Immigrants with all sorts of cases in process, pending appeals or parole, have been required to regularly check in with Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers to ensure their papers are in order and they are continuing to follow the law. But as the Trump administration ramps up its mass deportation efforts, these appointments have become increasingly fraught.
ICE does not provide information on how many migrants it has arrested during their routine check-ins. However, a new investigation by The Guardian estimates, based on arrest data from the first four weeks of the Trump administration, that about 1,400 arrests, or about 8% of the nearly 16,500 arrests during that time period may have occurred during or right after people checked in with the agency.
The Guardian reviewed cases in the arrest data, which was released by the Deportation Data Project from UC Berkeley Law School, where people who had previously been released on supervision were now arrested, as well as cases of people with pending immigration proceedings who were arrested in their communities.
Among these cases is that of Jorge’s, a 22-year-old asylum seeker from Venezuela, who reported in February to the ICE field office in Portland, Oregon, for what he figured would be a routine check-in. Instead, he was arrested and transferred to a detention center in another state.
“The truth is, this is so crazy,” he told The Guardian. “I have a clean record. That’s why I voluntarily went to ICE. Now I feel despair. My future is literally hanging in the balance.”
In detention, he has seen glimpses of the news that the president has declared war on Venezuela’s Tren de Aragua gang, that Venezuelan men with no criminal convictions were being sent to a mega-prison in El Salvador. “I’m afraid,” he said. “But I don’t know what to think. It feels like I am being unjustly imprisoned simply for being Venezuelan.”
Similarly, Alberto, a 42-year-old from Nicaragua who had been granted humanitarian parole, checked in with ICE using an electronic monitoring program that same month. Three days later, he was arrested.
“Essentially, these people are low-hanging fruit for ICE,” said Laura Urias, a program director and attorney at the legal non-profit ImmDef. “It’s just very easy to arrest them.”
But Jorge and Alberto are not the only ones who have experienced these arrests. In fact, more than a dozen immigration lawyers, advocates and former immigration officials that the Guardian interviewed said they have been hearing of similar cases across the country.
ImmDef, which maintains a rapid response hotline for families of people who have been detained, has received several calls from people who said their loved ones were arrested at check-ins. But the organization has also seen a number of cases where people went to their check-ins, and encountered no problems, according to the news outlet.
This is the latest instance in which the Trump administration has proved to be willing to bend tradition, thinking of new ways to enact its mass deportation efforts. Most notably, the president invoked the Alien Enemies Act earlier this year, allowing hundreds of Venezuelan migrants to be deported to El Salvador’s mega-prison.
On Monday, the Supreme Court allowed the administration to continue using the 18th century wartime law. The court said the administration must give Venezuelans who it claims are gang members “reasonable time” to go to court, with the legal challenges occurring in Texas.
“For all the rhetoric of the dissents,” the court wrote in an unsigned opinion, the high court order confirms “that the detainees subject to removal orders under the AEA are entitled to notice and an opportunity to challenge their removal.”
Originally published on Latin Times
