Tag: Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)

Special Report: Amid Oil Spill Crisis, U.S. Authorities Search for Undocumented Immigrant Cleanup Workers

Federal immigration officials have been visiting command centers on the Gulf Coast to check the immigration status of Hispanic response workers hired by BP and its contractors.

Civil Disobedience: Undocumented Youth Risk Deportation in Push for Immigration Reform

Young protesters and immigrant activists are increasingly turning to acts of civil disobedience, knowing that the result may be deportation for undocumented demonstrators.

Immigration Agency Denies Deportation Quotas After Memo Is Leaked

ICE chief John Morton quickly denied the agency sets quotas for deportations, after a Washington Post story revealed an internal memo stating just that.

New York Immigrant Advocates Launch Campaign to End ICE’s Presence in Local Jails

By Maibe Gonzalez Fuentes, FI2W contributor
Pro-immigrant activist Humberto De La Cruz holds a copy of the letter advocates will send to the New York City council, during the press conference at Judson Memorial Church in Manhattan. (Photo: Maibe Gonzalez Fuentes)

Pro-immigrant activist Humberto De La Cruz holds a copy of the letter advocates will send to the New York City council, during the press conference at Judson Memorial Church in Manhattan. (Photo: Maibe Gonzalez Fuentes)

Saidah Mohammed, an 18-year-old from Brooklyn, New York, hasn’t seen her boyfriend, Jaun Pierre, for over a year. He’s being detained while he awaits deportation to his native Jamaica, an island he hasn’t visited since his parents brought him to the U.S., settling in Brooklyn some 10 years ago.

Jaun, 19, has spent the past 11 months in immigration detention. Before that he spent months detained on a minor charge in New York City’s Rikers Island prison. It was while he was a prisoner at Rikers that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents caught Jaun. His lawyer advised him to plead guilty to charges stemming from a fight he was allegedly involved in without informing him that such a plea would set grounds for deportation. Now proceedings are underway to return Jaun to Jamaica, away from his parents, siblings, friends and Saidah. (*In response to a reader’s comment, this paragraph was edited for clarity.)

Saidah told her boyfriend’s story through tears at a press conference Tuesday in New York where advocates and religious groups launched a new campaign to end the presence of ICE at the city’s jails.

Advocates called on New York City’s government to pass legislation that would preclude ICE from accessing detainees’ place of birth information prior to conviction. A bill drafted by the groups and sponsored by Council Member Eric Gioia will be introduced in the City Council next week.

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News Analysis: ICE Chief Promises Efficiency, Continued Tough Enforcement of Immigration Laws

On his first visit to Los Angeles, three months after becoming the chief of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), assistant secretary for Homeland Security John Morton said all his agency wants to do is become more efficient.

“We will try to apply immigration laws in a tough, smart and thoughtful manner,” said Morton to a small group of reporters invited to meet him last week as part of his tour of Southern California.

He said that if people expected ICE to stop doing its job, they would be disappointed. “That is not the point”, said Morton, who is a career prosecutor.

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Obama's Focus on Employers Causes Massive Firings, California Immigrant Activists Say

A month ago, Immigration and Customs Enforcement sent letters to 652 businesses across the country to let them know their hiring records would be audited “to determine whether or not they are complying with employment eligibility verification laws and regulations.” The goal was to check whether those companies have been making sure they are not hiring people not authorized to work in the U.S., a.k.a. undocumented immigrants.

Workers protest firings at Overhill Farms - Illustration: Southern California Immigration Coalition

Workers protest firings at Overhill Farms - Illustration: Southern California Immigration Coalition

The initiative apparently has led to firings at some of those companies. Last Saturday, pro-immigration activists and workers demonstrated in Los Angeles to demand that President Obama stop the audits as well as the use of e-Verify, an employee ID verification system widely criticized by immigrant advocates.

ICE’s increased vigilance over employers –it said the number of letters it sent in July exceeds the numbers sent during the entire previous fiscal year– follows Obama’s promises that his approach to enforcing immigration laws would focus more on the labor demand side rather than on the supply, i.e. the undocumented workers who’ve been the target of raids and deportations in the last few years.

But L.A. activists said this particular measure has swollen the ranks of the unemployed in the midst of the economic crisis.

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Immigration Reform Advocates To Protest Against Napolitano in New York Wednesday

NEW YORK — Local immigration activists plan to demonstrate against U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano Wednesday morning when she comes to the city to deliver a speech on terrorism, in what may be the first significant protest by presumed Obama administration allies against a member of the president’s cabinet.  (Editor’s note: We previously reported incorrectly that the demonstration was scheduled for Thursday.  We regret the error.)

May Day rally at Madison Square Park in Manhattan.

A previous demonstration by New York immigration groups, on May Day. (Photo: Maibe Gonzalez Fuentes)

Several pro- immigration groups are organizing a demonstration and press conference at the Council on Foreign Relations, where Napolitano will deliver a speech titled “Common Threat, Collective Response: Protecting Against Terrorist Attacks in a Networked World,” which will be broadcast live on the web.

The groups plan to protest Homeland Security’s “backward policies such as the implementation of e-Verify and the expansion of 287(g)” (a program that deputizes local law enforcement to enforce federal immigration laws) said Norman Eng, a New York Immigration Coalition (NYIC) spokesman. The demonstration comes on the heels of the release last week of a report that found Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), a DHS agency, violated the Constitution by conducting home raids without warrants and appropriate documentation under the Bush administration.

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Immigration Detention System Under Fire: News Analysis from Feet in Two Worlds

By Diego Graglia, FI2W web editor
Immigrant women at a detention center - Photo: Human Rights Watch

Immigrant women at a detention center . (Photo: Human Rights Watch)

The immigration detention system has been under fire from all sides in the past few weeks. Let us count the ways:

  • All of this came after high-profile detainee deaths in Rhode Island and Virginia called attention to the treatment immigrants receive while they await to be deported.

As with other aspects of immigration policy, the Obama Administration has hinted that it may address the issue of immigrant detention soon, but it has yet to announce any concrete measures on the matter.

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AP Study Shows "The High Cost" of Immigrant Detention

By Diego Graglia, FI2W web editor

Raymond Soeoth, a 41-year-old Pentecostal minister from Indonesia, spent more than two years under detention by Immigration and Customs Enforcement after his asylum claim was denied. Even after he agreed to be deported, he was drugged through forced injections — only to learn, while hallucinating at the airport, that he could not leave because his paperwork was not in order.

After becoming a plaintiff in a class-action suit, Soeoth was allowed to stay in the U.S. for at least two more years.

Soeoth’s case is one of several dramatic stories of undocumented immigrants that portray a disfunctional detention system in a special investigation The Associated Press published today. According to the news organization, “(a) computer analysis of every person being held on a recent Sunday night shows that most did not have a criminal record and many were not about to leave the country — voluntarily or via deportation.”

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Obama Administration May Revise Controversial Immigration Enforcement Program

By Diego Graglia, FI2W web editor

Maricopa County (Arizona) Sheriff officers conduct an immigration raid in Phoenix (Photo: AFP)

Maricopa County (Arizona) Sheriff officers conduct an immigration raid in Phoenix (Photo: AFP)

After a federal program that empowers local authorities to enforce immigration laws was severely criticized in an official report last week, a Homeland Security official told Congress that the agency is working on modifications to the program.

Still, pro-immigrant voices argue the 287g program –named after the section of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1996 that created it– should be shut down altogether.

In an editorial published last Sunday, Los Angeles Spanish-language newspaper La Opinión said,

As we have argued in the past, the (287 g) program should be ended. It is a sham that has only served to destroy families and ruin lives. That said, legislation that mandates efforts between federal immigration and local authorities to detain and deport felons should be fulfilled. But, we need to first close this shameful chapter and start from the beginning.

Last week, the Government Accountability Office released a report that said the program had expanded without proper oversight. Instead of targeting undocumented immigrants suspected of having committed serious crimes, local law enforcement agencies have arrested thousands for minor infractions, The Wall Street Journal reported.

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