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President Trump is giving immigration officials broad latitude to arrest and deport people who are in the country illegally.

Boston-area legal advocates warn that the Trump administrations new crackdown on illegal immigration will have the additional consequence of giving more power to employers who underpay undocumented workers and subject them to unsafe conditions.

Recent memos from the Department of Homeland Security secretary have given immigration officials broad latitude to arrest and deport people who are in the country illegally. While officials say the priority for now is to focus on gangs and people with serious criminal records, thousands of workers in construction, childcare, house cleaning, and the restaurant industry could become more vulnerable to mistreatment by unscrupulous employers who might threaten to turn them in to authorities if they complain.

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Its really going to give license to bad employers to make threats of deportation, said Brian Flynn, head of the employment law unit at the nonprofit Greater Boston Legal Services. Already, he said, workers fearing retaliation are less likely to report employers who fail to pay minimum wage or overtime, or who commit other violations. Were just not seeing as many workers come forward right now.

The Trump edicts threaten to roll back years of progress in the fight for workers rights in Massachusetts, where officials have been working since 2015 to inform domestic workers, such as nannies and housekeepers, of their rights to minimum wages and time off, regardless of their status. State Attorney General Maura Healey also has filed lawsuits against construction firms and other employers for misclassifying workers as contractors, instead of employees, to avoid paying them benefits.

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Healey, in a statement Wednesday, lashed out at the deportation directives.

President Trumps reckless mass deportation scheme will make our communities less safe and waste billions of taxpayer dollars, she said. Federal agents under the Obama administration had focused on finding people with dangerous criminal records, she said. But under Trump, workers without proper visas or work permits could be targeted.

I urge the President to reconsider this wrongheaded policy and pursue comprehensive immigration reform rather than eroding the publics trust and spreading fear and chaos in our communities, Healey said.

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For undocumented workers, the ramifications are sweeping. Some have grown wary of answering the door at home and are changing the way they commute. Others say their children fear coming home from school to discover their parents are gone.

Advocates for immigrants say that for now, Healeys office may be the only place to turn to for help.

Lawyers and advocates interviewed by the Globe said the full impact of Trumps immigrant policy is not yet known. One group said it would no longer refer wage and hour cases to the US Department of Labor, for fear records would be turned over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Another is warning undocumented workers who pay taxes using a special form for people without Social Security numbers that they could no longer be certain the IRS would keep their forms confidential.

Julie Dahlstrom, director of Boston University School of Laws Human Trafficking Clinic, said shes concerned that people filing for visas because they have been the victims of human trafficking or violence could put themselves at risk by coming forward.

There is a profound sense of fear and anxiety. I think thats directly impacting peoples willingness to report to law enforcement, Dahlstrom said. Theres a fear of being swept off the street, which is incredibly frightening.

Shawn Neudauer, a spokesman for the agency, said ICE is not planning to punish crime victims.

If we walk into a labor trafficking situation, our goal is to put the criminals behind bars, he said. Its not to put the victims behind bars.

But within ICE itself, agency officials are still trying to digest the administrations directives. In addition to speeding up deportations, ICE has been authorized to hire 10,000 new officers, who can walk into restaurants or construction sites and arrest workers who lack papers showing that they are in the country legally.

Neudauer acknowledged that if agents went to a business looking for an alleged gang member or drug dealer, other workers there could be ensnared, even for lesser violations, such as working without a visa.

Diego Low, director of the nonprofit Metrowest Worker Center in Framingham, said he has heard recent reports of young workers being questioned by ICE in their homes, including several men targeted at a single apartment building. In this environment, he said, its going to be harder to persuade workers to bring cases to law enforcement officials.

Theyve given bad actor-bad faith employers open season to further exploit, and, in fact, to swap out documented workers for undocumented, Low said. Theyre going to make it so much more profitable to hire workers who are both cheap and docile.

Read more:
Trump's illegal immigration moves could embolden unscrupulous employers - The Boston Globe

Mara Salvatrucha, aka MS-13, is a Central American-based gang best known for the bizarrely intricate tattoos worn by its members and for killing people.

Especially for killing people.

So youd think that when an illegal-immigrant MS-13 gang-banger turned up in NYPD custody, the de Blasio administration would quick as a wink deposit him with the feds.

Not so. New York is a sanctuary city the mayor and City Council having embraced the contempt for law and custom that the term implies. So last week, MS-13 stalwart Estivan Rafael Marques Velasquez tap-danced away from Rikers Island following a short stint for disorderly conduct never mind that immigration enforcement officials had requested that he be turned over to them.

This man is by his own admission a member of a violent street gang, Thomas Decker, field office director for the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement unit in New York, told Post reporters. Honoring a detainer request is not about politics, it is about keeping New York citizens safe.

Ah, but in New York, it certainly is about politics the were above the law sanctuary-city movement having devolved into another dreary vehicle for flipping the bird to President Trump.

Street gangs are nothing new to New York. But while classic gangs tended to avoid harm to innocents children in particular MS-13 targets them.

The gang has its roots in Salvadoran prison culture, but it has long since moved beyond that first hiring out as drug-cartel enforcers and eventually moving into the trade itself. Its appetite for casual, seemingly pointless violence has placed it in a category all its own.

On Monday, 26-year-old gang member Michael Christopher Mejia who sports both the trademark MS-13 face and neck tattoos and an appallingly long record of violent crime was charged with the murder of one Whittier, Calif., cop and the wounding of another. Just hours earlier, police said, Mejia had murdered a relative.

At a glance, this seems like just another garden-variety though tragic crime spree. And it certainly is nothing out of the ordinary for Southern California, which has long been in the gangs vicious grip.

But it does serve to underscore one undeniable fact: Where MS-13 goes, gross violence follows. Consider:

All of this is just scum off the top of the pond. Law enforcement officials are under no illusions about the MS-13 threat.

And so its impossible to believe that the NYPD is unaware of the danger and in any way condones the catch-and-release approach embraced by de Blasio & Co. regarding illegal aliens in general, and MS-13 in particular.

But good cops follow the orders of their elected superiors as they should and must who have developed an intricate list of offenses that merit the attention of federal immigration officers.

Being in America illegally isnt on the list, sad to say, and neither is disorderly conduct thus Marques Velasquez was kicked free last week. Happily, the feds swiftly scooped him up.

Indeed, left to their own devices, US Immigration and Custom Enforcement agents seem to sort things out rather quickly. Last week, ICE cops in New York corralled 40 illegal immigrants almost overnight and it turned out that, in addition to immigration violations, 95 percent of them had serious criminal convictions.

The bust horrified the usual suspects Shame on ICE! scolded the New York Immigration Coalition and no doubt the mayor disapproved. Also, MS-13.

But New York City doesnt need illegal-immigrant gang-bangers wandering its streets. Keep up the good work, ICE. Bob McManus is a contributing editor to the Manhattan Institutes City Journal.

See the rest here:
New York is safer without illegal-immigrant gangsters no thanks to the mayor - New York Post

Tucker Carlson was joined tonight by a civil rights leader who says that black males are disproportionately hurt by illegal immigration.

Peter Kirsanow, a member of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, explained that black males are more likely to experience competition from illegal immigrants.

"It's Econ 101, Tucker. When you have an oversupply of labor, the price of labor is going to be depressed,"Kirsanow said, adding that there's a striking oversupply of low-skill labor.

He noted that this doesn't effect just black males, but all low-skilled American workers.

He said that black males, however, are disproportionately concentrated in low-skill labor markets, which is also where the bulk of legal and illegal immigrants over the past 20 years are concentrated.

"We're talking about, at the very low end, hundreds of thousands of blacks losing jobs, probably if you do the math, up to 1.2 million blacks losing jobs,"Kirsanow said. "This has significant, obviously, impacts on the black community."

He lamented that many on the left and many black congressional leaders have embraced the "open borders philosophy" that's done such damage to black employment prospects.

Watch more above, and see Tucker battle an anti-Trump protester who says the president is "more dangerous than Hitler."

'More Dangerous Than Hitler'?! Tucker Battles Anti-Trump Protester

Immigration Activists Hang 'Refugees Welcome' Sign on Statue of Liberty

Malkin: Let's Stop Calling Them Sanctuary Cities, 'They're Outlaw Cities'

Gorka: 30 to 40% of Those Released From Gitmo Return to Terror

Link:
Civil Rights Activist: Illegal Immigration Hurts Job Prospects for Black Men - Fox News Insider

Local police help for feds on illegal immigration? Auburn Journal It's wait-and-see for Placer County and city of Auburn law enforcement on where the U.S. government will be moving on illegal immigration.Read the rest of this report in today's Auburn Journal.Get all of YOUR LOCAL NEWS TODAY. In the meantime, they say ... and more »

Read the original here:
Local police help for feds on illegal immigration? - Auburn Journal

During a discussion Wednesday morning on MSNBC, co-hostJoeScarborough claimedPresident Donald Trump has ablind spot on the issue of illegal immigration and attributed the wellbeing of the nations entire economy to undocumented aliens.

We have an economy, lets face it, we have an economy that is built on illegal immigration, Scarborough told Morning Joe co-host Mika Brzezinski, We have an economy that is built on that.

That phrase right there makes him sound more like a dictator in training.

The discussion was based on new memos issued by the Department of Homeland Security instructing border and immigration officials to ramp up enforcement. The enforcement guidance made clear the administrations priority targets arecriminal aliens with felony convictions.

But to Scarborough even a crackdown on newcomers at the border and the deportation of criminal illegal immigrants was too much. The MSNBC co-host instead suggested blanket amnesty for all theroughly 11 million illegal immigrants currently residing in the nation.

That is why I say why dont you just legalize it? Scarborough quipped.

Scarborough suggested many of the same conservatives who support Trump's immigration position have directly benefited from illegal immigrant labor.

"But the hypocrisy," Scarboroughsaid, "when we had Hurricane Ivan in 2005 you couldnt get insurance fast enough to fix up home. Guess who went up without workers comp. And fixed those homes?"

Brzezinski suggested Trump hasundermined the media to such a degree "that he can actually control exactly what people think." "And that is our job," Brzezinski claimed.

"Well, I think that the dangerous, you know, edges here are that he is trying to undermine the media and trying to make up his own facts," Brzezinski added.

Scarborough responded with what has become a common Trump attack line from him,arguing Trump'sattacks on the media are similar tothe actions of the 20th century's brutal dictators.

"It's when he says the media is the 'enemy of the people,' where he sounds like Mussolini or Lenin," Scarborough said,"that phrase right there makes him sound more like a dictator in training."

See the article here:
Scarborough: US Economy 'Built on Illegal Immigration' - LifeZette