The Obama administration is gearing up for a fresh wave of raids against Central American migrants in what’s likely “the largest deportation sweep targeting immigrant families,”Reuters reported Thursday:
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has now told field offices nationwide to launch a 30-day "surge" of arrests focused on mothers and children who have already been told to leave the United States, the document seen by Reuters said.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesperson Jennifer Elzea didn’t explicitly confirm these details, but in an email to CityLab, she stressed that ICE’s “current operations” were in line with announcements Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson made in January and March. She also reiterated that all targets for enforcement would be individuals and families who crossed the border illegally after 2014, and who have subsequently been ordered to be removed by an immigration judge with no pending appeals or claims for asylum or humanitarian relief under U.S. laws. (Families who entered before that year and have no criminal records are de-prioritized for deportation according to 2014’s Department of Homeland Security directive.)
If these raids are conducted in the same fashion as the ones in January, they’re likely to deepen the mistrust that immigrant communities already harbor toward the U.S. government.
[For more of this story, written by Tanvi Misra, go to http://www.citylab.com/politic...-immigration/482577/]
Comments (0)