#TGIF - Immigration Updates Before the Weekend
It’s Friday! But before you check out of the week, read (or skim) these really important announcements in the immigration world.
Table of Contents
No Vetted Director at ICE for Over Five Years
Public defenders are now handling deportation cases in Cook County
Russian Military is Deporting Ukrainians During the War
Hundreds of people waiting outside Orlando immigration facility hoping to book appointments
Please Check Out My Interview with Frank News about Asylum
My Upcoming Talk at UC San Diego
No Vetted Director at ICE for Over Five Years
It has been 1,937 days, 64 months, or 5.3 years since Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has had a real Senate-confirmed director.
No ICE director was officially confirmed during the entire Trump administration. The current ICE Director, Tae Johnson, was not confirmed by Congress.
Biden has nominated Sheriff Gonzalez from Houston, Texas, to take on this role, but Congress has failed to take action. The most recent news on the hold-up was that “Senate Democrats withdrew the procedural motion to advance Gonzalez's nomination after a Republican senator from Oklahoma brought up an alleged domestic complaint” (see the article here). Gonzalez has denied any wrongdoing.
The last Congressionally-confirmed director was Sarah Saldaña who was nominated by President Obama and confirmed by the Senate.
Public defenders are now handling deportation cases in Cook County
Immigrants who are facing deportation in Cook County, Illinois, have a new resource: access to attorneys. This is a big deal, and here’s why.
As you may already know, there are about 1.8 million immigrants facing deportation within the immigration court system in this country. But unlike people facing criminal charges in the criminal justice system, immigrants are allowed to hire an attorney but they are not provided an attorney if they cannot afford one. (FYI: the case that required defendants to be provided attorneys was called Gideon v Wainwright.)
The reason this matters is that academic research has repeatedly found that access to an attorney makes a huge difference in procedural justice, court efficiency, and immigration case outcomes. The immigration legal system is exceedingly complex and difficult to navigate alone, which I suppose makes it on par with most of the US legal system, except that if most of us fail to, say, register our car on time, we don’t face the risk of getting deported.
WBEZ explains more about how this new pilot program works in Cook County, featuring Alma Anaya, Cook County commissioner of the 7th District; Eréndira Rendón, vice president of immigrant justice at The Resurrection Project; and Guadalupe Perez, an immigration attorney with the Cook County Public Defender’s Office Immigration Unit pilot. Listen to the report “Public defenders are now handling deportation cases in Cook County”, reporting by Nereida Moreno.
Russian Military is Deporting Ukrainians During the War
Deportation is a common tactic to gain or maintain territorial control in times of geopolitical conflict. Rather than allowing civilians to leave cities in conflict zones to wherever they choose, Russians are moving Ukrainians through “filtration centers” into Russia.
(This raises a question for me about whether this constitutes deportation, per se, and what I would ultimately be comfortable with defining as the precise boundaries around the term deportation. As my partner would say, it’s not not deportation.)
In any case, just this week, Russian military officials confirmed that the “Russian Ministry of Defence has stated that the invaders have deported 1.1 million people from Ukraine, including nearly 200,000 children.”
CNN provides useful reporting here, with maps that help to illustrate the geography of these deportations, in their story “Russia or die: After weeks under Putin's bombs, these Ukrainians were given only one way out.”
As you can see, in one case, this person from Mariupol in eastern Ukraine, was relocated into Russia, then moved through Moscow to St. Petersburg, and finally ended up in Estonia.
Hundreds of people waiting outside Orlando immigration facility hoping to book appointments
Despite some claims that immigrants who are released into the US will simply “disappear” into the country, immigrants in Orlando, Florida, are working overtime just to meet with an immigration officer. A news report this week from The Black Chronicle found that “Hundreds of people waiting outside Orlando immigration facility hoping to book appointments.”
“It’s been pure hell because they have to sleep on the sidewalk,” said Galo Delgado, whose nephew has been waiting for weeks to talk with an ICE agent. “They have to do things that they’ve never done. There are no facilities here to go to the bathrooms.”
The story highlights the challenges that immigrants face even when trying to do things “the right way” due to all kinds of structural barriers and inefficiencies.
Please Check Out My Interview with Frank News about Asylum
Frank News and I had an in-depth conversation about the current state of the asylum system. It’s the first time I’ve done an interview that ended up in print rather than on a podcast, and I’m really happy with how it turned out. So I hope you’ll check it out below. “Manufactured Migration: On migration forced by foreign policy, race and asylum, and an ecosystem of surveillance, patrolling, and job creation at the border.”
My Upcoming Talk at UC San Diego
I’m really excited to be part of a panel on immigration data next Friday (May 20) at the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at UC San Diego alongside Caitlin Patler, Juan Manuel Pedroza, and Alicia Riley. Click here to register for the event.
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