No slowdown seen in arrests, detentions, despite stated change in immigration policy

ByJohn Lantigua
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer

4 comments

Posted: 9:36 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 22, 2011


Dario Perez Roblero, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico, was arrested Aug. 25 for picking berries at Sweetbay Preserve off Beeline Highway in Palm Beach Gardens.

It is a park where some people go bird-watching . That day, a Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office deputy was watching and Perez, 19, got nabbed on suspicion of violating a local ordinance involving park foliage. He was turned over to immigration authorities and sent to the Broward Transition Center immigration detention facility in Pompano Beach.

Luana, who is in her 50s, also undocumented and from Mexico, was entering a cosmetology show in early September at the Fort Lauderdale Convention Center when she and two friends were stopped by agents of Customs and Border Protection, her attorney said. Luana - not her real name - ended up in the female section of the Transition Center, with much larger concerns than her makeup.

The two have taken different paths since their arrests. Luana, who has no criminal record or previous run-ins with immigration authorities, is free, although with an ankle monitor, and must appear before an immigration judge. Under new Obama administration guidelines, she has a chance of seeing possible deportation proceedings against her suspended and being allowed to stay.

Perez, who according to authorities was arrested twice previously while trying to get into the U.S. from Mexico in 2008, is still in custody and with no immediate prospect of going free. According to those same new guidelines, because he is a repeat immigration offender, he is probably facing removal from the country.

The two of them fall on opposite sides of a dividing line recently drawn by the Obama administration.

Conflicting messages

In August, the White House announced it would reduce the number of people in deportation proceedings and try to keep people who pose little or no threat to society out of those proceedings. Instead, it said it will dedicate more time and effort to deporting people considered dangerous: people who are dangers to national security, convicted criminals, gang members, repeat immigration offenders and also undocumented people recently arrived who have no history in the U.S.

Members of the immigrant community generally welcomed the news, but if they thought arrests by immigration agents of everyone else would stop, they were wrong. Despite the new guidelines, undocumented people of all descriptions are still being arrested and put into the pipeline, immigrant advocates say.

Attorney Cheryl Little, executive director of Americans for Immigrant Justice, the Miami-based nonprofit that represents undocumented people throughout South Florida, said agents of Customs and Border Protection, in particular, but also Immigration and Customs Enforcement, are still arresting the undocumented, including those not in the "mandatory detention" categories.

"CBP arrests are of great concern, and fly in the face of Washington's message, as do recent ICE arrests," Little said.

Attorney Aileen Josephs of West Palm Beach, a founder of Florida Voices for Immigration Reform, agreed. "We're still seeing many people detained," she said. "There has been no change in that."

Josephs said that seems to contradict the new deportation policy. But a spokesman for the Border Patrol in South Florida, Victor Colon, said nothing in the new guidelines has changed the basic job of his agents.

"If in the pursuit of our duties we encounter a person in the country illegally, we will effect an arrest," Colon said. Period.

He said Border Patrol agents deliver those prisoners to ICE, which runs detention centers and also decides who should go into deportation proceedings. He said Border Patrol had nothing to do with that decision.

ICE spokesman Nestor Yglesias laid out the agency's policy.

"In order to better prioritize the agency's limited resources on targeting criminal aliens and those that put public safety at risk, ICE has issued guidance for ICE law enforcement personnel and attorneys regarding their authority to exercise discretion when appropriate," he said.

But nothing in Yglesias' statement or previous pronouncements by ICE says its agents will stop arresting undocumented people who are not in the mandatory detention categories targeted for deportation. ICE has long maintained that if its agents are pursuing criminal aliens and happen to run into other undocumented people along the way, those people could find themselves arrested as well.

Crackdown amid leniency

In a speech Oct. 5, Janet Napolitano, Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security - which oversees both ICE and the Border Patrol - spoke on the new Obama administration policy called "prosecutorial discretion ."

She described it as "a prioritization system that begins with finding and removing individuals who are criminals and repeat (immigration) offenders. At the same time, our officers have the legal responsibility to remove unlawful individuals from this country. They will do so according to our priorities. But they will do their jobs."

And they have. ICE announced this month that it had deported 396,000 people in fiscal year 2010-11, more than in recent years.

The newly announced, more lenient deportation policies on the one hand and the continuing crackdown on the other are just another example of Obama administration policies that are creating confusion and frustration in the immigrant community, advocates say.

Those policies also have left immigration attorneys suspicious about the administration's ability to enforce its will. In June, when the "prosecutorial discretion" policy was outlined in a memo from ICE Director John Morton, the union representing ICE agents accused the Obama administration of trying to gut U.S. immigration policy and issued a vote of no confidence in Morton.

Napolitano, who testified last week on Capitol Hill, was asked to address that delicate issue.

"There are troubling reports that there are ICE and CBP (Border Patrol) field offices which have announced that these new deportation priorities do not apply to them," said Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Illinois. "Is that true?"

In other words, was there mutiny in the ranks? Napolitano denied that, but even that the question was raised heightens the tensions around an emotional and divisive issue in American political life.

In her testimony last week, Napolitano told senators that implementation of the new policies is near. She said people in her department are on board and are collaborating with the Justice Department on ways to cut down the deportation lists and that in the next two to three weeks, pilot programs will begin in certain areas of the country to accomplish that. She didn't say where those areas are located.

Attorney not satisfied

Meanwhile, ICE said that while people are still being arrested, fewer noncriminals are spending much time in detention, because the large volume of targeted offenders is crowding them out. One ICE official, speaking off the record, said that of 700 people being held at the Transition Center in Pompano Beach - a much higher percentage are mandatory detention offenders than was true a year ago.

But that doesn't satisfy Luana's attorney, Sara Van Hofwegen, who doesn't understand how her client ended up in detention, given the new guidelines.

"The issue is why they were outside a cosmetology show at the convention center to begin with," Van Hofwegen said. She said an exhibition of beauty products and techniques is an unlikely place to look for dangerous individuals.

Little and other South Florida immigrant advocates recently wrote a letter to President Obama and Napolitano asking for changes in policy - including greater controls over who the Border Patrol arrests and the end of detention for anyone not in the mandatory detention categories. She said the combination of policies is mind-boggling.

"The left hand doesn't seem to know what the right hand is doing," she said.

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