In the New York City area, arrests of undocumented immigrants have surged 40 percent compared to the previous fiscal year, with data showing that the share of those swept up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents despite having no criminal record doubled. In New Jersey, that share has gone from 25 percent to 40 percent. It mirrors what immigrant rights advocates, and now Human Rights Watch, have been pointing out for months: Donald Trump’s narrative that immigrants are dangerous, and that his mass deportation force has been focused on rooting them out, is a lie. In throwing out Barack Obama’s deportation priorities and treating immigrant parents no differently than a murderer, Trump’s thugs cast out families with no regard “for people’s deep and longstanding ties to the United States”:
“Sonia H.” told Human Rights Watch that she was stopped by Border Patrol agents in July as she got off a city bus. It happened to her at 3 a.m. as she made her way home from a shift at Denny’s. Immigration and Customs Enforcement locked her in immigration detention and deported her 10 days later. “I’ve never committed a crime, I’ve never been in jail,” Sonia said. “I didn’t drive because I didn’t have a license; I never broke the law except by not having papers.” She blinked back tears. “Trump shouldn’t kick out people who are just taking care of their families.”
On April 18, 2017, Linda and her mother were taking Justin to the doctor when the Dallas police stopped her Ford Explorer. “I don’t think I was speeding—I was with my mom and kid—but they said I was going 45 in a 40-mile-an-hour zone,” Linda said. As Justin cried and begged—“Please don’t take my mother!”—they arrested Linda for driving without a license. After three days in Richardson County Jail, and 25 years living in the United States, Linda was deported.
Manuel G. was giving a friend a ride back to his hotel from an Alcoholics Anonymous event in Tulsa, Oklahoma, when was stopped by police, he said, for making a wide U-turn. That stop led to Manuel’s deportation from the country that had been his home for 29 years.
“The number of people seized in the interior of the country—wrenched from their families and communities—has increased sharply,” the Human Rights Watch report continues. “The most dramatic such increase has been among undocumented people without criminal convictions: 28,011 were arrested between inauguration day and the beginning of September, nearly triple the 10,031 in arrested during the same seven-and-a-half-month period in 2016.” Imagine getting deported for a U-turn that would at most be a minor traffic court inconvenience for most people. But this is the reality of immigrant life in the Trump era. One wrong turn, quite literally, and you could get torn from your family.
ICE has already been caught red-handed waging a smear campaign trying to portray the immigrants they’ve arrested as dangerous—that order came straight from former Department of Homeland Security secretary and current White House chief of Staff John Kelly—because that’s not who they’re arresting. Instead they’re arresting hardworking people who are American in every way but on paper, and they’re leaving behind children, oftentimes U.S. citizens, who will be faced with trauma for years. As research has noted, mass deportation policies “create toxic stress for young children by breaking families apart, instilling fear in the immigrant community, and preventing families from accessing programs that meet children’s most basic needs”:
“Lucia H.” told Human Rights Watch that after repeated deportations left her unable to rejoin her family in the US, her 5-year-old stopped eating and was hospitalized, her husband had to leave his job working in the fields to take care of him, and their eldest son, 14, suffered a breakdown and is now receiving therapy. “My little one tells me, ‘come back, mami. I’m not going to eat anymore. I don’t want to live because you don’t come back,’” she said.
Since Sonia H. ’s deportation in August, her nine-year-old US-citizen son “David” has been living with nuns at a children’s home in Laredo, Texas. Sonia felt that leaving her son with the nuns to continue his education in the US was her best option. “It’s hard, so hard,” she said. “But I’ll just have to be here, seeing him whenever I can.”
Deported migrants worry about who will pay the bills for their families without their contributions. Maria, the wife of “Jose R.” and mother of their four-year old US citizen son, gave up the family apartment in Kansas City after Jose’s deportation and rented a room in a house with her child. “My wife has to be two people now to take care of our son,” Jose said.
And as immigrant rights advocates like America’s Voice and others have noted, “silent raids” have also surged. Under previous administrations, undocumented immigrants were sometimes allowed to work legally and keep living in the U.S., so long as they continued staying out of trouble and checked in regularly with ICE officers. Under this administration, immigrants are walking into once routine meetings but not walking back out:
For example, “Alberto Z,” who is the father of three young US citizen children, had been checking in with ICE for five years until the agency decided to deport him at a check-in February. Alberto’s application for immigration relief based on his long residence in the US and his US citizen family was denied in 2016.
“Marco T.” might have been the kind of person who qualified for such discretionary treatment under the Obama administration. He said he has three US-born children–10- and 14-year-old sons and a 7-year-old daughter who he described as pretty typical American kids—no prior deportations, and no prior criminal convictions. He entered ICE custody after a traffic stop near Dallas. “It’s just that the government now is very harsh,” he told Human Rights Watch. “Sooner or later they will get you for a minor offense. And then the consequence is deportation.”
Jesus Lara, an Ohio father of four American citizens, was deported to Mexico earlier this summer following a silent raid. Lara had no criminal record, was a taxpayer, and followed ICE’s rules by checking in regularly for years. That didn’t matter to federal immigration officials in the Trump era:
With his options exhausted, Lara’s family and advocates went with him to Cleveland's Hopkins International Airport to say goodbye. "These are the darkest times I've ever seen as an attorney,” said former American Immigration Lawyers Association president David Leopold, who represented Lara. “When the best and the brightest that we have to offer are taken from their homes and sent away. The law is so broken."
As Human Rights Watch continues, one of the most important ways to fight back against cruel, mass deportation policies is to call on Congress to “decline to increase funding to the detention and deportation system, unless such funding increases are for systemic reforms to improve detention conditions and increased transparency and accountability.” And, we must also demand Congress pass the bipartisan DREAM Act, which would put up to 2 million undocumented immigrant youth and young adults—many of them parents of U.S. citizens—on a path to citizenship.