Vol. 80/No. 2 January 18, 2016
(front page)
Obama administration launches
raids to deport Central Americans
CASA de Maryland
Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents are targeting thousands of people whose requests for asylum have been denied. Many missed court dates to fight their deportation because they lacked an attorney or knowledge about complicated court procedures. The vast majority will be sent back to El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala with no right to further court hearings or judicial review.
“We had a mother and her three children taken by ICE, pretending to be looking for a ‘criminal’ and asked to enter the house to check whether he was there,” Charles Kuck, an immigration attorney in Atlanta told the Wall Street Journal Jan. 3.
Some 100 people, including mothers of children threatened with deportation, rallied against the roundup in an action organized by CASA de Maryland outside the White House Dec. 30.
Rev. Alison Harrington, pastor of Southside Presbyterian Church in Tucson, Arizona, is offering sanctuary to those facing deportation and encouraging other churches to do the same.
More than 100,000 families have entered the U.S. through its southwest border seeking asylum since 2014, as well as tens of thousands of unaccompanied children.
The plan to begin the raids was announced on the front page of the Washington Post Dec. 24. They are the first nationwide operations directed specifically against Central Americans.
The raids could be the largest since April 2012 when immigration agents swept up more than 3,100 people who ICE claimed were “criminal aliens.”
While the overall number of deportations has been declining since 2004, the number of immigrants deported under judicial orders and who therefore face felony charges if they try to re-enter the United States increased fourfold from 1997 to 2013, but have since declined substantially.
The number of cops patrolling the U.S. border has doubled over the past decade to more than 18,000 today, ramped up under both the George W. Bush and Obama administrations, making it much more difficult to enter without papers.
The initiation of these raids comes amid a lot of media attention to Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump’s call for the mass deportation of undocumented immigrants and for extending the wall on Mexico’s border.
“The President’s actions are far more harmful than Trump’s demagoguery,” said Pablo Alvarado, executive director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, in a Jan. 3 statement. “While Trump’s dangerous rhetoric stigmatizes our loved ones, President Obama actually deports them.”
An average of 34,000 people are held in detention at any one time in the U.S. on immigration charges. With the recent surge of Central Americans crossing the border the Department of Homeland Security opened family detention centers, two in Texas and one in Pennsylvania, that now hold more than 1,700 people.
Many women and their children have been held for months. In August a federal judge in California ordered the Obama administration to begin releasing them from these centers starting in October. The administration said it’s complying, but also appealing.
From California to Colorado and Alabama to Texas, detained immigrants have held hunger strikes over the last three months to protest the abysmal conditions. Supporters of 10 men from Bangladesh who had been on a hunger strike for nearly a month rallied outside the Krome immigration prison near Miami Dec. 27 to protest a judge’s order to force-feed the men.
In recent months the flow of families crossing the border has shot up. More than 12,000 individuals were apprehended at the border in October and November, compared to 4,500 in the same months the previous year. The number of unaccompanied minors caught by border cops during those two months doubled to more than 10,000.
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