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A Border Patrol agent at the fence along the border between the United States and Mexico on the outskirts of Nogales, Ariz., on Sept. 22, 2016. (Tomas Munita/New York Times)

President Donald Trump says the country is continuing to make "historic progress" to curb the flow of illegal immigration along thesouthern border.

"We inherited a full-fledged border crisis. It was a disaster," Trump said in his weekly radio address April 7. "Yet, with quick and bold steps, we have so far exceeded even the most bullish predictions for the progress we could make in so short a period of time. Last month, we saw a 64 percent reduction in illegal immigration on our southern border."

Itwasnt the first time Trump claimed he inherited a mess, or that hes turned things around at the border. Hes recently emphasized statistics to show decreases in illegal immigration. In March, he said illegal immigration wasdown 61 percent since Election Day (Mostly True) and down 40 percent since his first month in office (Mostly True).

Is Trumps story getting even better?

What we found is that Trump is changing how he's doing the counting in a way that emphasizes progress.

The 64 percent reduction

To get to the 64 percent reduction, Trump isnt looking at the decrease from February 2017 to March 2017, as he did when he talked about the decrease between January and February.

Instead, hes looking at the year-over-year reduction (March 2016 vs. March 2017), the White House told us.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection data show that in March 2017 border patrol made 12,193 apprehensions at the southwest border. In March 2016, there were33,316 apprehensions. Thats a 63.4 percent decrease year-over-year. Add in people who were deemed inadmissable to the country and you reach 64 percent.

But if you looked at the decrease from February 2017 to March 2017, as Trump did last month, the drop would not have been as dramatic.

From February 2017 to March 2017, border patrol apprehensions dropped about 35 percent, not 64 percent.

Point being, Trump picked the number that showed the biggest decrease, when last month he calculated the figure a different way. Importantly, alistener to Trump's weekly radio address would have no way of knowing Trump changed his measuring stick.

Aside from the specific numbers, Trumps rhetoric and tough immigration stance can be credited for the decreases, experts have told us. But they caution against making early conclusions about the effect Trumps policies have had.Changes on the ground usually take longer to materialize, experts said.

Oh, Canada?

While data backs Trumps claim of decreases at the U.S.-Mexico border, the northern border has actually seen an increasein illegal immigration.

"As we increasingly secure the southern border, won't that put more pressure on the northern border and other ports of entry?" Sen. John Hoeven, R-N.D., asked John Kelly, Department of Homeland Security secretary, during an April 5 Senate committee hearing on border security and public safety.

Kelly said security concerns were not at the same level in the northern border as they are in the southern border. But that sector also needs attention, he said.

"We obviously need to watch it, one of the things the Canadians recently did was to allow ... Mexicans to travel to Canada without visas and we're seeing a little bit of increase in Mexicans coming illegally into the United States from the north," Kelly said.

(SinceDec. 1, 2016Mexicans do not need a visa to visit Canada.)

In all fiscal year 2016, there were 2,283 border patrol apprehensions at the northern border, compared to 408,870 at the southern border.

Our ruling

Trump said, "Last month, we saw a 64 percent reduction in illegal immigration on our southern border."

It depends on how you define last month.

The White House said Trump was speaking about year-over-year changes, from March 2016 to March 2017. Border patrol apprehensions declined 63.4 percent during that time.

But if you looked at the decrease from February 2017 to March 2017, as Trump did just a month earlier, the decrease was about 35 percent.

That difference would be lost on a listener. We rate Trumps statement Half True.

Share the Facts

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Half True

"Last month, we saw a 64 percent reduction in illegal immigration on our southern border."

Donald Trump

President of the United States

in weekly address

Friday, April 7, 2017

04/07/2017

Original post:
Donald Trump changes yardstick in claim about southern border apprehensions - PolitiFact

The congregation talked immigration reform and ways they can do their part(courtesy:NBC).

Bowling Green, Ohio (WNWO)--In light of changing immigration reform rules one church is starting the discussion and spearheading efforts to help.

After Sunday's service, the Maumee Unitarian Universalist Congregation in Bowling Green sat and listened to Labor Leader Baldemar Velasquez speak on the difficulties immigrants in Northwest Ohio including : deportation, wage intimidation, along with ICE (Immigration and customs Enforcement) and border patrol .

He stressed the importance of immigrants knowing their rights, specifically focusing on their rights to due process and an attorney with looming deportation.

He also mentioned for families to have a family preparedness plan, urging the community to "adopt"' a family and help " keep proper documents gathered and put in one place" in case something were to happen.

Velasquez is the president of F.L.O.C. ( farm labor organizing committee supporting other unions)and also works with the nonprofit CMWJ,( Campaign for Migrant workers Justice, which does education and job training for illegal immigrants).

"We want to know how to help" said Congregation President Steve Israel, explaining why it was so important for the congregation to hear Velasquez speak.

Read more:
Church hears from Illegal Immigration Leader | WNWO - WNWO NBC 24

One of the smartest steps President Trump has taken to get our illegal immigration problem under control was ending the Obama administrations policy known as catch and release.

Border Patrol agents have long sarcastically called it the catch and run policy. Why?

Because aliens who have been caught and then released under the stipulation they show up for a scheduled hearing frequently fail to appear in court. Thats the finding of a new report produced by former federal immigration court judge Mark H. Metcalf and published by the Center for Immigration Studies.

In fact, no courts have higher failure-to-appear rates by defendants than U.S. immigration courts, the report found.

Why should this concern us?

These illegal aliens are ignoring immigration court orders to appear without fear of repercussion, leaving them free to run and disappear into the interior of the country. Chances are, they wont be found again, incarcerated or deported. In fact, over the past 20 years, 37 percent of all illegal aliens released pending trial never showed up for court. According to Metcalf, of the almost 2.5 million aliens released from detention, 918,098 failed to appear in court. Nearly 46,000 aliens disappeared each year rather than appear in court when they were supposed to.

Aliens are more likely to be ordered deported for their failure to appear than through actual court decisions on the merits of their supposed claimed right to remain in the U.S. Even in cases where aliens are ordered deported because they never showed up for court, those deportation orders are widely ignored both by those immigrants and by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement division within the Department of Homeland Security that is charged with enforcing them.

Metcalf found that almost a million deportation orders issued by federal immigration judges 953,506 to be exact have not been enforced by ICE. That is a 58 percent increase since 2002. Bottom line, immigrants who are here illegally believe that they can stay here illegally even when they have been ordered removed. Why? Because the federal government has in the past chosen to ignore these orders.

Even worse, Metcalf says, the Department of Justice has been manipulating the statistics it reports to Congress to cover up the staggeringly high failure-to-appear rate. When DOJ reported statistical data on the percentage of illegal immigrants who failed to appear in court, they made the number look misleadingly smaller by including detained aliens in the total number. Obviously, aliens being held by ICE are going to be brought to court. They dont have the ability to ignore court orders to appear.

Among the aliens who disappeared and never showed up for court are more than 3,000 from countries that the State Department says are involved in terrorism or have activist terrorist organizations. That includes aliens from Iran, Sudan and Syria, all of whose governments are classified as state sponsors of terrorism. In fact, Metcalf found, a troubling 11 percent of asylum applicants from those three state sponsors of terrorism absconded before their court proceedings. We have no idea where they are inside the country or what they are doing.

This problem illustrates a significant double standard in our legal system. There is no other court in America that lets defendants ignore orders to appear. In fact, federal law provides severe penalties for failing to show up to a federal district court. Only in immigration courts can noncitizens disappear and potentially not face the kinds of consequences that a citizen would face for failing to appear in federal district court.

When illegal immigrants ignore our courts and ICE doesnt enforce the law, it destroys the integrity of our legal system and encourages continued illegal immigration. The Trump administration is right to try and prevent illegal aliens from exploiting the loopholes in our immigration court system.

Hans Von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation, is co-author of Whos Counting? How Fraudsters and Bureaucrats Put Your Vote at Risk and Obamas Enforcer: Eric Holders Justice Department. Grant Strobl is a member of Heritages Young Leaders Program.

Read more:
von Spakovsky and Strobl: No more 'catch and release' for illegal immigrants - Boston Herald

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The detainees sued for money damages and restitution.

The lead plaintiff in the lawsuit, Alejandro Menocal, stayed in the facility for three months while he was facing deportation. He said, Its their job to run the facility, and instead they used and abused us to run the facility, and thats why were suing.

Lawyers for the defendant says no other court has ever recognized trafficking or unjust enrichment claims for cleaning bathrooms, serving meals, doing laundry, and performing other housekeeping duties. They write that in spite of this fact, the district court denied the companys motion for an immediate appeal on the merits, thereby shielding the merits from this Courts review. They assert, Such unprecedented claims deserve extra vigilance to ensure that class certification based on them follows rigorous analysis.

The contractor who operates the Colorado facility has filed court documents asking for permission to appeal the judges ruling that the illegal aliens can proceed as a class action.

Lawyers for GEO Group, Inc. (GEO) write that the district courts class certification presents legally unsettled issues of national importance and manifest errors that warrant immediate review. They ask the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit to decide whether the federal district court properly certified classes authorizing an alleged 60,000 immigration detainees to seek monetary relief.

In particular, the defendant-petitioner asks the Tenth Circuit to determine:

(1) Does a contractor operating a detention facility for the federal government compel forced labor in violation of a federal human trafficking statute by requiring detainees to periodically perform housekeeping chores, when that contractor and its housekeeping policies are subject to extensive federal contractual and regulatory requirements as well as direct federal supervision, and the housekeeping policy is both longstanding and judicially-accepted?

(2) Is the contractor unjustly enriched, and required to pay restitution to detainees for the detainees participation in a federally-created, sponsored and supervised voluntary work program, when the settled expectation for decades has been that participants are provided a daily allowance of $1?

GEO operates immigration detention facilities under contracts with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). They have operated the Aurora, Colorado detention facility since 1986.

The federal contractor urges they are subject to extensive contractual, regulatory and statutory requirements and having illegal aliens do housekeeping chores is a long-standing practice that has been signed off by the courts.

The ICE detainees sued saying the contractor was unjustly enriched under Colorado law when the defendant had them work for a daily allowance of $1. GEO argues that the Voluntary Work Program (VWP) has been authorized by Congress and the $1 daily allowance is reimbursed by ICE.

In their Petition for Permission to Appeal Class Certification, GEO argues that Congress passed the Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) to punish human traffickers, not to award damages to illegal aliens who must be housed in a detention facility after they illegally enter the country. Moreover, they say that the district court did not demand any evidence but made its decision to certify the lawsuit as a class action based solely on presumptions and inferences. The district court did not have any evidence that even one detainee expected to receive more than the daily allowance. Detainees are not employees and should not expect special treatment, GEO writes.

The Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) authorizes DHS/ICE to detain aliens while they are waiting for removal or hearings and requires that ICE detains certain classes of immigrants. ICE requires that detention facilities maintain the highest sanitation standards at all times in all locations without exception. There is a supervised program of daily cleaning by all detainees, and GEO implements these requirements through an ICE-approved program. Nobody trafficked them there. The district court should have granted their motion to dismiss the lawsuit, they urge.

Issuing a questionable class certification order could force the federal contractor to enter into a settlement. GEO is the only defendant in the case. The contractor urges that they based their contract with the federal government on the assumption that the sanitation policy and daily allowance would continue to withstand legal scrutiny (as it has for decades, they write). The district clerks certification of a class of plaintiffs that consists of all those detained at the facility over the past ten years presents a potentially catastrophic risk to GEOs ability to honor their contracts.

The alien detainees also claim that GEO violated Colorados minimum wage laws.

The lawyers for the detainee plaintiffs responded to GEOs petition to appeal the class certification saying they oppose the appeal. They argue that the district courts order is not a death knell for the litigation and the district court did not commit manifest error because the class certification issues are not novel.

Lana Shadwickis a writer and legal analyst for Breitbart Texas. She has served as a prosecutor and associate judge in Texas. Follow her on Twitter@LanaShadwick2.

Read more here:
Illegal Aliens Suing Detention Center for 'Forced Labor' - Breitbart News

Agents for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested 82 people in Virginia, Maryland and the District last week, including one who they said was identified as an officer in command of a Somali organization known for human rights abuses, rape, torture and killings.

The arrests included 68 people with previous criminal convictions, ICE said in a news release that described the five-day operation as a routine, targeted immigration enforcement.

Those who have outstanding orders of deportation, or who returned to the U.S. illegally after being deported, can be immediately removed from the country. Others will remain in custody awaiting a hearing before an immigration judge, or pending deportation arrangements.

The Somali, a 50-year-old male, was picked up in Falls Church and was a second lieutenant in the Somalian National Security Service and had a felony drug conviction, ICE said.

Agents also took into custody two people who have ties to the MS-13 street gang, ICE said, two who already had been given final deportation orders and three who had overstayed their visas.

(Monica Akhtar/The Washington Post)

ICE said two of the targeted individuals had pending local charges and one was wanted by a foreign law enforcement organization. Three more had unlawfully entered the U.S., the agency said.

Most were arrested in Virginia but two were arrested in the District and one in Maryland. Their names were not released.

Similar sweeps happened during the Obama administration. But there has been heightened scrutiny of such actions since the inauguration of President Trump, who promised to crack down on illegal immigration.

Those who were arrested came from 26 countries, the agency said, including:

A 40-year-old citizen of Trinidad and Tobago, who was arrested in Norfolk and has convictions for felony drug distribution and firearm possessions.

A 45-year-old citizen of the Dominican Republic, arrested in Chesterfield, who has felony convictions for sale of cocaine and attempted robbery.

A 22-year-old citizen of Honduras, arrested in Fairfax, who has felony convictions for stolen goods and grand larceny.

A 34-year-old citizen of El Salvador, arrested in Chesterfield, who ICE said is a documented MS-13 gang member who was removed from the United States in 2006.

A 57-year-old citizen of Honduras, arrested in Richmond, who has felony convictions for grand larceny and inflicting corporal injury to a spouse.

See the article here:
ICE arrests 82 in five-day sweep in Virginia, Maryland and DC - Washington Post