Slate: “When Adoption Stories Don’t Have Happy Endings”

Adam Crapser was adopted at age three from South Korea. His first adoptive family in the US “fought viciously and punished the children frequently,” and when Adam was nine, his adoptive parents decided they no longer wanted the children. They placed him in a foster home, separating him from his sister, and Adam ended up in Oregon with new adoptive parents Thomas and Dolly Crapser, who also reportedly abused him. According to Adam, among many other horrific things, Dolly Crapser “slammed the children’s heads against door frames and once hit him in the back of the head with a two-by-four after he woke her up from a nap.”    

Adam was thrown out from the Crapsers’ house when he was sixteen. When he broke into the house to retrieve items he brought from South Korea—a Bible and rubber shoes—he was arrested and spent more than two years in jail. After he was released he got in more trouble, including misdemeanors, assault, and unlawful firearms possession, among others. After he served his time he began to turn his life around, holding down jobs, marrying, and having kids. “I made a lot of mistakes in my life, and I’m not proud of it,” Crapser tells the New York Times. “I’ve learned a lot of lessons the hard way.”

There was, however, a major problem. Crapser wasn’t a US citizen, since neither his adoptive parents nor the adoption agency that brokered his arrival in the US had ever filed for his US citizenship. Citizenship was not automatic for international adoptees until 2001, and then only applied to adoptees born after February 27, 1983. Crapser was finally able to get his adoption paperwork and applied for a Green Card but the case triggered a Department of Homeland Security background investigation, which turned up his old convictions and a criminal record that made him subject to deportation.

Which is why on November 8 this month after spending months in immigration detention he was put on a plane and flown back to South Korea, likely never to return to America. He left behind his wife, children, and friends. Crapser is not the first international adoptee to be deported. Adoptees from all over the world, including Brazil, India, Mexico, Germany, and elsewhere have been returned to their birth countries when it was discovered they were not US citizens and had issues relating to their Green Card applications. The Adoptee Rights Campaign estimates that some 35,000 international adoptees, adopted before 2001, are thought to be without citizenship.

Maureen McCauley Evans, a parent of international adoptees, writes in Slate:

It’s tempting to say that Adam and other adoptees in his situation brought deportation on themselves and their families by committing crimes—certainly many in Congress take that position. But it misses the point. International adoptees were brought to America with the permission and oversight of the United States government. The deal was that they would be welcomed here, to have a brighter future as Americans for the rest of their lives…If we believe adoptees to be genuine members of American families, they do not deserve deportation. If we don’t believe they are genuine family members, then adoption loses its meaning and integrity. What’s more, the US loses its honor and breaks its promise to these legal immigrants adopted by US citizens.

A bill, called the Adoptee Citizenship Act, is designed to provide retroactive citizenship to international adoptees, but it has made slow progress through Congress, and its outcome doesn’t look promising.

Crapser was reunited with his mother in South Korea. The last time she saw him was when she left her three children at an orphanage after her husband left her and she was unable to afford raising the kids. “I missed them, especially when it rained or snowed or when the sky was overcast,” she tells the New York Times. “But the belief they were having a better life somewhere sustained me.” Crapser says: “I was told to be American. And I tried to fit in. I learned every piece of slang. I studied everything I could about American history. I was told to stop crying about my mom, my sister, Korea. I was told to be happy because I was an American.”

The Nation: “The Deportation Machine Obama Built for President Trump”

While Obama’s executive actions announced in November 2014 were seen as a step forward for many immigrants (even though these actions have stalled in a variety of lawsuits) and his administration has crafted an image as being “smart” on deportation policy and advocating for comprehensive immigration reform, nevertheless Obama will leave his successor the “most sophisticated and well-funded human-expulsion machine in the history of the country.”

When President Obama took office in 2009 he inherited a burgeoning deportation apparatus from President Bush who had created the Office of Homeland Security in 2001 (which subsequently become the Department of Homeland Security) with the “War on Terror” in mind. Tom Ridge, then Director of the Office of Homeland Security, expanded his department to include an immigration enforcement plan that aimed for a “100% removal rate” of undocumented immigrants in the US, a vision encapsulated in a document titled “ENDGAME Office of Detention and Removal Strategic Plan.” With Obama in office, the Nation reports, this went on:

Instead of reversing that architecture and disavowing that plan, President Obama turbocharged it. To pay for the ballooning enforcement-first approach, the budget for immigration enforcement grew 300 percent from the resources given at the time of its founding under Bush to $18 billion annually, more than all other federal law-enforcement agencies’ budget combined.

Before the end of his first term in office, the Obama administration had taken a small program developed in George W. Bush’s last days that aimed to turn local police into “force multipliers” and expanded it by about 3,600 percent.

Two years after being elected, President Obama had doubled the number of people being prosecuted for unauthorized entry into the US by expanding Bush’s border-court system, Operation Streamline, which tries up to 70 people per day. What started out as an experiment in three jurisdictions in 2008 expanded to every single border sector except California by 2010, eventually sending 209,000 individuals, over a period of four years, to serve federal prison sentences for the sole reason of crossing the border without documentation. To implement the strategies of ENDGAME, DHS has become the largest law-enforcement agency in the country, with more than 48,000 personnel dedicated to immigration enforcement alone (up from 26,000 agents in 2002).

Although the Obama administration has promoted prosecutorial discretion to target immigrants who commit crimes and also provided resources for the temporary relief program and deferred action, it does not alter the massive deportation net the president has constructed.  

By April 2014, immigration authorities scanned a total of 32 million sets of fingerprints, a number three times the undocumented population and equivalent to 10 percent of the entire US population. In fiscal year 2012, the height of its deportation quota pursuit, ICE processed 9 million prints, matching 436,000 submitted by local law enforcement, and issued detainers (a practice largely abandoned now due to constitutional concerns) for over a quarter-million of those it identified.

Not all agree that Obama is a hardliner on immigration. “There’s no question that there’s been a record number of formal removals, no question that enforcement has not tailed off,” Marc Rosenblum, a deputy director at the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute, tells The Daily Beast. “But [Obama] is exercising a lot of discretion in the interior, a lot of people are coming across ICE’s radar and not being put through removal.”

In the end, what happens to this deportation machine is up to the next president. With the possibility of presumptive Repubilcan nomineee Donald Trump—who has repeatedly made far-reaching claims about deporting all undocumented immigrants—being elected as the next president, with this well-functioning deportation apparatus, the Nation believes he may have the necessary tools to beat Obama’s reputation as the “deporter-in-chief.”

VOX: “The disastrous, forgotten 1996 law that created today's immigration problem”

Immigration reform is sorely needed, as many activists, immigration practitioners, and (certain) politicians have been saying for the last few years. But how did we get into this immigration mess in the first place? Vox explains the 1996 immigration bill signed by President Bill Clinton that overhauled immigration enforcement in the US and consequently led to the massive deportations ongoing today as well as the huge increase in the number of undocumented immigrants in the US. This 1996 bill, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (called IIRIRA), produced key changes in American immigration law and enforcement policies.

The bill made more people eligible for deportation (i.e. removal)

Legal immigrants—including Green Card holders—can be deported if they're convicted of certain crimes, but in 1996, Congress retroactively expanded the crimes which made immigrants eligible for deportation.  "Overnight people who had formed their lives here—came here legally or had adjusted to legal status, were working here, building their families, had ordinary lives in which they were on the PTA and everything else—suddenly, because of some conviction, weren't even allowed to go in front of a judge anymore,” Nancy Moravetz, a NYU law professor, tells Vox. “They were just fast-tracked to deportation."

The bill made it easier to deport and detain undocumented immigrants

Not only did IIRIRA allow immigrants convicted of certain crimes to be deported, it permitted undocumented immigrants apprehended within 100 miles of the border to be stripped of the ability to argue their case before a judge before getting deported. It also required the government to hold more immigrants in detention before deporting them, which makes it much more difficult to get legal representation, and decreased the discretion immigration judges and the executive branch had regarding removals. "Discretion was taken away from district directors and immigration judges almost entirely," Doris Meissner, former head of Immigration and Naturalization Service (now US Citizenship & Immigration Services), tells Vox. "And so deportations started to go up, people were deported who otherwise would not have been deported."

IIRIRA made it more difficult for undocumented immigrants to obtain legal status

 As Vox explains, for much of the 20th century, certain undocumented immigrants were able to obtain legal status once they'd been in the US for a certain period of time. Before the law changed, in 1996, immigrants who had been in the US for at least seven years could obtain legal status if they showed it would cause them "extreme hardship" to be deported. IIRIRA changed this by limiting "cancellation of removal" to immigrants who were able to show that they had been in the US for at least ten years, and who had a US citizen (such as a child or spouse) who would suffer "exceptional and extremely unusual hardship," if the foreign national was removed from the US.  This was a higher standard than the previous “extreme hardship” which only the foreign national themselves had to suffer. Moreover, the US would only grant cancellation of removal to 3,000 immigrants each year. IIRAA went further to also essentially eliminate one of the most common ways to gain citizenship. Vox explains:

Marrying a US citizen or permanent resident makes you eligible to apply for a green card. So does having an immediate relative who's a US citizen (like a child), as long as the citizen's over 18. These are true whether or not you already live in the US. And before IIRIRA, it was true regardless of whether or not you were legal to begin with. Starting after IIRIRA passed in 1996, though, an unauthorized immigrant couldn't directly apply for legal status — even if he had married a US citizen, or qualified for a green card through a relative. Immigrants were banished for at least three years if they'd lived in the US without papers for six months; the banishment lasted 10 years if the immigrant had lived in the US without papers for a year or more.

Applicants can apply for a waiver to the 3- and 10-year bars only if they leave the country first, making it too risky of a proposition for many. After IIRIRA, although deportations from the United States increased, the number of undocumented immigrants living in the US also increased dramatically, going from five million in 1996 to twelve million by 2006.  

The 3- and 10-year bars, Vox says, has “caused millions of immigrants to remain unauthorized who'd otherwise be eligible for green cards or US citizenship by now.” According to Douglas Massey's estimate, without the 3- and 10-year bars, there would be 5.3 million fewer undocumented immigrants in the US today. "I don't think people fully appreciated what those laws had done," Nancy Morawetz tells Vox, referring to both IIRIRA and other 1996 immigration laws. In some ways, they're "still being sorted out today."

Huffington Post: “Democratic Lawmakers Want Kids In Immigration Proceedings To Get a Fair Shot”

Many unaccompanied minors in deportation hearings do not have legal representation, and a new bill sponsored by Democratic senators proposes to change this. The bill, called “Fair Day in Court for Kids Act,” led by Senators Harry Reid, Bob Menendez, Patrick Leahy, Patty Murray, and Dick Durbin, proposes to ensure that children in immigration proceedings have access to lawyers, legal orientation programs, and post-release services. It also applies to "vulnerable individuals," defined as people with a disability or victims of abuse, torture, or violence.

In a speech on the Senator floor introducing the bill, Senator Reid discussed the importance of dealing with the humanitarian crisis from Central America, noting that thousands of migrants, mainly women and children, have fled the region to escape extreme violence, human trafficking, drug trafficking, sexual assaults, and widespread corruption and have come to the US seeking asylum. He said:

These refugees should have help in making their asylum request. And that means that they need a lawyer. Under current U.S. law, there is no right to appointed counsel in non-criminal immigration removal proceedings, even if the person in question is a child. Imagine that. These children, who don’t speak English and are in a new country, are unreasonably expected to represent themselves in a court of law?

Having legal representation can prove critical for women and children in deportation proceedings, as a study by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University found that children were allowed to remain in the US in seventy-three percent of cases in which they had representation, according to data from fiscal years 2012 to 2014. Children without representation were only allowed to stay in fifteen percent of cases. "Trying to win asylum without a lawyer is like playing Russian roulette," Gregory Chen, Director of Advocacy for the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA), said on a call with media.

While some groups, including Kids In Need of Defense (KIND) help provide attorneys for children in deportation proceedings, and the Justice Department provided grants in 2014 for attorneys to assist, currently only about a third of minors are going through the immigration process with legal counsel, according to the latest data. "It's just so patently unfair to put these kids through this process unless they have some help," Wendy Young, president of KIND, told the Huffington Post. For deportees returned to the highly dangerous Central American region, a Guardian report found many of them including minors were killed after their return to their home countries.

The legislation will likely face opposition from the Republican-controlled Congress. In a congressional hearing earlier this month, several Republican panel members blamed President Obama’s lax immigration policies for attracting the surge of migrants and children from Central America. Congressman Trey Gowdy said that migrant children are told that once in the US they should find an immigration officer and claim asylum, and he charged the Obama administration with not conducting adequate background checks on the people who sponsor the newly-arrived children, leading to their possible exploitation, he asserted.

ABC News: “US Agents Round up Central Americans Slated for Deportation”

Immigration agents over the weekend began conducting raids targeting the removal of Central American families as well as unaccompanied children who crossed over the US southern border without documentation over the past two years. The raids, seen as an effort to deter future undocumented immigrants from crossing the border, are targeting individuals who have entered the US since May 2014, have been issued final orders of removal by an immigration court, have exhausted appropriate legal remedies, and have no outstanding appeal or claim for asylum or other humanitarian relief, according to a statement by Jeh Johnson, the head of the Department of Homeland Security.

In the statement, Johnson said that the 121 people rounded up this past weekend during raids in Georgia, Texas, and North Carolina were transferred to family detention centers mainly in Texas to await removal. Johnson said the raids “should come as no surprise” and noted that he has said “publicly for months that individuals who constitute enforcement priorities, including families and unaccompanied children, will be removed.”

Although these latest actions affect only a small part of the more than 100,000 Central American family members, mostly mothers with children, who crossed into the US since 2014, the raids have been strongly condemned by many. Greg Chen, director of advocacy for the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA), told the AP the group was "shocked and outraged" to hear of the raids targeting "women and children who are extremely vulnerable and by and large have fled from horrendous violence in their home countries."

The immigration surge in the past two years has been linked to a rise in gang-related violence in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras as well as extreme poverty in the region, while some immigrants crossed the border to reunite with family members in the US or to claim asylum.

One family caught up in the immigration raids was Maria Hernandez and her two sons, who fled gang violence in El Salvador in 2014. They were asleep early Saturday morning in her parents' Dallas home when immigration agents banged on the door. "They entered all the rooms and woke up my kids, saying they had a deportation order," Hernandez told VICE News in Spanish. "We were very surprised—I was almost naked when they entered. We were all crying."

The agents took Hernandez and her six- and nine-year-old sons into custody and drove them first to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement office and then to a detention center in South Texas, from where they will be deported to El Salvador. "They told us that in two days they'll send us to our country," Hernandez said Monday in a phone interview with Vice News from the South Texas Residential Center in Dilley, Texas. "It's the worst thing that could happen. We all have threats on our lives."

A Guardian investigation last year into the consequences of Obama’s deportation policies revealed many US deportees have been murdered shortly after returning to El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, with a study saying as many as eighty-three returning deportees have been killed since 2014.

Guatemala's Vice Minister Oscar Padilla said that starting Monday “consulates would be interviewing and reviewing the cases of citizens on deportation lists to ensure that each has an order signed by a judge.” The foreign ministry also advised Guatemalans in the US that they “need not open their doors to immigration agents unless the officers have a warrant signed by a judge, and that they carry with them at all times phone numbers of family members, a lawyer and the nearest consulate.”

Immigration activist groups have also begun alerting undocumented immigrants of the impending raids and informing them of their rights through videos, social media, and email and phone blasts. Advocates are noting that immigrants have the right to deny ICE officials entry; immigration agents must have an order signed by a judge to enter a house. “To be on the safe side, just don’t answer the door,” Bryan Johnson, a New York-based immigration lawyer, told the LA Times. “The problem is if you open the door, then it’s he said, she said. But if you never open the door, there’s proof—they have to break it down.”