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After nearly two months in a Texas prison, Ignacio watched through a computer screen last week as a border county prosecutor announced he was dropping the criminal trespassing charge against him.

But that didnt mean the 28-year-old migrant from Venezuela was going to be freed.

Instead, the next few days became a whirlwind of confusion, fear and, ultimately, a trip back to detention as a hastily built Texas system to catch and jail migrants suspected of illegally crossing the border struggled to adapt to releasing people from state custody. Ignacios return to lockup is the most recent example of cracks that have surfaced in the states new immigrant detention system.

Nobody knows what to do, and every time somebody thinks they figure it out, something new happens, said David Ortiz, Ignacios court-appointed attorney in his trespassing case.

The Texas Tribune agreed to use a pseudonym for Ignacio because he and his brother told attorneys they fear publicity will harm his chances for being granted asylum. More than 20,000 Venezuelans have been apprehended by U.S. Border Patrol in Texas this year, with many claiming they are fleeing political persecution, violence or economic crisis.

Last week, after nearly two months and hundreds of trespassing jailings under the new border arrest initiative, Val Verde County Attorney David Martinez dismissed dozens of cases against migrants in the interest of justice. He later explained that he was following what the states top cop told legislators last month: Police on the border want to target dangerous criminals, not the many migrants who are fleeing hardships or seeking asylum.

Court documents show that over two days of virtual court hearings for more than 70 migrant arrestees, Martinez dropped 40 cases, including Ignacios.

[DPS Director Steve McCraw] said were not looking for people who are crossing the river and then looking for law enforcement officers to turn themselves in. We are looking for the ones who are getting away from us, Martinez, a Democrat, said after the hearings. I listened to that.

He said he began working with defense lawyers to see if the defendants had asylum claims or medical issues he should consider before deciding whether he should proceed with prosecution. Martinez said he is still filing criminal cases in most instances, however, to get to the step of making that determination.

With court dockets few and far between in single-judge counties, that meant most of the dozens of men whose cases were dismissed last week had already been in prison for weeks.

In August, Martinez dropped one trespassing case against an 18-year-old who had been separated from his father, and offered plea deals that came with 15-day sentences for about 25 others. Having already spent at least 15 days in a state prison, they were then picked up by U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement officials.

Arrested in Del Rio in July, Ignacio was one of the first to be jailed at a retooled state prison under Gov. Greg Abbotts new initiative to lock up migrants on state criminal charges in response to a surge in illegal border crossings. Typically, people crossing the border illegally are apprehended and processed by U.S. Border Patrol, but Abbott has repeatedly blamed the increase in apprehensions on President Joe Biden and sought to ramp up state law enforcement at the border in response.

Ortiz said Ignacio and a group of other Venezuelans were seeking asylum and had been pointed toward private land on the Texas side of the Rio Grande by officials on a boat in the river.

They were arrested by the Texas Department of Public Safety on trespassing charges. Over the next several weeks, hundreds more migrants would be arrested in Val Verde and Kinney counties and detained in two Texas prisons converted into state immigration jails. Almost all of the migrants are jailed for allegedly trespassing on private property a misdemeanor offense.

DPS reported this month that, since March, state police have made thousands of immigration-related arrests and seized thousands of pounds of drugs and millions of dollars. In recent weeks, state police have in part shifted away from Val Verde County, however, and started making a larger number of trespassing arrests in rural Kinney County.

On Monday, Abbott reiterated that the policy in Texas is to arrest and to jail people who are coming across the border illegally and trespassing. In a statement Friday, DPS officials said the agency is continuing to make arrests at the border.

Ultimately, it is up to the discretion of the County and District Attorneys whether or not to dismiss a particular case, the statement read.

Still, the dropped charges and release from prison havent necessarily led to a fast release into the United States for the migrants after weeks or months in detention.

ICE didnt want to take custody of Ignacio or the others whose cases were dismissed because they had no criminal conviction, multiple officials said. And officials with U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which processes migrants apprehended at the border, didnt have an interest in Ignacio because he had already been in the state for nearly two months.

So Ignacio and a handful of other migrants released from the Briscoe prison after their cases were dismissed on Wednesday were taken back to the border town of Del Rio. Without any U.S. documentation aside from his prison release forms, Ignacio was dropped off with the others at a gas station bus stop, Ortiz said. Unsure what to do, he and a Honduran migrant started walking.

They were scared to get a ride or even just walk along the highway, said Maria Renteria, a law fellow at RAICES, an immigrant rights group. Renteria has been in touch with Ignacios brother, who lives in Dallas.

The next day, Ignacio and the other man were able to get in touch with Ortiz, who drove the men to Val Verde Border Humanitarian Coalition, a group that helps connect resources to asylum-seekers released by federal authorities. Ignacio had entered Texas seeking asylum and hoping to reunite with his brother, Ortiz said, but he never had a chance to have his asylum claim heard since he had been arrested immediately after crossing the river.

Believing the men had the proper paperwork, a volunteer tried to drive them to San Antonio on Thursday with a group of migrants who had upcoming asylum hearings, said Tiffany Burrow, operations director for the coalition. But they were stopped at a federal immigration checkpoint, and the two men were taken into custody.

Ignacio found himself back in detention, this time in a CBP processing center in Eagle Pass. Federal authorities told Renteria last week that Ignacio could be there for days or weeks before officials could process him and decide whether to deport him which is what they did with the Honduran man or release him into the U.S. on an asylum bond.

It was unclear what happened to the other roughly half dozen men who were dropped off at the bus stop after their cases were dropped.

[Ignacio is] lucky because his criminal attorney is great and was helpful, but for other people who didnt get so lucky in terms of representation, I dont know whats going to happen to them, Andani Alcantara Diaz, an attorney with RAICES, said Friday. Its very confusing. Im sure its confusing for CBP as well.

On Friday, after Ignacio was again detained, Val Verde County Sheriff Joe Frank Martinez said a new system had been put in place to process migrants released from the prison. Men whose cases had been dismissed in court Thursday would be transported from prison to the new state booking center in Del Rio before being turned over to CBP officials.

Those that can be deported back to their home county are going to be deported, and those that have a legal [asylum] claim will be given a notice to appear, and they will move wherever theyre going, the sheriff said.

On Monday, he reported that out of 17 men released under the new process, eight had been released pending asylum hearings. The rest were deported.

Join us Sept. 20-25 at the 2021 Texas Tribune Festival. Tickets are on sale now for this multi-day celebration of big, bold ideas about politics, public policy and the days news, curated by The Texas Tribunes award-winning journalists. Learn more.

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After a Texas prosecutor dismissed dozens of migrant trespassing cases, some men were dropped at a border bus station - The Texas Tribune

The morning of the 9/11 attack I was the Assistant Director for Investigations (ADDI) of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) in San Antonio, Texas. I was a long way from New York, but I felt like the rest of the nation that what happened was in our backyard and it was personal. As someone who oversaw a program that was responsible for finding and arresting those who were illegally in the United States, I also sensed a point of failure.

Given the fact that the past and still current terrorist threat to the United States comes primarily from foreign-born individuals, enforcing our immigration laws in a meaningful way can and should make a difference. Of course, no immigration system can be completely beyond manipulation or abuse, but it does not have to be. However, there must be at least an attempt to wisely enforce our immigration laws to secure the homeland and protect the people of this nation.

While 9/11 was the most destructive in American history, the attacks of last September were not the first carried out by foreign terrorists on U.S. soil. We can all agree that part of the problem was, and is, the mismanagement of temporary visas, such as those issued to students and tourists, because all of the 19 hijackers were originally allowed into the country on temporary visas. Others have argued that there is a problem with illegal immigration, because at least three of the hijackers four, if Zacarias Moussaoui is included had overstayed their visas and were illegal aliens at the time of the attacks.

Hijackers Mohammed Atta, right, and Abdulaziz Alomari pass through airport security Sept. 11, 2001, at Portland International Jetport in Maine in an image from airport surveillance tape released Sept. 19, 2001. (Portland Police Department)

Terrorists have used almost every means of entering the country; however, we must attempt to close any loopholes that exist that make it easier for a terrorist or terrorist sympathizer to gain access to the homeland.

The Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Justice have made great strides to close many of the vulnerable areas but the need to secure the homeland has also been politicized to the extent that larger vulnerabilities have been created. This is where I think many politicians have forgotten.

The creation of databases such as the No-Fly List, the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE), the Terrorist Screening Database (TSDB), etc., along with the various Joint Terrorism Task Forces and efforts like the Visa Security Program have all added some security and overwatch of those who want to do our homeland harm, but the politics of immigration enforcement has created vulnerabilities that make all those efforts less effective. If you are someone in this world who wants to come to the United States to do us harm and there exists any derogatory information on you or your affiliates, its more unlikely that you can get a plane ticket to enter the U.S. or a visa to enter.

We must attempt to close any loopholes that exist that make it easier for a terrorist or terrorist sympathizer to gain access to the homeland

The politicization of immigration enforcement at our borders has created a great vulnerability. The current Biden administration along with their open-border agenda has created a nightmare for those who spend their lives trying to secure the homeland. Again, those who want to do us harm will find it more difficult to get to the U.S. on a plane or with a visa, but they can easily enter the U.S. illegally through our southern border. So far this year, Border Patrol has arrested five individuals on the terror watchlist but what is more concerning is that there have been well over 300,000 got-a-ways. These are people who entered the U.S. illegally without arrest based on camera, drone, and sensor traffic. The Border Patrol says over 300,000 that they know of. The actual number is much higher.

If you are a terrorist, a gang member, a drug smuggler, you are going to take advantage of the current crisis and the fact that border agents are overwhelmed with this humanitarian crisis and cross undetected because at least 40 percent of border agents are not on the line because they are processing and caring for families and children. Yes, if you are a terrorist and want to get to the U.S. undetected you will cross the southern border like 20 million others did over the past decades. You will cross just as the 300,000 did and enter the U.S. and onward to your destination. For those that say there is no evidence of terrorists coming across the border, I say you are simply ignoring the data. For example, we know that over 100 Known or Suspected Terrorists (KST) have been encountered at the Darian Strait in Panama by officials working with Homeland Security Investigations. Most of them had a final destination of the U.S. Luckily, our enforcement relationship with Panama is good and many got deported from Panama. How many didnt get arrested in the Darian Strait? We may never know.

Add to the fact that our border is more vulnerable than it ever has been because of politics, the fact that ICE has been crippled from enforcing interior immigration laws. ICE can no longer prioritize the arrest of any illegal alien for simply being in the U.S. illegally to include those with a final order of removal issued by a federal judge. The current ICE priorities as dictated by the Biden administration speak of recent border entries, those of national security concerns, and those who have been convicted of a serious aggravated felony. The vast majority (90 percent) of those ICE arrested last year, even though more than 91 percent were convicted criminals or pending criminal charges, are no longer a priority under the current administration. Of special note, none of the 9/11 hijackers would meet the current priorities. Its now acceptable to be in the US illegally and overstay a visa because the current administration has halted enforcement actions against that population also.

And finally, add to those problems the fact that politicians have created sanctuary jurisdictions where local and state law enforcement are not allowed to work with ICE, we have created the perfect recipe for disaster. Again, politics that dictate these types of non-enforcement policies add to our national security vulnerabilities. The 9/11 Commission found that law enforcement should always work and share information with other law enforcement. These politicians forgot that also.

Continue reading here:
State of Immigration: 9/11 Reminds Us to Never Forget Enforcement - Hstoday - HSToday

File photo: Detainees at Winn Correctional Center, in Winnfield, Louisiana. Some attorneys fear ICE detainees in Hudson County will be transferred out of state to far-away jurisdictions like Louisiana.

Hudson County will stop its long-standing practice of housing federal immigration detainees at its jail in Kearny, but what that means for the 45 people now held at the facility is unclear.

County Executive Thomas DeGise sent a letter to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcements district office in Newark Friday saying that starting Nov. 1 the jail will no longer house or accept any detained individuals who face civil immigration violations.

William ODea, a commissioner on the Hudson County Board of County Commissioners, who has opposed the agreement that pays the county to house the detainees, thanked DeGise for his letter. But ODea said he fears that the remaining detainees could be transferred to other facilities far from their attorneys, family and friends. That happened to some detainees who were held at the Essex County jail when that facility shut down its ICE operations in August.

Our work is not done yet though we need to focus on helping get the detainees released or expediting their hearing process to ensure that ICE does not try to vindictively transfer them far away, he said.

An ICE spokesperson declined to comment Monday on whether the agency will use its discretion to release or transfer detainees before the Nov. 1 deadline.

ICE can use these transfers to send people across the country where they will not have family or community support or access to counsel, said Pachnanda, who said her organization represents at least three people held in Hudson County. If people are transferred, they are going to be away from counsel and in jurisdictions like Louisiana, where they wont have the right to an attorney.

Although people facing criminal charges are entitled to a public defender if they cannot afford a private attorney, legal assistance isnt automatically provided in immigration court. New York City and the state of New Jersey have set aside funds to help pay for legal services for detainees facing civil immigration charges. Hudson and Essex counties also set aside funds to help ICE detainees with their legal immigration cases.

Hudson Countys move was called a win by immigrant advocates who have long lobbied for the county to stop profiting from immigration detention, which has kept men and women away from their families while they wait for their cases to be resolved. Some point to allegations of inhumane conditions at some of the facilities, which have been the site of hunger strikes by detainees in the past few years. Advocates have also raised concerns about potential transfers.

New Jersey jails have been no stranger to abuse, wrongful deaths and scandal, said Amy Torres, the executive director of the New Jersey Alliance for Immigrant Justice. But as sites close, we also cannot tolerate transfers to sites further away, especially after the retaliations ICE took with Essexs announcement earlier this summer. The attention now turns to our senators and congressional leaders to push ICE for releases so that people currently detained can fight their cases from home and in the care of community.

A request for comment from U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez and Sen. Cory Booker was not immediately answered on Monday. Both senators called for the end of agreements between New Jersey counties and ICE to house immigrant detainees in December.

New Jersey used to be home to four ICE detention centers before Essex County shut down its operations last month. Besides Hudson County, ICE also has an existing intergovernmental agreement with Bergen County, as well as with CoreCivic, one of the countrys largest private prison companies, to run an immigration detention center in the city of Elizabeth.

Hudson County has housed ICE detainees at its jail since the 1990s, bringing in millions to county coffers. During President Donald Trumps tenure, the administration adopted stricter policies to curb illegal immigration, which led ICE to arrest more people who had been charged with civil immigration violations. That, in turn, led to the population at immigration detention centers to swell.

During the Trump presidency, and prior to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, Hudson County housed at times 600 detainees daily for the federal agency, receiving $120 per day, per detainee. The county billed ICE more than $19 million in 2016, which jumped to $27.4 million in 2018, according to invoices provided by the county to The Record and NorthJersey.com.

Last year, the Board of County Commissioners approved the renewal of its ICE contract for 10 years, after a marathon online meeting where more than 100 people spoke against it. ODea was among those who voted against renewal.

After Essex County announced in the spring it would phase out its operations with ICE, Anthony Vainieri, chairman of the Hudson County Board of County Commissioners, who voted in favor of extending the ICE contract, said he had changed his stance on keeping the agreement going.

ODea said the county was trying for many months to find other ways to make up the revenue it would lose if it no longer housed ICE detainees. Earlier this year, the county received $7 million for the Hudson County Pilot Reentry Program, which represented a $4 million increase from the previous year, and could help close some of the gap in revenue.

Read more:
Where will detainees go as another county rejects ICE? - NJ Spotlight

Editors note: There were so many letters to the editor in the September 15, 2021 edition of the paper that we ran out of room to publish them all. This letter from Larry Benson, originally scheduled to run in print on the 15th, will instead show up in print in the September 22nd edition.

I didnt expect to be writing this letter about Dan Shannons column after reading his initial column a few weeks ago, where he explained how he would only be concerned with the facts of any given situation that he might be referring to. Wow, was I wrong.

Facts, boy I dont know, he puts out lots of numbers associated with his opinions of various situations, but there are zero source references to support any of his claims. Heres one fact that he failed to mention when he referred to 9/11. While it was a terrible tragedy, perpetrated by a small group of terrorists, we went to war with two countries, one of which wasnt even involved in that tragedy, and killed approximately 71,000 Afghan civilians, and even worse, between 187,000 and 207,000 Iraqi civilians. How many more terrorists do you suppose these tragedies may have created?

Five dollar a gallon gas? Where is that in evidence? As it turns out there are many reasons for gas prices to rise and fall, none of which any president may or may not be responsible for, which include: The dot com bust putting a chill on the economy, falling U.S. production giving OPEC more pricing power, rising oil prices helping spur the 2008-2009 recession, which crashed oil prices, economic recovery sending oil prices back to $100/bbl, U.S. fracking boom breaking OPECs hold on oil prices, again crashing prices, and prices declining because of COVID-19. All of these things happened over the course of the terms of 3 different presidents: Bush, Obama and Trump.

Illegal immigration and its effects: His claim that illegals are responsible for so much crime in our country while several empirical studies generally find that immigrants do not increase local crime rates, and are less likely to cause crime than their native-born peers, and are less likely to be incarcerated than native-born Americans. Our thriving economy depends on illegals to keep prices and wages low. If politicians wanted to stop illegal immigration all they would have to do is prosecute businesses that hire them. Its that simple, but neither party will admit to that or do anything about it. He also makes no mention of the fact that the rights God, Ronald Reagan, gave amnesty to 3 million illegals when he was president.

Billions of dollars of military equipment left behind? All that was left behind was destroyed except for equipment in the hands of the Afghan armies.

Finally, respect: Referring to our current president as Old Joe and a past president, probably one of the greatest humanitarians in our history, as Mr. Peanut is beyond disparaging. Dan Shannon, The Smartest Man in the Room? From the actual facts quoted in his column, he must be the only one in the room, just sayin.

Larry Benson

Enumclaw

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Columnist must be the only one in the room - Enumclaw Courier-Herald

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A few weeks ago, my life irrevocably changed forever when I received my green card and became a legal permanent resident of the United States. The transition from a non-resident alien to an official resident was fraught with challenges, and involved an incredible amount of hard work. The stressful load of our uncertain legal status fell apart the minute my family received our green cards, and we could not help but feel a weird mixture of disbelief and happiness.

As immigrants from one of the most populous countries in the world, I knew that our path to citizenship would take a long time. Despite being the second largest immigrant group in the United States, Indian immigrants are less likely to have naturalized citizenship than other immigrants.This can be attributed to the quota system adopted by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) that prevents more than 7 percent of visas in a particular category from being granted to people from any onecountry. Unfortunately, this creates a uniquely unjust system that equalizes quotas from countries as small as Monaco to countries that are basically continents, such as China or India.

Furthermore, immigration laws have abysmal implementation rates, as evidenced by the nearly five million people waiting in the green card application backlog.It is estimated to take decades to process all their papers, and there are 675,000 applicants who will die before receiving a stable legal status in the United States. Additionally, USCIS classifies immigrants based on their employment preference categories, in other words, their skill and education levels. As my mother is classified as a highly educated and highly skilled worker, my family managed to file our green card application in the EB1 category (priority workers), thus allowing us to receive legal resident status in two years.This is not the norm for the average Indian immigrant who is expected to wait nearly fifty years before they achieve stability and safety in this country.

To add insult to injury, an average green card application costs nearly $2,000 per person, which can round out to $10,000 for a family of four.Spending that much money on an application that has between a 6 to 50% chance of getting rejected is a financially challenging prospect, especially for low and middle income earners. While a green card is in processing, immigrants are also discouraged from traveling abroad, on the off-chance that the U.S. Customs and Border Protection decides to deport them upon their return to a U.S. airport. This meant that while my friends were getting excited for their fall semester, I was getting stressed out about my impending trip to Scotland for the United Nations Climate Change Conference, and the overwhelming fear that I would get deported to India upon my arrival in JFK. With the help of my local Congresswoman Jahana Hayes, I was preparing an official petition to the federal government when my family received a notification that our green cards were ready.

The immigration system is more than just a simple dichotomy between maintaining law and order versus welcoming immigrants from all backgrounds. Other variables play a role, especially the legal system which is convoluted and vague, while also exhibiting cruel and arbitrary enforcement. An advisor from the International Student & Scholar Services recounted the experience of one international student at UConn on an F1 visa, who was arrested because his roommate covered up the smoke detector in their room. While this might seem like a simple misdemeanor, a black mark on the students records can mar his immigration prospects for life. Legal immigrants in college are also prohibited from partaking in internships, paid or unpaid, and are often limited from working for more than twenty hours a week and can be deported if they do so.

Predictably, while legalimmigratonbrings its own plethora of problems to the table, illegal immigrants suffer far more at the hands of our legal code.An infamous story that details the cruelty of the immigration system is the tale of ten-year old Rosa Maria Hernandez who crossed the national border to go to a hospital in Texas for emergency gallbladder surgery when she was arrested by ICE agents two days after her recovery. Stories like this advance the widespread publicity of the troubles of illegal immigrants, and can help build empathy for their struggles.

However, the radio silence on the issues of legal immigrants prevents the average Joe from truly understanding the difficulty of incentivizing illegal aliens to come into this country legally, when the legal side of the immigration coin is equally messy and unjust.The visual roadmap in this article details just how convoluted legal immigration can be and imagine adding to this the incredible stress of waiting for confirmation from a centralized federal government that seems like a disconnected, slow-moving and inhumane system.That is the reality of the immigration process a cruel, never ending waiting game for the illusory stability of permanent residence.

More here:
Green Cards and Legal Immigration: A cruel waiting game - UConn Daily Campus