#Americas millions of Mexicans without documents live in fear of deportation

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Americas millions of Mexicans without documents live in fear of deportation

Donald Trumps crackdown has been a terrifying bolt from the blue

The queue starts outside the consulate gate soon after dawn and stretches up Park View street. The visitors speak in low murmurs, exchanging the latest rumours. A dragnet in Glendale. Checkpoints in Highland Park. People deported for jaywalking. For speaking Spanish.

Some visitors say they have sold their furniture to create an emergency fund. Others wonder if they should stop going to work and pull their kids from school. Overreactions? Wise precautions? No one knows. Theyve come here for answers.

Inside the gate hulks a nondescript, cream-coloured office block. Lights flicker into life on a pale winter day and by 7am all is aglow: the consulate general of Mexico in Los Angeles is open for business. It is a lighthouse, of sorts, for undocumented Mexicans caught in the political maelstrom that is Hurricane Trump.

Im here to make a plan, said Juana Sanchez, 53, a seamstress who has stitched and sewed in LAs fashion district for 29 years. A plan for what? She managed a tight smile. Deportation. The immigration policies gusting out of the White House have chilled the USs estimated 11 million undocumented people, half of whom are Mexican. The new president has vastly widened the numbers deemed priorities for expulsion.

As we speak tonight we are removing gang members, drug dealers that threaten our communities and prey on our very innocent citizens, he told a joint session of Congress last week. Bad ones are going out as I speak and as I promised throughout the campaign.

The Mexicans who flock to the LA consulate say that in reality Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is sweeping up caretakers, students, mothers anyone who entered the US illegally, and is thus a law-breaker.

Trump is the worlds worst terrorist. He has the Latino community terrorised, said Rosa Palacios, a careworker with a nine-year-old granddaughter who weeps in fear at losing relatives. The hostility outdid previous anti-immigrant crackdowns, she said. It is worse than when they thought we were infected.

Manuel Selvas, 44, who earns $10 an hour unloading containers, said the president had uncorked prejudice. Before people were afraid to be racist in public but now they feel protected. People in the street had yelled at him to leave America, he said. They say were stealing jobs but Americans dont want to clean toilets or pick strawberries.

Mexicos government has warned of a new reality for Mexicans in the US and urged them to take precautions and get in touch with their nearest consulates, which will receive $50m in extra funding. The concern is humanitarian and economic remittances from the US topped $27bn last year, a lifeline that dwarfs oil revenues. Mexicos 50 US consulates are scrambling to meet the surge in demand for their services. A new 24-hour hotline is fielding thousands of calls daily.

With an estimated 1 million undocumented people, LA purportedly the second biggest Mexican city outside Mexico City is a crucible. The four-storey consulate that abuts MacArthur Park is certainly the biggest and probably busiest consulate. Visitors fill its halls and offices with nervous energy, seeking help and hope.

Sanchez, the seamstress, said she had never been in trouble with the law but feared being stopped on her way to or from work. I drive very carefully, so carefully, she said in Spanish. They can take you for any infraction. You have the fear of not knowing that if you leave your home, youll be back.

She sat at the end of a row of plastic chairs in a large room lined by lawyers cubicles the department of protection. Sanchez sought a deportation contingency plan: a checklist of what to say and not say if stopped, who to call, what to pack, if given the chance to pack. Im very grateful to this country. It has let me work. Ive been happy. I dont want to go to Mexico. But if I do go I want to be prepared.

Birth certificates, which many migrants lack, are crucial. Some used to consider them arcane, an irrelevance in the US, but now they feel vital, a key document to help keep them in the US or, if need be, start a new life in Mexico.

Edgar Perez, 35, a business student, sought Mexican passports for his two US citizen children lest he be expelled. It would make it easier for them to visit me. The tone was matter of fact but fear gnawed at him, he said. Its always on the news, every day, but I dont know whats going to happen.

Some compare detention by ICE to a malign rapture experience: youre going about your business then poof, sucked into a void. Who will pick up the kids from school? Feed the cat? Pay the electricity? Questions you can dwell on in a detention centre before being bussed south and herded across a walkway into Tijuana, Nogales, Juarez or some other border city.

The uncertainty is prompting people to scrimp and save, said Jos Guerrera, who sells coffee and snacks outside the consulate. Ive been doing this 16 years and never seen people so anxious. Theyre saving money for whatever may come.

Some trek to this gritty downtown neighbourhood of taco restaurants and discount stores, their signs in Spanish, hoping the consulate can help avert deportation. A Mexican birth certificate, for instance, can be used to obtain a California driving licence invaluable in a city where cars rule and driving without a licence can land you in jail.

Arianna Diaz, 25, sought help with her request for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca), an Obama-era programme that legalises so-called Dreamers immigrants who were brought to America illegally as children. Diaz, a would-be nurse, entered the US aged seven and grew up speaking English. She now has a husband, a toddler and a newborn, all US citizens, but felt vulnerable. Last month ICE agents deported Guadalupe Garca de Rayos, a young mother of US children, from Arizona.

I dont know Mexico. I have no family there, said Diaz. With all the bad things Ive heard, I dont want to go. Her three-month-old son had a heart condition requiring continuous care. The prospect of separation horrified her. No, no, no. Trump has said he has a soft spot for Dreamers, a vague statement to which Diaz clutches. Most of us are hardworking people. We call this our home.

The consulates website advises on what to do if detained phone someone as soon as possible, dont sign anything you dont understand and offers key phrases in English: I want to remain silent. I do not consent to a search. I am a Mexican citizen and I want to speak to my consulate. I want to speak to a lawyer. Having a lawyer, studies show, dramatically improves the chance of remaining in the US.

Civil rights groups give another tip: do not open the door to immigration agents unless they can show a judicial warrant through the window, or slip it under the door. Agents use ruses posing as regular police, pretending to be looking for someone else, implying a warrant of removal is a judicial warrant to gain access.

The consulates protection unit has 19 attorneys and legal advisers. When not giving advice they are visiting jails, swotting up on immigration law and monitoring social media for alerts about raids. Felipe Carrera, the units chief, said consuls had provided protection for decades, not least during the tenure of Barack Obama, who was dubbed the deporter-in-chief for expelling 2.5 million people.

The Trump eras challenge was how to empower people with information without fuelling panic, he said. The LAPD, for instance, has a policy of not facilitating deportations, but Trump has threatened to withdraw federal funding from so-called sanctuary cities. We dont want to be naive. The reality is changing, said Carrera.

Sifting fact from hype is tricky. ICE picked up 680 people across the US in a series of raids last month a routine sweep, said the agency. Trump, however, claimed it as part of his promised crackdown. Immigrant activists saw it that way too and said plenty of non-criminals were swept up.

Carlos Garca de Alba, the consul general, said similar raids happened before Trump. On TV you hear about massive raids but so far weve not seen that. In the future there could be but up to now, no.

The psychological impact was deep, however, and a panic psychosis inhibited some people from going to work or sending children to school, said the consul. In the current climate, Hispanics had legitimate reason to fear being targeted, he said. My concern is of racial profiling and people being pushed even more to the shadows.

Things looked very different a year ago. De Alba was finishing a stint as ambassador to Ireland and preparing to move to Mexicos embassy in the United Arab Emirates. Trump was leading the Republican primaries but few thought he could win the White House. Hillary Clinton was promising immigration reform and her appeal to Latino voters included comparing herself to a Latina abuela (grandmother).

Latinos in California had become the single biggest population group and wielded growing clout in city halls and the state assembly. The LA consulate enlisted the mayor, galleries and museums in a year-long celebration of Mexican art, culture, gastronomy and commerce. The initiative was called 2017: Year of Mexico in Los Angeles.

Then Trump stormed to victory. Instead of crowning a queen, Mexicans fell under a new kings heel. Instead of moving to the Arabian peninsula, De Alba, as part of a wide-ranging diplomatic shuffle, moved to LA to lead 250 staff. The year-long festival of Mexican culture is going ahead, showcasing writers, musicians and artists, but Mexican residents, documented and undocumented, are in grim mood. Troomp, as they pronounce his name, has shredded any sense of security at inhabiting a liberal, bilingual metropolis.

Its now a felony to pee in the street, said Arturo Arias, 45, a homeless man seated on a bench with two friends in MacArthur Park. Jaywalking too. Used to be you got a ticket. Now they can use it to kick you out.

Freddy Cazador, 77, nodded. Ive heard ICE is riding inside patrol cars.

Carlos Espiridion, 66, chimed in. If they stop you and you answer in Spanish theyll check your record, look for any excuse to deport you.

They referred to ICE, LAPD, sheriffs deputies and other law enforcement agencies. Their comments were based on inaccurate rumours. But the fear was real. It afflicted not just Arias, who is undocumented, but Espiridion, who has a green card. He felt that one slip, a minor infraction, could land him in Tijuana, shuffling in line with other deportees at a soup kitchen. Last month a former gardener leapt to his death near the border crossing hours after being deported.

On the edge of MacArthur Park, a landmark immortalised in the 1968 hit sung by Richard Harris, the queue outside the consulate dwindles as the day wears on. Visitors emerge clutching sheaves of documents and scatter across the city, back to jobs and homes.

The consulate sits in LAs heart. From here you can walk to city hall, the Walt Disney concert hall and Dodger stadium. Numerous allies the mayor, LAPD, civil society groups express desire to protect Mexicans. Hollywood too. Pleas for tolerance and diversity peppered the Oscars.

Few of the faces on stage were Latino, however, and it remains to be seen how hard LAs business, political and cultural elites will fight for a largely invisible underclass.

With Trump vowing more executive actions and a cranked-up deportation machine, it is left to the consulate and grassroots activists to respond case by case, day by day, a gruelling, bureaucratic slog where victories and defeats play out in private, away from the protest marches and cries of resistance.

It is about processing birth certificates and legalisation applications and visiting jails and detention centres and teaching marginalised people they have rights teaching them that if the knock comes it is OK not to open the door.

Bureaucracy behind the climate of fear

New guidelines announced last month expanded the number of undocumented immigrants who can be targeted for deportation and sped up the deportation process. Now any immigrant living in the US illegally who has been charged or convicted of a crime or suspected of one will be an enforcement priority. This could include people arrested for shoplifting or minor traffic offences.

Any undocumented immigrant who has been in the country for less than two years can also be targeted for expedited removal, which does not need to be authorised by a court.

The guidelines also called for thousands of extra federal agents to be hired, local law enforcement to be enlisted to expedite arrests, and more immigration judges deployed.

There were 11.1 million undocumented immigrants in the US in 2014 this has not changed since 2009 and it accounts for 3.5% of the US population.

5.8 million Mexicans were living as undocumented immigrants in 2014 52% of the total.

The number of Mexicans living as undocumented immigrants has fallen over recent years, while the number from other countries has grown by 325,000 between 2009 and 2014. People coming from Asia and central America account for most of this increase.

1 THE PARENTS

Jesus Hernandez, 31, senses the fear among colleagues every time he clocks in for work on one of LAs building sites. You see it on their faces. Theyre worried something will happen that there might be a raid.

For Hernandez and his partner, Berta Cervantes, 41, deportation could mean gut-wrenching separation from their three children, aged five, nine and 10. What can be worse? said Cervantes.

They came to the consulate to ask about certifying a guardianship letter for the childrens aunt, should they choose to keep them in the US. The children are US citizens.

They also wanted to apply for Mexican passports for the children to facilitate cross-border visits and perhaps integration, should they decide to move the children to Mexico, where they could be viewed as foreigners.

They speak Spanish but dont read or write it, said Hernandez. If they end up in a Mexican school we dont want them to feel lost, or fall behind. Obtaining passports now would mean one less bureaucratic headache.

2 THE LAWYER

Felipe Carrera. Photograph: Rory Carroll for the Observer

Felipe Carrera heads the consulates protection department, a 19-strong team of attorneys that advises and arranges documentation for documented and undocumented Mexicans in and around LA.

Were a kind of defence centre. Were trying for a balance between not causing panic and empowering the community with the information that it needs.

Mexicos US consulates have provided this protection service for decades but demand has spiked since Trump took power, prompting Mexicos government to pledge an extra $50m for the increased workload. Were hoping for more money and personnel, said Carrera.

The biggest threat was often not immigration raids but crooked notaries and scam artists who conned clients with fake, dangerous promises to fix peoples legal status, he said. People are being defrauded and losing their property and savings.

3 THE CONSUL

Carlos Garca De Alba. Photograph: Rory Carroll for the Observer

Carlos Garca de Alba, formerly Mexicos ambassador to Ireland, took over the consulate in Los Angeles last year in a diplomatic shuffling prompted by Trumps rise. The speed of developments here, its so fast, he said. It started even before the presidents inauguration.

An urbane Hibernophile steeped in Irish literature, De Albas job now includes tracking detentions of Mexicans by LA and US federal law enforcement agencies.

Despite headlines about mass deportations, numbers so far are normal but the executive orders had unleashed a panic psychosis, said the consul.

My concern is that racial profiling and fear will push people even further into the shadows. Parents are asking me if they should stop sending children to school. It means theyre really in fear. You cant do that to honest human beings. These people are hard workers, they pay taxes.

Berta Cervantes and Jesus Hernandez at Mexicos LA consulate. Photograph: Rory Carroll for the Observer

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from Americas millions of Mexicans without documents live in fear of deportation

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We must legalize marijuana to save our nation’s values

You smell that? Everybody’s heard of it. Pot, weed, reefer, gas, Mary Jane, doja or whatever you wanna call it, everybody has an opinion on marijuana. With countless medical benefits and with a majority of Americans supportive of its legalization, many wonder why it’s still illegal, or why it was even made illegal in the first place. And compared with other legal drugs, marijuana is very safe. While more and more Americans are wanting to spark up, the federal government continues to meander around the issue of legalizing marijuana. Still, cannabis consumption is taboo to many. So, throughout history, corrupt politicians have levied public ignorance to continue racial injustice across the United States. Marijuana should be legalized because of its harmlessness and must be legalized as a corrective measure for nearly a century of police targeting that has been detrimental to the economic success of communities of color.

Consider this, that morning cup of coffee you need so desperately to get your day started is more dangerous than marijuana, an illegal drug. Yes, more people have died from caffeine consumption than they have from smoking weed. Despite its harmlessness, the United States Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) considers marijuana a schedule one drug, and it remains illegal at the federal level. According to the DEA, marijuana poses a great risk to public safety because it has “no currently acceptable medical use” and because of the drug’s “high potential for abuse and dependency (1).” Essentially, schedule one drugs are considered to be the worst of the worst. This is a conundrum to many, as the medical benefits of marijuana are fairly well documented at this point. Studies show marijuana can assuage chronic pain, nausea and vomiting caused by chemotherapy, wasting syndrome associated with AIDS, and a plethora of other medical and psychological conditions (2). For some, marijuana is a life-saving drug. Take, for example, Charlotte Figi, a five-year-old living in Colorado suffering from a life-threatening form of epilepsy called Dravet Syndrome (3). Figi was having hundreds of seizures a month and the drugs she took to control her seizures were causing her body to deteriorate. Doctors told Figi’s family to prepare for her death. She couldn’t walk, talk, or eat on her own until she began taking medical marijuana, which reduced the number of seizures so significantly that she now lives a  fairly normal life. Charlotte Figi was lucky to live in a state with a medicinal marijuana program, if she were to live in the many states where it still is not legal, she may not have been so lucky.  Patients should have a right to all beneficial treatments, even those in states without medical marijuana programs, and it is a violation of human rights to deny them those treatments. Even though Figi lives in a state where medicinal marijuana is legal, the federal government could still crack-down on legal states for marijuana production (4).  According to the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. constitution, when state and federal laws are in conflict, federal law overrules state law. Under George W. Bush’s administration, the DEA shut down 30 to 40 medical dispensaries in California (5). Action against legal states has been considered by Trump’s presidency, so medical and recreational marijuana programs in legal states are still at risk.

As for recreational marijuana, many are still confused as to why it’s still illegal since it has far fewer adverse effects when compared to legal drugs like alcohol and nicotine. There have been no recorded overdoses on marijuana, unlike alcohol where roughly 6 people die a day from alcohol poisoning (6). Critics of marijuana legalization say we should keep it illegal because the long-term effects of regular marijuana consumption are still unknown. Americans are well aware of the negative long-term effects of alcohol and nicotine consumption, but those drugs remain legal and are still readily used. Many see it as a gateway drug that could lead to using hard drugs but that is far from the truth. Marijuana could actually assuage the opioid crisis afflicting many communities across the United States because instead of prescribing chemically addictive opioid painkillers (a gate-way for many opioid abusers), doctors could prescribe medical marijuana for pain, which is not chemically addictive (7). Many opposers to marijuana legalization also claim that legalizing marijuana puts young people at risk for cannabis abuse. However, all propositions to legalize marijuana include requirements of being at least 21 years of age to purchase recreational cannabis. As time has progressed, Tetrahydrocannabinol (the psychoactive component to marijuana) levels in marijuana have increased, which is a concern for some. As THC (Tetrahydrocannabinol) percentages in marijuana increase there are still no risks of overdose. Sure if you consume a lot of marijuana, whether it be from an edible or by smoking it, you may experience some discomfort but it will subside. With alcohol on the other hand, over drinking can have serious health consequences that could lead to death. Looking at marijuana’s history may provide some reasons as to why something so harmless has been so demonized.

The history of marijuana’s prohibition can be characterized by systemic racism and corruption. In America’s early colonies cannabis Sativa was farmed to make goods like rope and clothing, and before being made illegal, marijuana was an ingredient used in medicines and tinctures (8). This would all change after the Mexican Revolution of 1910 when Mexican immigrants introduced recreational marijuana to the United States. It quickly became popular in the Black Jazz community, but the government began cracking down on the drug to advance ulterior motives. In states like Texas, marijuana was used as an excuse to search and deport Mexican Immigrants. By the time the Great Depression rolled around, marijuana and Mexican immigrants were used as an excuse for the economic turmoil at the time, inducing public fear of marijuana even further. This led to many linking marijuana use to violence and crime committed by what they believed were "racially inferior" or underclass communities (9). In 1937, Congress passed the Marijuana Tax Act following a racist national campaign against weed. In congressional hearings, outrageous claims were made saying that marijuana caused men of color to become violent and solicit sex from white women. At the time Harry Anslinger, the first commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics led the racist campaign against marijuana. Anslinger fought for marijuana’s prohibition because he believed it caused African-American jazz musicians to create “satanic” music and that it “promotes interracial mixing, interracial relationships (10).” The obvious racist component to marijuana’s prohibition would become clearer in 1971 when President Nixon announced the War on Drugs, which disproportionately affected black and Latino communities. The war on drugs was used to target the anti-war left, or hippies that readily consumed marijuana and other psychedelics. Nixon’s administration was not shy about their intentions. In 1994, Nixon’s chief domestic advisor told Harper’s Magazine, “the Nixon White House had two enemies: the anti-war left and black people (11).” He continued to admit that by getting the public to associate marijuana with hippies and heroin with black people, they could disrupt those communities by arresting their leaders, raid their homes, and vilify them in the media. President Reagan continued the legacy of harsh drug laws when he signed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, and the Comprehensive Crime Control Act which raised federal penalties for marijuana possession and dealing. These laws established a “three strikes you’re out” policy, requiring life sentences for repeat drug offenders, and the death penalty for drug kingpins (12). In 1989, President George Bush would declare a new War on Drugs in a nationally televised speech. Bush’s War on Drugs perpetuated racist drug arrests, and gave more power to local and state police by equipping them with military-grade equipment for anti-drug operations (13).

The excessive racist policing of marijuana and other drugs coupled with policies of mandatory sentencing has led to the mass incarceration of people of color in the United States. Today the United States is the world’s leader in incarceration, with 2.2 million in the nation's prisons and jails. People of color make up 67% of the nation’s prison population despite only making up 37% percent of the U.S. population (14). Many people equate mass incarceration to modern slavery, as the U.S. prison population is readily used as a workforce but prisoners are not fairly compensated for their work. Incarcerated people assigned to work for state-owned businesses earn between 33 cents and $1.41 per hour on average. Nonviolent drug convictions are a defining characteristic of the federal prison system. According to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), 52% of drug arrests were for marijuana in 2010 (15). Although marijuana is legalized in some states, most states’ continued practice of arresting people for drug possession destabilizes individual lives and communities. An arrest for marijuana possession results in a criminal record, which prevents employment and increases the likelihood of longer sentences for future offenses. This issue disproportionality affects African-American communities where African-Americans are more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession, despite White Americans using the drug at the same rate. In some states, black Americans are 7.5-8.5 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession. Zero-tolerance policies in schools are also contributing to the issue, creating a school to prison pipeline scenario wherein many cases drug crimes committed on campus are handled by law enforcement instead of being handled within schools. Of course, young black men are disproportionately affected by these policies, furthering the racial disparity behind bars.  In the conversation of marijuana legalization and decriminalization, we must address the decades of racist drug policing and sentencing. Legalizing marijuana would help put an end to much of the racist policing that has been detrimental to communities of color for decades. Of course, it won’t correct the legacy of systemic racism, that is why we must expunge the records of those convicted with nonviolent drug crimes related to marijuana. Compensation for wrongfully serving time should also be considered, and so should putting money towards building up communities of color that have been impacted by racist policing. Of course, this money could be appropriated from a marijuana tax. Revenue generated from a marijuana tax could also be put towards a variety of issues afflicting our country, such as infrastructure or bettering our schools. When Colorado legalized marijuana, they had projected to make approximately 67 million in marijuana tax revenue in the first year and earmarked the first 40 million in revenue for school construction (16).

It is also important to note that policing marijuana is expensive. According to the ACLU, states spend 3.6 million dollars a year on policing marijuana. This is a waste of tax-payer money that could be spent in much more productive ways. Many Americans are still wary of marijuana legalization. Plenty of Americans believe marijuana legalization is a sign of the United States’ moral decline, for we’re taught that illegal equals amoral. Clearly, marijuana users are not amoral, but our racist justice system is. Instead of continuing to punish people for using marijuana, a harmless drug, our justice system should take responsibility for decades upon decades of injustice. Not only would legalizing marijuana help correct racial injustice but it also gives the United States an opportunity to reclaim its core values of individual liberties and personal freedoms that have been lost in all of this. Free citizens of the United States of America should have the right to decide what they can or can't put in their body. According to the U.S. Constitution, we have protections on personal property regarding concepts of privacy, making marijuana illegal is a direct contradiction to those values. We enter this world with one thing in our possession, one piece of personal property: our physical bodies. The United State’s boasts that it is the “land of the free,” and we should uphold and champion those values even on the issue of marijuana. And if we are all “created equal” our justice system should ensure that all Americans of all colors are treated equally in the eyes of the law. On the same token, marijuana too should be treated equally with other legal drugs under the law.

Bibliography:

1. “Drug Scheduling.” DEA, www.dea.gov/drug-scheduling.

2. Vasquez, Margie. Marijuana : Medical Uses, Regulations and Legal Issues. Nova Science Publishers, Inc, 2016. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=1226236&site=eds-live.

3. Goldstein, Margaret J. Legalizing Marijuana : Promises and Pitfalls. Twenty-First Century Books ™, 2016. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=1283710&site=eds-live.

4. “Amid Fears of Federal Marijuana Crackdown, State Attorney General Vows to ‘Defend the Will of Washington Voters.’” Spokesman-Review (Spokane, WA), 2017. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edsggo&AN=edsgcl.482347523&site=eds-live.

5. Trumble, Sarah, and Nathan Kasai. “The Past-and Future-of Federal Marijuana Enforcement – Third Way.” – Third Way, 12 May 2017, www.thirdway.org/memo/the-past-and-future-of-federal-marijuana-enforcement.

6. “Alcohol Poisoning Deaths.” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 6 Jan. 2015, www.cdc.gov/vitalsigns/alcohol-poisoning-deaths/index.html.

7. Lucas, Philippe, et al. “Medical Cannabis Patterns of Use and Substitution for Opioids & Other Pharmaceutical Drugs, Alcohol, Tobacco, and Illicit Substances; Results from a Cross-Sectional Survey of Authorized Patients.” Harm Reduction Journal, vol. 16, no. 1, 2019. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1186/s12954-019-0278-6.

8. McNearney, Allison. “The Complicated History of Cannabis in the US.” History.com, A&E Television Networks, 20 Apr. 2018, www.history.com/news/marijuana-criminalization-reefer-madness-history-flashback.

9. Coyne, Christopher, and Abigail Hall. “Four Decades and Counting: The Continued Failure of the War on Drugs.” Cato Institute, 12 Apr. 2017, www.cato.org/publications/policy-analysis/four-decades-counting-continued-failure-war-drugs.

10. Smith, Laura. “How a Racist Hate-Monger Masterminded America's War on Drugs.” Medium, Timeline, 28 Feb. 2018, timeline.com/harry-anslinger-racist-war-on-drugs-prison-industrial-complex-fb5cbc281189.

11. Baum, Dan. “[Report]: Legalize It All, by Dan Baum.” Harper's Magazine, 31 Mar. 2016, harpers.org/archive/2016/04/legalize-it-all/.

12. Fabens-Lassen, Ben. “A Cracked Remedy: The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 and Retroactive Application of the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010.” Temple Law Review, no. Issue 3, 2014, p. 645. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edshol&AN=edshol.hein.journals.temple87.25&site=eds-live.

13. Lee, Gary A. “Reno Criticizes Bush’s Approach to War on Drugs.” The Washington Post, 1993, p. A4. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edsbro&AN=edsbro.A13750288&site=eds-live.

14. “Criminal Justice Facts.” The Sentencing Project, 2019, www.sentencingproject.org/criminal-justice-facts/.

15. “Marijuana Arrests by the Numbers.” American Civil Liberties Union, 2019, www.aclu.org/gallery/marijuana-arrests-numbers

16. Coleman, Gerald D. “Is America Going to Pot?: We Need to Weed through the Pros and Cons of Marijuana Use before Rushing into a Decision on Its Legalization.” U.S. Catholic, vol. 79, no. 5, May 2014, pp. 23–27. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=reh&AN=CPLI0000585550&site=eds-live.

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New Post has been published on News Twitter

New Post has been published on http://www.news-twitter.com/2017/02/22/ny-times-major-elements-of-trumps-new-immigration-policies-9/

NY Times: Major Elements of Trump’s New Immigration Policies

The Trump administration has declared an end to the so-called catch and release policy, though it may take awhile to see any significant change. “Catch and release” came about in part because the government had nowhere to hold detainees waiting for immigration decisions. One of the memos released on Tuesday directs officials to expand detention facilities, but it will take time to build centers big enough, or find enough room in jails, to hold the thousands of Mexican and Central American asylum seekers expected to cross the border this year.

Continue reading the main story

The document also raises another alternative: sending migrants back to Mexico to wait out the immigration process, even those who are not originally from Mexico. That proposal comes with its own problems. Though United States law appears to allow it, Mexico’s laws do not, if the immigrant is not a Mexican citizen.

No judge required

Two decades ago, Congress passed a law allowing the government to quickly deport undocumented immigrants who have not been in the United States very long, without allowing them go before a judge.

In practice, the government has used this process, called “expedited removal,” relatively narrowly because of concerns about whether it violates constitutional rights of due process that are granted to anyone in the United States, regardless of immigration status. Since 2002, expedited removal has been applied only to immigrants who have been in the country less than two weeks and were caught within 100 miles of the border. That is because the Supreme Court has held that such immigrants can still be considered “in transit” and not here long enough to qualify for due process protections.

The Trump administration is now planning to use expedited removal as extensively as the original law allows, saying that limits on its use had contributed to a backlog of more than half a million cases in immigration court.

Immigration advocates vowed to challenge the change.

“Someone could be living in Chicago for a year and a half and then be swept off the street by an ICE agent,” said Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the A.C.L.U.’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, referring to Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. “He is going to be detained and removed right away without ever seeing a judge.”

Children traveling alone

One of the memos on Tuesday acknowledges that children who arrive at the border alone — “unaccompanied alien children,” in government parlance — are entitled to special protections: Unlike other border crossers, whom border patrol agents may deport without a legal hearing, these children must appear before an immigration judge and be interviewed by an asylum officer. Children have surged across the border in recent years, many fleeing violence and destitution in Central America.

But the memo turns a sterner face to their parents, who, under the new policy, may be subject to deportation or even prosecution for enabling their children to come into the country.

The memo notes that parents and relatives often pay smugglers several thousand dollars to bring their children from Central America, an act that the memo says amounts to facilitating illegal smuggling or trafficking.

Continue reading the main story

Immigration advocates are predicting that the policy will drive parents of migrant children further underground. With parents fearful of prosecution, advocates say, navigating the immigration process — or even showing up to court — could become much harder for these children.

Photo

A rally for immigrants’ rights in New York this month. Credit Bess Adler for The New York Times

‘Dreamers’

Some 750,000 people who were brought into the country as children were issued work permits and temporary protection from deportation under an Obama program known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA. Even President Trump said last week that the subject “is very, very difficult” for him and that he promised to “deal with DACA with heart.”

So far, the Trump administration has left the program alone. But chills went through the community of “Dreamers,” as DACA recipients are known, with the recent arrest of a 23-year-old Mexican immigrant in Washington State, Daniel Ramirez. Immigration agents arrested him when they went to his house to detain his father, a convicted drug trafficker. They said Mr. Ramirez admitted to having gang affiliations, which cancels the protection offered under DACA. But Mr. Ramirez denies having made the admission, and his lawyers are fighting his deportation.

Role of local police

A program known as 287(g), named for its section of the Immigration and Nationality Act, allows the Department of Homeland Security to train local and state law enforcement officers to work as de facto federal immigration officers, identifying undocumented immigrants in their communities and jails and turning them over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

From 2006 to 2013, the program led to 175,000 deportations, according to federal statistics. But investigations and court rulings revealed an ugly side effect: In some jurisdictions, local officers were using their authority to racially profile Latinos. One of the most egregious cases was in Maricopa County, Arizona’s most populous, during the tenure of Sheriff Joseph Arpaio, who a federal judge ruled had discriminated against Latinos in patrols and other enforcement efforts.

The Obama administration curtailed the use of the program, which currently involves 32 agencies in 16 states. The Trump administration wants more agencies to take part, and some have already expressed a desire to do so.

Statistics and sanctuaries

The administration is trying to significantly expand the amount of information available on the enforcement of immigration laws and, in particular, unauthorized immigrants who commit crimes. Immigration and Customs Enforcement will establish a new office to work with the victims of crimes committed by undocumented immigrants, some of whom appeared with Mr. Trump on the campaign trail.

The office, known as Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement, or Voice, will provide victims with information about defendants’ immigration status and whether they are in jail. Significantly, funding for the office comes from reallocating “any and all resources that are currently used to advocate on behalf of illegal aliens” by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

ICE will now have to provide monthly public reports on its apprehensions and releases. The agency also has to publish a weekly report about state and local authorities that release undocumented immigrants from jails. That is a clear shot across the bow at so-called sanctuary cities that limit their cooperation with federal immigration authorities, contending that turning in unauthorized immigrants would destroy the fragile relationship that the police have with immigrant communities.

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“We are going to continue our policy that has been in place because we think that it helps us have a safer, stronger, better community,” Mayor Stephanie A. Miner of Syracuse said on Tuesday.

The Trump administration is already pondering ways to punish those cities by denying them some federal aid.

“Now everyone is going to be able to see how many criminal aliens are being released as a result of the sanctuary policies,” said Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, which supports tighter controls on immigration.

No privacy

In January 2009, the departing Bush administration extended some Privacy Act rights, which American citizens and legal permanent residents already had, to undocumented immigrants. That meant that information obtained by one agency, like the Internal Revenue Service or Citizenship and Immigration Services, could not generally be shared with other agencies, like Immigration and Customs Enforcement. One rationale for the move was to protect the personal information of immigrants who might one day become citizens covered by the Privacy Act.

The Trump administration has now rescinded those privacy protections. One of the memos released on Tuesday said that those protections had been detrimental to the families of the victims of crimes committed by undocumented immigrants, because those families could not get information about such defendants’ legal status, or whether they had been deported, leaving victims “feeling marginalized and without a voice.”

The Department of Homeland Security said it would develop new rules on the sharing of undocumented immigrants’ private information. But advocates for unauthorized immigrants said they feared that immigrants who had applied for legal status — in the process divulging they were not here legally — were now in danger of having that information used to deport them.

“The constitution doesn’t traditionally allow bait and switches,” said Thomas A. Saenz, the president and general counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, an organization that advocates for immigrants. “These are folks who submitted their information attempting to play by the rules, with part of the rules being that the government would protect their privacy.”

Beefed-up force

The memos released on Tuesday repeat Mr. Trump’s demand in his executive order for a larger enforcement force that can speed up the removal of millions of undocumented immigrants from the United States.

In practice, that may play out more slowly than the president might prefer. The source of this caution is none other than John F. Kelly, the homeland security secretary, who told lawmakers this month that he did not believe it would be possible to hire the desired 15,000 ICE and border patrol agents in the next couple of years. “I’d rather have fewer and make sure that they’re high-quality people,” Mr. Kelly told lawmakers. “I will not skimp on the training and the standards.”

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On top of the stringent hiring standards and training, Border Patrol applicants are required to take a polygraph test, which nearly 60 percent fail. A previous surge in hiring under President George W. Bush resulted in dozens of corruption cases, with Border Patrol and other agents accused of taking bribes and providing information to Mexican drug cartels.

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[hollywoodjuliorivas]

A Former Farmworker on American Hypocrisy

In the pandemic, “illegal” workers are now deemed “essential” by the federal government.

By Alfredo Corchado

Mr. Corchado is the Mexico border correspondent for The Dallas Morning News.

May 6, 2020

ImageWorkers in Joe Del Bosque’s asparagus fields near Oro Loma, Calif., in April.

Workers in Joe Del Bosque’s asparagus fields near Oro Loma, Calif., in April.Credit...Max Whittaker for The New York Times

EL PASO — The other day, armed with a face mask, I was rushing through the aisles of an organic supermarket, sizing up the produce, squeezing the oranges and tomatoes, when a memory hit me.

Me — age 6 — stooping to pick these same fruits and vegetables in California’s San Joaquin Valley. I spent the spring weekends and scorching summers of my childhood in those fields, under the watchful eye of my parents. Once I was a teenager, I worked alongside them, my brothers and cousins, too, essential links in a supply chain that kept America fed, but always a step away from derision, detention and deportation.

Today, hundreds of thousands of immigrants from Mexico and Central America are doing that work. By the Department of Agriculture’s estimates, about half the country’s field hands — more than a million workers — are undocumented. Growers and labor contractors estimate that the real proportion is closer to 75 percent.

Suddenly, in the face of the coronavirus pandemic, these “illegal” workers have been deemed “essential” by the federal government.

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Tino, an undocumented worker from Oaxaca, Mexico, is hoeing asparagus on the same farm where my family once worked. He picks tomatoes in the summer and melons in the fall. He told me his employer has given him a letter — tucked inside his wallet, next to a picture of his family — assuring any who ask that he is “critical to the food supply chain.” The letter was sanctioned by the Department of Homeland Security, the same agency that has spent 17 years trying to deport him.

“I don’t feel this letter will stop la migra from deporting me,” Tino told me. “But it makes me feel I may have a chance in this country, even though Americans may change their minds tomorrow.”

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Farmworkers stacking and thinning the asparagus crop.

Farmworkers stacking and thinning the asparagus crop.Credit...Max Whittaker for The New York Times

True to form, America still wants it both ways. It wants to be fed. And it wants to demonize the undocumented immigrants who make that happen.

Recently, President Trump tweeted that he would “temporarily suspend immigration into the United States” — a threat consistent with the hit-the-immigrant-like-a-piñata policy he spearheaded in his 2016 campaign. Less than 24 hours later, the president backed down in the face of business groups fearful of losing access to foreign labor, announcing that he’d keep the guest worker program.

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In the past, the United States has rewarded immigrant soldiers who fought our wars with a path to citizenship. Today, the fields — along with the meatpacking plants, the delivery trucks and the grocery store shelves — are our front lines, and border security can’t be disconnected from food security.

It’s time to offer all essential workers a path to legalization.

It might seem hard to imagine this happening during the “Build the wall” presidency, when Congress can barely agree on emergency stimulus measures. Many Republicans no longer support even DACA, the program that protected Dreamers who grew up here and that could be revoked by the Supreme Court this week. But the pandemic scrambles our normal politics.

“We have started talking about essential workers as a category of superheroes,” said Andrew Selee, the president of the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute and author of “Vanishing Frontiers.” If the pandemic continues for a year or two, he said, we should think “in a bold way about how do we deal with essential workers who have put their life on the line for all of us but who don’t have legal documents.”

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The author, far right, age 9, with his mother, Herlinda, and, from left, brothers Juan, Frank and Mario, from left.

The author, far right, age 9, with his mother, Herlinda, and, from left, brothers Juan, Frank and Mario, from left.

Maybe, he said, “they should be in the pipeline for fast-track regularization, just like those with DACA” are, for now.

Of course, America has always been a fickle country. I learned that lesson as a crop-picking boy, when my aunt Esperanza, who ran the team of farmhands that included my mom, brothers and cousins, would yell: “Haganse arco.” Duck!

The workers without documents would stop hoeing and scramble. Run — if not for their lives, then almost certainly for their livelihoods. We’d watch as the vans of the Border Patrol came to a screeching halt, dust settling. The unlucky workers would make a beeline for the nearest ditch or canal. Some would simply drop to the ground, hoping for refuge amid the rows of sugar beets, tomatoes or cotton. Sometimes the agents gave chase. We’d always root for the prey.

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On more than one occasion, agents took my mom and my aunt Teresa, locking them in the cages in the back of the van, because they didn’t have their green cards on them. We’d race home and fetch the cards and make a mad dash to the immigration offices in Fresno some 60 miles away from our farm camp in Oro Loma, praying we’d make it before they could be deported.

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Workers planting rows of cantaloupes near Oro Loma.

Workers planting rows of cantaloupes near Oro Loma. Credit...Max Whittaker for The New York Times

We were desperate to prove they had every right to be out in those desolate fields, as if they were taking a dream job away from somebody else.

One time, Aunt Teresa looked genuinely disappointed at the sight of our smiling faces. She was ticked off she hadn’t been deported.

“I miss Mexico,” she said.

Sometimes, the night after such raids, a puzzling thing would take place. A labor contractor or farmer would drive up as we’d gather for dinner of beef, green chile and potato caldillo washed down with tortillas. He’d compliment us for the hard work we had put in that day. And then he’d ask: Did we know anyone who might want to come and work alongside us?

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Taking shelter during a lunch break.

Taking shelter during a lunch break.Credit...Max Whittaker for The New York Times

He meant more Mexicans.

The instructions were simple: Get the word out, spread the farmer’s plea back in our towns in Mexico because plenty of rain had fallen that winter and now it was summer and everything around us was ripe, aching for that human touch. The season looked promising. Plenty of crops to pick.

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Today not much has changed. The vulnerable — Dreamers working in health care; hotel maids; dairy and poultry plant workers; waiters, cooks and busboys in the $900 billion restaurant industry — still work to feed their families while feeling disposable, deportable by an ungrateful nation.

Tino, the farmworker in the San Joaquin Valley, is worried about the coronavirus. He wonders whether it’s best, after 17 years of hiding from immigration authorities, to return to Oaxaca, “where I’d rather die.”

But Tino’s dreams outweigh his fears. He wants the best for his family, including a son born in the United States, who’s looking at colleges in California. So, he continues in his $13.50-an-hour job.

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Credit...Max Whittaker for The New York Times

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Credit...Max Whittaker for The New York Times

He works for, among others, Joe L. Del Bosque of Del Bosque Farms, one of the largest organic melon growers in the country. Mr. Del Bosque employs about 300 people on hundreds of acres, and his fruits and vegetables are sold in just about every other organic supermarket across the country, including the place where I now shop in El Paso.

“Sadly, it’s taken a pandemic for Americans to realize that the food in their grocery stores, on their tables, is courtesy of mostly Mexican workers, the majority of them without documents,” Mr. Del Bosque told me. “They’re the most vulnerable of workers. They’re not hiding behind the pandemic waiting for a stimulus check.”

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Joe Del Bosque employs about 300 people on hundreds of acres.

Joe Del Bosque employs about 300 people on hundreds of acres.Credit...Max Whittaker for The New York Times

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Image

Fresh organic asparagus from Del Bosque Farms.

Fresh organic asparagus from Del Bosque Farms.Credit...Max Whittaker for The New York Times

Along with other farmers, he has been pleading with Congress for the past few years to legalize farmworkers, if not as part of comprehensive immigration reform, then as a bill focused on farmworkers, because “you need these workers today, tomorrow and for a long time.”

“With or without Covid,” he added, “we need to constantly replenish our work force to ensure food supplies.”

Some Democratic lawmakers, including Representative Veronica Escobar of El Paso, are pushing to include legalization in any updated coronavirus relief package. “The hypocrisy within America is that we want the fruits of their undocumented labor, but we want to give them nothing in return,” she said.

Even with unemployment projected to be 15 percent or higher, Mr. Del Bosque told me he doubts he’ll ever see a line of job-seeking Americans flocking to his fields. The rare few who have shown up at 5:30 a.m. don’t come back. Some, he said, give up the backbreaking work before their first lunch break.

He fears looming labor shortages. That’s not because of raids by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement resuming or a wall keeping workers out. He worries about a potential coronavirus outbreak, yes, but his most immediate concern is that his farmworkers are aging. Their average age is 40. My old school, Oro Loma Elementary School, which was once filled with Mexican children, closed down in 2010.

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The author at Oro Loma Elementary School.

The author at Oro Loma Elementary School.

The fields are simply running out of Mexicans as fewer men and women migrate each year, either because they’re finding better jobs in Mexico or because of demographics. The Mexican birthrate is down from 7.3 children per woman in the 1960s to 2.1 in 2018. Those who do come want higher-paying jobs in other industries.

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The best way to guarantee food security in the future is to legalize the current workers in order to keep them here, and to offer a pathway to legalization as an incentive for new agricultural workers to come. These people will be drawn not just from Mexico, but increasingly from Central and South America.

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Mr. Del Bosque’s farm has relied on Mexican workers since the 1950s.

Mr. Del Bosque’s farm has relied on Mexican workers since the 1950s.Credit...Max Whittaker for The New York Times

Del Bosque Farms have been dependent on Mexican workers since Mr. Del Bosque’s parents, also immigrants from Mexico, started hiring them in the 1950s under the Bracero Program, which began during World War II. The program issued some five million contracts to Mexicans, inviting them to come to the United States as guest workers to help fill labor shortages so Americans could fight overseas.

Hundreds of the workers who’ve toiled at Del Bosque Farms over the years have become legal residents, many more citizens, including my father, Juan Pablo.

For many years my father spent the springs and summers working in the United States, but every November he’d high-tail it back to his village in Mexico, where he played in a band called the Birds with his five brothers. He didn’t trust his American bosses to raise his pay, and always worried about the possibility of suddenly being deported, so he wouldn’t commit to them. The Texans especially, he thought, were prejudiced against Mexicans.

The boys from Mexico worked so hard, Texas ranchers argued during one of America’s cyclical anti-immigrant periods, that the hiring of Mexicans should not be considered a felony. Thus, the Texas Proviso was adopted in 1952, stating that employing unauthorized workers would not constitute “harboring or concealing” them. This helps explain why Americans call immigrants “illegal” but not the businesses that hire them.

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When the Bracero Program ended in 1964, amid accusations of mistreatment against Mexicans, my father thought he had enough of plowing rows on a tractor and digging ditches. He dreamed of running a grocery store in Mexico, raising his kids out where mountains embraced us. But he was such a hard worker that his boss couldn’t fathom the idea of losing him. So he helped my father get a green card for every member of his family, including me. Later he began working for the Del Bosques.

Without legalization, he would have left and probably never come back.

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During the pandemic, undocumented immigrant farmworkers in California are deemed essential.

During the pandemic, undocumented immigrant farmworkers in California are deemed essential.Credit...Max Whittaker for The New York Times

As a 6-year-old immigrant, I’d cry at night under the California stars, homesick for Mexico, for my friends and cousins. Then one night, as my mother tucked me into bed, she caressed my face. “Shhhh,” she whispered, “they’re all here now.” And she was right.

Today my siblings include a lawyer, an accountant, two truck drivers, a security guard, an educator and a prosthetics specialist. Cousins went off to fight wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, or to help run medical centers and corporations, including Walmart in Arkansas. Others still grind away in the fields of California and meatpacking plants of Colorado, work in nursing homes or clean the houses of the rich. Many of us make an annual pilgrimage to our home village in the Mexican desert. But we’re firmly planted here.

Without being thanked for it, we’re replenishing America.

Alfredo Corchado is the Mexico border correspondent for The Dallas Morning News and the author of “Midnight in Mexico" and “Homelands: Four Friends, Two Countries and the Fate of the Great Mexican-American Migration.”

[bountyofbeads]

Trump administration to expand its power to deport undocumented immigrants

https://wapo.st/2JIPHyi

Trump administration to expand its power to deport undocumented immigrants

By Maria Sacchetti | Published July 22 at 4:07 PM ET | WWashington Post | Posted July 22, 2019 |

The Trump administration on Tuesday will significantly expand its power to quickly deport undocumented immigrants who have illegally entered the United States within the past two years, using a fast-track deportation process that bypasses immigration judges.

Officials are calling the new strategy, which will take effect immediately, a “necessary response” to the influx of Central Americans and others at the southern border. It will allow immigration authorities to quickly remove immigrants from anywhere they encounter them across the United States, and they expect the approach will help alleviate the nation’s immigration-court backlog and free up space in Immigration and Customs Enforcement jails.

The stated targets of the change are people who sneaked into the United States and do not have an asylum case or immigration-court date pending. Previously, the administration’s policy for “expedited removal” had been limited to migrants caught within 100 miles of the U.S. border who had been in the country for less than two weeks. The new rule would apply to immigrants anywhere in the United States who have been in the country for less than two years — adhering to a time limit included in the 1996 federal law that authorized the expedited process.

Immigrants apprehended in Iowa, Nebraska or other inland states would have to prove to immigration officials that they have been in the United States continuously for the past two years, or they could end up in an immigration jail facing quick deportation. And it could be relatively low-level immigration officers — not officers of a court — making the decisions.

President Trump has promised to deport millions of immigrants and has threatened enforcement raids targeting those in as many as 10 major cities.

Nearly 300,000 of the approximately 11 million unauthorized immigrants in the United States could be subject to expedited removal, according to the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute. The typical undocumented immigrant has lived in the United States for 15 years, according to the Pew Research Center.

Though border apprehensions have fallen in June and July as the Trump administration and Mexico have intensified their crackdown on the southern border, acting Department of Homeland Security chief Kevin McAleenan said in a draft notice Monday that “the implementation of additional measures is a necessary response to the ongoing immigration crisis.” He said the new rule would take effect immediately upon publication in the Federal Register, which is scheduled for Tuesday.

“DHS has determined that the volume of illegal entries, and the attendant risks to national security and public safety presented by these illegal entries, warrants this immediate implementation of DHS’s full statutory authority over expedited removal,” McAleenan said in the notice. “DHS expects that the full use of expedited removal statutory authority will strengthen national security, diminish the number of illegal entries, and otherwise ensure the prompt removal of aliens apprehended in the United States.”

Immigration lawyers said that the expansion is unprecedented and effectively gives U.S. agents the power to issue deportation orders without bringing immigrants before a judge or allowing them to speak with a lawyer.

“Under this unlawful plan, immigrants who have lived here for years would be deported with less due process than people get in traffic court,” Omar Jadwat, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, said in a statement. “We will sue to end this policy quickly.”

Royce Bernstein Murray of the American Immigration Council also vowed to challenge the policy in court, arguing that the broadened authority allows DHS “to essentially be both prosecutor and judge.”

Immigrants’ advocates warned that the policy could ensnare longtime legal residents or even U.S. citizens who have been deported in error before. Vanita Gupta, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, said she fears the rule will lead to increased racial profiling and turn ICE into a “show-me-your-papers militia.”

“This new directive flows directly from the racist rhetoric that the president has been using for the last week and indeed months, but this new rule is going to terrorize communities of color,” said Gupta, who was head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division under President Barack Obama. “It really reads as a send-them-all-back policy,” she added, referring to the audience’s “Send her back!” chants at a Trump rally last week in response to the president’s attacks on a Somali-born Muslim congresswoman, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.).

David Leopold, a Cleveland immigration lawyer and former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said expanding the expedited-removal program shifts the decision-making to immigration officers who might not have much experience with such a policy and means that many immigrants who might have the right to remain in the country will not be given the opportunity to show it.

“That is going to apply to a huge swath of people,” he said, noting that the rule requires migrants to prove that they have been in the United States for years — a particularly difficult onus when they, by definition, lack legal immigration documents. “My view is: How are they going to prove it? The burden is on them to prove it. If I can’t prove it, I’m done.”

ICE, which enforces immigration law and makes arrests across the United States, estimates that “a significant number” of undocumented immigrants would be eligible for expedited removal, including at least 20,500 migrants the agency apprehended last fiscal year and more than 6,400 it arrested this year, as of March 30.

McAleenan, in the federal notice, made reference to the Trump administration’s recent efforts to deter migration to the United States on many fronts, an approach that has included pushing asylum claimants back into Mexico to await court hearings, stepped up Mexican enforcement against migrants as they head north, and the threat of ICE raids on families who have final removal orders. McAleenan wrote that the new rule “will reduce incentives” for migrants to enter the United States and swiftly move away from the border to avoid the faster deportation process.

DHS said it has anecdotal evidence that many immigrants smuggled into the United States hide in “safe houses” far from the southern border to avoid the threat of expedited removal. This year officials said 67 undocumented immigrants were found in a safe house in Roswell, N.M., — just beyond 100 miles from the Mexican border — and the year before they found three others, held for ransom, at a house in San Antonio, about 150 miles from the border.

Federal officials said they could make exceptions for people with serious medical conditions or “substantial connections” to the United States, and they said deportation is not necessarily immediate. Officials said they have safeguards in place for migrants who might be U.S. citizens or legal residents.

Asylum officers will interview immigrants who fear returning to their home countries, to determine whether they qualify for asylum or another form of protection, and they potentially could refer them to full deportation proceedings. Unaccompanied minors from non-neighboring countries are not eligible for speedy deportations under federal law.

E xpedited removals stem from a 1996 law, signed by President Bill Clinton, that authorized the use of expedited deportations for undocumented immigrants apprehended anywhere in the country who could not prove they had been physically present in the country two years before their apprehension.

In practice, enforcement was far more limited, at first applying to migrants arriving at a port of entry or by sea. In 2004, President George W. Bush expanded expedited removals along the U.S.-Mexico border, allowing for the swift expulsion of immigrants caught within 100 miles of the border who had lived in the country fewer than 14 days. The Bush administration said issuing removal orders bars migrants from reentering the United States and makes it easier to pursue criminal charges against them if they try.

Expedited deportations soared from about 50,000 immigrants in 2004 to 193,000 in 2013, about 44 percent of the total number of people deported that year, according to the American Immigration Council.

Trump sought to expand expedited deportations days after he took office as one of multiple strategies to crack down on illegal immigration at a time when the immigration-court backlog hovered at about 600,000 cases. The plan never materialized, and illegal border crossings sank in the months after he assumed the presidency.

But apprehensions soared during the past year as migrant families from Central America sought refuge in the United States; they often are quickly released to await court hearings because of limits on how long the United States can detain children.

Since then, the immigration-court caseload has spiked to more than 900,000 cases, and ICE has more than 50,000 migrants in custody each day, a record.

In the notice, McAleenan said expedited removal will relieve pressure on detention centers and the courts. He said the courts had fewer than 168,000 cases at the end of fiscal 2004, when DHS expanded expedited removal along the southern border.

Migrants in expedited proceedings spend an average of just more than 11 days in immigration jails, while detainees awaiting “time-consuming” court hearings spend almost 52 days in jail, McAleenan said.

“DHS expects that the New Designation will help mitigate additional backlogs in the immigration courts and will reduce the significant costs to the government associated with full removal proceedings before an immigration judge, including the costs of a longer detention period and government representation in those proceedings,” McAleenan said in the notice.

The Trump administration says the notice is exempt from the Administrative Procedure Act’s public comment requirements, but DHS is seeking comments on the change even though it is slated to take effect immediately upon posting.

[rightsinexile]

Case Notes

Grace v. Whitaker: Judge blocks US asylum rules for domestic, gang abuse survivors

This piece was written by Nidia Bautista and originally published by Al Jazeera on 19 December 2018. The original article publication can be found here. The opinion in its entirety can be found here.

A US federal judge on Wednesday struck down the policies put in place by former Attorney General Jeff Sessions that made it harder for individuals fleeing domestic and gang violence to obtain asylum.

Last June, Sessions reversed precedent put forth by the Obama administration that allowed more individuals to cite domestic violence and fears of gang violence as part of their asylum application. Sessions argued that "the mere fact that a country may have problems effectively policing certain crimes - such as domestic violence or gang violence - or that certain populations are more likely to be victims of crime cannot itself establish an asylum claim."

On Wednesday, Judge Emmet Sullivan found the policies "arbitrary, capricious and in violation of the immigration law". Sullivan also ordered federal officials to return plaintiffs who were deported and provide them with new credible fear determinations "consistent with the immigration law."

The decision was the result of a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) on behalf of a dozen asylum seekers, including children, who had their asylum claims rejected after their "credible fear" screenings by asylum offices, an initial step in the asylum process where officers determine whether asylum-seekers have a well-founded fear of persecution.

Plaintiffs in the ACLU case were placed in removal proceedings without a hearing, according to the ACLU. That included an indigenous woman named Grace, who fled Guatemala after enduring 20 years of rape and beatings by a partner.

Judge Sullivan permanently blocked the government "from continuing to apply those practices and from removing plaintiffs who are currently in the United States without first providing credible fear determinations consistent with the immigration laws."

In the Mexican border city of Tijuana, where thousands of Central American migrants and refugees have been living in different shelters after arriving last month as part of a collective exodus, migrants, including Xiomara Ramirez Hernandez, hope the decision will help their chances of getting asylum in the coming months. Up until today Hernandez, 52, from San Salvador, El Salvador, didn't think she had a good chance of obtaining asylum. She's staying in Tijuana's El Barretal shelter, along with more than 3,000 other migrants and refugees, and has been in the border city for a month now. On October 18 of this year, she was ordered to leave San Salvador within 24 hours by a member of the Barrio 18 gang, a known rival of the MS 13 gang.

The threat came after Hernandez found out her 22-year-old daughter was found beaten and naked in an empty lot in the capital city. She had been attacked, raped and left for dead by a member of Barrio 18. Hernandez approached San Salvador's attorney general's office to report the crime. Within days the perpetrator showed up at her door and gave her an ultimatum: leave the city or stay and be killed.

She joined the migrant caravan to escape the threats. On Wednesday morning, Hernandez was thinking about leaving Tijuana and travelling to Ciudad Juarez to look for work. But Judge Sullivan's decision might mean a change of plans. "If I have the chance to present my asylum claims, I'm going to, absolutely," she told Al Jazeera. "I won't survive back in my country."

Human rights advocates and lawyers slammed Sessions's decision earlier this year as a violation of women's human rights. Gender violence is a widespread issue in Central America and at least 50 percent of women experience domestic violence in the region. UN Women has said that domestic violence represents only the beginning of a number of violent acts that could culminate in femicide. An estimated 387 women were killed in Honduras in 2017 while every 18 hours a woman was killed in El Salvador that year.   The Justice Department said it was still deciding whether it would appeal the decision.

How far reaching is the impact of Grace v. Whitaker?

This case note was written by Jeffrey Chase, and originally published on 24 December 2018. It is reprinted here with the author’s permission, all rights reserved.

Six months after a significant number of US immigration judges cheered a decision intended to revoke the hard-earned right of domestic violence victims to asylum protection, immigration advocates had their chance to cheer last week’s decision of US District Court Judge Emmet G. Sullivan in Grace v. Whitaker. The 107-page decision blocks USCIS from applying the standards set forth in a policy memo to its asylum officers implementing the decision of former Attorney General Jeff Sessions in Matter of A-B-. Judge Sullivan concluded that “it is the will of Congress - and not the whims of the Executive - that determines the standard for expedited removal,” and therefore concluded that the policy changes contained in the USCIS memo were unlawful. In his decision in Matter of A-B-, Sessions stated that “generally, claims … pertaining to domestic violence or gang violence will not qualify for asylum.” In a footnote, Sessions added “accordingly, few such claims would satisfy the legal standard to determine whether an [asylum applicant] has a credible fear of persecution.” Read properly, neither of those statements are binding; they are dicta, reflecting Sessions’ aspirations as to how he would like his decision to be applied in his version of an ideal world. However, both the BIA and the author of the USCIS policy memo forming the basis of the Grace decision drank the Kool-Aid. The BIA almost immediately began dismissing domestic violence cases without the required individualized legal analysis. And USCIS, in its memo to asylum officers, stated that in light of A-B-, “few gang-based or domestic violence claims involving particular social groups defined by the members’ vulnerability to harm may … pass the ‘significant probability’ test in credible fear screenings.” If one reads Matter of A-B- carefully, meaning if one dismisses the more troubling language as non-binding dicta, its only real change to existing law is to vacate the precedent decision in Matter of A-R-C-G- which had recognized victims of domestic violence as refugees based on their particular social group membership. A proper reading of A-B- still allows such cases to be granted, but now means that the whole argument must be reformulated from scratch at each hearing, requiring lengthy, detailed testimony of not only the asylum applicant, but of country experts, sociologists, and others. Legal theories already stipulated to and memorialized in A-R-C-G- must be repeated in each case. Such Sisyphean approach seems ill suited to the current million-case backlog. However, the BIA and the USCIS memo chose to apply Sessions’ dicta as binding case law, an approach that did in fact constitute a change in the existing legal standard. When the Department of Justice argued to the contrary in Grace, Judge Sullivan called shenanigans, as USCIS’s actual application of the decision’s dicta to credible fear determinations harmed asylum applicants in a very “life or death” way. The judge also reminded the DOJ of a few really basic, obvious points that it once knew but seems to have forgotten in recent years, namely (1) that the intent of Congress in enacting our asylum laws was to bring our country into compliance with the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees; (2) that the UNHCR’s guidelines for interpreting the 1951 Convention are useful interpretive tools that should be consulted in interpreting our asylum laws, and (3) that UNHCR has always called for an expansive application of “particular social group.” Judge Sullivan further found that as applied by USCIS, the should-be dicta from A-B- constitutes an “arbitrary and capricious” shift in our asylum laws, as it calls for a categorical denial of domestic violence and gang-based claims in place of the fact-based, individualized analysis our asylum law has always required. How far reaching is the Grace decision? We know that the decision is binding on USCIS asylum officers, who actually conduct the credible fear interviews. But is the decision further binding on either immigration judges or judges sitting on the Board of Immigration Appeals? USCIS of course is part of the Department of Homeland Security. Immigration judges and BIA members are employees of EOIR, which is part of the Department of Justice. Its judges are bound by precedent decisions of the Attorney General, whose decisions may only be appealed to the Circuit Courts of Appeal. However, the credible fear process may only be reviewed by the US District Court for the District of Columbia, and only as to whether a written policy directive or procedure issued under the authority of the Attorney General is unconstitutional or otherwise in violation of law. This is how Grace ended up before Judge Sullivan. The BIA and Immigration Judges generally maintain that they are not bound by decisions of district courts. Despite these differences, the credible fear interviews conducted by USCIS are necessarily linked to the immigration court hearings of EOIR. An asylum officer with USCIS recently described the credible fear interview process to me as “pre-screening asylum cases for the immigration judge.” The credible fear process accounts for the fact that that the applicant has not had time yet to consult with a lawyer or gather documents, might be frightened, and likely doesn’t know the legal standard. But the purpose of the credible fear interview is to allow the asylum officer to gather enough information from the applicant to determine if, given the time to fully prepare the claim and the assistance of counsel, there is a significant possibility that the applicant could file a successful claim before the immigration judge. The credible fear standard has always been intended to be a low threshold for those seeking asylum. Before A-B-, a victim of domestic violence was extremely likely to meet such standard. The USCIS memo reversed this, directing asylum officers to categorically deny such claims. But now, pursuant to Grace, USCIS must go back to approving these cases under the pre-A-B- legal standard. When an asylum officer finds that the credible fear standard has not been met, the only review is before an immigration judge in a credible fear review hearing. Although, as stated above, EOIR generally argues that it is not bound by district court decisions, its immigration judges would seem to be bound by the Grace decision in credible fear review hearings. Congress provided the district court the authority to determine that a written policy directive of the AG (which was implemented by the USCIS written policy memo) relating to the credible fear process was in violation of law, and Judge Sullivan did just that. Even were EOIR to determine that the decision applies only to USCIS, the IJ’s role in the credible fear review hearing is to determine if USCIS erred in finding no credible fear. If USCIS is bound by Grace, it would seem that IJs must reverse an asylum officer’s decision that runs contrary to the requirements of Grace. But since the credible fear standard is based entirely on the likelihood of the asylum application being granted in a full hearing before an immigration judge, can EOIR successfully argue that its judges must apply Grace to conclude that yes, a domestic violence claim has a significant chance of being granted at a hearing in which the IJ will ignore the dicta of A-B-, find that the only real impact of the decision was that it vacated A-R-C-G-, and will thus apply an individualized analysis to an expansive interpretation of particular social group (with reference to UNHCR’s guidelines as an interpretive tool)? And then, once the case is actually before the court, ignore Grace, and apply what appears to the be BIA’s present approach of categorically denying such claims? Many immigration judges are presently struggling to understand Matter of A-B-. The decision was issued on the afternoon of the first day of the IJ’s annual training conference. This year’s conference was very short on legal analysis, as the present administration doesn’t view immigration judges as independent and neutral adjudicators. But the judges tapped for the asylum law panel had to throw away the presentation they had spent months planning and instead wing a program on the A-B- decision that they had only first seen the prior afternoon. Needless to say, the training was not very useful in examining the nuances of the decision. As a result, fair-minded judges are honestly unsure at present if they are still able to grant domestic violence claims. Of course, a decision of a circuit court on a direct challenge to A-B- would provide clarification. However, A-B- itself is presently back before the BIA and unlikely to be decided anytime soon. I am aware of only one case involving the issue that has reached the circuit court level, and it is still early in the appeal process. My guess is that EOIR will issue no guidance nor conduct specialized training for its judges on applying A-B- in light of the Grace decision. Nor will the BIA issue a new precedent providing detailed analysis to determine that a domestic violence claimant satisfied all of the requirements set out in A-B- and is thus entitled to asylum. A heartfelt thanks to the team of outstanding attorneys at the ACLU and the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies for their heroic efforts in bringing this successful challenge.

New guidance requires fair process for process for domestic violence, gang asylum claims at the US border

The following was released by the Centre for Gender & Refugee Studies at the University of California-Hastings on 14 January 2019. The guidance for both EOIR and USCIS can be found here.

The Centre for Gender & Refugee Studies (CGRS) is pleased to share the government’s new guidance for asylum cases which clarifies that there is no blanket rule against claims involving applicants fleeing domestic violence and gang violence. The guidance was issued in accordance with US District Court Judge Emmet Sullivan’s recent ruling in Grace v. Whitaker. The Grace lawsuit, filed by CGRS and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) last summer, challenged the implementation of former Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ Matter of A-B- decision in credible fear proceedings. Under US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) guidance issued after A-B-, many asylum officers and immigration judges had been rejecting survivors of domestic violence and gang violence at this initial screening stage, returning countless asylum seekers to the risk of life-threatening harm. In his December decision Judge Sullivan ruled that key legal interpretations in Matter of A-B- and related USCIS policy memos were arbitrary, capricious, and unlawful. He granted our request for a permanent injunction, blocking asylum officers and immigration judges conducting credible fear interviews and review hearings from implementing them. Notably, Judge Sullivan ruled that each case must be considered on its own facts, and that there can be no general rule against asylum claims based on domestic violence and gang violence in the credible fear screening process. He also rejected the government’s attempt to impose a heightened legal standard in cases involving violence perpetrated by non-government actors, such as intimate partners and members of criminal organizations. The new guidance brings the government into compliance with the Court’s order and requires that asylum officers and immigration judges provide a fair process for asylum seekers in credible fear proceedings, including those presenting themselves at our southern border. CGRS encourages advocates representing individuals at all stages of the asylum process to review the new guidance closely and to contact CGRS for our most up-to-date litigation resources and practice pointers.

Rayamajhi v. Whitaker: No de minimus funds exception to the material support bar

This note is in regards to the Rayamajhi opinion released by the court on 15 January 2019.

The panel dismissed in part and denied in part a petition for review of Board of Immigration Appeals’ denial of asylum and withholding of removal to a citizen of Nepal under the material support terrorist bar. The panel held that petitioner’s argument for a duress exception to the material support bar is foreclosed by Annachamy v. Holder, 733 F.3d 254 (9th Cir. 2013), overruled in part on other grounds by Abdisalan v. Holder, 774 F.3d 517 (9th Cir. 2015) (en banc), and therefore does not constitute a colorable legal or constitutional question providing jurisdiction over the otherwise unreviewable material support determination. The panel held that there is no de minimis funds exception to the material support bar. The panel explained that the plain text of the statute, 8 U.S.C. § 1182(a)(3)(B)(iv)(VI), states that funds knowingly given to a terrorist organization are material support, regardless of the amount given. The panel further held that even if the statute is ambiguous on this point, the Board’s interpretation in In re A-C-M-, 27 I. & N. Dec. 303 (B.I.A. 2018), that there is no de minimis exception, was based on a permissible construction of the statute, and therefore is entitled to Chevron deference.

[newstfionline]

What America Looks Like From a Jail in South Texas

By Jose Antonio Vargas, NY Times, Sept. 15, 2018

Of all the ways I imagined the inevitable--being arrested, getting detained--I never envisioned sitting on the cold cement floor of a jail cell in South Texas surrounded by children.

It was July 2014. The cell, as I remember it, was no bigger than 20 by 30 feet. All around me were about 25 boys, as young as 5, the oldest no more than 12. The air reeked. A boy across the room from me was crying inconsolably, his head buried in his chest. Most of the boys wore dazed expressions. It was clear they had no idea where they were or why they were there.

The only source of entertainment came from Mylar blankets, flimsy metallic sheets that were supposed to keep us warm. Three boys played with a blanket as if it were a toy, crunching it up into a ball, passing it back and forth.

A window faced a central area where a dozen or so patrol agents were stationed, but there was not much to look at. All I could do was stare at the boys’ shoes. My shoes were shiny and brand new; theirs, dirty, muddy and worn down. The only thing our shoes had in common was that none of them had laces.

“Jose Antonio Vargas,” said an agent as he walked in. “I don’t need you. Not yet. But we’re gonna move you.”

The moment the agent said my name, one of the boys playing with the blanket started speaking to me. I had no idea what he was saying. The one word I could make out was “miedo.” Something about “miedo.”

If I spoke Spanish, I could have told the boys the story I kept secret for years, a story that I’m now asked to tell almost every day: I was born in the Philippines, a country whose history is characterized as being “300 years in the convent, 50 years in Hollywood.” When I was 12, my mother put me on a plane to California to go live with her parents. When I was 16, while applying for a driver’s permit, I discovered that the documents my grandfather had given me were fake, that I did not have legal documents to be in this country.

Which is why, in 2014, a Border Patrol agent at the airport in McAllen arrested me the moment I told him I was here illegally.

If I spoke Spanish, I could have told the boys about the country they had arrived and been detained in, a country I’ve lived in for more than 20 years, the country I did not ask to come to but where I have been educated, where I have worked since I was a teenager, where my grandparents and other relatives immigrated with documentation but where I have found myself stranded without a way to “get legal.”

This is a country that prides itself as one founded and built by immigrants, but also one whose laws and policies have historically been anti-immigrant. Ask the Chinese. Talk to the Irish.

This is a country that depends on immigrant labor, often cheap labor, especially from undocumented workers, while spending billions of dollars a year detaining, incarcerating and deporting people the government deems “illegal.” Undocumented workers like me pay taxes into this very system. This is a country of welcome, where people like me have been befriended, supported, even nurtured by American citizens of all racial, economic and political backgrounds, and it is a country whose citizens continue to vote for local and national officials who uphold and enact an inhumane immigration enforcement machine that locks up children.

If I spoke Spanish, I could have told the boys that none of this was their fault. I could have explained, in the clearest, most accessible way I could, the connection between the irreversible actions of the United States of America and the inevitable reactions in their countries of birth. How a trade agreement, like the North American Free Trade Agreement, drove millions of Mexicans out of jobs and led parents to cross borders so they could feed their kids. How decades of interventionist policies by both Republicans and Democrats brought economic and political instability to and sowed violence in El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.

How people like us come to America because America, from its people, its politics and its products, were and are very much already in our countries.

I don’t understand much Spanish. The most Spanish thing about me is my name. My name is Jose because of Spanish colonialism. But my Jose isn’t José. (After the Americans forced the Spanish out of the Philippines, their typewriters couldn’t type accented vowels.)

So in that cell that night, I told the young boy holding the crunched-up blanket, “No hablo español.”

Quickly, I added, “Soy Filipino.”

I am Filipino, a declaration that seemed to cause him more confusion. I’m not sure he heard me when I said, almost in a whisper, like a prayer, “Pepeton ang pangalan ko.” My name is Pepeton.

It’s my nickname, combining the nicknames of Jose (Pepe) and Antonio (Ton). It’s the name of my past--what my mother and everyone in the Philippines who knows me calls me.

It’s the name I’ve avoided so I could construct a different kind of identity, not the “illegal” you see and hear about in the news, but the journalist who reports the news and became a writer so I could see my name on a piece of paper. But inside that cell, there was no place to hide, nothing to run away from, no role to play.

After I was handcuffed at the airport, I was driven alone in a white van. Upon my arrival, two agents took everything I had: my phone, my wallet, my backpack, my luggage. I was asked to take off my leather belt and the laces in my shoes. When I asked why, one of the agents answered, “We don’t want you hurting yourself.”

I wanted to laugh. I’ve always used laughter to conceal my emotions; here, to distance and detach myself from the absurdity of this ordeal. Is this really about who has the right papers and what the laws are? Is this really about who is a citizen or not? Are we talking about the same citizenship that many Americans callously take for granted?

I asked one of the guards if he spoke Spanish. He did.

“What’s ‘miedo’?”

“Fear,” he said. “It means fear.”

Sitting on the floor, I kept thinking of the boys’ parents, the fear they must have felt knowing that they needed to do what they needed to do. I also kept thinking of my mother, wondering as I had so many times over all these years what she told herself as she said goodbye to me at the airport 25 years ago.

My mother and I haven’t seen each other in person since 1993, but we do sometimes talk by phone or chat. We rarely talk about what happened on the day we separated, though. Sometimes I will ask about a fact here or there. What was I wearing? What was she wearing? What were her last words to me? But we never talk about how we felt, what we lost, what it means.

The truth is, if my mother had known then what she knows now--that calling her on the phone is difficult, because I can’t really pretend that I know the voice on the other end of the line, that seeing her on Skype or FaceTime feels like some sort of twisted joke, that the technology that easily connects us makes the divide even more acute--I’m not sure if she would have said goodbye at the airport. On one of our rare phone calls she said, “I look at you, now, the person you’ve become, and how can I have any regrets.” I’m sure she meant it as a statement, but it sounded like a question.

I am not entirely sure who I have become.

What I am sure of is that at every complicated and complicating juncture of my life in America--getting to college, getting a job, getting a driver’s license so I could have a valid proof of identification so I could get a job, keeping the job--a stranger who did not remain a stranger helped me out.

After telling me that my green card was fake, the curly-haired, bespectacled woman at the Department of Motor Vehicles could have called immigration officials.

After finding out that I was ineligible for financial aid because I don’t have any legal papers, the administrators at Mountain View High School didn’t need to help me. I didn’t even ask them for help, because I didn’t know how to. But they offered help, even when I didn’t know what kind of help I needed, even when they didn’t know what they were doing.

After I confessed about my fake papers, the doctored Social Security card, the driver’s license I wasn’t supposed to have, the senior newsroom personnel at The Washington Post, where I worked as a reporter, could have dragged me to the office of human resources and gotten me fired.

Sitting on the floor, all alone in the cell, I couldn’t stop thinking about the boys’ futures. I wondered if, when and how they would get out. If they got to stay, who would welcome them to this country, and how they would be welcomed? I wanted to tell them not to be scared, that they would survive whatever they would have to survive. I wanted to tell them that the American people are capable of being better than their laws. I wanted to tell them, “No miedo.”

Jose Antonio Vargas (@joseiswriting) is the author of the forthcoming “Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen,” from which this essay is adapted.

[toyanjohnposts-blog]

Anti- Immigration: Today’s     Devastation

Some of the most hard working people I encounter daily are immigrants. I am a hard worker and I was once living in this country illegally. Working long tedious hours are second nature to most legal and illegal immigrants because being an immigrant, especially an illegal immigrant, means working harder than anyone for less than everyone in order to survive. Many may argue that illegal immigrants contribute to high crime rates and strains the American economy, but immigrants are the backbone of society, without them thriving States like New York, which is highly populated with immigrants will not be able to function. We work the jobs most American citizens won’t do for half the price, sometimes less.

Immigrants are great assets to society and the American economy. They are hard working people willing to sacrifice everything for the opportunity provide for themselves and their loved ones. They often abandon their homes, families and everything they have ever known to pursue their dreams of being financially stable. I lost my mother to migration. She left before I could walk or talk and I didn't see her again until I was twelve years old. She left me like so many other mothers do, to provide for their children. Many immigrant mothers sacrifice raising their own children, only to work hard raising their employers children.

However, arguments against immigration claim immigrants are bad for the economy. This is far from true because immigrants help rather than hurt the economy simply by spending the money they earn. Immigrants are large consumers in society as well, they earn and spend money, contributing revenue to the declining U.S economy. Immigrants make up a massive number in the labor force and just like American citizens immigrants pay taxes on every penny they spend.  If immigrants stopped spending money they earned many stores would go out of business and the economy will suffer tremendously as immigrants make up over 37 percent equating to 3.07 million of New York City’s population.

           I have heard people say that immigrants are lazy, but laziness is not a luxury most immigrants can afford. Contrary to popular belief, immigrants without children that were born in the United States that are under the age of 21, do not qualify for any public assistance until they have maintained their green cards or permanent residency for at least five years. Illegal immigrants do not qualify for any public assistance whatsoever. Working hard is sometimes the only option for most immigrants. Seizing every employment opportunities wherever they can find employment. They take on back-breaking jobs in inclement weather such as construction, food delivers, cab drivers and much more. Without much financial help from government aids, Green card holders under five years and illegal immigrants only options are to seek employment.        

Because of desperation many illegal immigrants are mistreated and exploited by advantageous employers, abusive family and friends. They are most times over worked and underpaid.  They live in fear of being detained and deported, so they usually comply with people that are purposely exploiting them such as, advantageous employers who overwork and underpay them. Now that our new president Donald Trump declared war on illegal immigration, immigrants are even more fearful of what the future holds for them and their families who depend on them.

It is heart breaking to watch many families, friends and even total strangers worry about their future in America. Some are afraid to leave their houses because they are fearful of being stopped and asked to provide their immigration documents declaring their legal status. The increasing number of I.C.E or Immigration Control Enforcement raids being led to capture illegal immigrants and are making many people stay inside of their homes out of fear. Being afraid to leave the house is the reality for many U.S immigrants in 2017. These policies are harsh and unjust. They separate families and send the wrong message to the rest of the world that immigrants are not welcomed in the great United States of America and should be discarded like disposables utensils.

Hard working immigrants are undervalued and should be appreciated more. Immigrants in the United States should be celebrated they contribute such rich culture and exude the true determination required to achieve the American dream. They should be made to feel safe in a country they work hard in and not live in fear of being deported for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Ignorant statements by the “free” world leader targeting Mexican immigrants like, “They’re are rapist. And some, I assume, are good people” are hurtful, harmful and far from the truth. People should not believe this bias hateful view because immigrants are the backbone of society. They are hard working people that contribute to the U.S and the functioning of busy city’s like New York.

[trmpt]

America’s millions of Mexicans without documents live in fear of deportation

[latestnewsvirls]

Americas millions of Mexicans without documents live in fear of deportation

Donald Trumps crackdown has been a terrifying bolt from the blue The queue starts outside the consulate gate soon after dawn and stretches up Park View street. The visitors speak in low murmurs, exchanging the latest rumours. A dragnet in Glendale. Checkpoints in Highland Park. People deported for jaywalking. For speaking Spanish. Some visitors say […]

The post Americas millions of Mexicans without documents live in fear of deportation appeared first on Latest News Virals - The Latest Headlines From Around The World..

from Latest News Virals – The Latest Headlines From Around The World. http://www.latestnewsvirals.com/americas-millions-of-mexicans-without-documents-live-in-fear-of-deportation/

[newstwitter-blog]

New Post has been published on News Twitter

New Post has been published on http://www.news-twitter.com/2017/02/22/ny-times-major-elements-of-trumps-new-immigration-policies-7/

NY Times: Major Elements of Trump’s New Immigration Policies

The Trump administration has declared an end to the so-called catch and release policy, though it may take awhile to see any significant change. “Catch and release” came about in part because the government had nowhere to hold detainees waiting for immigration decisions. One of the memos released on Tuesday directs officials to expand detention facilities, but it will take time to build centers big enough, or find enough room in jails, to hold the thousands of Mexican and Central American asylum seekers expected to cross the border this year.

Continue reading the main story

The document also raises another alternative: sending migrants back to Mexico to wait out the immigration process, even those who are not originally from Mexico. That proposal comes with its own problems. Though United States law appears to allow it, Mexico’s laws do not, if the immigrant is not a Mexican citizen.

No judge required

Two decades ago, Congress passed a law allowing the government to quickly deport undocumented immigrants who have not been in the United States very long, without allowing them go before a judge.

In practice, the government has used this process, called “expedited removal,” relatively narrowly because of concerns about whether it violates constitutional rights of due process that are granted to anyone in the United States, regardless of immigration status. Since 2002, expedited removal has been applied only to immigrants who have been in the country less than two weeks and were caught within 100 miles of the border. That is because the Supreme Court has held that such immigrants can still be considered “in transit” and not here long enough to qualify for due process protections.

The Trump administration is now planning to use expedited removal as extensively as the original law allows, saying that limits on its use had contributed to a backlog of more than half a million cases in immigration court.

Immigration advocates vowed to challenge the change.

“Someone could be living in Chicago for a year and a half and then be swept off the street by an ICE agent,” said Lee Gelernt, deputy director of the A.C.L.U.’s Immigrants’ Rights Project, referring to Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. “He is going to be detained and removed right away without ever seeing a judge.”

Children traveling alone

One of the memos on Tuesday acknowledges that children who arrive at the border alone — “unaccompanied alien children,” in government parlance — are entitled to special protections: Unlike other border crossers, whom border patrol agents may deport without a legal hearing, these children must appear before an immigration judge and be interviewed by an asylum officer. Children have surged across the border in recent years, many fleeing violence and destitution in Central America.

But the memo turns a sterner face to their parents, who, under the new policy, may be subject to deportation or even prosecution for enabling their children to come into the country.

The memo notes that parents and relatives often pay smugglers several thousand dollars to bring their children from Central America, an act that the memo says amounts to facilitating illegal smuggling or trafficking.

Continue reading the main story

Immigration advocates are predicting that the policy will drive parents of migrant children further underground. With parents fearful of prosecution, advocates say, navigating the immigration process — or even showing up to court — could become much harder for these children.

Photo

A rally for immigrants’ rights in New York this month. Credit Bess Adler for The New York Times

‘Dreamers’

Some 750,000 people who were brought into the country as children were issued work permits and temporary protection from deportation under an Obama program known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA. Even President Trump said last week that the subject “is very, very difficult” for him and that he promised to “deal with DACA with heart.”

So far, the Trump administration has left the program alone. But chills went through the community of “Dreamers,” as DACA recipients are known, with the recent arrest of a 23-year-old Mexican immigrant in Washington State, Daniel Ramirez. Immigration agents arrested him when they went to his house to detain his father, a convicted drug trafficker. They said Mr. Ramirez admitted to having gang affiliations, which cancels the protection offered under DACA. But Mr. Ramirez denies having made the admission, and his lawyers are fighting his deportation.

Role of local police

A program known as 287(g), named for its section of the Immigration and Nationality Act, allows the Department of Homeland Security to train local and state law enforcement officers to work as de facto federal immigration officers, identifying undocumented immigrants in their communities and jails and turning them over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

From 2006 to 2013, the program led to 175,000 deportations, according to federal statistics. But investigations and court rulings revealed an ugly side effect: In some jurisdictions, local officers were using their authority to racially profile Latinos. One of the most egregious cases was in Maricopa County, Arizona’s most populous, during the tenure of Sheriff Joseph Arpaio, who a federal judge ruled had discriminated against Latinos in patrols and other enforcement efforts.

The Obama administration curtailed the use of the program, which currently involves 32 agencies in 16 states. The Trump administration wants more agencies to take part, and some have already expressed a desire to do so.

Statistics and sanctuaries

The administration is trying to significantly expand the amount of information available on the enforcement of immigration laws and, in particular, unauthorized immigrants who commit crimes. Immigration and Customs Enforcement will establish a new office to work with the victims of crimes committed by undocumented immigrants, some of whom appeared with Mr. Trump on the campaign trail.

The office, known as Victims of Immigration Crime Engagement, or Voice, will provide victims with information about defendants’ immigration status and whether they are in jail. Significantly, funding for the office comes from reallocating “any and all resources that are currently used to advocate on behalf of illegal aliens” by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

ICE will now have to provide monthly public reports on its apprehensions and releases. The agency also has to publish a weekly report about state and local authorities that release undocumented immigrants from jails. That is a clear shot across the bow at so-called sanctuary cities that limit their cooperation with federal immigration authorities, contending that turning in unauthorized immigrants would destroy the fragile relationship that the police have with immigrant communities.

Continue reading the main story

“We are going to continue our policy that has been in place because we think that it helps us have a safer, stronger, better community,” Mayor Stephanie A. Miner of Syracuse said on Tuesday.

The Trump administration is already pondering ways to punish those cities by denying them some federal aid.

“Now everyone is going to be able to see how many criminal aliens are being released as a result of the sanctuary policies,” said Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, which supports tighter controls on immigration.

No privacy

In January 2009, the departing Bush administration extended some Privacy Act rights, which American citizens and legal permanent residents already had, to undocumented immigrants. That meant that information obtained by one agency, like the Internal Revenue Service or Citizenship and Immigration Services, could not generally be shared with other agencies, like Immigration and Customs Enforcement. One rationale for the move was to protect the personal information of immigrants who might one day become citizens covered by the Privacy Act.

The Trump administration has now rescinded those privacy protections. One of the memos released on Tuesday said that those protections had been detrimental to the families of the victims of crimes committed by undocumented immigrants, because those families could not get information about such defendants’ legal status, or whether they had been deported, leaving victims “feeling marginalized and without a voice.”

The Department of Homeland Security said it would develop new rules on the sharing of undocumented immigrants’ private information. But advocates for unauthorized immigrants said they feared that immigrants who had applied for legal status — in the process divulging they were not here legally — were now in danger of having that information used to deport them.

“The constitution doesn’t traditionally allow bait and switches,” said Thomas A. Saenz, the president and general counsel of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, an organization that advocates for immigrants. “These are folks who submitted their information attempting to play by the rules, with part of the rules being that the government would protect their privacy.”

Beefed-up force

The memos released on Tuesday repeat Mr. Trump’s demand in his executive order for a larger enforcement force that can speed up the removal of millions of undocumented immigrants from the United States.

In practice, that may play out more slowly than the president might prefer. The source of this caution is none other than John F. Kelly, the homeland security secretary, who told lawmakers this month that he did not believe it would be possible to hire the desired 15,000 ICE and border patrol agents in the next couple of years. “I’d rather have fewer and make sure that they’re high-quality people,” Mr. Kelly told lawmakers. “I will not skimp on the training and the standards.”

Continue reading the main story

On top of the stringent hiring standards and training, Border Patrol applicants are required to take a polygraph test, which nearly 60 percent fail. A previous surge in hiring under President George W. Bush resulted in dozens of corruption cases, with Border Patrol and other agents accused of taking bribes and providing information to Mexican drug cartels.

Continue reading the main story

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[featurenews]

Attorneys file petition to release Afghan family detained by Ice in Los Angeles

Immigration officials stopped family of five en route to Seattle, where they had been approved to relocate after a rigorous vetting process over father’s prior job Attorneys have filed a petition seeking the release of an Afghan family of five who were detained by US immigration officials when they arrived at Los Angeles international airport (LAX) on Thursday. Related: America’s millions of Mexicans without documents live in fear of deportation Continue reading... https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/mar/05/afghan-family-detained-immigration-los-angeles-lax?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=tumblr

[bountyofbeads]

Trump administration threatens hefty fines on immigrants who elude deportation

https://wapo.st/2NCNqbU

Instead of a war on drugs(Opioids) and gang members, Trump has committed to a war on refugees and religious organizations that support them!!! SAD 😔😢😭😭😭🥵🤬🤬🤬

Trump administration threatens hefty fines on immigrants who elude deportation

By Maria Sacchetti | Published July 02 at 2:27 PM ET | Washington Post | Posted July 2, 2019 |

The Trump administration is threatening to impose hundreds of thousands of dollars in civil penalties on immigrants who disobey deportation orders by seeking refuge in churches or elsewhere in the United States, according to federal officials.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Washington headquarters on Monday notified a woman seeking sanctuary in a North Carolina church that the agency intends to fine her more than $300,000. An immigrant in Colorado faces a fine of more than $500,000.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement generally does not conduct enforcement operations in churches, and while financial penalties for evading deportation have been on the books for years, they were rarely enforced.

ICE’s headquarters issued the notices days after Trump postponed immigration raids that would have targeted parents and children with outstanding deportation orders, a threat that reinvigorated efforts inside the United States to shield migrants from deportation in churches and homes.

Rosa Ortez Cruz, a 38-year-old mother of four living in a Chapel Hill church, received a notice that ICE intends to fine her $314,007 for “willfully” failing to depart the United States and for having “connived or conspired” to avoid deportation. She has said she fears for her life if deported to her native Honduras, and has appealed her case to the federal courts.

“Over $300,000 being assessed against a person that has nothing? It might as well be a million dollars. It might as well be a billion dollars,” said Ortez Cruz’s lawyer, Jeremy McKinney, of Greensboro, who received the June 25 notice by certified mail. “She has nothing of monetary value at this point. She is unemployed. She lives in a church.”

Federal officials said they quietly began assessing the civil penalties in December as part of a rolling effort to curb sanctuary jurisdictions that have thwarted Trump’s efforts to deport undocumented immigrants and to hold immigrants accountable for breaking the law. Trump called for enforcing the penalties in an executive order days after taking office in 2017.

ICE said it is issuing two types of fines. One targets immigrants such as Ortez Cruz with outstanding deportation orders, threatening them with penalties of up to $799 a day. In a year, an immigrant could accrue fines of more than $291,635.

A second fine targets immigrants who agreed to leave the United States voluntarily and then did not. They would typically face a lesser fine of up to $4,792 total, though an immigration judge could raise or lower the penalty slightly.

The agency must notify immigrants about the civil penalty before imposing the fines, and give them at least 30 days to dispute it. Once ICE issues a fine, the immigrant can appeal it to the Justice Department’s Board of Immigration Appeals.

“ICE is committed to using various enforcement methods — including arrest; detention; technological monitoring; and financial penalties — to enforce U.S. immigration law and maintain the integrity of legal orders issued by judges,” said ICE spokesman Matthew Bourke in a statement.

It remains unclear how the Trump administration will enforce the fines. Immigrants who fail to pay will be referred to the Department of the Treasury for collection. Any payments will also go to that agency.

Immigration lawyers and others say the fines will likely never be paid and are an attempt to frighten immigrants amid new threats of immigration raids. After Trump said last month he would deport “millions” of people from the interior of the United States, advocates for immigrants reactivated rapid-response networks and called on churches to offer families sanctuary to shield them from deportation.

The civil penalties for violating immigration laws have been on the books since 1996, when President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, signed a hard line bill into law. In the rare instances when fines have been assessed, they have been lower, about $1,000, according to Laura Lynch, senior policy counsel for the American Immigration Lawyers Association.

Trump has repeatedly blasted sanctuary jurisdictions for refusing to help immigration officials detain and deport immigrants, even those arrested for a crime, and earlier this year swept out ICE’s acting director and the Homeland Security secretary saying he wanted to go in a “tougher” direction.

But advocates for immigrants say Trump’s broad crackdown is also ensnaring people arrested for traffic violations and other minor offenses.

Ortez Cruz, the woman in sanctuary in North Carolina, had traffic violations and misdemeanor charges stemming from an altercation with her then teenage son that led to her deportation proceedings, her lawyer said.

She and her now 20-year-old son arrived in the United States in 2002, after fleeing her abusive ex-partner in Honduras who had stabbed her multiple times. She had three more children, all U.S. citizens, age 14, 10 and 8.

She has appealed her immigration case to the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, which is expected to hear arguments this year.

Because immigration officials could deport her while that case is pending, she fled in April 2018 to The Church of Reconciliation, a Presbyterian church, and a network of volunteers is caring for her.

Sanctuary movements have frustrated Trump’s efforts to increase deportations, and in April, Trump threatened to send the record numbers of families crossing the Mexican border to sanctuary cities and towns.

But sanctuary cities have largely welcomed the immigrants, and quickly activated a rapid-response network to hide them in churches and private homes when Trump threatened mass deportations last month. Outraged advocates took to social media with offers to help immigrants hide, using the hashtag #protectmyneighbor.

Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service launched a new initiative called the “United Sanctuaries of America” to call on congregations and local organizations to serve as a “network of sanctuaries” to protect immigrants.

Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, president and CEO for Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service, criticized the fines as an attempt to drive immigrants underground and make them fearful of appealing their immigration cases, particularly if they missed a court hearing and were ordered deported.

“We believe this is intentional and tragically advances efforts to deport migrants without the need to exercise due process,” she said, adding that the fines render the sanctuary efforts “more relevant than ever.”

Approximately 500,000 of the 10.5 million undocumented immigrants in the United States currently have outstanding deportation orders and are considered fugitives, according to 2018 ICE budget documents.

Most were spared deportation under the Obama administration because they had clean criminal records or U.S.-born children. Federal officials instructed ICE agents to focus on criminals and recent border crossers.

Trump terminated Obama’s priority system and vowed to deport anyone in the United States illegally. He also threatened to crack down on sanctuary cities.

But sanctuary jurisdictions have swelled into the hundreds under Trump. The president has not matched the Obama administration’s peak deportation numbers, and he has struggled to contain the historic numbers of families, particularly children, crossing the U.S.-Mexico border to seek asylum.

[imamiswanto]

America’s millions of Mexicans without documents live in fear of deportation

http://dlvr.it/NXpSzB

[freespeechradionews]

New Post has been published on FSRN

New Post has been published on https://fsrn.org/2017/02/daca-recipient-detained-by-ice-in-seattle-immigrant-mother-seeks-sanctuary-in-denver-church/

DACA recipient detained by ICE in Seattle, immigrant mother seeks sanctuary in Denver church

A recipient of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) sits in an immigration detention center in Washington state in what is the first known case of a documented immigrant arrested in nationwide sweeps launched last week by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. Meanwhile, a Mexican-born mother seeks sanctuary in a Denver church instead of risking deportation at a scheduled check-in. Shannon Young has more.

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Official information about the immigration enforcement actions has been sparse and slow-moving, but one thing is clear: the Obama era guidelines on high and low priority removals are no longer in place.

In a written statement issued Tuesday, Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly said ICE officers had arrested more than 680 people “in the Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, San Antonio and New York City areas of responsibility.” That list does not include cities where immigration arrests also occurred, like Seattle, where 23-year-old DACA recipient Daniel Ramirez Medina was taken into custody.

Ramirez is the first known case of a person with legal status targeted in the new wave of immigration sweeps.

“Daniel has been in detention now for a couple days, unfairly and unjustly,” says Paul Quinones, a Seattle-based DACA recipient himself, says that while in custody, Ramirez has been pressured to sign a confession of gang affiliation. “And we have seen ICE lying about him and trying to defame him by painting him as a criminal, which is nothing more than carrying out Trump’s executive orders on interior enforcement and is seeking to further criminalize our community and expand the definition of who is a criminal.”

DHS – of which ICE is a part – says that approximately 75 percent of those arrested in the enforcement actions have histories of criminal convictions.

“Instead of focusing on the removal of hardcore criminals, a quarter of the people detained in the ICE raids are innocent people, including the arrest of a Dreamer in Seattle,” explains Los Angeles Congresswoman Linda Sanchez. She also says that the acting director of ICE canceled a scheduled meeting with members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. The lawmakers specifically wanted to discuss the nationwide actions launched last week.

“We’ve heard that some parents aren’t sending their kids to school because they’re afraid to,” Sanchez says. “People are not answering the door, they’re not leaving their homes to go to work, because of the fear that these raids have incited.”

ICE maintains the actions are not raids, but that “during targeted enforcement operations, ICE officers frequently encounter additional suspects who may be in the United States in violation of federal immigration laws. Those persons will be evaluated on a case by case basis and, when appropriate, arrested by ICE.”

Daniel Ramirez Medina, the Dreamer arrested in Seattle, appears to have been what attorneys call a ‘collateral arrest,’ meaning that agents decided to take him in while searching for someone else, in this case, Ramirez’s father. But the fact that he had status under DACA has sent a chill through the large community of immigrant youth with the same type of papers.

“The government did promise people who were enrolled in this program that their personal information will not be used as a device for targeting them for immigration enforcement, A, and B, that they would be protected under this program just so long as they met the requirements, established by such, and they passed a background check,” notes Juan Escalante, a Florida-based DACA recipient and digital campaigns manager with the advocacy organization, America’s Voice.

DACA benefits young immigrants brought to the U.S. as minors, without authorization, which means, in most cases, their parents are undocumented. Many Dreamers now worry that the information they provided as part of the vetting process can now be used against their families.

Escalante explains some of the requirements: “You have to, essentially, provide proof that you have resided in the country for at least five years with no interruptions, meaning that you should not have left the country at any period of time. There is an age requirement, biometrics requirement, an application fee of $455, a background check to which you have to submit very detailed information as to who you are, any sort of affiliations that you may have, if any at all, and provide a history of your residence, meaning where you have lived throughout your time here in the United States. The level of detail that is demanded in these applications is extremely explicit, all of which is turned over, again, in good will by immigrant youth to the government for verification and approval, in order to confer them this deferred action status.”

And it’s not just DACA recipients who are now suddenly questioning if their status makes them a target of the immigration authorities with whom they have contact.

The recent deportation of Guadalupe Garcia de Rayos sent a message that longtime undocumented residents with U.S. born children could no longer take solace in being considered a low priority for removal. Garcia de Rayos was arrested during a routine check-in with immigration authorities and summarily deported to Mexico hours later.

Jeanette Vizguerra, a Mexican-born mother who has lived in the U.S. for two decades, opted to seek sanctuary in a Denver-area church instead of going to her immigration check-in Wednesday morning. She spoke by cell phone and through a translator to a group of supporters gathered outside of the office where her lawyer learned her request to stay her deportation had been denied.

“I want to say that I think that I made the right choice by not coming today. In my heart, I knew that today was different than in the past. In my heart, I knew that they were going to deny me my stay. And that is why I didn’t come today. I am going to keep fighting,” Vizguerra told her supporters. “Today, in the afternoon, there will be an action in Washington, D.C. to take this up to the next level, this rejection of my stay. I’m going to need my community here with me every step of the way in the next weeks and months.”

President Trump’s executive order on interior immigration enforcement expands the criteria for priority removal from fugitive criminals to anyone in violation of federal immigration law. Immigration rights advocates say the criteria is broad enough to lay the groundwork for the expulsion of millions of people, and that the deportation force Trump promised during the campaign is already taking shape.

[newstfionline]

Spanish Thrives in the U.S. Despite an English-Only Drive

By Simon Romero, NY Times, Aug. 23, 2017

ALBUQUERQUE--Wander into El Super, a sprawling grocery store in the same valley where fortune seekers on horseback laid claim nearly four centuries ago to one of Spain’s most remote possessions, and the resilience of the language they brought with them stands on display.

Reggaetón, the musical genre born in Puerto Rico, blares from the speakers. Shoppers mull bargains in the accents of northern Mexico. A carnicería offers meat, a panadería bread, a salchichonería cold cuts, and there’s also a tortillería--that one’s self-explanatory for many who never even studied the language of Cervantes.

“Everything I need here is in Spanish,” said Vanessa Quezada, 23, an immigrant from the Mexican state of Chihuahua, gesturing toward the branch of the First Convenience Bank, where tellers greet people with a smile and “Buenas tardes.”

Indeed, the United States is emerging as a vast laboratory showcasing the remarkable endurance of Spanish, no matter the political climate.

Drawing on a critical mass of native speakers, the United States now has by some counts more than 50 million hispanohablantes, a greater number of Spanish speakers than Spain. In an English-speaking superpower, the Spanish-language TV networks Univision and Telemundo spar for top ratings with ABC, CBS, FOX and NBC. The made-in-America global hit song of the summer? “Despacito.”

At the same time, more than 20 states have enacted laws making English the official language, President Trump won the election with a platform that included building a border wall, and his push for new limits on legal immigration would require that applicants speak English to obtain legal residency green cards.

Juan Rodríguez, 44, a Colombian immigrant who owns La Reina, a Spanish-language radio station in Des Moines, said it was an “extremely uncertain time” for some Spanish speakers, particularly undocumented immigrants who are trying to be seen and heard less often now that the president has made deportation a priority.

“But that fear doesn’t prevent us from living our lives in Spanish,” Mr. Rodríguez added. “Iowa may be an English-only state, but it’s also our state.”

Throughout the world, the position of English as the pre-eminent language seems unchallenged. The United States projects its influence in English in realms including finance, culture, science and warfare.

But on a global level, Mandarin Chinese dwarfs English in native speakers, ranking first with 898 million, followed by Spanish with 437 million, according to Ethnologue, a compendium of the world’s languages. Then comes English with 372 million, followed by Arabic, Hindi, Bengali, Portuguese and Russian.

Immigration from Latin America bolstered the use of Spanish in the United States in recent decades, but scholars say other factors are also in play, including history, the global reach of the language, and the ways in which people move around throughout the Spanish-speaking world.

Authorities in parts of the United States have repeatedly argued for curbing the spread of Spanish, like the former Arizona schools chief who said all Spanish-language media should be silenced. A judge pushed back this week against that official’s drive to also ban the state’s Mexican-American studies program, saying the ban was “motivated by racial animus.”

Linguists trace some of the coveted vibrancy that Spanish now enjoys to decisions made well before Spain began colonizing the New World in 1492.

As the Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes explained in “The Buried Mirror,” his book about the Hispanic world, the 13th-century Spanish king Alfonso X assembled a cosmopolitan brain trust of Jewish intellectuals, Arab translators and Christian troubadours, who promoted Spanish as a language of knowledge at a time when Latin and Arabic still held prestige on the Iberian Peninsula.

Alfonso and his savants forged Spanish into an exceptionally well-organized language with phonetic standards, making it relatively accessible for some learners. They are thought to have hewed to a policy of “castellano drecho”--straight or right Spanish--imbuing the language with a sense of purpose.

Even today, Spanish remains mutually intelligible around the world to a remarkable degree, with someone, say, from the Patagonian Steppe in Argentina able to hold a conversation with a visitor from Equatorial Guinea, one of Africa’s largest oil exporters.

Drawing on entropy, a concept from thermodynamics referring to disorder, Jean-Benoît Nadeau and Julie Barlow, the Canadian authors of a 2013 book charting the evolution of Spanish, describe the degree to which Spanish is spread out geographically over a wide array of countries.

By this measure, Mandarin ranks low on the entropy scale since most of its speakers live in the same country. English boasts greater entropy, but Spanish, the majority language in more than 20 countries, ranks first, followed by Arabic.

Rivaling Spain and parts of Latin America, the United States exemplifies how the movement of people throughout the Spanish-speaking world is taking the language in new directions.

In metropolitan Los Angeles, an area with more than 4 million Spanish speakers--more than Uruguay’s entire population--linguists say that a new dialect has coalesced as different types of Spanish come into contact with one another. And here in New Mexico, an influx of Mexican and Central American immigrants is nourishing and reshaping a variant of Spanish that has persisted since the 16th century.

Ojos Locos, a cavernous sports bar in Albuquerque, offers a glimpse into how Spanish is changing. Like El Super, it’s part of a chain founded in the United States aimed at the Latino market.

“What’s a sports cantina without delicious authentic Mexican comida--mas tacos, mas wings y mas cerveza,” Ojos Locos explains on its website. Such servings were in abundance on a recent Sunday when Mexico’s national soccer team played against Jamaica, and mexicano Spanish seemed to be the venue’s dominant language.

But some tables were effortlessly mixing English and Spanish, especially those where children were accompanying their parents, while others, including tables of mixed-ethnicity couples, cheered, conversed and cursed (Mexico lost, 1-0) over their frozen margaritas almost entirely in English.

The ways in which families use languages at the dinner table also show how Spanish is evolving.

In the Nava family, which moved to New Mexico from northern Mexico more than 20 years ago, the grandparents passionately debate in Spanish the performance of their football team, the Dallas Cowboys.

But when their adult children talk to one another, it’s in Spanglish. And the language of their grandchildren? Mainly English, with a sprinkling of Spanish words here and there.

“Our real communication is in Spanglish,” said Cindy Nava, 29, a policy analyst at the New Mexico Legislature who arrived in the United States at the age of 7. “But we still recognize the importance of speaking Spanish correctly.”

Irking some grammarians, Spanglish is indeed gaining ground, evident in the way characters in telenovelas are speaking, Daddy Yankee’s reggaetón lyrics or ads like the Wendy’s commercial in which sweethearts bond over bacon cheeseburgers served on buns of “pan de pretzel.”

Long before Mr. Trump was elected, the growth and durability of Spanish had caused concerns, leading to “official language” laws that in some cases limit the use of any language other than English in government offices and documents, and in other cases are largely symbolic.

Rosalie Porter, who came to the United States from Italy as a child and is now the chairwoman of an organization seeking to end bilingual education and declare English the official language of the United States, said, “When I was an immigrant child, my language was not politically correct.”

“Today it’s different,” said Ms. Porter, whose group, ProEnglish, was founded by John Tanton, a Michigan doctor who started a handful of organizations seeking to restrict immigration. “Immigrants enjoy a lot more visibility” she added, emphasizing that she understood the business reasons behind the growth of Spanish-language media.

Even apart from political efforts, the continued growth of Spanish in the United States is not assured. Linguists have documented how new generations of Latinos around the country are steadily shifting to English, just as descendants of other immigrants have done.

But if the past is a guide, Spanish will continue to evolve and endure.

“In many places in the U.S., English and Spanish are in bed with each other, a contact that is both generative and exciting,” said Junot Díaz, the writer who masterfully explores the immigrant experience in the United States, largely through the travails of his Spanglish-speaking Dominican protagonist, Yunior.

“For many of us,” he went on, “Spanish is our path to love, and as history has proven no one can legislate away love.”