NY Times: “The Deported: Uprooted from his life and family in the United States, a Honduran deportee returns to the country that he tried so hard to escape”

Although deportations this past year are at their lowest levels since President Obama took office in 2009, nevertheless he still has the reputation as the “Deporter-in-Chief” and is still criticized for his harsh deportation policies that over his administration have torn many immigrant families apart. Luke Mogelson in the New York Times profiles some recent deportees from Honduras, a country dominated by gang violence and extreme poverty.

Kelvin Villanueva

Mogelson tells the story of Kelvin Villanueva, a Honduran who lived in the US for fifteen years. One night in Kansas City, Villanueva was pulled over by a policeman because of a broken taillight, arrested, and transferred to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). After spending the next four months in prisons and detention centers, he was flown back to Honduras, a country he fled because the notorious and violent street gang, the 18th Street Gang, recruited him and threatened him if he did not join. In Kansas City he left behind his partner Suelen Bueno and their four children. While with ICE he attempted to apply for asylum, but was determined ineligible.           

Mogelson does an excellent job at describing Villanueva’s experience of being undocumented in the US and deported. He explains the constant fear of deportation that the undocumented live under, harsh detention at ICE, and being returned in manacles to his home country he tried desperately to escape. Then there’s the immigration attorney who willingly takes thousands of dollars (which they’ve borrowed from a money lender) in case fees and who appears more interested in the Kansas City Royals playoff game than in helping Villanueva evaluate any feasible options for returning to the US. Not to mention Villanueva’s boss who still allegedly owes him thousands of dollars from work and later comes to his house and steals his power tools, the most expensive items he owns.

Villanueva is just one of many deportees in similar situations. Mogelson writes:  

Over the last five years, the United States has deported more than half a million Hondurans, Guatemalans and Salvadorans, many of whom, like Villanueva, have had to leave their children behind. Although Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, says it exercises discretion to target lawbreakers for removal, a majority of Central American deportees have no criminal record. Among those who do, about half are guilty of either a traffic violation or an immigration-related crime — entering the country illegally, for instance.

In Honduras, Villanueva stays with his aunt in a one-room plywood structure that stands in an open field with his brother, himself deported after a DUI conviction, who has left behind his US-citizen wife, son, and daughter. His brother has missed his six-year-old’s birthday, while Villanueva’s youngest daughter refuses to sleep at night, determined to be awake when he returns. His youngest son is uncharacteristically introverted and lethargic, sleeping most of the day. Villanueva’s only thought is to return to his family, even though if caught again entering the US without legal documentation he could face felony charges and a lengthy prison sentence. ‘‘I just need to raise them,’’ Villanueva says of his children. 

Bayron and Belky Cardona

In Honduras, Mogelson meets Bayron and Belky Cardona, a couple who had managed to cross the Rio Grande. Scared of the Border Patrol in Texas, they tried to reenter Mexico but were caught. Cardona and Belky are college graduates in their twenties who had opened a computer-repair shop in Honduras in a building owned by Belky’s father. Mogelson explains why they tried to escape to the US:

Their neighborhood was entirely under the control of the MS-13; members of the gang soon confronted Cardona, demanding an impuesto de guerra, or war tax. Impuestos de guerra are a common source of revenue for gangs throughout Honduras, and in Cardona and Belky’s area, every business paid. The amount the gang wanted far exceeded what Cardona could afford. When he failed to produce the money, the MS-13 threatened to kill him. Cardona and Belky went to the United States Embassy, applied for visas and were denied. Then they alerted the police — ‘‘our big error,’’ Cardona told me.

Now back in Honduras after being deported, Bayron has changed his appearance, grown a beard and replaced his contacts with glasses. While Belky’s father had paid half the amount that MS-13 wanted, neither of them think they could safely remain in Honduras. They are unsure what to do. Belky is humiliated by their treatment in the US. She describes being in a room in McAllen, Texas after her capture where officers are studying monitors showing video feeds from a section of the border. “They laugh at us,’’ she tells Mogelson. ‘‘One officer was celebrating all the people they’d caught. They watch the people crossing — and they laugh at us.’’

NY Times: "The Great ‘Sanctuary City’ Slander"

San Francisco / Protima Daryanani

The US Senate is set to vote today on a controversial bill sponsored by David Vitter of Louisiana to punish so-called “Sanctuary Cities” by denying them federal law enforcement funds. The bill—a version of which passed the House in July—came about after the tragic death of Californian Kathryn Steinle who was shot in San Francisco by an undocumented immigrant with prior drug convictions who had been deported previously.  

“Sanctuary cities and the associated violent crimes by illegal immigrants are reaching a critical point, and we cannot wait any longer to take action to protect Americans here at home,” said Vitter in a press release. “There is simply no incentive for these localities to enforce current immigration laws, and my legislation will make sure sanctuary cities are no longer rewarded for their failures to uphold the law.”

Not everyone agrees with this assessment. The New York Times editorial board says the bill scapegoats eleven million immigrants based on the actions of a few and is based on the lie “that all unauthorized immigrants are dangerous criminals who must be subdued by extraordinary means.”

What Are ‘Sanctuary Cities?’

The American Immigration Council, whose mission is to shape a rational conversation on immigration and immigrant integration, explains that the phrase comes from the “church-centered” movement in the 1980s when many Central American refugees fleeing civil wars were denied asylum. Religious institutions banded together to oppose the return of the refugees to where they had been persecuted and this became known as the “Sanctuary Movement.”

The American Immigration Council points out that the term “sanctuary city” is a “misnomer when used to describe community policing policies which attempt to eliminate fear from those who worry that reporting a crime or interacting with local law enforcement could result in deportation.”

“Sanctuary cities” do not ensure that immigrants in those communities are insulated from any immigration enforcement action against them; their residents are still subject to federal enforcement actions and in fact, many “sanctuary cities” have enacted community policing policies to ensure that immigrant communities interact with the police and that law enforcement officers do not detain persons they have no legal authority to hold. Many sanctuary city policies came about after the Obama-instituted “Secure Communities,” which shared information between state and local law enforcement and federal authorities, and “shattered trust” between immigrant populations and law enforcement agencies.

Tom Manger, Chief of Police for Montgomery County and President of the Major Cities Chiefs Association, explains: 

To do our job we must have the trust and respect of the communities we serve. We fail if the public fears their police and will not come forward when we need them. Whether we seek to stop child predators, drug dealers, rapists or robbers—we need the full cooperation of victims and witness. Cooperation is not forthcoming from persons who see their police as immigration agents. When immigrants come to view their local police and sheriffs with distrust because they fear deportation, it creates conditions that encourage criminals to prey upon victims and witnesses alike.

What Does the Bill Do? 

The Stop Sanctuary Policies and Protect Americans Act proposes to withhold certain funds and grants from “sanctuary jurisdictions” and require that these funds are re-allocated to other jurisdictions that allow local law enforcement to cooperate with federal policies, among other things, and includes “Kate’s Law,” which establishes a mandatory minimum sentence of five years for undocumented immigrants who are convicted of re-entering the US after being convicted of an aggravated felony or being convicted of having illegally re-entered the US twice prior.

While co-sponsor Pat Toomey calls the bill “commonsense legislation” to protect Americans, the New York Times argues that “sanctuary city” policies perform an important function by ensuring that law-abiding immigrants don’t fear and shun the police, and allowing them to be a productive part of the community in which they reside. “The answer to an immigrant population in the shadows is — as it has been throughout our history — integration and welcome instead of scapegoating and oppression,” the New York Times states. “And leaving local law enforcement free to focus on catching criminals and protecting public safety.

Report: Immigrants Less Likely to Commit Serious Crimes Than the Native-Born

With the recent tragic killing of Californian woman Kathryn Steinle in San Francisco allegedly by an undocumented immigrant with felony convictions who had been deported to Mexico five times, the issue of immigration and crime is being debated on the national level and, in particular, among presidential candidates.

While some are using the tragic death in San Francisco to prove a link between crime and immigrants, according to a new report by the Immigration Policy Center, a non-partisan organization whose mission is to provide research and rational analysis on immigration, immigrants (whether documented or undocumented) are less likely to commit serious crimes or be incarcerated than the native-born and are also less likely to engage in criminal behaviors; moreover; higher rates of immigration are associated with lower rates of violent and property crime.

The report uses a variety of studies and methodologies to provide a comprehensive look at the relationship between immigration and crime going back over a century. Data, for example, from the 2010 American Community Survey conducted by the authors of the report show roughly 1.6 percent of immigrant males age eighteen to thirty-nine are incarcerated, compared to 3.3 percent of the native-born. "This disparity in incarceration rates has existed for decades, as evidenced by data from the 1980, 1990, and 2000 decennial censuses," the authors state. The report also shows that even with dramatic increases in immigration, there is no corresponding increase in violent crime—in fact, during 1990 to 2013 when the foreign-born population grew over five percent and undocumented immigrants tripled from 3.5 million to 11.2 million, violent crime declined forty-eight percent and property crime fell forty-one percent. This is true even in cities with traditionally large immigrant populations such as Miami, Chicago, San Antonio, and San Diego.

While the report notes that immigrants as a group "tend to be highly motivated, goal-driven individuals who have little to gain by running afoul of the law," the authors state that unfortunately "immigration policy is frequently shaped more by fear and stereotype than by empirical evidence."

Politicians are already discussing changes to immigration policies as a result of the shooting death in San Francisco, but Christina Bejarano, professor of political science at the University of Kansas, cautioned in an interview to the Christian Science Monitor:  “[I]t is not fair to rush to extreme action, since that can endanger people, as well as foster more racist and xenophobic commentary toward immigrants without actually thinking through how to best solve our immigration problems.”

Harper's: "Displaced in the D.R.: A Country Strips 210,000 of Citizenship"

Photo by Daniel Loncarevic/iStock/ Getty Images

After stripping citizenship from over two hundred thousand Dominicans, many of Haitian descent, the Dominican Republic has threatened mass deportation for those who do not register with the government to obtain legal status. The threats of deportation come after years of anti-Haitian discrimination and a documented history of violence against Haitian immigrants culminating in 2013 when the Dominican Constitutional Tribunal, the nation's highest court, revoked citizenship retroactively to 1929 for all Dominicans with undocumented foreign parents even if they had been born in the Dominican Republic. The ruling, which became known as "the Sentence," effectively rendered 210,000 Dominicans stateless, most of whom are of Haitian descent. Juliana Deguis Pierre, who was one of the plaintiffs in the suit against the government that in the end backfired and led to her loss of citizenship, said the Sentence "paralyzed her life," as it meant she could not legally work, marry, open a bank account, get a driver’s license, vote, or register for high school or university. "I'm nobody in my own country," she told Harper's at the time.

In response to severe international criticism of the Sentence—including many who compared it to Hitler's stripping citizenship from Jews in Germany in the 1930s—the Dominican government issued a presidential decree for a "regularization" plan for undocumented immigrants. The plan allowed for anyone who immigrated to the Dominican Republic before October 2011 to apply for regular migratory status, and afterwards citizenship. While the plan did provide options for undocumented Dominicans to avoid deportation, critics of the plan noted the difficult obstacles in applying, including burdensome documentation requirements and the need to apply in-person at designated offices far from most Haitian communities. Those who did not apply by June 2015 would be deported.

Now that the June deadline has passed, with hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants still reportedly unregistered, it remains unclear if mass deportations will take place. The Dominican government has not stated if it will extend the deadline for registration, has repeatedly denied any plans for mass deportations, and has stated that as a sovereign nation it has the right to enact and enforce its own immigration policies as it sees fit.

In the meantime, many continue to speak out against the Dominican government's deportation plans. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio spoke this past Sunday from Washington Heights, the Manhattan neighborhood with a large Dominican population. "It is clearly an illegal act," Mayor de Blasio said. "It is an immoral act. It is a racist act by the Dominican government. And it’s happening because these people are black. And it cannot be accepted."

The Other Side

"For the past five months, she had been documenting the gradual unraveling of their lives, in moments both mundane and monumental: the first visit to their home by immigration officers, the delivery of Zunaid’s deportation orders, his final trips to eat American ice cream and watch American basketball. Now only four days remained before he would be sent off to Bangladesh, a deportation that would upend not just one life but two. Zunaid would be forcibly separated from the United States after 20 years; his wife, an American citizen, would be forcibly separated from her husband."

- "The Other Side of Deportation: An American
Struggles to Prepare for Life without Husband"
The Washington Post

Huffington Post: "Whoops! The Department of Justice Admits That It Misunderstood U.S. Citizenship Law"

The US government has been misinterpreting certain citizenship statutes since 2008 and has consequently been incorrectly ordering US citizens deported, reports Laura Murray-Tjan, the Director of the Federal Immigration Appeals Project. The Department of Justice (DOJ) admitted their mistake in a recent decision saying that they "misread" the legal requirements for legitimation. Murray-Tjan writes:

The DOJ's error involved what is known as "derivative citizenship." If a parent naturalizes while a child is under 18, the child automatically becomes a citizen, if some other conditions are met. For example, if a father naturalizes, his out-of-wedlock children must be "legitimated" to derive citizenship.

This recent DOJ decision overturned an immigration judge's order to remove (i.e., deport) Oshane Shaneil Cross, a twenty-six-year-old man who was born out of wedlock in Jamaica to parents who were not American citizens at the time. Cross had been arrested for burglary in Connecticut and argued that he became a US citizen when his father naturalized. The immigration judge, however, said that Cross had never been legitimated under Jamaican law because his biological parents never married. In response, the decision clarified that "a person born abroad to unmarried parents can qualify as a legitimated 'child'...if he or she was born in a country or State that has eliminated all legal distinctions between children based on the marital status of their parents or has a residence or domicile in such a country or State[.]" This was true in Cross's case as Jamaica had passed a law in 1976 that eliminated legal distinctions between children born to married and unmarried parents.

What about those already deported? Murray-Tjan asks. "Will the DOJ communicate its error to affected individuals? How? When?...Will the government make any effort to identify them and bring them home?"

Is a Sock Drug Paraphernalia (And How Is that Relevant to Immigration)?

In 2010, Moones Mellouli, a Tunisian national and US lawful permanent resident with two master's degrees from the University of Missouri-Columbia and jobs as an actuary and as a math instructor at the university, was arrested for driving under the influence and having four Adderall pills in his sock. After he plead guilty to a misdemeanor for possession of drug paraphernalia—i.e., the sock in which he had the four pills—he got a suspended sentence plus a year's probation. Then he was ordered removed (i.e. deported).

Mr. Mellouli appealed and last month the Supreme Court heard oral arguments on the case, which is essentially about "whether a minor drug offense must render a lawful permanent resident deportable from his home and family in the United States." This is not the first time the Supreme Court has considered such a question.

From NPR: "Federal law allows the government to deport a non-citizen convicted in state court for a crime 'relating to' any drug controlled under the federal criminal code. But state laws often make many more drugs illegal, and Kansas law treats any container used to store a drug as 'drug paraphernalia.'" The SCOTUS blog noted that during the oral arguments the Justices "probed in detail the meaning of the language and how it applied to the case at hand." In the end, "a majority of the Court seemed to side with...Mellouli’s interpretation" and Mellouli "had the better of the statutory argument."

Justice Samuel Alito made an interesting point, which also might suggest which way the Court is leaning: "'It's really hard to believe that the Kansas statute actually regards as drug paraphernalia any thing that is used at any time to contain a controlled substance.'"

"Shakedown: How Deportation Robs Immigrants of Their Money and Belongings"

Out of the 400,000 people deported from the US in fiscal year 2013, nearly one third were deported without their money or personal belongings, a new report by No More Deaths says. Using data from No More Deaths' Property Recovery Assistance Project, the report argues that dispossession has become a prevalent and dangerous deportation practice. The report explains the three main ways whereby immigrants being deported lose their money and/or their belongings: complete failure of US officials to return money and belongings before they are deported; cash or funds returned in forms that cannot generally be accessed internationally, such as personal checks, money orders, or prepaid debit cards; and, least common, money directly stolen by US agents.

While the report acknowledges that some Customs and Border Protection (CBP) "agents have indicated that they go out of their way to ensure the return of confiscated belongings," these officers "view this activity as a favor outside of the scope of their duties." This view as well as comments by "higher-level officials suggest a willingness, at all levels of CBP, to use the power to seize belongings at will rather than in accordance with the law."

While the money lost is generally valued at under $100 USD per person, nevertheless this amount represents significant funds for many deported immigrants. As a result of their loss of funds or property, these immigrants reported that they could not afford to travel home, afford shelter or food, were unable to obtain employment due to loss of identification documents, or were exposed to dangers such as threats, robbery, or attacks. This is not to mention the psychological trauma of the loss of personal keepsake and family heirloom items.

The report recommends that detained immigrants be granted access to vital belongings including medications while in custody, that belongings should never be destroyed while detained immigrants are serving a sentence, and that funds are provided to immigrants in cash before they are deported.

In response to the allegations, Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman Marsha Catron said in an email that the "agency has standards to ensure detainees' property is safeguarded and returned when they are released or deported" and that any "'allegation of missing property will be thoroughly investigated[.]'"