, and she had fled political repression in China. And until she remarried in 2008, Wu was a woman on her own, running an employment service for immigrants.
“She was disabled, so she had to be tougher than the others,” said Guo.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the country at a detention center in El Paso, federal officials were trying to figure out what to do with Chen, a man who could seem normal one moment and mentally unbalanced the next. Immigration officials continued to hold Chen for another year after his 30-day sentence ran out, holding out hope that China would take him back.
When that didn’t happen, an immigration agent dropped Chen off at a local homeless shelter, in April 2008.
But just two months later, El Paso police arrested Chen after he punched two men in a plaza downtown. Then, just days after Chen got out of jail for the assaults, police arrested him again on a disorderly conduct charge for attacking a man on a bicycle right in front of them. Police described him as “a danger” to himself and others in their report.
Chen returned to the El Paso detention center to await deportation, but again China refused to take him back, so in October 2009, immigration officials again released him. This time, he made it clear that he wanted to get back to New York. He blamed Qian Wu for his troubles, court records later showed, and he knew exactly where to find her: Apartment 3F in a building on 40th Road.
When Chen walked through Wu’s unlocked front door for the first time since 2006, she ran downstairs and begged neighbors to call 911. She asked police and prosecutors for help with a new restraining order, since hers had expired, but never managed to get one. Guo warned his wife to stay inside.
One desperate night, Guo recalled, he asked Wu what they should do, and she responded bitterly.
“She said we can just wait to die,” he said.
Most victims, including Wu, have no idea that the criminal who victimized them has been released, based on a Globe analysis of ICE’s little-known victim notification program and the number of immigrants released from its custody. Federal immigration statistics show ICE has released or deported more than 1 million criminals over the past decade, but they have made just 1,000 to 3,000 victim notifications.
Currently, only 336 crime victims are enrolled in ICE’s program, compared with 2.2 million victims in the Justice Department’s electronic notification system in 2010 alone.
Immigration officials say they want more crime victims to sign up for their system, but it’s up to the victims to register. Wu’s widower was unsure whether she had been offered the opportunity to enroll, though he knows she would have been interested.
The Queens district attorney’s office, which handled Chen’s attacks on Wu, said they were not aware of Chen’s release. ICE officials say they are under no obligation to contact law enforcement officials when civil immigration detainees are released, though they do so when officials request it.
In Flushing, court records show, Chen stalked the panicked Wu for days. He moved into the same building, a few doors down. He tried to reach through the metal gate on her door and unlock it. He even took the $200 her husband gave him to go away.
On Jan. 26, 2010, security camera footage showed Chen leaving Wu’s building, his green sweater soaked in blood. Police arrested him at a local hospital seeking treatment for a hand wound.
Chen, now 50, made no secret in court that he wanted to kill Wu as revenge for his long stint in prison. Justice Richard L. Buchter called the murder “cold-blooded and grotesque,” and especially senseless because Chen was not supposed to be here at all.
“I just — I am just disturbed by what you told me regarding the fact that this person should have been deported and was not,” said Buchter, who sentenced Chen to 27 to 29 years in prison.
Wu’s widower has filed claims against ICE and multimillion-dollar lawsuits against the New York City Police Department and Chen.
From his offices in Times Square, lawyer George W. Clarke said Guo’s case is one of the toughest he’s had in years, because immigration officials provide so little information. They ask him questions he said they should answer, such as when they released Chen, and refuse to provide documents.
“They’re not telling us anything,” Clarke said. Later, he added: “I think it’s just the immigration service doesn’t want to be bothered or exposed to liability for releasing people who may be guilty of crimes and who have no right to be here, such as Huang Chen.”
Officials at the Chinese Embassy in Washington did not respond to e-mails and phone calls about Chen’s case.
The whole experience has shaken the Rev. Bill Morton, an El Paso priest who gave Chen a cleaning job when he got out of detention and sometimes drove him to meetings with ICE. Over time, he became concerned about Chen’s mental health and, looking back, he wonders why immigration officials didn’t express similar concerns, or warn volunteers like him.
“I’m totally pro-immigrant, but I’m certainly not pro-ignorance or indifference where you’re exposing criminal people or insane people on an unknowing public,” Morton said. “That’s not helping immigrants or the US or the person themselves.”
--more--"
"Out of sight, detainees struggle to be heard; With constitutional rights lacking, even for those with no record of crime, immigrants languish, pawns in a burgeoning law enforcement system that is defined by secrecy" by Milton J. Valencia and Maria Sacchetti | Globe Staff, December 10, 2012
Irene Bamenga had her plane ticket to go home. The 29-year-old, carrying a bag of medications to treat a life-threatening heart condition, had planned to return to France and wait out her application for permanent residence in the United States before rejoining her husband in Lynn.
Bamenga had stayed in the United States much longer than she was supposed to under a visa waiver program, but she was exactly the kind of person immigration agents are officially encouraged not to put in jail: She had no criminal record, a husband in the country legally, and a heart condition — and she was trying to leave on her own anyway.
Still, when border agents discovered Bamenga was here illegally as the couple tried to drive to Canada for her flight in July 2011, the young woman ended up in handcuffs and a belly chain, joining 33,000 other immigrants across the country that day who were prisoners of the Department of Homeland Security.
Twelve days later, Irene Bamenga was dead.
“She was terrified,” her husband, Yodi Zikianda, recalled of the day of her arrest. “She was telling me, ‘I cannot stay in jail.’ ”
He repeatedly called the phone number that border agents gave him to try to help his wife get out or to at least get her medications, but he couldn’t get beyond taped messages.
If Bamenga had been accused of a crime, she would have been entitled to a public court hearing within hours of her arrest, giving her a chance to state her case and to plead for treatment of her congestive heart failure. But as a prisoner awaiting deportation inside the nation’s most secretive detention system, she had no right to a hearing or a court-appointed lawyer. Most important, she had no reliable access to the six medicines that she needed to stay alive.
Isn't this the kind of human rights crap over which we lecture the rest of the world?
For days, as Bamenga was transferred from one New York jail to another, she either got no medications or reduced doses, even though she told jailers she was struggling to breathe and had palpitations. She even filed a written request for medical help. Finally, on the 12th day of detention, her cellmates found her lying on her bunk, eyes wide open, not breathing — dead after receiving what the immigration system’s own investigators concluded was poor medical care.
That's typical treatment and has been for years.
“It was all wrong,” said Zikianda, a parking attendant in Boston and an engineering student at Wentworth Institute of Technology. “Why couldn’t they just let her go?”
Irene Bamenga paid the ultimate price for her encounter with immigration authorities, but countless others have suffered from its toxic combination of insensitivity and lack of public accountability, a yearlong Globe investigation has found.
Globe does deserve credit for this series; however, it will soon fade and nothing will change.
Every day, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, detains more than 10,000 immigrants who have no criminal records and sometimes deep ties to the United States, holding them for weeks and often months in jails where they have fewer rights than criminals and little access to the outside world. It is a system that separates parents from young children, locks away the elderly during their twilight years, and sometimes puts the sick at great risk.
Yet, that same agency has released 8,500 criminals — including as many as 201 murderers — to US streets over the past four years because their home countries wouldn’t take them back, as the Globe reported on Sunday.
Such inconsistencies fester in a fast-growing detention system that provides little information about the people it arrests. ICE’s network of detention centers — almost all of them originally designed to house criminals — has quadrupled in size since 1995, but ICE doesn’t release even the names of detainees, purportedly because it needs to protect immigrants’ privacy.
The information that ICE officials do release, such as the calculation that detainees typically remain locked up less than a month, masks painful individual stories. On one day last January, nearly 3,000 immigrants had been locked up for more than six months — and close to 900 for more than a year — while they went through the deportation process, according to ICE records released last month to the American Civil Liberties Union.
Despite the official secrecy, however, immigration detention stories do surface, making it clear why the acronym ICE strikes fear into so many immigrants’ hearts:
■ A Texas father disappeared for four days into the detention system after a call to tell his family he had been arrested by border agents on the way home from work one night earlier this year. Only after a Globe reporter began asking questions about Jesus Tovar’s whereabouts did the family learn that he had been shuffled from jail to jail and pressured to accept deportation back to his native Mexico.
Tovar, whose children include US citizens though he has been here illegally since 2001, was eventually freed, but few immigrants have journalists making calls about them.
■ An Arizona mother, brought here from Mexico as a baby, was locked up for seven months in an immigration prison, away from her children, after one of the nation’s best known anti-illegal immigration crusaders raided the restaurant where she worked. Luz Tamayo now faces deportation to a country she scarcely knows.
■ A Massachusetts man faced deportation and was jailed after he attempted to do what the government asked in 2003, voluntarily reporting that he was here illegally. By the time immigration officials finally sent Elmaati Hachani a deportation hearing notice almost eight years later, he had moved and the notice went to the wrong address. Hachani then was dramatically arrested in front of his pregnant wife and locked up for the next two months; she miscarried days later.
Immigration officials dropped the case against Hachani on Friday after numerous questions from the Globe.
Although only about one in 30,000 detainees dies in custody, Irene Bamenga’s case was in no way isolated: 10 other detainees died in immigration custody in 2011, including 55-year-old Jose Aguilar-Espinoza, who died of heart problems in California. Aguilar’s family contended in a lawsuit that his death could have been prevented, arguing that jail officials should have known that he had a pacemaker and that authorities failed to render immediate care for his serious medical needs.
Meanwhile, in Pennsylvania, a 47-year-old detainee from China hanged himself with a bed sheet, one of perhaps a dozen suicides in custody since 2003, based on ICE records.
Media reports about deaths in custody have spurred attempts at making the system more transparent, such as publicly listing the names and causes of death of the 131 detainees who have died in detention since 2003. President Obama has tried to lift the veil further, while pushing immigration to focus enforcement on criminals rather than the majority of the nation’s 11.5 million undocumented immigrants. Immigration officials’ own reports have concluded that locking up most illegal immigrants is both unnecessary and expensive — $122 a night per detainee.
And yet they are releasing the dangerous ones.
See: The Illegal Immigrant Imprisonment Industry
Yeah, people are making money off it.
But reforms have been slow to catch on in a system that has become the nation’s largest law enforcement network. About 90,000 federal employees work for the four main agencies that make up the immigration system, with a combined budget of $20 billion — dwarfing even the $10 billion and 40,000 employees in combined resources of the FBI and the US Marshals Service.
Last year, ICE detained a record 429,247 foreign nationals — more than double 2001 levels — and deported 396,906 immigrants, at least 180,000 of whom may have been here illegally but had no criminal record. By ICE’s own estimate, many thousands of them could have been spared deportation under its 2011 policy of “prosecutorial discretion,” or selectively enforcing the law.
In Irene Bamenga’s case, records show that the border agents had filled out a form that could have cleared the way to let her go. On the form, they listed no threat posed by Bamenga except that she was “likely to add to the illegal population.” But agents did not list her medical condition, which could have been a reason to let her fly to France on her own rather than face detention. The agents detained her anyway. Their names have been blacked out in records obtained by the Globe under a Freedom of Information Act request.
ICE, which took responsibility for Bamenga from the border agents, says they acted correctly, noting in a statement that Bamenga knew that she would be subject to immediate deportation without right of appeal if she stayed in the United States longer than 90 days. She had been here since 2005, and ICE officials said that deportation of people who overstay their visa waivers is essential, or else everyone would feel free to stay indefinitely.
But others say Bamenga’s imprisonment was both unnecessary and wildly disproportionate to an immigration violation — yet typical of the harsh treatment meted out to many illegal immigrants.
“The problem is, Ms. Bamenga is just a really horrible, specific example of the system,” said Joanne Macri, head of of the Criminal Defense Immigration Project for the New York State Defenders Association, who raised questions about the case after Bamenga’s death last year.
If Bamenga had been charged with a crime, Macri said, it would have been simple for her to get medical care within hours — at the bail hearing guaranteed to newly arrested defendants, citizens or not — under the US Constitution.
“I would have said, ‘Your Honor, I’m sick,’ ” Macri explained.
But the status of immigrants isn’t addressed at all in the Constitution or its amendments, and the border control system that grew up over the course of the nation’s history provides few of the due process safeguards of the criminal courts.
Since when has the U.S. government given a damn about the Constitution? They consider people who cite it as terrorists!
Immigration officials say they decide whether to detain someone, within “a reasonable period of time,” and the immigrant will be brought before an immigration judge “as soon as is practicable,” and that can depend on the judge’s docket.
Thousands of detainees like Bamenga get no hearing at all because their deportation is automatic, meaning that their fate is essentially decided by the people who arrest them.
“There is no rhyme and reason to a lot of this,” said Macri. “It all depends on who picks you up, who encounters you, how they feel about you, and what their bed space looks like to determine if you’re going to be one of the lucky ones or the unlucky ones.”
‘Like I had killed someone’
Jesus Tovar was not one of the lucky ones.
The 36-year-old father of five had been living illegally in Mission, Texas, near the Mexican border, for more than a decade, but he had no criminal background when Customs and Border Protection agents arrested him last March while he was on his way home from work laying tile. Tovar said the agents told him they were looking for smugglers, but caught him instead.
After an initial call to his family to report he’d been arrested, they heard nothing more from Tovar or anyone else; they could not even find his name on a Department of Homeland Security website set up by the Obama administration to help families find detained loved ones.
Over a nine-day period, he was shuffled five times from one jail to another and forced to sleep on concrete floors, or in a windowless room with more than 100 other men.
After Tovar had been missing for four days, his wife, Gloria, called the Globe, which had been in contact with a lawyer that knew the family. The Globe eventually found him in the East Hidalgo detention center, about 40 miles from the family’s home. Initially, the jail denied to a Globe reporter and to the family in separate calls that Tovar was there, before acknowledging he was there temporarily.
Like Bamenga, immigration agents put Tovar in shackles and a belly chain when they transferred him from one jail to another.
“They put me in handcuffs like I had killed someone,” he said in Spanish. “They tied my feet, my hands and my stomach. I was like, ‘I haven’t killed anyone, what is this?’ ”
Finally, that same month, ICE released Tovar on personal recognizance, after the Globe inquiry into his case. He has a deportation hearing scheduled for next year in immigration court.
A crucial conviction
By the time President Obama announced a two-year reprieve from deportation for young undocumented immigrants this June, it was too late for Luz Tamayo.
Tamayo, a 28-year-old manager of a Sizzler restaurant in Phoenix, might have been a perfect candidate: She arrived from Mexico as a baby in her mother’s arms. But when it became clear that her good grades and flawless English were useless without legal residency, she bought a fake Social Security card in her own name and went to work.
Her lawyer likened the act to a college student getting a fake ID, but for Tamayo, it was a mistake that could get her deported.
In 2010, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, the 80-year-old Springfield, Mass., native known as “America’s toughest sheriff,” raided the Sizzler as television cameras recorded the event, arresting Tamayo and several other Latino employees for identity theft and other crimes that day.
See: Arizona Again
After a month in jail, Tamayo pleaded guilty to identity theft, even though the court warned her in writing that it was a felony conviction that could get her deported. Tamayo said she didn’t realize the implications — her lawyer at the time did not return calls for this article — and she was desperate to return to her family, which was running low on money and food.
“Nobody else was going to support my kids,” said Tamayo, who has no other criminal conviction. “I was just working. I wasn’t trying to go out there and have everything. I was just trying to live, day by day.”
Instead of being released at the end of her 90-day sentence in September 2010, Tamayo was transferred to an ICE jail in the Arizona desert for another seven months. She begged immigration to let her out on bail so that she could return to her children, Ivan, 9, and Erika, 7, who were being cared for by relatives. But the immigration officer, according to Tamayo, said the more she fought, the longer she would be in jail.
ICE said Tamayo is ineligible for Obama’s program because of the felony conviction. “Ms. Tamayo’s criminal history makes her ineligible for discretion under the agency’s current guidelines,” said Amber Cargile, an ICE spokeswoman in Arizona.
Sheriff Arpaio, who has come under fire for allegedly discriminating against Latinos, stressed that identity theft is a serious crime that can damage the victim’s reputation for years. But, in Tamayo’s case, there is no record that she harmed anyone. She was not ordered to pay restitution to the Social Security number’s real owner.
Smoking pot doesn't harm anyone, but... she still broke the law, right?
Nonetheless, Tamayo’s immigration lawyer said, there’s a good chance she’ll be jailed again or deported, though she is free on bail now.
“I’m so discouraged, having seen this going on for so long, having seen so many good people be deported because the law is so harsh,” Suzannah Maclay said from Phoenix. “It wasn’t her choice to come here.”
Trying to follow the law
Elmaati Hachani of Westborough, 48, did what the US government asked him to do — and got arrested for it.
Talk about a life lesson!
The native of Morocco had stayed here illegally after his visa expired in 1996, but after the Sept 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, he willingly stood in line at the John F. Kennedy federal building in Boston for a controversial new program that required foreigners from certain Arab and Muslim nations to register with immigration officials. Not since World War II, when the United States detained families of German, Japanese, and Italian descent, had the government specifically targeted people like this.
Yes, AmeriKa has its concentration camps, but don't let that stain the inculcating and indoctrinating narrative of official history.
Hachani’s friends, also here illegally, called the program a witch hunt and did not register, but Hachani hoped that signing up in 2003 would help his effort to stay.
“I was one of the people who went there, obeyed the law . . . and registered themselves,” he said recently.
But by admitting that he was here illegally, Hachani had unwittingly set himself up to be deported. Immigration officials told Hachani to call a toll-free number to find out when his deportation hearing would take place. For years, Hachani called every month, but no hearing was scheduled.
Finally, Hachani stopped calling around 2009 and moved from Revere to Westborough, where he runs his own cleaning company. In a crucial misstep, he failed to notify immigration agents of his new address.
He's here illegally yet owns a business?
When immigration officials finally notified him that there would be a deportation hearing, they sent the letter to his old address, and Hachani never saw it. The hearing happened anyway and he was ordered deported in January 2011, making Hachani a fugitive. Immigration agents found him at his new home within weeks.
In March 2011, eight years after Hachani told US officials he had overstayed his visa, plainclothes immigration agents descended on him as he got into his car for work and slapped him in handcuffs. Then they knocked on the door, handed his terrified, pregnant wife a citation, and told her Hachani was going to jail.
But it's a compassionate government that cares.
The next month, the Obama administration announced it was discontinuing the special-registration program because it was little help in detaining terrorists.
By then, Hachani was in jail. He said he spent 65 days in Plymouth County House of Correction, which holds ICE detainees, until he was released on bail to fight for a new deportation hearing.
After inquiries from the Globe, immigration officials last week offered to drop the case against Hachani and his wife, said Jeffrey Rubin, his Boston lawyer.
“He’s overwhelmed with joy and relief,” Rubin said. “It’s the culmination of a long road filled with anxiety and despair and trauma.”
Immigration officials say they are trying to make their system more humane, improving health care and offering more recreational opportunities in detention, while allowing more immigrants to remain free while they await their deportation hearings.
But critics say the the system has grown so big and sprawling that no central authority really controls it, despite court rulings and presidential initiatives.
Oh, the BUREAUCRACY ha$ gotten OUT of CONTROL, huh?
So let me get this straight: the system is releasing the people it should keep in jail and jailing those that should be let out? Yup, it's AmeriKan justice all right!
Do I have an answer to the issue? No, I don't, but I'm not the one who devised the economic globalism that has led to this point. That has been the province of the central bankers and those who have constructed it for them. Besides, my first concerns are ending wars and Wall Street lootings.
“You can have all these plans coming from the leadership, but if it does not turn into serious change on the ground, then we have a problem,” said Andrea Black, executive director of the advocacy group Detention Watch Network.“The people actually in detention are suffering as much as ever.”
Similarly, immigration officials take pride in having reduced the average detention for immigrants from 40 days to 26 since 2001, the year that the Supreme Court ruled that foreigners with final deportation orders in general should not be imprisoned longer than six months. That ruling, in a case called Zadvydas v. Davis, and a second ruling in 2005 have spurred immigration officials to release 8,500 criminal noncitizens who have been in the United States since 2008 because their home countries did not agree to take them back.
But many nonviolent immigrants remain in detention far longer than six months, many as their cases drag through the system. Data released last month to the ACLU as part of a lawsuit show that ICE holds hundreds of detainees for more than a year, often without granting them a bond hearing where they could argue for their release.
“The first question you need to ask is, why does this person need to be detained in the first place?” said Judy Rabinovitz, deputy director of the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project. “People are being locked up without a bond hearing, and it’s affecting them, affecting their families.”
I guess it's the illegal part that confused me.
The refusal of immigration officials to release detainees’ names makes it difficult to investigate the cases of some of the longest-held prisoners, but one case in Massachusetts shows how an extraordinarily long “administrative detention” could happen.
Juan Carlos Hernandez came to the United States on the Mariel Boatlift, a tidal wave of Cubans who came by private boat to south Florida in 1980. He was never officially admitted to the United States, but was allowed to stay under a special parole agreement. By 1984, Hernandez was in prison in New York for burglary and theft, putting him on a track to be deported. But Cuban leader Fidel Castro would not take back the people who left in the boatlift, so US immigration officials kept Hernandez locked up after his release from New York custody in 1991. He remained in immigration custody until his release from Fort Devens in 2005.
Even the 2001 Supreme Court ruling prohibiting indefinite detention of immigrants did not help Hernandez, because it did not apply to Mariel Cubans who were never legally admitted to this country. Hernandez remained in prison for those 14 years after his prison term until a 2005 Supreme Court ruling said the government cannot indefinitely imprison Mariel Cubans either.
Hernandez, who did not want to comment for this article, was a broken man in a wheelchair by the time he was released, but ICE officials say they followed protocol. An immigration spokeswoman said that Hernandez was “afforded numerous parole interviews” during his incarceration, but that ICE’s associate commissioner for enforcement ruled that his release would not be in the public interest.
Kevin Barron, a Boston-based lawyer who represented Hernandez, had argued that his freedom should be decided by a regular judge in a public courtroom.
“Any kind of proceeding that isn’t open, that isn’t public, is subject to abuses,” said Barron.
Unless they are military tribunals and such!
But the death of Irene Bamenga may best underscore how difficult it will be to change the massive, secretive detention system that the United States has built since 9/11.
The month before Bamenga was arrested in July 2011, ICE director John Morton issued a memo urging immigration officials to use “prosecutorial discretion” in deciding whether to lock someone up. They should be arresting people who represent a threat, he wrote, while going easy on people such as victims of crime, women nursing children, or people with serious medical illnesses.
Immigration officers, Morton said, can “decide not to assert the full scope of the enforcement authority available to the agency.”
But the very next month, Border Protection agents at the New York-Canadian border brought the “full scope” of federal authority down on Bamenga, and ICE detained her even though she appeared to qualify for lenience under Morton’s memo.
Forgiveness
Yodi Zikianda tottered through the iron gates of the new cemetery in Moissy-Cramayel, a tranquil village in the northern region of France, heading past family members and friends toward the grave of his late wife, just to touch the new gravestone he had placed there in her honor. It was his first visit since she was buried.
Family members stayed by his side, one leaning on him for comfort, but Zikianda said nothing. All he could do on the brisk October day was stand there, sobbing quietly, thinking how different things could have been.
On the night of her arrest, Bamenga had been processed at the Allegany County jail, near Buffalo, and the booking officer asked if she was taking any medication.
“Lots of them,” she had replied, according to an observation report filled out in the booking process. She even brought them with her, and turned them over to ICE officers.
But it would take four days before Bamenga received any medications. She was transferred two days later to the Albany County jail, and she had to explain her prescriptions again, but still did not receive the proper doses for her congestive heart failure.
By July 26 of last year, 11 days after her arrest, Bamenga was getting sicker and she practically begged for help, writing to her jailers, “What is the disposition of my case, I would like to know?”
She never got an answer. The next day, she died.
Zikianda, 33, has sued both jails, echoing the findings of the immigration system and an agency consultant that the jails failed to provide proper medical care to Irene Bamenga. A New York state investigation later cleared the Albany jail, but Zikianda’s lawyers hope the lawsuit will reveal the truth.
“What are they doing to follow up to make sure their standards are being followed?” said Alex MacDonald, one of Zikianda’s attorneys, noting ICE still detains immigrants in both jails and never sanctioned the facilities. Zikianda wants “to ensure that justice is done and this does not happen again.”
The ceremony at the cemetery was Zikianda’s opportunity to finally ask for forgiveness of those in Moissy-Cramayel, a village of just over 16,000, where Bamenga attended school and the Notre Dame Church of the Assumption, where she and Zikianda married in 2005. He had failed to protect Bamenga.
Her mother, her stepfather, her siblings, and other family members still cannot understand how a French national trying to leave the United States could be jailed, placed in shackles, and allowed to die in a cell. They asked Zikianda for answers, but he had none. He could only offer that he had been unable to do more.
“They should have brought us back Irene,” her mother, Marie Madeleine Nelo, cried out in French in the living room of her home, where she hosted a reception after the ceremony.
Zikianda’s large family was there, too. And in a moment of silence, his uncle, Robert Zikianda, the patriarch of the family, stood to ask Bamenga’s family to release Zikianda of his duties as a husband, a tradition in their African culture.
Bamenga’s family, through her stepfather, somberly obliged.
“You’ve made the grave, you’ve done what you should have done, you go on with your life,” a family friend, Daphine Paris, said, roughly translating the solemn exchange.
And yet Zikianda, who would seem a bear of a man if he weren’t so broken, did not feel ready to go on without Irene, the passionate Celtics fan with the big smile who steered her husband onto a better course. She had encouraged the refugee from Congo to become an engineer. She would do something in social work, or business. They would have kids. All she needed to do was go home to France and wait out her application for a green card.
“It was the pursuit of an American dream,” Zikianda said.
--more--"
"Courts inside prisons, far from public view; Frightened, confused, and often held far from home, thousands of immigrants find themselves at the mercy of a legal system that, for many, amounts to an assembly line toward deportation" by Maria Sacchetti and Milton J. Valencia | Globe Staff, December 11, 2012
LUMPKIN, Ga. — Wait beneath a canopy of razor wire for a security guard to buzz open the first towering gate. Then, the second. Walk through the chain-link fence onto a concrete path, toward the
tiny sign that says “courtroom.” To the left is a door marked “public access.”
The door is locked.
A guard punches in a code and the door swings open, but it can take almost an hour to get inside the immigration court with the highest deportation rate in America — not counting the time it takes to drive there from Atlanta, almost 140 miles away.
Inside the jail at the Stewart Detention Center, judges in long black robes preside from their benches in courtrooms with cinderblock walls. Inmates in blue, orange, and red uniforms sit on wooden benches waiting to learn whether a judge will let them stay in the United States or send them away.
The court has all the trappings of the American judicial system, except for one of its most cherished principles: accountability. In immigration courts nationwide, files and evidence are kept from public view. Hearings are open, but not publicized, and are often held inside detention centers; the few outsiders who attend quickly discover that judges have broad powers to eject the public. Most judges’ full decisions are never even written down.
The secrecy conceals the inner workings of a controversial court system that renders life-altering decisions with little opportunity for public review once the hearing is over. Each year, immigration judges order some 160,000 people to leave the country, including more than 10,500 who asked for asylum because they said their home country was dangerous.
The 58 US immigration courts are overburdened and understaffed, carrying caseloads several times larger than regular courts and run by about 250 judges who have burnout rates that rival prison wardens, one study showed, partly because they make so much less money and have far less job security than other federal judges.
But we always have plenty of money for wars, Wall Street, and Israel.
Half of the immigrants before the court have no lawyer to help them navigate the maze of immigration law, and the justice they receive depends heavily on who hears their case: for instance, some judges grant nearly all requests for asylum, while others deny each one, according to data collected by Syracuse University. Yet the judges’ words are usually final: Immigrants appeal fewer than one deportation decision in 10.
It's the same in any courtroom across AmeriKa.
“They had a reason for putting it there,” said Wanda Tejeda, who lives down the street from the detention center in Lumpkin, where the population of the 1,700-bed facility outnumbers the whole town. “What better place to put it than a little town in the middle of the South in the middle of nowhere that nobody’s ever heard of?”
The officials who run the immigration courts acknowledge that they make public far fewer documents than regular courts, and that their courtrooms increasingly are located inside locked detention centers that are difficult for the public to get to. But they insist they are not trying to hide anything, and have also opened courts outside of jails.
Immigration courts are allowed to withhold many documents to better protect immigrants’ privacy because they are under the executive, not the judicial branch, explain the leaders of the Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review, which runs the courts. Officials say the three new courts they have placed inside detention centers over the last decade are simply a way to reduce costs, not to discourage public participation.
And the immigration officials say they are aware that so many immigrants don’t have lawyers, noting that they try to connect detainees with nonprofit groups that can help them understand the process and minimize their time locked up.
Juan Osuna, the office’s director, said in a written statement that his staff “is keenly aware of the many issues that respondents face.”
Maybe so, but the immigration judges at Stewart issued a deportation order to almost every immigrant who came before them last year, with many of the detainees giving up before they got a chance to fully make their case to stay. They are on an assembly line that often ends when immigrants, exhausted by incarceration, beg to be deported.
One day this year at Stewart, dozens of immigrants in prison garb sat on scarred wooden benches waiting their turns before the judge. Many had little hope, facing certain deportation because of their criminal records, and a few were eager to go home. But others were tense. In one courtroom, a man bent over a Spanish-language Bible. In another, a Mexican national teared up when prison guards blocked his daughter from hugging him goodbye before she returned to South Carolina.
A weary-looking immigrant from Mexico whose full name could not be heard over the roar of the air conditioner, stood dejectedly before Judge Barry S. Chait, who was appointed last year after many years as a lawyer for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, the agency that runs the detention system.
The Mexican man had told Chait that he would look for a lawyer. But he showed up for the hearing alone in blue prison scrubs, his hair mussed. Because his file is secret, there is no way to tell how long he had been held.
“I will speak for myself,” he told Chait in Spanish, through the court interpreter, explaining that he had no money for an attorney.
Speaking in legal jargon, Chait told the man in English that he could avoid deportation if he could make a legal case to stay. After all, the man had several factors that would make him a good candidate for legal residency: He had little to no criminal record and was related to many people who are here legally. In fact, his young children are US citizens and his parents are legal residents. He had lived in the United States for more than 10 years.
But it was unclear whether the man fully grasped what the judge told him through the interpreter.
Chait reminded the man he could apply for a bail hearing.
“Have you done that, sir?” the judge prodded.
“No,” the man said in Spanish. “I don’t know how.”
“You can ask the law librarian to help you,” the judge said.
But jail officials later said that the guard in the law library is not supposed to provide legal assistance. The guard on duty that day only spoke English.
The Mexican man kept asking how long he would be in jail. When the judge said the case could take weeks to decide, the man asked to be deported.
“OK, sir,” Chait said finally. “Good luck to you in Mexico.”
Secrets of Ellis Island
Many years before Ellis Island became the nation’s busiest immigrant inspection station, it was a place of public spectacle: federal officials used the patch of sand in New York Harbor to carry out the public execution of pirates.
I say the practice should be revised with the modern version: bankers
But, in a sign of the secrecy that would shroud immigration for generations to come, federal officials locked Ellis Island down tight — requiring permission before anyone could step ashore — when they opened the immigration center in 1892.
The Supreme Court even ruled that the island wasn’t on US soil, so that babies born there did not automatically become citizens.
Immigrants denied entry into the United States because they were sick, poor, or for other reasons were subject to closed deportation hearings on Ellis Island. Officials gave advocacy groups office space to help immigrants, but officials kept the public out, dictating in regulations that the hearings were “separate and apart from the public.”
Historians say the secrecy wasn’t necessarily nefarious: US officials were trying to protect millions of new immigrants from swindlers and others seeking to take advantage of them. But the use of islands as the place where immigrants’ fates were decided contributed to a culture of secrecy pervading the entire immigration process.
“That’s why they picked Ellis Island. If you have it on the island, you have fewer people looking at it,” said Vincent Cannato, a history professor at the University of Massachusetts Boston and the author of “American Passage: The History of Ellis Island.”
“They kind of walled off the immigration system from prying eyes.”
The Constitution said nothing about the immigration system, but the authors clearly despised secret courts: The Sixth Amendment decreed that criminal trials should be public because they feared that secret courts would breed atrocities such as the English Star Chamber of the 17th century. Today, that principle of openness is applied to civil courts, too, including divorce and bankruptcy proceedings that many people might prefer to keep private.
From the beginning, there were troubling reports from behind the gates on Ellis Island — including the sexual assault of female detainees and concerns about patronage and corruption. Others feared immigration officials were too lax, granting entry to immigrants with low skills or deadly diseases such as typhus — “the worst riff-raff of Europe,” as one official put it, according to Cannato’s book.
A few US officials in the early 20th century worried that excessive secrecy was fostering abuses, but they were “a voice in the wilderness,” Cannato said, and the public paid little attention to immigration policy except when national security threats periodically thrust foreigners into the spotlight.
After World War I, the rise of communism in Russia stoked fears of leftist radicals in the United States, prompting authorities to arrest hundreds of Russian and Eastern European immigrants, whisking them to Ellis, Deer Island in Boston Harbor, and other places for deportation hearings that historians say were probably closed to the public. Certainly, the conditions detainees endured were out of public view: Immigrants on Deer Island stayed in cold, fetid cells that drove some to the brink of madness. One man jumped from the fifth floor of a building to his death.
During World War II, immigration officials detained Japanese, Italian, and German immigrants and US citizens after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941. The military held some 100,000 Japanese-Americans in camps in the West, while others were jailed or forced to relocate to other US cities and towns.
The US government eventually apologized to Japanese-Americans for the World War II internments, and in the years to come made some reforms to make immigration more open and fair, such as opening many immigration hearings to the public.
Yet, following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, federal officials began secretly rounding up foreigners based on perceived threats to national security. This time, officials arrested hundreds of people, particularly Muslim men, refused to identify those held for immigration violations, and closed their deportation hearings to the public.
Civil liberties groups and the news media fought the secrecy surrounding the Muslim detainees in court, but the issue never reached the nation’s highest court. To this day, the Supreme Court has never ruled on whether deportation hearings should be open to the public.
But the debate over Muslim detainees missed the larger group of immigrants who face secret arrests and deportations every day — many without ever appearing before an immigration judge because their offenses, such as overstaying their tourist visas, call for automatic deportation.
Last year, federal immigration agents deported 396,906 people, their identities still kept secret.
Justice beyond razor wire
To get to Lumpkin, take the highway southwest from Atlanta almost all the way to Alabama, a two-hour drive to one of the poorest corners of the United States. Pass the sand-colored tanks, soldier statues, and the sign for “Sniper School” that mark the Army’s Fort Benning, and keep driving until the road dwindles to one long ribbon dotted with tract houses and double wide trailers, water towers and tiny white churches, long stretches of hayfields, and Georgia red clay.
Take a left at CCA Road, named for the private corporation that runs the Stewart Detention Center, and you have arrived at an increasingly common sight in the US immigration system: an immigration court inside a jail.
Thirty years ago, courts in jails were less common, but now, they are booming. Eighteen of the 58 immigration courts nationwide are in detention centers, and the judges decide deportation cases of criminals and noncriminals alike — all stemming from civil immigration violations, not crimes. About 42 percent of the cases decided last year involved immigrants detained in places such as Lumpkin or the Arizona desert.
No sign outside the razor wire at the Stewart Detention Center informed the public there was an immigration court here when a reporter visited this year. And the reporter was the only independent observer in the courtroom, even though Lumpkin’s court is one of the fastest growing in America, with more than 11,000 new cases in 2011, a 40 percent increase from the year before, according to the immigration courts.
Since the files are secret, no one can fully analyze what happens in immigration court.
But it is clear from statistics that Lumpkin’s immigration court dispenses justice with lightning speed. Lumpkin judges typically resolved cases in less than two months compared with almost two years in Boston immigration court, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a record collection program at Syracuse University.
Federal officials say such comparisons are not useful, because each case is different and the rapid pace at Lumpkin reflects federal efforts to move cases along in order to minimize how long detainees are jailed. Cases in Lumpkin may also move faster because so many of the detainees are criminals who are ineligible to remain in the United States.
However, Lumpkin’s efficiency may also reflect the fact that so few detainees have lawyers, which immigrants must pay for themselves, unlike low-income Americans charged with a crime. Only 22 percent of immigrants in detention had lawyers in court last year, according to the courts, compared with about half of all immigrants facing deportation.
Lumpkin, in fact, has just one immigration lawyer.
“I’m the only immigration lawyer anywhere near here,” said Bobby Olds, who lives in Columbus but opened an office this year a few doors down from Jason’s Taxidermy on the main square in Lumpkin, a fading timber town of 1,400.
And yet, he said, he barely makes a living. Last year, he said, he earned $2,400 from immigration cases.
“The Hispanics,” he said, “they just can’t afford it.”
In the end, the outcome of immigration cases in the Stewart Detention Center seems almost preordained: Stewart judges ordered 98 percent of the detainees deported last fiscal year, the highest rate in the United States, compared with 71 percent nationwide and 57 percent in Boston.
‘Please do not let me die in jail’
When immigration cases do make it to the public court system — usually because of criminal charges or when the immigrant files a lawsuit demanding release — the culture clash can be jarring.
Judge Richard A. Posner of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago said his court overturned immigration appeals court decisions “a staggering 40 percent” of the time in 2005, including one decision to deport a Moroccan man based on a paperwork mix-up that Posner called “completely arbitrary.”
“The adjudication of these [immigration] cases at the administrative level has fallen below the minimum standards of legal justice,” lamented Posner, a conservative judge.
In Boston, Chief District Court Judge Mark L. Wolf heavily criticized the immigration court’s handling of a 19-year-old immigrant from Panama who had spent 21 months in jail fighting deportation, acting as his own attorney. Erick Flores-Powell, who came to the United States at age 5, was a suspected gang member and authorities wanted him deported, but Wolf couldn’t understand why the process was taking so long.
“By my calculation, at least seven of the 21 months he’s been locked up is because the immigration judge couldn’t conduct the proceedings correctly,” Wolf said during a 2009 review of a lawsuit that Flores-Powell filed asking for his release, faulting immigration judge Paul M. Gagnon for technical mistakes.
Wolf also couldn’t understand why officials had transferred Flores-Powell to his courtroom in handcuffs; a shackled immigrant is a common sight in immigration court, but not in federal court.
“Why do you think it’s necessary for him to be in handcuffs?” Wolf asked the Suffolk County deputies. “Because I’ve been conducting court proceedings for 24 years. I had Gary Sampson, who murdered three people, [mobsters] Frank Salemme and Stevie Flemmi, and none of them had to be handcuffed . . . Can we take the cuffs off of him?”
Though prosecutors argued that Wolf had no authority to hear the case because it was an immigration matter, Wolf said Flores-Powell’s immigration case was riddled with so many errors that he decided to hold a bond hearing himself. He ordered Flores-Powell released in December 2009.
Flores-Powell ultimately won his deportation case and now works in construction. “They throw you with the wolves” in immigration court, Flores-Powell said last week. “I kept praying and got to Judge Wolf. And he just followed the law.”
Earlier this year in Boston, US District Court Judge William G. Young chided an immigration judge for his part in keeping an elderly refugee from Poland locked up for five years awaiting deportation.
“Please, do not let me die in jail,” Walter Miszczuk, now 75, had written to a federal judge at one point during his long fight against deportation, during which he had been transferred to a detention center in Alabama, more than 1,000 miles from his Rhode Island home, and criminally charged for failing to apply for a Polish passport.
To be sure, Miszczuk, a retired auto mechanic, contributed greatly to his own problems. Though he came here as a legal refugee with a young daughter in 1982, he pleaded no contest to sexual assault on a teenager in 1994. Then, in 2006, he served brief sentences for twice violating a restraining order taken out by his former girlfriend, which were violations of probation for a domestic vandalism conviction.
But Miszczuk spoke poor English, did not have an immigration lawyer, and said he did not understand that pleading no contest to the charges would trigger his deportation. He insists that most of the charges are false, and a criminal lawyer who was appointed in Rhode Island, Gerard Donley, recently persuaded a judge to throw out the 1994 sex assault altogether.
Meanwhile, Miszczuk remained locked up in legal limbo for years because he refused to apply for a new Polish passport, which US officials needed to deport him.
Finally, Judge Young reviewed the convoluted case in March and quickly concluded that Miszczuk should go free. He tossed out the charge that Miszczuk had criminally failed to apply for a passport and criticized his immigration judge for failing to document why he wanted to deport Miszczuk in the first place.
“This court cannot invent reasons by which the defendant might be lawfully convicted,” Young said, calling the immigration judge by the disdainful title “hearing officer.”
Young ordered Miszczuk released in March, but immigration officials immediately took custody of him to resume deportation proceedings. They finally released Miszczuk seven months later when the Globe began making inquiries. He said they gave him a bus ticket to Rhode Island and $20 for food on the journey from Alabama.
Immigration judges say they have been unfairly targeted for criticism by other judges who don’t understand their difficult working conditions.
Immigration judges earn roughly $50,000 less a year than their federal court counterparts, even though they carry more than triple the caseload, about 1,500 cases each, according to Dana Leigh Marks, president of the National Association of Immigration Judges.
Unlike federal judges, immigration judges do not have life tenure to protect them when they make unpopular decisions. As employees of the Justice Department, immigration judges can be demoted or disciplined by the attorney general.
“They’re assuming we’re working under the same conditions,” Marks, a San Francisco immigration judge, said of the federal judges. “Immigration judges are rendering decisions in death penalty cases under traffic court conditions.”
In fact, immigration judges have to act as their own clerks, taking notes and running the recording machine during hearings that can last for hours. Then, when the testimony is over, they extemporaneously dictate a decision into the recorder, often without a break.
“We’re bailiff, court reporter, and court clerk, and then we’re the judge,” Marks added. “And supposedly focusing on the legal aspects of the argument and trying to think.”
Members of the public can watch these judges at work, but it can be almost impossible to follow individual cases. Although the immigrants’ names are posted on the courthouse wall when they’re scheduled for a hearing, their nine-digit “alien numbers,” which are required to get information about the cases, are blocked out. Unless the judge asks, it is impossible to verify how long the immigrant’s case has been pending or how long the person has been detained.
Understanding the decisions is also a challenge. Except for the fleeting moments when judges dictate them in open court, the public usually can obtain only an edited version of the final decision — sometimes so censored they are unreadable.
That lack of public accountability also makes it impossible to know why immigration decisions vary so widely in cases that, from the outside, seem similar.
For example, Houston immigration Judge Howard Rose, a former federal prosecutor, rejected 100 percent of the asylum cases he heard from January 2008 to June 2010, according to the court. All of the asylum seekers were ordered deported even though they said they would face danger in their home country.
At the other extreme, Judge Terry Bain of New York, a former immigration lawyer, rejected just 7 percent of requests for asylum cases over the same period.
Perhaps New York asylum seekers had stronger cases than those in Houston, where the immigrants were locked up, suggesting that many had criminal records and were not eligible for asylum. Or maybe the New York judge is simply more sympathetic to immigrants.
But court officials aren’t explaining, saying that Rose and Bain could not comment because immigration judges are barred from speaking to the news media.
For years, the judges’ union has been pushing for Congress to transform the immigration courts into a more independent court that would take them outside of the control of the Justice Department. Under the so-called Article 1 court, referring to the section of the Constitution that authorizes it, the president would appoint judges to a fixed term, the Senate would confirm them, and Marks said their files and decisions would be open to the public.
She said she would welcome the increased public scrutiny. “If what you’re doing is right,” she said, “then it withstands the light of day.”
One day too late
Jairo Machado’s desperate family hired Boston immigration lawyer Jeffrey Rubin last year because the veteran immigration lawyer was willing to take on tough cases. And Rubin, a skilled navigator of the shadows and vagaries of the immigration courts, thought he could save Machado from deportation to El Salvador — based on an 11-year-old deportation order he said he hadn’t known about. After all, Machado had deep ties to the United States, including two biological children who are US citizens.
Rubin was wrong.
Machado, now a 30-year-old carpet layer, had waded across the Rio Grande as a teenager to reunite with his mother, who left for Massachusetts to work when he was a boy. He was arrested several times in his early 20s but was never convicted of a crime. Then he fell in love and moved in with his girlfriend. Everything seemed to be going well until immigration officials arrested him in 2011 and told him that he faced deportation.
To ask an immigration judge to reconsider the 2000 deportation order, Rubin knew he faced considerable red tape. In the regular federal court system, he could have downloaded Machado’s file online or walked into a courthouse to request it. But immigration lawyers generally have to file a formal Freedom of Information Act request for a copy of their clients’ immigration files, which can take weeks or months to process.
In November 2011, Rubin sent the request for Machado’s file, stored in Virginia, believing he had time to read the documents before filing the motion to reopen Machado’s case.
“I thought I had more time, so I was going to do it one time and do it right,” Rubin said.
Then, ICE shipped Machado to Louisiana.
Tipped off by a relative about Machado’s relocation, Rubin said, he talked to an immigration officer who reassured him that Machado would be in the United States for two more weeks.
Two days later, Machado was in El Salvador. He had been dumped penniless at the airport with no one to pick him up.
The next day, Rubin said, Machado’s immigration court file arrived in the mail.
In El Salvador, Machado stayed with his wife’s relatives while Rubin tried to reopen his case. But Machado grew anxious and, like many deported immigrants, he sneaked back over the border this year. Officials caught him and sent him to Stewart.
“I did it for my family,” he said in a jailhouse interview, speaking through a telephone on the other side of a glass window.
Now, a full year after ICE deported Machado while his lawyer was preparing his appeal, Rubin will finally get his chance to argue that Machado should be allowed to stay here. Machado has a hearing in Boston immigration court on Tuesday.
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Related: Immigration Incarceration
"The big question; what has been the big question, for a good while, is, “When are things going to change? Why are they going on so long? Why is nothing being done?”
That's why I'm unenthusiastic about reading a staus-quo paper unless it comes to pushing the agenda.
It was a great three-part series investigating AmeriKa's concentration camps, but in the end nothing will change.
And how much did all this coat taxpayers?
"Immigration enforcement cost $18b" Associated Press, January 08, 2013
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration spent more money on immigration enforcement in the last fiscal year than all other federal law enforcement agencies combined, according to a report on the government’s enforcement efforts from a Washington think tank.
The report on Monday from the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan group focused on global immigration issues, said in the 2012 budget year that ended in September the government spent about $18 billion on immigration enforcement programs run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the US-Visit program, and Customs and Border Protection.
Immigration enforcement topped the combined budgets of the FBI; Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives; Drug Enforcement Administration; and Secret Service by about $3.6 billion dollars, the report’s authors said.
The implication in this timely (some might think agenda-pushing) release of the report is immigration must be reformed, right?
Since President Reagan signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act in 1986 — which legalized more than 3 million illegal immigrants and overhauled immigration laws — the government has spent more than $187 billion on immigration enforcement.
That amnesty didn't work, so why will this one?
According to the report, federal immigration-related criminal prosecutions also outnumber cases generated by the Justice Department.
The 182-page report concludes that the Obama administration has made immigration its highest law enforcement priority....
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Related:
Ranchers split over US border security plan
Under the plan, the Border Patrol would have a free hand to build roads, camera towers, helicopter pads, and living quarters without any of the outside scrutiny that can modify or even derail plans to extend its footprint.
Also see:
Illegals Already Have Amnesty
See why the problem is and will never be fixed?
Related: Israel's Solution to Illegal Immigration
But it's not good enough for AmeriKa?
"Lawmakers see immigration overhaul this year" by MICHELE SALCEDO, Jan. 27
WASHINGTON (AP) — Republican and Democratic lawmakers were cautiously optimistic Sunday that a long-sought overhaul of the nation's immigration system that includes a pathway to citizenship for the 11 million illegal immigrants currently in the country will clear Congress this year, the result of changes in the political landscape shown in November's election....
Sen. Robert Menendez, who along with Illinois Sen. Richard Durbin, the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate. and Sen. John McCain, is part of the six-member, bipartisan Senate group working on a framework for immigration legislation to be announced this week, said current politics dictate that a pathway for citizenship must be included....
Related: Ex-Senate intern was sex offender
Immigration agents waited to arrest intern, documents show
He worked in whose office?
Yeah, I guess it is not like they would want to hire a lazy American kid.
They got how much for dishwashing?
But the package "will have the enhancement of the border security," he said, nodding to Republicans' priority to tighten borders to prevent future illegal immigration. He also said the package would have to crack down on employers hiring undocumented workers....
For some reason the next two paragraphs were cut or rewritten:
The Senate proposal to be introduced by Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York -- another member of the bipartisan committee -- will cover four major areas: border enforcement, managing the future flow of immigrants to the United States, workplace verification standards, and a pathway for citizenship for undocumented immigrants, Senate aides said.
The other members of the group are Republican Senators Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Marco Rubio of Florida.
Back to near verbatim sentences:
If Republicans fail to act, they will pay the price in elections for generations, McCain warned.
"Well, I'll give you a little straight talk: Look at the last election... We are losing dramatically the Hispanic vote, which we think should be ours for a variety of reasons," McCain said....
More cut and rewrite(?):
Passage of a comprehensive immigration bill would fulfill a promise Obama made in both of his presidential campaigns. Since Obama won a second term, the administration has intensified its work on a legislative plan with immigration rights advocates, law enforcement officials, and religious leaders who support change.
Article did end this way:
Arizona Republican McCain has returned to the issue after having led a failed push to fix the nation's broken immigration system ahead of his 2008 bid for the White House.
Yup, five years after we told them we didn't want an amnesty bill here we are again.
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Also see: Early pact made on US immigration overhaul
The NYT piece replaced the printed paper pos I gave you.
Related: Lawmakers see immigration overhaul this year
I can't make sense of these papers.
Get your green card yet?
NEXT DAY UPDATE: Obama, senators prepare immigration plans
Also see: ICE raids at Galleria and The Woodlands Mall nab 13 Israeli citizens
I doubt I'll be reading about that in my Globe. I wonder how they are being treated.
