Articles Posted in Deportation & Removal

A couple weeks ago, Representative Luis V. Gutierrez, a Democrat from Illinois who has become a perennial thorn on immigration for President Obama, was arrested Tuesday afternoon along with about a dozen activists in a protest outside the White House.

The protesters were arrested peacefully after they sat down on the White House sidewalk, following a rally where demonstrators denounced the Obama administration for deporting more than one million immigrants in the last two years.

In a letter to Mr. Gutierrez on Monday, Mr. Obama rejected his proposal to suspend deportations of illegal immigrant college students with clean criminal records. Last week, Mr. Gutierrez and three other House Democrats had sent a letter to the president requesting the suspensions and also asking him to take executive measures to make it easier for illegal immigrants married to American citizens to remain in the United States.

Ekaterina Powell from our office brings us up to date with this recent development. Aliens who have controlled substance convictions are generally deportable and ineligible for adjustment of status (with certain exceptions for simple possession of 30 grams or less of marijuana).

Whenever an alien enters a guilty plea or nolo contendere or admits sufficient facts to warrant a finding of guilt, for which the judge has ordered some form of punishment, penalty or restraint on the alien’s liberty, the alien becomes deportable and inadmissible. See definition of conviction in 8 U.S.C. section 1101(a)(48)(A).

This definition of conviction leaves most of the aliens with simple possession convictions out of luck. These individuals cannot apply for adjustment of status through their immediate relatives U.S. citizens and may be deported from the United States even after years of being in lawful permanent resident status. The length of time that has passed since the entry of judgment does not matter for immigration purposes. Thus aliens that had drug convictions adjudicated years ago would be treated the same way for immigration purposes.

A New York judge released Dominique Strauss-Kahn from house arrest Friday, after prosecutors presented evidence questioning the credibility of the hotel maid who accused the former International Monetary Fund chief of sexual assault.

The alleged victim, a 32-year-old immigrant from Guinea, admitted to prosecutors that she lied about the specifics of her whereabouts following the incident, the details of an asylum application and information she put on tax forms.

According to a New York Times report, the 32-year-old hotel maid may be linked to drug dealing and possible money laundering. The unidentified woman also lied to investigators about previously being raped in her native Guinea.

In line with what we heard at the National Immigration Law Conference Last week, John Morton, the head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said the deportation program would continue to expand as planned in order to be operating nationwide by 2013, despite criticism from many police chiefs and from the governors of Illinois, New York and Massachusetts, who sought to withdraw their states.

In a fix likely to have broad practical effect, Mr. Morton issued a memorandum that greatly expanded the factors immigration authorities can take into account in deciding to defer or cancel deportations. Agents are now formally urged to consider how long an illegal immigrant has been in the United States, or whether the immigrant was brought here illegally as a child and is studying in high school or college.

Under Secure Communities, tens of thousands of immigrants who were here illegally but had not been convicted of any crime were detained by local law enforcement and swept into deportation proceedings. Until now, once immigration agents in the field had started a deportation, government lawyers had little authority to decide which cases were worth pursuing in immigration court. Many immigration violations are civil, not criminal, offenses.

This year the American Immigration Lawyers Association National conference is being held in San Diego. Just a few blocks from our down town office, you can see thousands of Immigration lawyers gather to socialize, learn and advance our profession.

This morning, ICE head John Morton, opened with an discussion about ICE’s activity and future plans. ICE released new IDENT statistics that show immigrants with low level offenses account for a large number of those caught in the dragnet created by Secure Communities.

Of 477,035 matches, 71, 197 have been identified as level 1 offenders, while 405,838 were identified as level 2 and level 3, between October 2008 and February 2011.

ICE officials are not happy this morning. Illegal immigrants arrested for petty crimes won’t be held in jail longer than necessary in San Francisco, even if federal immigration agents may want them detained for possible deportation.

Instead, starting Wednesday, deputies will treat those eligible for release just like U.S. citizens: They will be cited to appear in court. The new policy is his attempt to comply with a city law that prevents police from aiding federal authorities in non-felony crimes and a U.S. law that requires authorities to share fingerprints with immigration agents.

Under this policy, illegal immigrants who commit misdemeanors, such as disorderly conduct, trespassing or shoplifting, will not be held while the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) checks their status through a fingerprinting monitoring program.

CPB released a report on 5/19/11 of statistics on U.S. Border Patrol’s total apprehensions of undocumented individuals by fiscal year, from FY1999 through FY2010. The report also includes a breakdown of such apprehensions from Mexico, and from countries other than Mexico.

* U.S. Border Patrol agents apprehended 463,382 individuals smuggled across the border, including 8,905 smugglers. (3,027 of the smugglers apprehended were deemed “deportable.”)

* U.S. Border Patrol agents apprehended 59,017 “Other Than Mexican” illegal aliens through October 7, 2010.

Arizona will appeal directly to the US Supreme Court in a bid to overturn an injunction blocking key parts of the state’s controversial immigration law, state officials announced today.

Gov. Jan Brewer said she and Attorney General Tom Horne had decided to take the case directly to the nation’s highest court, asking it to examine whether US District Judge Susan Bolton acted correctly when she issued her injunction in Phoenix last summer.

A three-judge panel of the Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the injunction on April 11. Arizona could ask all active judges on the Ninth Circuit to rehear the appeal, but state officials decided it would be faster to take the case directly to the Supreme Court. Expect another showdown.

Great story, another example how the illegal immigration debate is now a big part of our culture.

In 1993, when I was 14, I became a regular on “Sesame Street.” The show usually liked to have a teenager on, so that was me. My character had my same name, Carlo, and eventually I got a job at Mr. Hooper’s store. I had to make a birdseed milkshake for Big Bird, that was my tryout. I ended up appearing on “Sesame Street” for five years. But the whole time, I had a secret: I was an undocumented immigrant. The papers I’d used to get hired were fake.

My family had come from Ecuador when I was seven and my older brother Angelo was nine. We came on a tourist visa, and the moment my parents had gotten it, we knew we were not coming back. They sold all our furniture before we left.

What do you make of this? Thousands of immigrants from India have crossed into the United States illegally at the southern tip of Texas in the last year, part of a mysterious and rapidly growing human-smuggling pipeline that is backing up court dockets, filling detention centers and triggering investigations.

The immigrants, mostly young men from poor villages, say they are fleeing religious and political persecution. More than 1,600 Indians have been caught since the influx began here early last year, while an undetermined number, perhaps thousands, are believed to have sneaked through undetected, according to U.S. border authorities.

Hundreds have been released on their own recognizance or after posting bond. They catch buses or go to local Indian-run motels before flying north for the final leg of their months-long journeys.