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  1. #1
    Senior Member lorrie's Avatar
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    Alabama Dreamer faces deportation after failing to signal, driving with empty beer bo

    Alabama Dreamer faces deportation after failing to signal, driving with empty beer bottles

    July 9, 2017 at 3:13 PM


    DACA recipient arrested
    Alabama DACA recipient Juan Infante-Campos (back right) poses with his mother, Norma Infante (back left),
    and two siblings. (Courtesy Norma Infante)

    Connor Sheets | csheets@al.com


    Alabama DACA recipient Juan Infante-Campos (left) poses at his 2015 graduation from Geraldine High School
    in DeKalb County. (Courtesy Norma Infante)

    Connor Sheets | csheets@al.com

    Juan Infante-Campos was two years old when his mother illegally brought him across the border from Mexico to the United States in 1999.

    On Saturday he sat in a cell in the DeKalb County Detention Center in Ft. Payne in the hills of northeast Alabama, waiting for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to take him into custody and likely initiate deportation proceedings.

    He now faces potential expulsion from the country he has called home for 18 of his 20 years. The fact that he could be sent to Mexico - a nation to which he has never returned since his arrival in America - came as a shock for Infante-Campos.

    He believed that his status as a Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipient protected him from such immigration enforcement actions, according to his mother, Norma Infante.

    Jessica Vosburgh, executive director of the nonprofit Adelante Alabama Worker Center immigrant advocacy group, said that Infante-Campos would be the first DACA recipient she is aware of in Alabama to be detained by ICE.

    "I haven't heard of other cases in Alabama of people who have been granted DACA getting picked up," she said. "That's not to say that it hasn't been happening."

    'Immigration hold'

    Instituted by the Obama administration in 2012, the federal DACA program offers deferred prosecution on immigration offenses committed by an estimated 750,000 immigrants who were brought to the country as minors.

    Qualifying immigrants, often referred to as Dreamers, must apply to have their DACA status, which also grants them temporary work permits, renewed every two years.

    Infante-Campos speaks English fluently, and in the six years since his mother moved her family from Oakland, California, to Crossville - a small DeKalb County community less than 15 miles east of Albertville - he has graduated from DeKalb County's Geraldine High School and secured a steady job doing metalwork and framing. He played soccer in high school and is a fan of the NFL's Oakland Raiders.

    "This morning he called me from the jail. He asked me when he is getting out of there. He says all the people there [are] really crazy and he is not bad like them," Infante told AL.com Friday.

    "I don't want my son to go to Mexico because he doesn't know people there and he came here when he was two years old."

    He received two-year DACA status three years ago and renewed it last year, Infante said. Infante-Campos, who is still an undocumented immigrant according to his mother, believed that his DACA status would provide him with a level of immunity from immigration enforcement.

    And it most likely would have under different circumstances, but on the night of July 1, he was pulled over by the DeKalb County Sheriff's Office for failure to use a turn signal. A sheriff's deputy found two empty beer bottles in the backseat of the young man's car, according to Infante. Deputies arrested Infante-Campos and his friend and passenger, 19-year-old Jose Martin Lara-Ortiz, and charged both of them with possession of alcohol by a minor, a misdemeanor, according to DeKalb County Sheriff's Office records.

    Bail was set at $3,000 for each man, Infante said, but when she went to the detention center the day after her son was arrested in hopes of bailing him out, she says she was told that he could not be released because he was being held at the request of ICE.

    Infante-Campos was previously charged in October with trafficking methamphetamine after he and another man were arrested in an Albertville parking lot while allegedly being in possession of three ounces of the drug. State court records show that he has not yet been convicted of drug trafficking or any other crime.
    Neither ICE nor the DeKalb County Sheriff's Office replied to requests for comment.

    Infante-Campos and Lara-Ortiz - who does not have DACA status - were being detained and denied release because the federal immigration enforcement agency had requested "immigration holds" on each of them, Infante said. Inmate records for the two men on the Sheriff's Office website include the phrase "hold for agency," which most likely indicates that they are under immigration holds, according to Vosburgh.

    "When I went over there, I told the guy, 'If I pay the bond he can get out now, right?' And he said, 'No, he's on immigration hold,'" Infante said. "But I told him, 'Why is he on immigration hold? He got DACA to stay here.' And he said, 'Anyway, he is illegal; he is on immigration hold.'"

    'Not a full guarantee'


    The controversial holds, also known as "ICE holds," amount to requests by ICE to local law enforcement agencies asking them to voluntarily keep in custody people who the agency suspects of being in the country illegally but would otherwise potentially be eligible for release.

    The practice allows ICE extra time to travel to locations around the country in order to physically take custody of people.

    Under the Obama administration, ICE holds were mainly deployed to detain immigrants who had been convicted of crimes. But immigration advocates say that they have increasingly been used under President Donald Trump to hold undocumented immigrants who have not been convicted of committing crimes, and in some cases, have never even been accused of a crime.

    "I think [the Infante-Campos case] is a sign that even after receiving DACA status, it's not a full guarantee of protection under the Trump administration, and that any sort of contact with law enforcement can be used against you," Vosburgh said.

    "It's not just everyone who's had their day in court and been convicted of a crime. It's also people who are innocent until proven guilty and are in the process of resolving a charge. And at this point under the memos, you don't even have to have been charged with a crime."

    Still, immigration enforcement against DACA recipients has been rare, even under Trump. When such incidents - including a March case in Mississippi that some observers alleged was brought as retaliation for an immigrants' public advocacy against U.S. immigration policies - have come to light in recent months, they have generated national headlines and widespread outcry.

    In March, ICE tweeted that "DACA is not a protected legal status, but active DACA recipients are typically a lower level enforcement priority."

    In April, after another DACA case attracted national attention, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions stated on Fox News that "DACA enrollees are not being targeted." But he also added that there is no guaranteed protection for Dreamers. "We can't promise people who are here unlawfully that they're not going to be deported," Sessions said, according to Politico.

    In general, the Trump administration is taking steps to widen the nation's immigration enforcement. In states including Alabama, ICE has increasingly detained undocumented bystanders who happen to be present at homes and workplaces that agents have raided in hopes of finding specific other immigrants accused or convicted of crimes.

    And on Friday, ProPublica reported that Matthew Albence, the head of ICE's Enforcement and Removal Operations division, directed his 5,700 deportation officers in February to "take enforcement action against all removable aliens encountered in the course of their duties," whether they have ever been accused of a crime or not.

    Infante, a mother of four, said that she is scared to think that her eldest son could be sent back to the violence and poverty that defined life in her hometown of Infiernillo, in the southwestern Mexican state of Michoacan.

    "There, it is very bad and when you have no money you can't go to school," she said. "Here, everything is better. You can find work and school is good for my kids. I can go anywhere and nobody's kidnapping my kids. [There's] more peace."

    http://www.al.com/news/index.ssf/201..._deportat.html


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  2. #2
    Senior Member lorrie's Avatar
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    Again, stop reminding us what Obama did.... he's gone and thank god!


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    Senior Member nomas's Avatar
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    He believed that his status as a Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipient protected him from such immigration enforcement actions, according to his mother, Norma Infante.
    What, he believed himself above the law?

    Infante-Campos was previously charged in October with trafficking methamphetamine after he and another man were arrested in an Albertville parking lot while allegedly being in possession of three ounces of the drug. State court records show that he has not yet been convicted of drug trafficking or any other crime. THREE OUNCES???? Get him out of here! He isn't the "good boy" they want to portray him as. This time around it was under age drinking.

    You notice Mom has had two more kids and never once a mention of Dad! I'm fairly certainly she's collecting benefits in the name of her American born kids. Kick the entire family out! She's illegal, give her the boot.

  4. #4
    Moderator Beezer's Avatar
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    Already charged with drugs...driving with empty beer bottles.

    Little Juan ... such a model citizen...NOT

    What next...let him off to KILL yet another American citizen on our roadways.

    Get the WHOLE family out of here now.
    ILLEGAL ALIENS HAVE "BROKEN" OUR IMMIGRATION SYSTEM

    DO NOT REWARD THEM - DEPORT THEM ALL

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