Locality: National

6/26/18 A federal judge in San Diego ordered immigration agents on Tuesday to stop separating migrant parents and children who have crossed the border from Mexico and to work to reunite families that have already been split up while in custody.
The judge blamed the “chaotic circumstance of the government’s own making” for the turmoil surrounding the separation of migrant children from their parents.

7/17/18 As thousands of asylum-seeking parents were separated from their children in recent months, the Trump administration actively portrayed them as law breakers who must be prosecuted and punished for coming to the United States. Left out of the narrative is one well-established fact: it is legal to seek asylum.
The Immigration and Nationality Act, which governs our nation’s immigration law, makes clear that anyone arriving at the U.S. border or within the United States is permitted to apply for protection. U.S. law embraces both international and domestic legal obligations not to return any person to a place where they face persecution on account of one of several protected grounds.

7/12/18 Detaining immigrant children has morphed into a surging industry in the U.S. that now reaps $1 billion annually – a tenfold increase over the past decade, an Associated Press analysis finds.
Health and Human Services grants for shelters, foster care and other child welfare services for detained unaccompanied and separated children soared from $74.5 million in 2007 to $958 million dollars in 2017. The agency is also reviewing a new round of proposals amid a growing effort by the White House to keep immigrant children in government custody.
Currently, more than 11,800 children, from a few months old to 17, are housed in nearly 90 facilities in 15 states; Arizona, California, Connecticut, Florida, Illinois, Kansas, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas, Virginia and Washington.

6/11/18 The Trump administration is not only doing everything it can to discourage immigration of all sorts, it intends to launch an effort to identify naturalized American citizens it believes cheated the naturalization process and strip them of their American citizenship. The extraordinary process of denaturalizing an American citizen has occurred very rarely, with the Justice Department filing an estimated 300 civil denaturalization cases since 1990. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Director L. Francis Cissna, however, told the Associated Press that the agency is ramping up its efforts to identify citizens who, for instance, assumed new identities in order to avoid deportation and claim a green card or citizenship.

6/12/18 The US government agency that oversees immigration applications is launching an office that will focus on identifying Americans who are suspected of cheating to get their citizenship and seek to strip them of it.
US Citizenship and Immigration Services Director L. Francis Cissna told The Associated Press in an interview that his agency is hiring several dozen lawyers and immigration officers to review cases of immigrants who were ordered deported and are suspected of using fake identities to later get green cards and citizenship through naturalization.

6/15/18 A couple years ago, James Schwab was at Oakland airport escorting a local journalist reporting on the immigration deportation flights from that facility.
The former Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesman – who resigned in protest earlier this year after refusing to “lie” about the results of a controversial raid warning issued by Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf – has one image from the tarmac that day seared into his memory.
A shackled grandmother was being loaded onto a chartered jet. She had no criminal record. She was in the country to take care of her grandchildren while their mother and father worked, he said.
“She was here illegally, yes,” Schwab said. “But why aren’t we fixing the laws? & It was the moment I realized how serious the immigration situation was in America.”

5/13/18 Here’s an overview of key ways Trump has made it more difficult and expensive to come here legally for foreign students, skilled temporary workers, green cards holders, refugees and others.
Yes, Trump still wants his big, beautiful wall to stop illegal border crossings. But he’s been railing against all forms of immigration since his campaign. And he’s having a much easier time chipping away at legal immigration than funding his wall. In some cases, the methods are strict quotas or new rules. But paperwork and red tape work, too. For instance, this administration tripled the number of pages in green card applications. Forms for sponsoring a foreign-born spouse are nine times longer than they used to be.

4/19/18 A Supreme Court ruling on immigration this week is igniting a new political battle over federal officials’ power to deport foreigners who have been convicted of certain crimes.
They say the ruling offers important protections to immigrants whom the Department of Homeland Security has portrayed as “aggravated felons” based on a broad and vaguely defined category called “crimes of violence,” which may not have resulted in physical harm.
Boston lawyer Matt Cameron said he is aware of “dozens” of immigrants who might be spared from deportation or be allowed to apply for U.S. citizenship because of the ruling.

3/26/18 ICE, the federal agency tasked with Trump’s program of mass deportation, uses backend Facebook data to locate and track suspects, according to a string of emails and documents obtained by The Intercept through a public records request. The hunt for one particular suspect provides a rare window into how ICE agents use social media and powerful data analytics tools to find targets.

1/26/18 The Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency has officially gained agency-wide access to a nationwide license plate recognition database, according to a contract finalized earlier this month. The system gives the agency access to billions of license plate records and new powers of real-time location tracking, raising significant concerns from civil libertarians.
Those powers are particularly troubling given ICE’s recent move to expand deportations beyond criminal offenders, fueling concerns of politically motivated enforcement. In New York, community leaders say they’ve been specifically targeted for deportation as a result of their activism. With automated license plate recognition, that targeting would only grow more powerful.

2/6/18 9th Circuit Court
Last week, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit issued a truly brutal decision, concluding that the Constitution did not require the government to provide a lawyer to a 15-year-old Honduran boy facing deportation.
It appears to be the first case ever to hold that children can represent themselves in court when important legal rights are at stake. That the ruling came in a deportation case involving asylum – where the stakes are incredibly high, the law notoriously complex, and the government pays a trained prosecutor to advocate the child’s deportation – makes the court’s decision even more extreme. The ruling is the latest, and most disappointing, chapter in our long-running effort to obtain fairness for children in immigration court. Key Words: Unaccompanied Minor, ETHICS

1/31/18 Economists say deporting undocumented immigrants and restricting immigration will remove billions of dollars from economy and cripple labor market. According to multiple independent studies, the United States stands to lose hundreds of billions of dollars, stagnate its workforce and deplete a wealth of intellectual capital if it pursues proposed deportation goals.

10/4/17 State Dept report presented to US Congress containing a description of the nature of the refugee situation and the planned number and allocation of the refugees to be admitted over the next year. Because the US humanitarian support for refugees extends beyond refugee resettlement, this report also contains information on requests for protection from asylum seekers domestically.

10/31/17 The case centers on the treatment of non-citizen soldiers who benefited from the Military Accessions Vital to the National Interest (MAVNI) program. MAVNI, established in 2008, was designed to attract “high-quality, multi-lingual, ethnically and culturally diverse recruits, and healthcare professionals…” by providing them with an expedited path to citizenship. Since 2016, however, DOD policies have made the application process more difficult. Increased security screening began to cause lengthy delays in the application process. Most recently, DOD stalled certification of the soldiers’ qualifying military service – a step necessary to complete the naturalization application through a formal policy issued on October 13, 2017 that imposed new certification guidelines.

11/15/17 The exponential increase in ICE courthouse arrests reflects a dangerous new era in enforcement and immigrant rights violations, Immigrant Defense Project attorney Lee Wang said. Immigrants seeking justice in the criminal, family and civil courts should not have to fear for their freedom when doing so.

8/5/17 Report from the National Council of State Legislators: Enacted legislation related to immigration increased in the first half of 2017 by 90 percent to 133 laws compared with 70 laws in 2016. The number of resolutions increased by 22 percent to 195 from 159. Lawmakers in 47 states enacted 133 laws and 195 resolutions related to immigration. An additional nine bills were vetoed by governors and 18 are pending signatures.