The Trump administration launched an operation this week that aims to apprehend and expel people who are in the U.S. without authorization regardless of whether they have committed crimes.
In a pair of memos that together run 19 pages, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) detailed plans to enforce two executive orders issued by the White House on Jan. 25 that together ramp up immigration enforcement.
“It’s a military operation,” the president said on Thursday. Though his spokesman later told reporters the president used the word as an adjective to mean the government is carrying out the policies “with precision,” the metaphor describes what’s happening. To aid in its effort, the government is hiring 10,000 more immigration officers and 5,000 border patrol agents.
In contrast to the Obama administration, which focused immigration enforcement on serious criminals, the current administration regards noncitizens within the country as people to be rounded up and removed. In a roundup this month of noncitizens in Southern California, officers detained 161 people who had a range of felony and misdemeanor convictions, as well as 10 people who had no criminal history at all.
The memoranda detail as much. The White House orders they implement broaden exercise of the government’s ability to remove noncitizens without a hearing before an immigration judge or an appeal to the Board of Immigration Appeals.
The government says it will remove noncitizens anywhere in the U.S. who have been here less than two years unless they happen to be an unaccompanied minor, qualify for asylum or otherwise prove they have lawful immigration status. That changes the policy in place since 2004, when DHS said it would limit so-called expedited removal to noncitizens encountered within 14 days of entry and within 100 miles of the border.
As a practical matter, the change means that you can be apprehended and deported solely at the discretion of an immigration officer, without the right to an attorney, or to have your case heard before a judge, or to appeal the judge’s ruling – the hallmarks of due process provided by the Fifth Amendment that apply in immigration court.
Here’s how Judge Harry Pregerson of the Ninth Circuit, in a dissent from a ruling that immigrants in expedited removal have no right to counsel, described the due process concerns:
“Now, the deportation process can begin and end with a [border partrol] officer untrained in the law… There is no hearing, no neutral decision-maker, no evidentiary findings, and no opportunity for administrative or judicial review. This lack of procedural safeguards in expedited removal proceedings creates a substantial risk that noncitizens subjected to expedited removal will suffer an erroneous removal.”
Imagine if you were summarily removed from the country, in error, after being here more than two years. Who would you complain to? Who would ensure that you were treated fairly?
The number of unauthorized immigrants in the U.S. has stabilized in recent years, at around 11 million, the Pew Research Center reported in September. As of 2014, at least half of undocumented immigrant adults had lived in the country for at least 13.6 years, up from a decade in 2009. Many of them are our neighbors.
“My family is so afraid,” Daniela Velez, 23, whose parents brought her to the U.S. from Venezuela in 2002, told lawmakers Friday in New Jersey. Daniela is protected by a program that defers the threat of deportation for young people who were brought to the U.S. as children. Her parents recently transferred their apartment and bank account into Daniela’s name.