Anxiety rises over continuing deportations and swift-changing immigration policies

President Joe Biden’s hundred day moratorium on deportations was supposed to ease anxieties in immigrant communities after four years of harsh crackdowns by the recently ended administration.

But across the nation, deportations continue at about the same pace as before Biden was inaugurated Jan. 20. That’s because the Texas attorney general sued to stop the policy change, with a judge issuing a temporary injunction on the moratorium through Feb, 23.

The fight over deportations in the courts and the halls of Congress signals the difficulty the Biden administration will have in changing immigration policy. Immigrant families are feeling increased anxiety and fear as they cope with a changing landscape.

And, ironically, fewer people were deported in President Donald Trump’s term than in the first four years of President Barack Obama. And his second term.

Hundreds of immigrants have been removed in recent weeks to Mexico, Guatemala, Ecuador, Honduras and Haiti. Groups ranging from law professors to Amnesty International to the Haitian Bridge Alliance to the Texas-based legal nonprofit RAICES are protesting the removals as unjust and demoralizing for immigrant families.

The legal challenge “leaves huge discretion” among supervisors and deportation officers, and can be “dizzying” for staff at Immigration Customs and Enforcement, or ICE, said Muzaffar Chishti, a director of the Migration Policy Institute’s office at New York University School of Law.

“During these muddied-watered days before we know what happens with the TRO, the supervisors are going to get a lot of discretion,” Chishti said.

At the border in El Paso, attorney Tania Guerrero said the Biden administration needs time to sort out the tangle of changes during the administration of President Donald Trump. “But we need to know what the game plan is,” said the lawyer with the Catholic Legal Immigration Network, or CLINIC. “It’s a lot of confusion. And, people are losing hope.”

Monday, a protest letter was sent to the acting head of the Department of Homeland Security about concerns that asylum-seekers would be sent back to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Angola and Cameroon without “a full and fair opportunity” to detail the persecution they faced in their homelands. It was sent by Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-NY, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, and Rep. Zoe Lofgren, D-San Jose, the recent chair of the House immigration subcommittee.

Tuesday, Rep. Joaquin Castro, D-San Antonio, called on the Biden administration to “reign in” ICE and “immediately halt these deportation flights.”

In Washington, an ICE spokesperson acknowledged that some deportation flights continue.

Other advocacy and legal groups are asking that migrants be released from detention centers. ICE responded that it has let more detainees go “when possible” due to the coronavirus pandemic, the spokeswoman said. In fact, less than 15,000 detainees are now held on civil charges in the nation’s detention centers. In 2019, the average daily population was about 50,000.

Deporter-in-Chief

Ironically, as tough-sounding as Trump was on enforcement, he didn’t surpass the deportation record of former President Barack Obama, who was derided as Deporter-in-Chief.

During the Trump administration, enforcement authorities deported an average of 234,000 compared to about 400,000 annually in the first four years of the Obama administration. In his second term, about 290,000 were deported annually.

Chishti of the Migration Policy Institute refers to the two-term president as Obama 1 and Obama 2. As time went on, priorities over who was to be deported became more focused. By the final two years of the Obama administration, immigrants with certain criminal convictions and those who were threats to national security or public safety or had recently crossed the border were the most likely to be targeted.

That meant that nearly 90 percent of unauthorized immigrants weren’t targets for enforcement, he said.

“That is significant at a basic anxiety level,” Chishti said.

Deportations declined in fiscal year 2020, and are down in the current fiscal year, but that’s because of Title 42, the temporary pandemic-related policy of rapid “expulsions” at the border, which are not technically deportations.

Living with anxiety

But even though Obama deported more migrants than his successor, Trump’s many other policies that hit hard on refugees, legal immigrants and asylum-seekers will be part of his legacy, as will his attempt to wall off Mexico from the U.S.

While Biden is using executive actions and hopes to use legislation to change the course of immigration policy, many Republican

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s are rallying to stop these efforts, including any easing up on deportations.

The next step in Texas Attorney Gen. Ken Paxton’s effort to seek a permanent injunction against the Biden deportation moratorium is a hearing scheduled for Feb. 19 before U.S. District Judge Drew Tipton, the Trump appointee who granted the TRO.

For immigrants awaiting deportation, the anxiety is back.

Since Biden’s inauguration, flights loaded with hundreds of immigrant detainees have left to countries at about the same pace as six weeks ago, said Thomas Cartwright, a leader in Witness at the Border, a pro-immigrant group that tracks charter-flight plans of ICE. The Biden administration “is going to have to make some fundamental changes to change the culture,” Cartwright said.

Many others are simply bussed from ICE detention facilities in North Texas, or in El Paso, walked across the international bridge.

One of the high-profile ICE deportations was that of a 27-year-old Mexican woman Rosa in El Paso. She was a witness to the onset of the Aug. 3, 2019, massacre at Walmart which left 23 people dead. She was deported last Friday.

Her attorney Anna Hey of the Diocesan Migrant and Refugee Services in El Paso asked that her client’s surname not be published because of the sensitivity of what she experienced as the gunman entered the Walmart property.

Rosa had been helping local and federal prosecutors in the case against gunman Patrick Crusius, from the Dallas area, who said he went on a killing spree because of a “Hispanic invasion.” She was in the application process for a special visa for those who assist law enforcement because they are victims of crime.

She hadn’t yet secured the visa due to a backlog. Only 10,000 such visas are given annually, s Hey said.

“There is a chilling effect anytime someone is deported under those circumstances,” Hey said. She is trying to get her client back from Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, through a humanitarian measure.

Agreements between local authorities and ICE meant ICE was notified when Rosa was stopped over a broken tail light. When police ran her record, they found a 2018 drunk driving arrest, and that resulted in a final order of removal, which she was fighting, Hey said.

“I believe the deportation order would not have been executed were it not for the injunction of President Biden’s moratorium on deportations,” the El Paso attorney said. “ICE officials were emboldened by the injunction.”

An ICE official said neither Rosa nor the attorney made them aware of Rosa’s cooperation with authorities in the massacre investigation. But Hey disputed that and said ICE investigators were involved in the interviews with Rosa and the FBI and El Paso police after the 2019 massacre.

Rosa was allowed one phone call before her deportation to Juarez and she called Hey, who was in a meeting. Within about an hour, Rosa had been deported across the downtown Paso del Norte International bridge.

Hey said Rosa made the ICE officer aware she was a witness to the massacre and was expected to testify for the prosecution. But the attorney said Rosa was “taunted” and told that U.S. prosecutors could call her back to El Paso if they wanted her testimony — and then “immediately send her back.”