Campaign Action
The moral depravity of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) knows no bounds:
Federal immigration authorities left about 50 immigrant women and children, most of them asylum-seekers from Central America, stranded at a downtown San Antonio bus station after service was canceled Friday due to Hurricane Harvey.
Barbie Hurtado, a community organizer with RAICES, a nonprofit that provides legal aid to immigrant families, said Democratic Rep. Lloyd Doggett, who represents San Antonio, had called immigration enforcement officials the day before to tell them not to drop families off.
According to Buzzfeed, “ICE routinely drops off families who pass their credible fear interviews at bus stations with tickets to relocate near families or sponsors while their immigration cases move through the courts.” A concerned Rep. Doggett told a local outlet that he was assured by ICE officials that the families “would be dropped off at the station in time to make connections before the storm hit.” They weren’t.
“Knowing that, they just dropped them off,” Hurtado said. “These are women and children who have been released from family detention with no money, cell phones, and don’t speak English.”
A local church took the frightened families in. “This is all really unacceptable,” Rep. Doggett said. “We need greatly improved communication and more attention to genuine humanitarian concerns.”
As Harvey hit Texas earlier this week, ICE and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) released a statement saying they “seek to provide for the safety and security of those in our custody and to protect them from bodily harm in the event of a hurricane or a major destructive storm.” Unless, of course, that involves closing immigration checkpoints.