The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse from Syracuse University, known as TRAC, is an organization that tracks the activities of various federal agencies. Among the agencies that TRAC tracks is the Department of Justice, and according to its website today, immigration-related DOJ prosecutions are at a record high under President Obama. FY 2009 saw approximately 90,000 DOJ prosecutions of cases that had immigration components, up 14.1% from FY 2008. Closer examination shows that the vast majority of prosecutions involve either the entry of an alien at an improper place/time (meaning an illegal border crossing), or the reentry of a deported alien, accounting for approximately 62,000 of the almost 68,000 cases prosecuted this calendar year.
So basically, the Obama administration has stepped up the apprehension of attempted illegal border crossers. This is nothing surprising, and is something that any President should be doing as a matter of national policy. As a matter of better national policy, though, the Obama Administration should be doing some serious thinking about what should be done to really stem the flow of illegal immigrants into the United States. Apprehending 62,000 illegal border crossers is a virtual drop in the bucket, and will never be a meaningful solution to the problem of illegal immigration. TRAC’s statistics only highlight the need for comprhensive and lasting immigration reform.
Filed Under (Immigrant Visas) by Joe on 25-09-2009
Two key programs are ending on September 30th, unless Congress authorizes their extension. The first is the Immigrant Investor Pilot Program, which authorizes the establishment of “Regional Centers” to pool qualifying investments, allowing immigrant investors to more easily obtain permanent residence, and the second is EB-4 classification for Non-Ordained Religious Workers. Although I’m all for bringing more qualified religious workers into the U.S., even though I’m about as un-religious as anyone can be, I’d be seriously shocked, saddened, and downright pissed to see the Regional Centers program sunset on September 30th. The fact that this program is good – no, GREAT – for everyone concerned is a true no-brainer. It brings rich immigrants into the country, creates jobs for American workers, infuses capital into a local economy, and provides a nice source of business for several immigration attorneys. Well, that last one might only be important to me, but the first three reasons should be important to the nation as a whole. As a matter of public policy we want to encourage the best, the brightest, and the wealthiest from around the world to come to the United States. The immigrants taking advantage of the Immigrant Investor Pilot Program are usually a combination of all three, and they have to have obtained their money legally to boot - and prove it – discouraging all those wealthy criminal geniuses from taking advantage of this program. In its infinite widsom, Congress not only created a means for some extremely wealthy people to essentially buy their way into the U.S., but also made it contingent on job creation, and created extra incentives to invest and create jobs in areas that are either rural or designated Targeted Low Employment Areas.
My question for Congress is – why would you not want to extend this program? In a world of increasing complexity, in which it’s often not clear what the best direction for the country is, the Immigrant Investor Pilot Program stands out as something truly good for all concerned. Let’s hope Congress steps up and does the right thing by extending this important program past its September 30th sunset date.
It’s been a busy week for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Miami field office. On Monday, Miami ICE – no joke intended – announced the sentencing of three area residents for a large-scale immigration fraud in which they promised undocumented immigrants work authorization and other benefits for as much as $7,500 a pop. Over a period of approximately a year and a half Nestor Romero, 56, Ada Calveiro, 60, and Rafael Diaz De La Rocha, 52, stole $426,700 from unsuspecting immigrants by promising them benefits for which they never could have qualified. In most cases, no applications were filed, and no work was done on any of these “cases.” Well, karma truly can be a bitch. Romero received 110 months in prison, Calveiro 40 months, and Diaz De La Rocha 20 months, according to an ICE News Release on September 21, 2009.
The next day, another big announcement out of Florida: the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, working in conjunction with ICE prosecuted and convicted 76-year-old Audie Watson of Taramac, Florida, for helping undocumented immigrants avoid deportation by selling them “membership” in an American Indian Tribe. For between $1,500 and $2,000, Watson sold these undocumented immigrants membership in the Pembina Nation Little Shell. A quick google search revealed that the Pembina Nation Little Shell is indeed a bona fide Indian Tribe, whose website now contains a bright yellow box at the bottom informing visitors that:
“The Little Shell Pembina Nation is under attack by scam artists who have misappropriated their name. The Pembina Nation does not sell memberships, roll numbers, license plates, or insurance. They do not participate in land schemes. If you are contacted by anyone attempting to sell you on the ‘benefits of tribal sovereignty’ in the name of the Little Shell Pembina Nation, contact the Attorney General in your state and the FBI. At least one of the conmen is a former inmate of the federal prison system.”
My question for Mr. Watson, and all the poor people that bought membership in the Little Shell Nation, is how did anyone seriously expect foreign nationals to pass themselves off as American Indians? Were the people that bought membership in this tribe taught tribal customs and history? How did a member of the Little Shell Nation even wind up in Mexico, or El Salvador, or wherever else these immigrants happened to be from? I’m not sure if anyone involved in this scam really thought it through, at least based on the information in ICE’s brief News Release.
I have a tendency to deride ICE and the work they do, and for good reason – they often break their own rules and regulations, they push the boundaries of the Constitution to the point of meaninglessness, and use Storm Trooper-like tactics to arrest and detain individuals that are essentially harmless. They also do a lot of good work, as these two cases illustrate. ICE serves a very important function in the immigration bureacracy, and should focus its efforts on people like Mr. Watson or Mr. Romero, not on undocumented non-criminal aliens. After all, ICE is just another law enforcement agency; although any undocumented immigrant is subject to detention and removal, there are countless bigger fish out there that should merit the bulk of ICE’s limited resources.
I spent a thoroughly frustrating morning at USCIS today, and got to thinking about some larger issues related to immigration. Here are the random immigration thoughts I had today, in no particular order:
Immigration is at the same time both an impersonal and a very personal branch of the law. Immigration deals exclusively with people, and all types of people at that. People that arrive in the United States to see the Grand Canyon. People that come here to escape war, persecution, and chaos in their home countries. People that want to make their fortunes in this country. People that already have fortunes, but want to make even bigger fortunes in the United States. The law allows and accounts for all these different situations, and even incorporates humanitarian considerations into otherwise dry and often uncompromising statutes. When adjudicating benefits, immigration officers have to apply the law in a neutral fashion - but they must see so many situations that cry out for a more humane solution, even if the law doesn’t allow for it. Yes, they have discretion, but discretion can only do so much – and that’s when an officer wants to use their discretion. Most simply don’t. I think I would go crazy telling so many people that they can’t remain in the country they have grown to love. Immigration officers must be very adept at separating themselves from the situations they face on a daily basis.
There is so much talk about ”fixing” the nation’s immigration system. I have news for everyone involved in the immigration debate – the United States has several neighbors to the south that are essentially third-world countries. Hell, many are third-world countries. Although Mexicans are perhaps the largest group coming across the southern border, plenty of Guatemalans, Salvadorans, Hondurans, Nicaraguans, and South Americans of various nationalities also make the long journey to El Norte. I love it when morons like Lou Dobbs call all of these border-crossers “lawbreakers.” They just want better lives for their families. In most criminal laws, there has to be criminal intent for someone to truly be considered a lawbreaker or criminal. These immigrants have no such intent – their intent is solely to better take care of their families. The irony is that, by crossing the border illegally, they put their families in a horrible position, one that isn’t easily fixed under current immigration law. I would like to advance a general truth – as long as people seek a better life for themselves and for their families, there will be illegal immigration. The challenge of immigration reform is to understand the force of this desire for a better life, and devise a legal means for foreign nationals to achieve it.
How can anyone blame someone for wanting to escape violence? The law as it exists right now does not allow people fleeing generalized violence from gaining any kind of status in the United States. Yes, I know all about the floodgate arguments - and the United States rightly can’t absorb people from every country in which there happens to be violence. After all, there a lot of violent countries – although in fairness, many parts of the U.S. might be even more violent than these violent countries (I am from L.A.). There are some situations in which a country becomes so generally violent and dangerous that America should step up and do something. I know that there’s very little political will to send U.S. troops to a foreign country with which we have no meaningful connection, especially after what happened in Somalia under Presidence Clinton, but the least we can do is provide sanctuary to foreign nationals that somehow make it to the United States. This was the basis for the Temporary Protective Status (TPS) program started by Congress in the early 1990s in response to the many civil wars in Central America, but TPS is generally no longer available to new applicants – and there are many applicants currently in the U.S. who need of a safe place to live for a while.
Alright - enough random thoughts for now. I’ll try to get a more proper posting about immigration law up tomorrow.
The Department of Justice announced today that the Attorney General swore in a new Chief Immigration Judge, Brian M. O’Leary. I have never met Judge O’Leary, nor have I read any of his decisions. I never even heard of him before today. I did read the short description of his background on the Department of Justice’s News Release, though, and can already tell a lot about Judge O’Leary, despite my lack of prior knowledge. It appears that Judge O’Leary began his career as an INS trial attorney, then became a U.S. Attorney, then became an attorney at INS General Headquarters (associate general counsel, deputy associate general counsel, and assistant general counsel – did the INS really need this many lackey attorneys?). After INS General Headquarters, Judge O’Leary became Judge O’Leary, serving as Assistant Chief Immigration Judge, Deputy Chief Immigration Judge in the Office of the Chief Immigration Judge, a member of the BIA, and then, finally, an Immigration Judge in the Arlington, Virginia Immigration Court. I’m describing Judge O’Leary’s career in excrutiating detail because I want to emphasize the fact that at no point in this man’s career did he ever represent an immigration facing deportation. He’s been on only one side of the aisle ever since he left law school, and almost certainly has a very specific perspective on immigrant rights and the relief to which non-citizens are entitled. The government has a bad habit of hiring its own for Immigration Judge, BIA, and other positions in the EOIR. This gives immigration-related adjudications a decidedly one-sided tilt, and deprives immigrants in removal proceedings of having a judge with a possibly different worldview hear their case. I hope that Judge O’Leary does well in his new job, but I can’t help but feel a little frustrated at what his elevation to this lofty new position means for our nation’s immigration court system.
The ACLU, working in conjunction with the National Immigration Law Center and the law firm Paul Hastings, announced today that it won a significant victory against ICE for immigration detainees at L.A.’s immigration detention basement. Although most of these detainees are indeed illegally here, and many also have serious criminal records, the fact remains that conditions at the L.A. detention facility were truly inhumane. The ACLU’s press release stated that immigrants were “held for weeks on end in crowded cells without drinking water, changes of clothing or sanitary napkins,” and that many were also ”deprived of their ability to defend themselves.” By way of background, L.A.’s detention facility is located in the basement of the downtown federal building, which also happens to house USCIS, USICE, the Department of Justice, the I.R.S., and many other bloated bureaucracies. This basement detention facility – known affectionately to some as “B-18″ - was never intended to house inmates, rather to be a sort-of stepping stone on a detained immigrant’s road from apprehension to either a more permanent detention facility or release. Unfortunately, the immigration detention system’s chronic lack of space turned B-18 into an extremely overcrowded facility, leading to gross civil rights violations and some seriously disgusting conditions. The main civil rights problem, aside from lack of access to water and wipes, was the practice of shuttling immigrants around to various other facilities in an effort to avoid housing anyone at B-18 on a long-term basis. People were moved to a local jail for one night, then back to B-18, then to another facility, and sometimes back to B-18 again, before finally being placed in one of the area’s longer-term immigration detention centers. Aside from being nervewracking and stressful for the detainess and their families, this ”disturbing human shell game” prevented us immigration attorneys from locating our clients from one day to the next (a situation that drove us truly insane). Hopefully the government’s settlement in this lawsuit indicates a new willingness to really put due process and civil rights above bureaucratic efficiency and a mindless adherence to the rules.
Saw this today at Talking Points Memo Muckraker: apparently Joe Wilson, the Representative from South Carolina that infamously called President Obama a liar during his address to Congress last week, lied about his having been an immigration attorney. After his outburst, Rep. Wilson said, and I quote, “We need to be discussing issues specifically to help the American people. And that would not include illegal aliens, these are people– I’m for immigration, legal immigration, I’ve been an immigration attorney. But people who have come to our country and violated laws, we should not be providing full health care services.”
Well, the Muckraker raked some muck, and found out that Rep. Wilson was most likely never an immigration attorney at any point in his long legal career. Check out TPMmuckraker’s investigation of Rep. Wilson here.
Reuters reported yesterday about the “Hold Their Feet to the Fire 2009″ immigration enforcement broadcast event taking place in Washington D.C. today and tomorrow. This unusual event is bringing together 47 of the conservative movement’s leading broadcasters and pundits for a two-day rant against illegal immigration and illegal immigrants. The hope is presumably to let Congress know how the public feels about this controversial and complex issue - since, of course, these broadcasters are the voice of the people. According to Reuters, “Hold Their Feet to the Fire is the largest immigration related media event each year and is a joint production of FAIR and participating radio and television stations.”
It disturbs me that the largest immigration-related media event every year is decidedly conservative and nativist; it disturbs me much more, though, that ”Hold Their Feet” is co-sponsored by the group Federation for American Immigration Reform, or “FAIR” for short. Since 2007, FAIR has been on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s list of hate groups operating within the United States. The Southern Poverty Law Center’s website states that “FAIR has long been marked by anti-Latino and anti-Catholic attitudes. It has mixed this bigotry with a fondness for eugenics, the idea of breeding better humans discredited by its Nazi associations. It has accepted $1.2 million from an infamous, racist eugenics foundation. It has employed officials in key positions who are also members of white supremacist groups. Recently, it has promoted racist conspiracy theories about Mexico’s secret designs on the American Southwest and an alternative theory alleging secret plans to merge the United States, Mexico and Canada. Just last February, a senior FAIR official sought “advice” from the leaders of a racist Belgian political party.”
Is this really who the conservative movement wants representing them on immigration issues? Don’t forget that “Hold Their Feet” isn’t some fringe event – among the broadcasters coming are heavy hitters like CNN’s Lou Dobbs – and it does have a concrete impact on many members of Congress and their views on immigration. I’d hope that if and when more people involved with this hatefest learn about who’s really behind it, they’d reevaluate the worldview this event reflects, and think twice about the accuracy and objectiveness of the information groups like FAIR disseminate.
According to a Q&A factsheet that USCIS released today, there will be a special E-2 visa for immigrant investors currently in the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, or CNMI. Although a U.S. protectorate, the CNMI has always had its own system of immigration, which was largely based on the issuance of temporary and long-term permits. In 2008, Congress decided to extend U.S. immigration law to the CNMI as part of the Consolidated Natural Resources Act, and USCIS has been slowly implementing various aspects of our immigration system there ever since.
This latest move would allow existing immigrant investors to obtain CNMI-specific E-2 status, valid for up to five years – until December 31, 2014, at the latest. It’s unclear from USCIS’s factsheet, but it seems as if this E-2 status is valid only for investors that have already invested in the CNMI, and is applicable to any qualifying investor irrespective of nationality. This would make sense, since there might be many foreign nationals in the CNMI that belong to non-treaty countries, who would therefore normally not qualify for treaty trader or investor visas on their own. These investors would lose their status in the CNMI, and would be forced to apply – if they qualified – for an employment-based visa in order to keep working for their own companies.
Although I think USCIS did the right thing by allowing any existing investor to apply for the CNMI E-2 visa, I don’t agree with the corollary to this decision, which is to only make the CNMI E-2 a five-year status, with no extensions possible. After December 31, 2014, all CNMI E-2 investors will have to find some other way in which to stay in the CNMI; if they can’t, they would have to leave. If these investors all have pre-existing investments, and if they previously had an expectation of being able to stay in the CNMI indefinitely based on that investment, USCIS should make the CNMI-specific E-2 status renewable indefinitely as well, at least for this specific group of investors. This would do no one any harm, and USCIS could always make any future investors in the CNMI comply with the requirements of the E-1 and E-2 visa categories as they now exist. The United States should do all that it can to encourage legitimate immigrant investment. Stripping a group of investors of their status after five years would do just the opposite, and could strike a severe blow to the CNMI’s already shaky economy.
I’m a firm believer that it’s important to give the government credit when it does something right. Now don’t scoff. Please, stop your scoffing – the government does some good every now and then, and it’s just as important to acknowledge the good as it is to condemn the bad. In this case, I’m talking about the Department of Homeland Security working with various American Indian tribes to issue tribe-specific Enhanced I.D. cards that comply with the requirements of the “WHTI” – the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative. American Indians have crossed back and forth across the borders with Canada and Mexico since “time immemorial,” as Seneca Nation President Barry E. Snyder, Sr., said in a ceremony today in Niagra Falls, New York. The Seneca is the latest Indian tribe to receive its own identification card, showing both tribal membership and U.S. citizenship, and easily facilitating the routine international travel typical of many of America’s border tribes. DHS is currently working with 25 other tribes on its Enhanced Tribal Card initiative, and has already signed agreements with the Kootenai Tribe of Idaho and the Pascua Yaqui Tribe of Arizona. The Department’s actions in these cases are an acknowledgement of the special status that American Indian tribes have as sovereign nations under U.S. law, as well as the special needs that many tribes have whose ancestral lands border Canada and Mexico. Way to go DHS!
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