In an attempt to deter parents thinking of illegally entering the U.S. with their children, the Department of Homeland Security is considering a proposal that would separate adults and children who cross the southern border together, according to multiple media reports.
News of the policy, which is still being considered by department officials, was first reported Friday by Reuters, who spoke to three government sources, and later confirmed by CNN and MSNBC.
Such a policy move would mark a significant change in immigration enforcement, as families are currently kept together and released until their court date, according to MSNBC. . . . The new policy would mean that adults are kept in custody instead of being released, while children will be placed in the care of the Department of Health and Human Services, before they are placed with a relative or state-sponsored guardian, per Reuters. … **We are trying to find ways to deter the use of children in illegal immigration, the official said. We are seeing kids essentially kidnapped and used to get here and stay.
All border controls are violent, and all border enforcement policies are awful. What distinguishes this — if La Migra attempts to go through with it — is the sheer malice. This idea serves no conceivable rational purpose other than deliberate cruelty, and pure political sadism, using the lives and emotions of children and taking them as hostages to punish their parents. The administration’s explicit theory is that the prospect this kind of deliberate cruelty to children might “deter” their parents. That is wrong. It’s not foolish, or mistaken, or ill-conceived. This proposed policy is, flatly, unspeakably evil.
Reuters and CNN say the Department of Homeland Security is considering a proposal aimed at deterring immigrants with children from entering the countr…
Following Donald Trump's executive order expanding the power of immigration authorities, those affected have included a married mom of two, an …
jezebel.com
Following Donald Trump's executive order expanding the power of immigration authorities, those affected have included a married mom of two, an individual protected by DACA, and a victim of domestic violence who was in court seeking a protective order. Now ICE has moved on to target people seeking safety from deadly weather.
NBC News 4 reports that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials surprised a group of men leaving a hypothermia shelter in Alexandria, Virginia early on Wednesday morning. The shelter is part of Rising Hope Mission Church, and thus falls under ICE's "sensitive location" policy. The policy demands that arrests not take place at churches, schools, or medical facilities. Agents reportedly waited until the men had crossed the street before surrounding them.
"It really was a stunning event," said the county attorney. "It has an incredible chilling effect for all undocumented victims of an…
washingtonpost.com
A hearing in El Paso County in Texas went from ordinary to "unprecedented" last week when half a dozen Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents showed up at a courthouse where an undocumented woman was seeking a protective order against the boyfriend she accused of abusing her.
The woman, a citizen of Mexico who was living in El Paso had been driven to the courthouse by a victim's advocate from the Center Against Sexual and Family Violence, a shelter for victims of domestic abuse where she had been living.
She left under arrest. . . . It was the first time in her 23 years at the courthouse, [El Paso County Attorney Jo Anne] Bernal said, that she can remember ICE agents making their presence known during a protective order hearing. The agents had come to stake out the woman, identified by her initials I.E.G., because, Bernal speculates, they likely received a tip from the only other person who knew the time and place of the hearing — the woman's alleged abuser.
–Katie Mettler, [This is really unprecedented] Washington Post (February 16, 2017)
The documents detail plans to hire thousands of additional enforcement agents and expand the pool of immigrants prioritized for removal.
washingtonpost.com
If these guidelines are enacted, it will be an appalling escalation of this already-terrible situation. It will be a brutal use of state violence to separate families, punish the weakest and the most vulnerable, to destroy livelihoods and literally endanger lives. And all for what? To enforce a ridiculous system of international segregation. To hell with that.
End 287(g). Stop deportation. Abolish ICE. Abolish DHS. Abolish the Presidency. Open the borders, and free the people who cross them.
La Migra has started conducted large-scale immigration raids in over half a dozen states, and is alleged to be setting up Ihre Papiere, bitte checkpoints and lurking in or around schools to follow children.
AUSTIN – After a day of reports surrounding Immigration and Customs Enforcement actions at various locations throughout Austin, Congressman Joaquin Castro confirmed a targeted operation by ICE in South and Central Texas. The Mexican Consulate of Austin has since confirmed 44 Mexican immigrants were detained in the past 48 hours in Austin.
. . . As Friday morning continued to roll on, social media began to fill with posts from people reporting ICE raids and arrests throughout the community. KVUE began investigating the reports with law enforcement and Defender Tony Plohetski talked to law enforcement sources at the federal, state, and local levels and none reported any operations outside of their daily action.
After a day of reports surrounding Immigration and Customs Enforcement actions at various locations throughout Austin, Congressman Joaquin Castro conf…
U.S. immigration authorities arrested hundreds of undocumented immigrants in at least a half-dozen states this week in a series of raids that marked the first large-scale enforcement of President Trump's Jan. 25 order to crack down on the estimated 11 million immigrants living here illegally.
Officials said the raids targeted known criminals, but they also netted some immigrants without criminal records, an apparent departure from similar enforcement waves during the Obama administration. Last month, Trump substantially broadened the scope of who the Department of Homeland Security can target to include those with minor offenses or no convictions at all.
Trump has pledged to deport as many as 3 million undocumented immigrants with criminal records.
Immigration officials confirmed that agents this week raided homes and workplaces in Atlanta, Chicago, New York, the Los Angeles area, North Carolina and South Carolina, netting hundreds of people. But Gillian Christensen, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), said they were part of "routine" immigration enforcement actions. ICE dislikes the term "raids," and prefers to say authorities are conducting "targeted enforcement actions," she said.
. . . Immigration activists said the crackdown went beyond the six states DHS identified, and said they had also documented ICE raids of unusual intensity during the past two days in Florida, Kansas, Texas and Northern Virginia.
That undocumented immigrants with no criminal records were arrested and could potentially be deported sent a shock wave through immigrant communities nationwide amid concerns that the U.S. government could start going after law-abiding people.
. . . ICE agents in the Los Angeles area Thursday took a number of individuals into custody over the course of an hour, seizing them from their homes and on their way to work, activists said.
. . . Spanish language radio stations and the local NPR affiliate in Los Angeles have been running public service announcements regarding the hourly "Know Your Rights" seminars the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles scheduled for Friday and Saturday. By the time the 4 p.m. group began Friday, more than 100 others had gathered at the group's office in the Westlake neighborhood just outside downtown.
A video that circulated on social media Friday appeared to show ICE agents in Texas detaining people in an Austin shopping center parking lot. Immigration advocates also reported roadway checkpoints, where ICE appeared to be targeting immigrants for random ID checks, in North Carolina and in Austin. ICE officials denied that authorities used checkpoints during the operations.
. . . Immigrant rights groups said that they were planning protests in response to the raids, including one Friday evening in Federal Plaza in New York City and a vigil in Los Angeles.
"We cannot understate the level of panic and terror that is running through many immigrant communities," said Walter Barrientos of Make the Road New York in New York City, who spoke on a conference call with immigration advocates.
. . . Jeanette Vizguerra, 35, a Mexican house cleaner whose permit to stay in the country expired this week, said Friday during the conference call that she was newly apprehensive about her scheduled meeting with ICE next week.
Fearing deportation, Vizguerra, a Denver mother of four — including three who are U.S. citizens — said through an interpreter that she had called on activists and supporters to accompany her to the meeting.
"I know I need to mobilize my community, but I know my freedom is at risk here," Vizguerra said.
The raids mark the first large-scale immigration action since President Trump's Jan. 25 order to crack down on the estimated 11 million immigra…
washingtonpost.com
It hardly needs adding here that this conduct is terrifying, and despicable. There is no nation on earth that is worth more than even a single innocent life, no border that is more important than a refugee, or a dream, or a family, or a plain old honest living. Nationalism is the most toxic idea in the world to individual liberty, to global justice, to fairness, to compassion or to simple human decency. Border controls are a form of population control, one of the most mean-spirited and practically most lethal in the world today. These raids are spreading fear; they are terrorizing a community and destroying families for a worthless political line. Halt these raids, stop deportation, tear down every wall and bury the rubble in the dirt.
Houston, we have a few problems:
It’s ICE, not the raids.
It’s the police, not police brutality.
It’s border patrol, not apprehensions.
It’s violence, capitalism, borders, citizenship, nation-states, empire, not refugees, not migrants.
These Evils are not accidental. Whoever will take the pains to consider the Nature of Society, will find they result directly from its Constitution. For . . . Subordination, or in other Words, the Reciprocation of Tyranny, and Slavery, is requisite to support these Societies . . . . In vain you tell me that Artificial Government is good, but that I fall out only with the Abuse. The Thing! the Thing itself is the Abuse! –Anonymous, A Vindication of Natural Society (1757).
