Thread: ICE says it won't help Catch and Release immigrants get to bus stations, airport

ICE says it won't help freed immigrants get to bus stations, airports
y

• Alfredo Corchado
• Dianne Solis

EL PASO - No more bus rides. No more help with travel arrangements to be reunited with relatives.

Citing "inaction" on the part of Congress, ICE spokeswoman Sarah Rodriguez said in a statement that the agency will no longer detain immigrants in holding cells beyond the legally limited handful of days once they cross into the U.S. as has been happening in recent weeks. But they also say they will stop helping immigrant families make contact with relatives when they are released pending the outcome of their cases. Nor will they transport them to bus stations or the airport.

This means that families will only be released to nonprofit shelters when space is available. And the overtaxed nonprofits say that those shelters are rapidly filling up and they fear that immigrants will soon be homeless on the streets of El Paso and elsewhere along the U.S.-Mexico border.

Border and immigration experts say the vision of homeless, roaming immigrants may play into the hands of the Trump administration, which appears to be drumming up political support as the midterm elections approach by creating a climate of fear that includes Trump's ominous threat to close the border, his dispatching of more troops south and his steady Tweeting about the "dangers" of allowing a caravan of thousands from Honduras to make their way to the southwest border to request asylum.

"Definitely President Trump, he's using the border and immigrants as political pawns, but this is what energizes his base and he's going back to his favorite playbook," said Fernando Garcia, executive of the Border Network for Human Rights. "It's very unfortunate that this is happening, because we are a nation of immigrants, and these are our values."

Annunciation House volunteer Rachel Soltis (left) gets in touch with Leslie Angelia's family in Los Angeles to arrange a bus ticket for her and her daughter Argelee Yulieth, 3, a day after the pair were released from detention at a motel in El Paso, Texas, on October 23, 2018.
(Genaro Molina/TNS)

Rodriguez said in a statement Thursday that "to mitigate the risk of holding family units past the time-frame allotted to the government, ICE began curtailing all reviews of post-release plans from families apprehended along the southwest border starting on Tuesday Oct. 23."

The review process included a "non-required" post-release plan to make sure refugees had secured travel arrangements to reach their final destination.

"However, due to the recent uptick in family units presenting themselves along the Southwest border, ICE no longer has the capacity to conduct these reviews," said a statement by ICE. The new practice "applies to the entire Southwest border," including San Diego, Phoenix, El Paso and San Antonio.


In the past, ICE authorities have coordinated between agencies, including nonprofits, to make sure the immigrants have shelter and transportation to relatives pending the outcome of their immigration cases.

The streets of El Paso

On Friday afternoon, Ruben Garcia, founder and director of Annunciation House, a non-profit group in El Paso that provides and coordinates temporary shelter for immigrants with a network of area churches, was headed for the local Greyhound bus stations after hearing that about 20 immigrants had huddled there. None had bus tickets, and they left. Garcia headed for the streets of El Paso to check up on them.

"If that's true, we're looking at the first example of this new policy," said Garcia, who has already been looking for additional lodging options to house the growing number of families from Central America. "Right now, we're looking at trying to arrive at an equilibrium between the number of refugees released and the number of cots available... But will it go up to have space for everyone?

That's what we have to wait and see."

By early evening, more than 75 more had found their way to the bus station, said Garcia, who issued a "emergency" plea for volunteers, food, and blankets. He found overnight refugee at a local church.

Garcia said his shelter is overwhelmed by the number of immigrants arriving at the border. In May, Annunciation's network of shelters needed about 300 beds each week. Now he said the shelter needs more than 1,100 beds to handle all the immigrants passing through.

Overall, undocumented migration is at historic lows. Border Patrol agents apprehended about 396,000 immigrants in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30 -- about a fourth of the high-water mark in 2000.

What's changed radically is the composition of those migrants: In September, about half the migrants were travelling in families or were minors travelling alone. No longer is the stereotypical migrant a single Mexican male, and, in fact, Mexican migration has been in decline for more than a decade, according to the Pew Research Center.



Family immigration is on the rise. In Arizona last month, federal authorities ran out of space for the swelling numbers of families crossing the border. They have begun to detain immigrants only briefly before releasing them.

In the Rio Grande Valley, where the majority of migrant families have crossed the border, Brenda Riojas, a spokeswoman for Catholic Charities, said federal immigration officials are still calling them when they are about to release migrants.

Non-governmental shelters have been at capacity for some time, and the number of people sheltered in the McAllen area in October -- from 500 to 600 daily -- is about double that of July.

In downtown McAllen, immigrant families can frequently be seen walking from the McAllen bus station to the Catholic-run "respite" center a few blocks away with a volunteer escort. Sister Norma Pimentel, the director of Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley, meets regularly with the Border Patrol chief for the region, Manuel Padilla, Riojas said.

"They give us a heads-up and say they'll release this amount this day, and let us know when they'll be at the McAllen bus station."

Whether that will continue after ICE's announcement remains to be seen.

"Trump's divisive, nativist rhetoric and policies are moving beyond their previous parameters and potentially creating scenarios of unprecedented negative consequences for international relations between the U.S. and Latin America," said Howard Campbell, a border anthropologist and author at the University of Texas in El Paso. "They are also fanning the flames of racial and ethnic conflict in the U.S."

The decision to no longer help migrants with their transportation plans follows Trump's ominous threat to close the border altogether.

If Trump issues an executive order to deny migrants the chance to apply for asylum, it will quickly face legal challenges.

The Immigration and Nationality Act contains provisions on asylum rights for those who are already physically in the U.S. or who arrive in the U.S. That federal law links back to the five types of persecution that are grounds for seeking asylum -- and are laid out in the 1951 United Nations convention on refugees and a 1967 addition.

The United States signed that U.N. agreement.

"As the Supreme Court reaffirmed in its travel ban decision earlier this year, all presidents have wide discretion about who to admit to the United States because immigration touches on national sovereignty," said Stephen Yale-Loehr, an immigration attorney and law professor at Cornell University. "But that discretion has limits.

The U.S. immigration statute explicitly allows people to apply for asylum. Only Congress can change the law.

Daniel Kowalski, an attorney who edits an immigration law journal, said, "I really don't see how an executive order can override that."

Some are referring to a possible directive from the White House to close the border as a "Latino ban," a reference to a January 2017 executive order that hit countries with large Muslim populations and was called a "Muslim ban."

"We will use every tool to stop Trump from undermining the Constitution and international laws, and from instituting his administration's agenda to impose a Latino Ban in any form," said Marielena Hincapie, the executive director of the National Immigration Law Center.

"Like the #MuslimBan, we'll fight the #LatinoBan too," tweeted RAICES, the legal nonprofit whose acronym means Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services. San Antonio-based RAICES also has a large Dallas office.

𝐑𝐀𝐈𝐂𝐄𝐒

✔@RAICESTEXAS


In 2017 when we were at the airport in Dallas coordinating legal services during the #MuslimBan we knew the immigration fight was coming for all of us.

Now the administration is proposing a #LatinoBan at the southern border.

Like the #MuslimBan, we'll fight the #LatinoBan too.

Tal Kopan

✔@TalKopan


Scoop: The administration is considering a travel ban-like action for the Mexican border: https://www.sfchronicle.com/politics...e-13337662.php …



8:22 PM - Oct 25, 2018

• 
  181
• 
  112 people are talking about this

Troops to the border

On Thursday, the Pentagon said it plans to deploy an additional 800 U.S. troops to the border to assist in security operations and in response to the Central American caravan. The latest deployment would add to the 2,100 National Guard troops already on the border.

"The real question is, what will the military do on the border?" asked Victor M. Manjarrez, Jr., a former U.S. Border Patrol Chief and associate director at the Center for Law and Human Behavior at UTEP. "If the response is to provide transportation, detention guard duty, or even setting up tent cities, then they would be needed on the border. If they are being sent to conduct patrol duties on the border, then they are not being used effectively, and not needed."

At a shelter in El Paso, Sister Lelia Mattingly, 77, looked on as children ran around playfully. Others simply stared, or were cuddled by their mothers and fathers. She's a volunteer at a shelter and has spent time in Bolivia and Central America.

"These poor people are being used as political pawns by cynical politicians," Mattingly said. "We need to take a step back as a country and question our own role in Central America of supporting dictators who neglected the poor and drove people out in desperation. This is all a backlash. We're paying for what we have done, but this country is so divisive that few want to even hear that."

https://www.dallasnews.com/news/immi...tions-airports

Give them NOTHING!

Offer them a voucher for a bus ticket home.

No food, no medical care, no housing, no school, no money, no welfare, no food stamps, no clothes!

Fingerprint them all so they are in the system.

They have NO authorization to be on our soil. No papers!

Go after the employers who hire them.

FIRE the government employees who award them taxpayer benefits.

Prosecute the Governor's issuing them ID's and Driver's Licenses!