Thread: ICE will no longer delay deportations for those with 'private bills' pending

ICE will no longer delay deportations for those with 'private bills' pending

Kate MorrisseyContact Reporter

“Children’s and families’ lives are on the line."

Immigration officials told Congress on Friday that they will no longer hold off on deportations for individuals who have special legislation pending that would give them legal status to be in the U.S.

“Private bills,” as they are known, affect a specific person or small group. About half of the 4,200 private bills introduced since 1983 have been to grant an individual legal immigration status in the U.S., according to data from Congress.

Under Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s previous policy, the agency would postpone a deportation while waiting to see if a bill passed and became law. About six percent of private immigration bills have become law since 1983. By reintroducing private immigration bills each Congressional session, members of Congress have been able to postpone deportations for years.

They will not be able to do that any more, according to a letter that ICE sent to certain members of Congress on Friday.

Deportations will not be automatically postponed. If the chair of the Judiciary Committee sends a written request to ICE, the agency will postpone a deportation for up to six months, but it will no longer repeatedly postpone deportations.

In the letter, acting ICE director Thomas Homan writes that "the stay mechanism, combined with the repeated introduction of bills which are rarely if ever enacted, could prevent ICE from removing aliens who fall within the enforcement priorities" from an executive order that President Donald Trump signed in January, "including those who pose a risk to public safety or national security."

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-California, who has sponsored 91 private immigration bills since 1997 — the second highest for any member of Congress after former Sen. Daniel Inouye, D-Hawaii — issued a joint statement with Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Illinois, calling the change “mean-spirited.”

“Children’s and families’ lives are on the line. Private immigration bills are a critical safety net that Democrats and Republicans alike have carefully used for a small number of the most critical cases,” the Senators wrote in the joint statement.

Lawmakers have used private bills to help individual immigrants who are important to their constituents, immigrants whose stories are often extraordinary and who don't have options to stay in the U.S. under the current system. Just under two-thirds — or about 64 percent — of private immigration bills introduced since 1983 have come from Democrats.

There are currently 26 private bills pending in Congress. All but one are meant to help individuals with their immigration status, and most have had bills introduced for them before, so their deportations have been postponed for a number of years.

They come from all over the world. One family fled the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Another set of parents are "stateless" and cannot be deported together to one country. Some are from Pakistan and France and China.

Feinstein is sponsoring eight of the current bills.

Two more are sponsored by Rep. Susan Davis, D-San Diego, and one is sponsored by Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-Alpine.

Davis said she carefully considers the criteria agreed to by members of Congress about who is eligible for a private bill before deciding to sponsor someone. That includes making sure the person has no criminal history, that he or she contributes to the community and that he or she has exhausted all other options for immigration relief, she said.

"The reality is that it’s in the absence of comprehensive reform that that would even become an issue, and that’s why I think it’s done with a great deal of care," Davis said by telephone.

Davis inherited one of her cases from former Rep. Bob Filner, who was a copious sponsor of private bills. Filner said one of his strategies in introducing private immigration bills was to give time for other legal options to be pursued.

"It became a bureaucratic way to buy time and in many cases it bought enough time to change the situation," Filner said over the phone.

Together with Feinstein, he got one of the three most recent successful private immigration bills signed into law in 2010, for a San Diegan named Shigeru Yamada who was orphaned after an accident killed his mother a few years after they arrived in the U.S. Without her, Yamada did not have an option for legal status after he became an adult.

Filner said he was careful about bills he agreed to sponsor, making sure the beneficiaries had no criminal history.

"The people I knew were in very strange and difficult circumstances that really deserved a private bill," Filner said.

"I didn’t do it just for a lark."

Filner also sponsored a bill for Flavia Maboloc Cahoon, 56, of southeastern San Diego, and now Davis sponsors a bill for her.

Originally from the Philippines, Cahoon came to the U.S. on a fiancé visa, but immigration officials refused to give her a green card after she got married because they said she checked the wrong box on her visa application, Cahoon said.

She and her husband eventually divorced, and she met Albert Cahoon, 66, who has become the love of her life, she said. She and Cahoon married in September 1997 and together raised her daughter Jane, who is now in the Navy.

Because of the earlier issue with her visa application, Cahoon said, normal immigration channels would require her to return to the Philippines for 10 years before her husband could sponsor her green card. Private bills have kept her in the country since ICE tried to deport her in 2005, she said.

She pays taxes, has cared for many Americans as a nurse and has never used public benefits, even when she struggled financially in the years she was a single mother, she said.

"What are they going to gain that they're going to separate me from my husband, my daughter and now my granddaughter?"

Cahoon said over the phone after she heard about the change in policy.

She’s been nervous since she heard about a Denver woman with a private bill pending who ended up taking sanctuary in a church when her request for postponement was denied earlier this year, Cahoon said.

Cahoon anxiously checks her driveway every night, fearful that she will see ICE vans coming for her, she said.

Rep. Hunter's office didn't respond to repeated requests for comment about his private immigration bill. Hunter inherited the current case from his predecessor and father, Duncan L. Hunter, and previously sponsored a bill for one other case.

The elder Duncan Hunter said that when he was in office, he sponsored private immigration bills when there was a significant amount of hardship involved.

Because of that standard, he said, sponsoring private immigration bills did not conflict with his otherwise hardline approach to immigration policy.

"There's a vast difference between people coming legally or people who apply for hardship and smugglers coming in," the elder Hunter said in a phone interview.

http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/...509-story.html

“Children’s and families’ lives are on the line. Private immigration bills are a critical safety net that Democrats and Republicans alike have carefully used for a small number of the most critical cases,” the Senators wrote in the joint statement.

We need safety nets for Americans, and that does not include "private bills" to legalize illegal aliens in the United States.

I totally support this new ICE policy and thank the administration for such an important change about a problem many of US didn't even know we had on top of all the ones we did know about!

THANK YOU ICE!!

Congress Handles Immigration Problems One At A Time

10/27/2009

(PRIVATE) Bill could keep brothers in U.S. through 2009

9/19/2007

4/7/17

Democrat Files Special Bill To Shield Illegal Immigrant From Deportation

No more private bills by Crooked Congresscritters wishing to usurp our laws and defy the best interest of American Citizens.

5/12/27

UPDATE

2:25 p.m.
From now on, the relatively small number of immigrants who get bills filed on their behalf will only be eligible for stays up to six months with the possibility of one 90-day extension.

http://abcnews.go.com/International/...iding-47375999