'Silent raids': Immigrants are walking into routine ICE check-ins but not walking back out

Gabe Ortiz

Daily Kos Staff

Thursday June 08, 2017 · 10:53 AM PDT

2017/06/08 · 10:53

Demonstrators gather outside the First Unitarian Church in Denver, Colorado on February 18, 2017 in support of Jeanette Vizguerra, an undocumented Mexican mother of three US born children. .Vizguerra received sanctuary at the church and has been living in the church's basement since February 15 when she avoided a scheduled meeting with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials for fear of immediate detention and deportation.It is uncommon for US authorities to enter places of worship, schools and hospitals to deport undocumented immigrants... / AFP / Jason Connolly (Photo credit should read JASON CONNOLLY/AFP/Getty Images)

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The AP highlights this huge shift from Obama-era immigration policy—the “silent raids” targeting undocumented immigrants who, after years of regularly checking in with ICE, are suddenly getting cuffed, detained, and deported after their meetings with immigration officials.

According to the AP, ICE is tracking nearly 1,000,000 undocumented immigrants—82 percent have no criminal record. Many of these immigrants, so long as they’ve shown that they are staying out of trouble, have been allowed to leave their meetings and stay in the U.S. with their families. This process can repeat every three months, six months, and sometimes up to a year.

But the Trump-era has seen the turbo-boosting of a frightening occurrence—undocumented immigrants, simply following the rules by heeding the federal government’s instructions to meet with immigration officials, walk into ICE offices but don’t walk back out:

In Michigan, Jose Luis Sanchez-Ronquillo reported to authorities for more than four years before he was arrested at an April check-in and sent to a Louisiana detention facility. The 36-year-old father of two came into contact with police during a traffic stop and lost his immigration case in 2012. But he was then repeatedly allowed to stay, said Shanta Driver, his lawyer.

In Virginia, 33-year-old Cesar Lara was detained in May after living here for a decade. The Mexican house painter wound up with a deportation order after he was arrested in 2012, when officials stopped him for removing wood from a forest, said his mother, Maria De Lara.

“(Trump) said they were just going to deport pure criminals and bad people, and my son is not a criminal,” she said. “He’s working for the community.”

Of the 970,000 people on ICE’s radar, “it’s hard to know how many immigrants with deportation orders are being detained,” noted the AP. But “in Atlanta, immigration attorney Charles Kuck said one in five of his clients with scheduled check-ins has been detained since Trump took office, something that hardly ever happened during the prior administration.”

This Arizona mom of two U.S. citizen kids is believed to be one of the first undocumented immigrants to be arrested and deported from a “silent raid”:

About eight years ago, there was a knock on Guadalupe García de Rayos’s door. Authorities had come to arrest the undocumented mother of two U.S.-born children, a Mexican native who had lived north of the border since she was 14.

The Phoenix mother was detained for months and eventually ordered to be sent back to Mexico. But for the subsequent years, after she appealed her voluntary deportation, García de Rayos was allowed to remain in the United States, as long as she checked in once a year, and then every six months.

Each year, she did so, and each year, immigration officials let her stay.

This year, as García de Rayos feared, was different. When she went to check in as usual at the central Phoenix offices of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), she was taken into custody as protests erupted outside.

According to a recent Spanish-language report from Univision, Guadalupe—“the deported Mexican who became the symbol of the new Trump political age”—now resides in the Mexican state of Guanajuato, where she secured a microloan to open a small tortilla shop after selling clothes and fruit in an outdoor market for a short time. She remains separated from her two teens, who are thousands of miles away in Arizona. It’s no surprise, then, why numerous mothers have opted to go into sanctuary rather than risk getting caught in ICE’s web and becoming the next Guadalupe.

It’s the method to Donald Trump and John Kelly’s madness—deport hardworking immigrant moms and dads if they show up, and if they don’t show up out of fear of being separated from their kids, cite their absence as cause to deport them, all the while claiming that “bad hombres” are the ones they’re really targeting. “The Trump Administration doesn’t need to rely on raids,” said America’s Voice executive director Frank Sharry, “when these ‘silent raids’ advance their goals of sowing fear among immigrants and deporting whoever they can get their hands on.”

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