“Immigration law is a mystery and a mastery of obfuscation, and the lawyers who can figure it out are worth their weight in gold.” -Former INS spokeswoman Karen Kraushaar, Washington Post on April 24, 2001.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement Director John Morton announced his resignation Monday after more than four years at the head of the agency.
A senior Department of Homeland Security official familiar with the matter said that Morton’s departure was voluntary but acknowledged that the Obama administration was surprised by the timing as Congress is in the middle of debating a comprehensive overhaul of immigration laws.
Morton has been hired as Senior Vice President of Capital One Financial Corp. heading compliance starting this August.
I will always remember him as the man that was "pleased" to report that in a six month period in 2011 his office deported 46,486 parents of United States citizens.
Yesterday, the House Judiciary Committee had an open hearing where they debated the Strengthen and Fortify Enforcement Act (SAFE Act). The SAFE Act criminalizes the act of being undocumented, which includes visa overstays.
The legislation will also all increase Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers by 5,000 and permits State and local government to enforce federal immigration laws, as well as permitting the arrest and indefinite detention of immigrants in privately owned federal detention centers.
The National Immigrant Justice Center (NIJC) has determined through a 2010 FOIA request that from 2008 to 2012 the Department of Homeland Security has maintained a practice of detaining children in adult detention facilities.
NIJC determined that from 2008-2010 children under the age of 18 were cumulatively held for a total of 36,598 days in 30 different adult detention centers. Four children were detained between
1,000 and 3,600 days, with one child being held for a decade after being detained at the age of 15.
It is believed this data has been under-reported, however, so there is no way of knowing how many undocumented children are actually being caged nationwide.
Yesterday, the ACLU and Cooley LLP filed a class-action law suit in California challenging what they characterize as "endemic abuses" stemming from Border Patrol and ICE officers employing "misinformation" and "deception" to coerce Mexican nationals to sign voluntary departure orders and forgo their right to a hearing before an immigration judge.
The lawsuit, Lopez-Venegas v. Napolitano, alleges thatas a matter of regular practice, Border Patrol agents and ICE officers pressure undocumented immigrants to sign what amounts to their own summary expulsion documents. The procedure is formally known as “voluntary departure,” but it regularly results in the involuntary waiver of core due process rights. An individual who signs for voluntary departure immediately surrenders his or her rights to a hearing before an immigration judge and is usually expelled to Mexico within a matter of hours.
The lawsuit was filed by the ACLU of California, the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project, and Cooley LLP. It includes seven individual plaintiffs that claim that their constitutional rights violated.
Anthony Stiegler, partner at Cooley LLP, provided the following comment:
“The policy and practice of misrepresenting an individual’s legal rights to summarily deport them from this country is inconsistent with the fundamental notions of fairness and due process under our Constitution. The United States derives its core strength because we embrace these values and abide by the rule of law.”
I couldn't have said it better myself Mr. Stiegler.
It appears that the establishment on the left is finally starting to take notice of President Obama's deportation record. On Sunday Arianna Huffington appeared on This Week with George Stephanopoulos where she called Obama's record deportations a "scandal" that nobody is talking about:
"More people have been deported over the Obama administration than over the whole two terms of George Bush. And we’ve had, for example, since 2010, 200,000 parents of American citizens being deported for minor offenses. This is a real tragedy. And if this were being done under George Bush, Democrats would have been up in arms.”
She goes on saying that there is no accountability in the White House for their own actions calling the deportation and detention system a real nightmare.
Any of this sound familiar?
Here is a clip from the segment. You need to go to the 6:45 minute mark to hear her comments, and the typical response from the Obama apologist David Plouffe that DREAMers aren't being deported, which we all know isn't true. Thankfully, Ms. Huffington called him out on it.
I stumbled upon an article written by Laura Murphy, Director of the ACLU Washington Legislation Office. Ms. Murphy provides a summary of the "highlights and lowlights" of the recent immigration reform legislation that has made its way through the Senate Judiciary Committee.
In reading the summary it struck me that the proposed Senate immigration bill specifically includes protections against the hallmarks of the Obama administration's deportation and detention policy. Such protections include prompt bond hearings for detainees, alternatives to the for-profit privately run immigration detention system, bars to racial and ethnic profiling by federal law enforcement officials, restrictions on the use of solitary confinement, and restrictions on middle-of-the-night deportations.
So let me ask you this... Why does it take a new law to protect immigrants from the discriminatory and abusive practices of the current administration?
For example, right around the same time that the President was on Telemundo telling the world that "the vast majority of [people being deported] now are criminals," Bertha Alicia Avila Medrano was arrested and taken into custody while driving to a family baptism with her three young daughters in the car. The children, Jennifer (16), Rosaly (9), and Xitlaly (5) are haunted by the memory of their mother being dragged away in handcuffs. Ms. Medrano has been detained for six months in Eloy Detention Center, which parenthetically is the same facility where two immigrant detainees in three days recently committed suicide.
So Mr. President, the 11 million undocumented immigrants question is why does it take comprehensive immigration reform for you to stop destroying families, and abusing immigrants with your castigatory deportation and detention policies?
What is your excuse this time?
Click here to sign the petition to bring this woman home to her family.
Syracuse University's TRAC Immigration's latest report found that ICE takes 1,500 immigrants into custody in a typical work day, and of those taken into custody roughly 1,000 are ultimately deported. Only about 1/4 (360 immigrants) of all individuals taken into custody are released by ICE, and a very small percentage (20 immigrants) are released under electronic monitoring (ankle bracelet) or placed on enhanced supervision.
What is even more troubling is that many custody determinations are made directly by the agency that takes the individual into custody in the first place. A much smaller percentage of custody determinations are made by an immigration judge in the context of a court proceeding.
