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Welcome to Poll Watch, our weekly look at polling data and survey research on the candidates, voters and issues that will shape the 2020 election.

It increasingly looks like the Supreme Courts conservative majority will allow the Trump administration to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, according to close observers of the court.

Legal arguments aside, polls show that DACA which has shielded from deportation roughly 700,000 undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children enjoys overwhelming popular support. Allowing it to end would put the court out of step with trends in national public opinion, which has recently become more sympathetic to immigration than at any point in recorded history.

But the voters who pay the closest attention to immigration tend to be Republicans, and they hold much more conservative views on this issue. Just before the 2018 midterm elections, a Pew survey found that Republican voters were four times as likely as Democratic voters to say illegal immigration was a very big problem: 75 percent of Republicans said it was, compared to 19 percent of Democrats.

The publics views on immigration have gradually become more liberal over all in recent years, even as President Trump has made his opposition to immigration a central component of his political persona.

In the past two years, three quarters of Gallup respondents have said that immigration is generally a good thing more than ever before recorded. By a double-digit margin, Americans are more likely to say that immigrants help the economy rather than hurt it, Gallup found.

DACA enjoys broader consensus than almost any other proposed immigration policy. A Marquette Law School poll found in September that 53 percent of voters nationwide would oppose a Supreme Court decision to strike down the program, while 37 percent would favor it. Before the case reached the Supreme Court, 84 percent of Americans said in a March 2018 Politico/Harvard University poll that they generally supported DACA. And in another Politico/Harvard poll, from December of that year, 66 percent of respondents said it was extremely important that Congress renew the program.

All of the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates have expressed support for DACA. People who are sympathetic to the Dreamers undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children now make up a sizable chunk of the electorate in swing states like Arizona, Florida, Michigan and Pennsylvania. And the Hispanic population is climbing especially quickly in some competitive Southern states; it roughly doubled from 2000 to 2010 in North Carolina, Virginia and Georgia.

Most Americans seem comfortable with these developments. The share of the country that said immigration levels should be increased hit 30 percent earlier this year, the highest number since Gallup started asking the question in the 1960s. All told, more than three in five Americans now say that immigration levels should either rise or remain where they are.

Daniel Herrera, a communications consultant at the left-leaning Raben Group, said that if DACA ends, it could propel a youth mobilization campaign similar to the one that led to the programs passage in the first place.

Where DACA does come into play is: How well are Dreamers and Dreamer allies going to mobilize people who may not vote? he said.

Its about your traditional get-out-the vote operations, where Dreamers are the public face of a campaign to get the youth vote out, he added. Thats how youre going to mobilize youth voters, because theoretically theyll see themselves in those Dreamers and be more motivated to vote.

But there is a deeper partisan rift on immigration than on almost any other issue. Eighty-two percent of Democrats in a September Pew poll said it was important for the government to build a path to citizenship for immigrants who are currently in the country illegally, but just 48 percent of Republicans did.

While 58 percent of all Americans said in a CNN poll last month that they disapproved of Mr. Trumps handling of immigration, that number plunged to just 12 percent among Republicans. Eighty-six percent of Republicans approved of how he has handled the issue.

Immigration may be more of a motivating issue for the Republican base than the Democratic one. Forty-six percent of liberal Democrats rank building a path to citizenship as very important, but a larger share of conservative Republicans fully six in 10 say the opposite: that it is very important for the government to increase deportations of immigrants who have entered the United States illegally.

When you just look at conservative Republicans, you can see that a hard-line approach to immigration is broadly supported and conservatives make up two thirds of all Republicans, said Carroll Doherty, an analyst at Pew Research Center. That shows you how those issues have resonated with the Trump base.

Still, Whit Ayres, a veteran Republican pollster, said that even many voters who support tough immigration policies often do not strongly favor ending DACA. The first step is to distinguish between attitudes about DACA and attitudes about immigration overall: Consistently, Americans on the order of 80 percent have supported allowing the DACA kids to stay, he said.

If the Supreme Court were to allow the Trump administration to end DACA, Mr. Ayres said, the focus would shift to the legislative branch. He argued that this could provide an opportunity for Republicans to push through one of their immigration-related goals,such as increased border security,in exchange for restoring DACA.

What it does is increase pressure on Congress to put DACA legalization together with border security, and pass a limited immigration reform with just those two components that gives something to both sides, he said.

Excerpt from:
The Supreme Court May Let Trump End DACA. Heres What the Public Thinks About It. - The New York Times

A new study finds that low-income, legal immigrants dont tend to move to states that offer them health insurance, suggesting that expanding their access to medical care wouldnt create a welfare magnet that could overwhelm public resources.

Using data from the American Community Survey capturing over 200,000 immigrants nationwide between 2000 and 2016, Stanford Universitys Vasil Yasenov, Duncan Lawrence, Fernando Mendoza, and Jens Hainmueller found that expanding public insurance offerings in certain states didnt have a discernible effect on immigrants who had already settled in the US choosing to relocate to those states.

The paper pushes back on President Donald Trumps rhetoric suggesting that immigrants take advantage of public health insurance and drain the social safety net. Trump has pursued several policies impeding immigrants access to health care, though for now they have been blocked in federal court.

Trump recently tried to prevent immigrants who do not have health insurance and cannot afford to pay medical care costs from entering the country as a way to cut costs for American citizens. And his public charge rule was estimated to cause tens of thousands of immigrants on Medicaid to drop their benefits.

The study could also inform debates about whether states should open their health insurance programs to more immigrants. Six states and Washington, DC, use state funds to offer Medicaid to unauthorized immigrant children, and California recently extended coverage to unauthorized immigrant adults, as well.

The researchers focused on specific categories of immigrants low-income pregnant women and children who had recently obtained lawful permanent residency and were below 200 percent of the poverty line who became eligible for state-level public insurance programs following a series of federal reforms in 2002 and 2009. They had been previously barred from participating in those programs if they had held green cards for less than five years under Clinton-era welfare reforms passed in 1996.

The 2002 reforms allowed states to provide prenatal care to immigrant women under the Childrens Health Insurance Program; in 2009, the Child Health Insurance Reauthorization Act allowed states to cover both immigrant children and pregnant women regardless of how long they had held green cards. As a result, the number of states offering them health insurance nearly doubled from 2000 to 2016.

Researchers thought immigrant mothers and children would be the most likely groups to make interstate moves due to expanded health care coverage, Yasenov said in an interview. But they observed no significant effect on their interstate migration rates.

Those results were surprising in light of prior studies about immigrants mobility and health care coverage: Immigrants tend to move around within the US more than their US-born counterparts, immigrants may choose to settle in areas with better public benefits, and substantially fewer immigrants have health insurance compared to US citizens.

According to a Kaiser Family Foundation study, noncitizens are significantly more likely to be uninsured than citizens: among those under age 65, 23 percent of immigrants with legal status and 45 percent of unauthorized immigrants are uninsured.

All of those factors would point to immigrants seeking out better health care benefits by relocating. But in reality, thats not the case and that could assuage policymakers concerns about expanding public health care programs to immigrants.

Policymakers are often concerned with fiscal constraints when they extend public health care and other public benefits the concern that people might be moving from another country, from another state, from another city would lead to spiraling costs, Yasenov said. We hope our results are informative to policymakers who are looking for evidence in the health care world, especially in the context of legal immigrants.

There are some limitations to the paper: It doesnt speak to the effect of public health care offerings on unauthorized immigrants, a point of friction in the 2020 presidential race.

Nearly all of the Democratic candidates have backed the idea of providing immigrants health care coverage regardless of immigration status. Every candidate raised their hands when asked if they supported it at a debate in June. But Trump is trying to use it against his Democratic rivals.

As long as Im president, no one will lay a hand on your Medicare benefits, Trump told voters at a speech in Florida on Thursday. I will never allow these politicians to steal your health care and give it away to illegal immigrants.

Go here to see the original:
A new study finds immigrants arent drawn to states that offer them health insurance - Vox.com

It took Doug Stephens two days to decide: He wasnt going to implement President Trumps latest policy to restrict immigration, known as Remain in Mexico. The asylum officer wouldnt interview any more immigrants, only to send them back across the border to face potential danger.

As a federal employee, refusing to abide by policy probably meant that hed be fired. But as a trained attorney, Stephens told The Times, the five interviews hed been assigned were five too many. They were illegal.

Theyre definitely immoral, Stephens said he told his supervisor in San Francisco. And Im not doing them.

A spokesman for the union that represents some 13,000 Citizenship and Immigration Services employees said Stephens is believed to be the first asylum officer to formally refuse to conduct interviews under the program officially known as Migrant Protection Protocols. But across the country according to asylum officers, including Stephens, as well as government officials asylum officers are calling in sick, requesting transfers, retiring earlier than planned and quitting all to resist Trump administration immigration policies.

Citizenship and Immigration Services declined requests for staffing data for the Homeland Security agency. In a sign of widespread discomfort among the asylum officers, however, the National CIS Council union has filed friend of the court briefs in lawsuits against the administration, arguing that its immigration policies are illegal. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals heard arguments last month in the litigation against the Migrant Protection Protocols, and a ruling is pending.

Since the Trump administration announced its Migrant Protection Protocols in December, U.S. officials have pushed roughly 60,000 asylum seekers back across the southern border to wait in places the State Department considers some of the most dangerous in the world, rather than allowing them to stay in the U.S. until their immigration hearings.

One of an asylum officers primary missions is to make sure that the government is not returning people to harm in their home countries, a foundational principle in U.S. and international law. While U.S. officials downplay the danger in Mexico, kidnappings, rape and other violence against asylum seekers are widespread and well documented.

Homeland Security officials concede that the program is designed to discourage asylum claims. The president is running for reelection on renewed promises to limit immigration. Under the policy, 11 asylum seekers have been granted some kind of relief, according to Syracuse Universitys TRAC database.

In a collaboration with the radio program This American Life, The Times interviewed asylum officers to get a front-line perspective on implementing Trumps policy. In almost every interview theyve conducted since MPP went into effect, half a dozen officers said, the asylum seeker expressed a fear of returning to Mexico many said theyd been harmed there already. But under the new standards, the officers said, they had to return them anyway.

Whats my moral culpability in that? said an asylum officer whos conducted nearly 100 interviews. She requested anonymity because she feared retaliation. My signatures on that paperwork. And thats something now that I live with.

The asylum officers objecting to the administrations immigration policies say they run counter to the laws passed by Congress, as well as their oath to the Constitution and extensive training, which includes how to detect fraud or any potential national security concerns.

Under U.S. law, migrants have the right to request asylum. Some 80% of asylum seekers pass the first step in the lengthy process, an interview with an officer thats known as a credible-fear screening. Congress set a low standard for this initial stage, to minimize the risk of sending someone back to harm. Ultimately, about 15% of applicants win asylum before an immigration judge.

Trump and his top officials have cited the difference in those percentages to back up the claim that asylum itself is a hoax or big fat con job.

Ken Cuccinelli, the acting head of Citizenship and Immigration Services, has publicly criticized the officers, saying they approve too many requests and oppose Trumps initiatives for partisan reasons. On Wednesday, Cuccinelli was named acting deputy Homeland Security secretary.

Cuccinellis office did not make him available for an interview. But during an October media breakfast, he said this about concerns from officers: So long as were in the position of putting in place what we believe to be legal policies we fully expect them to implement those faithfully and sincerely and vigorously.

Michael Bars, a Homeland Security spokesman, said in a statement that MPP is based on a federal statute that clearly states that aliens arriving from a contiguous territory may be returned to that territory pending their immigration hearing.

When Stephens refused to do the interviews in accordance with policy, his supervisors started disciplinary proceedings. He said he decided to quit, but not before drafting a memo outlining why he believed the Remain in Mexico policy violates the law. He sent it to everyone in the CIS office in San Francisco, as well as agency supervisors, the union and a U.S. senator.

No longer in government, Stephens now is trying to draw attention to the program and encouraging others to speak out.

Youre literally sending people back to be raped and killed, he said. Thats what this is.

Original post:
Asylum officers rebel against Trump immigration policies they say are immoral, illegal - Los Angeles Times

ICE agents during an enforcement operation in March 2018.(File photo: Keith Gardner/ICE)By refusing to honor ICE detainers, sheriffs in Mecklenburg and Buncombe Counties have put their constituents, documented and undocumented alike, in danger.

For many immigration activists, 2018 was the year of the Section 287(g) bogeyman.

Thats Section 287(g) of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1996, to be exact. It authorizes state and local law enforcement to assist in the transfer of illegal immigrants with criminal charges or convictions to federal authorities. It led to the identification of more than 402,000 illegal immigrants between 2006 and 2015, and its part of the reason more immigrants were deported under Obama than under any other president.

But as with all things immigration-related, the argument over 287(g) intensified once President Trump took office. Proponents contended that the provision allows law enforcement to use its resources on criminals rather than on the immigrant population more broadly, while critics charged that it leads to racial profiling and distrust between immigrant communities and the police.

The issue came to a head in 2018 as a rallying cry for progressive critics of the Trump administration. I would like us to go beyond to say not only do we not assist ICE, but were putting up a bit of a firewall to ensure that our local resources are not being used, Elizabeth Alex, a senior director at immigration-advocacy group CASA, said shortly after Election Day last year.

One of the main battlegrounds was North Carolina. Across the state, a coalition of progressive sheriff candidates, with national support, campaigned and won on taking a stand against ICE. In Mecklenburg County, the American Civil Liberties Union spent $175,000 to support Garry McFadden, the first time the group had run a voter-education campaign in a local sheriffs election. McFadden returned the favor. 287(g) is going to be history! he declared on Election Night. In Buncombe County, Democrat Quentin Miller ran on a platform that included a refusal to cooperate with ICE on 287(g). We need to do this as a community. A community of we, Miller told supporters after his victory.

One year into the experiment, voters are already voicing their concerns the anti-287(g) narrative has proved to be not only false, but dangerous.

* * *

Last week, voters in Tucson, Ariz. voted by a two-to-one margin against adopting a sanctuary city proposal, despite support for the initiative from the City Council. In Montgomery County, Md., nine illegal immigrants, at least four of whom had been previously arrested, have been charged with sexual assault since July. In response, the Democratic county executive has reversed a three-month-old policy that barred ICE detainers, after previously calling ICEs pursuit of illegal-immigrant criminals the definition of terrorism.

North Carolina has had no more success with such policies. In May, Luis Pineda-Ancheta, a Honduran national who had been deported in 2006, was released in Mecklenburg on bail when McFadden refused to comply with an ICE detainer request, which was submitted after Pineda-Ancheta was arrested for threatening to kill a woman. Five days later, the same woman reported that Pineda-Ancheta had kidnapped her, stuffed a cloth in her mouth, placed a rope around her neck, and led her into a stand of trees before tripping, which allowed her to escape. After a nine-hour standoff with SWAT, Pineda-Ancheta was arrested again.

McFaddens response? If I had known it was this fun, I would have done it years ago, he said when asked about his job last year, in the middle of the Pineda-Ancheta case.

This year, McFadden has denied 23 detainer requests involving illegal immigrants charged with criminal offenses, according to ICE reports, and stopped returning emails and phone calls from ICE to discuss the situation.

The situation is unsurprisingly similar in Buncombe County. Last month, Marvin Ramirez Torres, a Salvadoran national who was first put on ICEs radar in 2017, was convicted for raping an eleven-year old girl he knew personally and sentenced to time served. Rather than let ICE take custody of Ramirez Torres in the jail, Miller released him back into the community, a move opposed by the countys Democratic district attorney.

In explaining their positions, both McFadden and Miller, whose offices did not respond to requests for comment, have argued that ICE has no right to have its detainer requests fulfilled by local law enforcement without an arrest warrant.

All Im asking ICE to do is this: Bring me a criminal warrant, and Ill hold anybody for you, McFadden said in May. Miller echoed the sentiment in his statement on Ramirez Torress release in October. If ICE is aware of an individual that they have determined to be a danger to the public safety of Buncombe County, then ICE should obtain a warrant for their arrest. Once that warrant has been secured my Deputies will work to apprehend that individual, he said.

The problem is that no such warrant exists under immigration law, and the sheriffs know it. As of November 1, twelve of 25 outstanding detainers in involving illegal immigrants with criminal charges in North Carolina come from Buncombe and Mecklenburg.

Frequently we hear sanctuary policy proponents say, wed love to cooperate with ICE, and we will, as soon as they give us a judicial warrant. They might as well say, well cooperate with ICE as soon as they give us a purple unicorn on a silver platter. They know its not possible, says Jessica Vaughn, the director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies. Most of immigration violations are civil. Even horrible criminals are removed on civil immigration violations, no matter how violent they are . . . ICE issues well over 100,000 detainers every year. The federal judiciary does not have the ability to process those, nor even the authority, really, not to mention they dont have the expertise.

* * *

Sanctuary polices like those upheld by McFadden and Miller havent always been the norm in North Carolina. Former Buncombe County sheriff Jack Van Duncan, who retired last November after three successive terms and left the Democratic party over what he calls an anti-law enforcement sentiment, says that while he was the first sheriff in the state to withdraw from 287(g), he was not one to stonewall ICE.

We did cooperate with ICE, we were not 287(g), he says. What it comes down to is if youre asking, Look, we have held someone that ICE asked us specifically to hold for 48 hours on their detainer, if you look at every case, generally that answer was going to be Yes, and we cooperate.

Van Duncan adds that he would have helped ICE in the Ramirez Torres case.

Specifically, in this situation, considering the charges and knowing that deportations going to be what takes place with this individual, we would have held him, the former Buncombe sheriff says. We would probably have coordinated with them, especially if my fellow prosecutor would call me and ask me to do that, we just always had that level of cooperation.

ICE Atlantas interim field-office director, John Tsoukaris, argues that such cooperation is crucial, because the immigrant community in North Carolina is more adversely affected when local law enforcement treats ICE detainers differently than it would detainers issued by any other agency.

I hear that theyre trying to build community trust, and I tell people I see no correlation between community trust with the police, and releasing somebody whos committed a serious crime or been convicted of a serious crime back into the community that he knows and thats where he committed the crime. Its all politics unfortunately, Tsoukaris says. A lot of these immigrant communities dont want these criminals there either. They prey on their own because they know that if theyre here illegally, they might be telling them, Hey, if you call ICE, then Im going to do something to you.

Whats more, when a sheriffs office ignores a detainer and releases an illegal-immigrant criminal back onto the streets, ICE is forced to pursue the suspect on its own, an unnecessary strain on its agents and resources and a potential risk to the immigrant community. After McFadden and Miller elected to release Pineda-Ancheta and Ramirez Torres instead of handing them over to ICE, the organization pursued both men and ended up taking them into custody. But according to Tsoukaris, such operations dont always have such an outcome, and are far from ideal.

Instead of taking ten minutes and youve taken somebody off the street, youre taking days and weeks to try to locate [the suspect], he says. Theres officer safety issues, something could happen at a house or street which could be a potential hazard for the people around in the community. Its safer for the officers and for the community, because when you go out into the community, you dont know who youre going to encounter.

All we need is a phone call to tell us, Hey this persons being released, and you got a couple hours to get here, he adds. Its very simple.

Here is the original post:
North Carolina Sheriffs Attack ICE to Hide the Failures of Sanctuary Policies - National Review

Photo: Washington Post Photo By Nick Miroff

Immigration jails in Trump era are packed, but deportations are fewer than in Obama's

It has been nearly 700 days since Bakhodir Madjitov was taken to prison in the United States. He has never been charged with a crime.

Madjitov, a 38-year-old Uzbek national and father of three U.S. citizens, received a final deportation order after his applications to legally immigrate failed. He is one of the approximately 50,000 people jailed on any given day in the past year under the authority of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the most foreigners held in immigration detention in U.S. history.

The majority of those detainees, such as Madjitov, are people with no prior criminal records.

According to the latest snapshot of ICE's prisoner population, from early November, nearly 70% of the inmates had no prior criminal conviction. More than 14,000 are people the U.S. government has determined have a reasonable fear of persecution or torture if deported.

Though President Donald Trump has made cracking down on immigration a centerpiece of his first term, his administration lags far behind President Barack Obama's pace of deportations. Obama - whom immigrant advocates at one point called the "deporter in chief" - removed 409,849 people in 2012. Trump, who has vowed to deport "millions" of immigrants, has yet to surpass 260,000 deportations in a single year.

And while Obama deported 1.18 million people during his first three years in office, Trump has deported fewer than 800,000.

It is unclear why deportations have been happening relatively slowly.

Eager to portray Trump as successful in his first year in office, ICE's 2017 operational report compared "interior removals" - those arrested by ICE away from the border zones - during the first eight months of Trump's term with the same eight-month period from the previous year, reporting a 37% increase from 44,512 to 61,094 people.

But the agency also acknowledged that overall deportation numbers had slipped, attributing the decline to fewer border apprehensions and suggesting that an "increased deterrent effect from ICE's stronger interior enforcement efforts" had caused the change.

Administration officials this year have noted privately that Mexican nationals - who are easier to deport than Central Americans because of U.S. immigration laws - also made up a far greater proportion of the migrants apprehended along the U.S.-Mexico border during Obama's presidency.

ICE officials say that the detainee population has swelled - often cresting at 5,000 people more than ICE is budgeted to hold - as a direct result of the influxes of migrants along the southern border, and that when ICE is compelled to release people into the United States, it creates "an additional pull factor to draw more aliens to the U.S. and risk public safety," said ICE spokesman Bryan Cox.

"The increase in ICE's detained population this year was directly tied to the border crisis," Cox said. "About 75% of ICE's detention book-ins in fiscal year 2019 came directly from the border."

Immigrant advocates say the packed jail cells result from an administration obsessed with employing harsh immigration tactics as a means of deterrence. They say the Trump administration is keeping people like Madjitov locked up when they previously would have been released pending the outcomes of their cases.

ICE also is holding people longer: Non-criminals are spending an average of 60 days in immigrant jails, nearly twice the length of the average stay 10 years ago, and 11 days longer than convicted criminals, according to government statistics.

"ICE has sort of declared open season on immigrants," said Michael Tan, a senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union's Immigrants' Rights Project. "So you're seeing people who under the previous administration would have been eligible for bond and release being kept in custody."

ICE officials say that they are enforcing a set of laws created by Congress and that the agency is working to take dangerous criminals off the streets. At a fiery White House briefing in October, acting ICE director Matthew Albence spoke of agents "unnecessarily putting themselves in harm's way" on a daily basis to remove foreign nationals who might cause harm to U.S. citizens. ICE Assistant Director Barbara Gonzalez spoke of having to "hold the hand of too many mothers who have lost a child to a DUI, or somebody else who's been raped by an illegal alien or someone with a nexus to immigration."

Most of those in immigration detention are neither hardened criminals nor saints. They are people who overstayed their visas, or whose asylum claims failed. They are people who struggled to navigate a complex immigration system, or who never tried at all, or who made critical mistakes along the way. They tend to be poor, luckless and lawyerless, advocates and researchers say.

A November snapshot of ICE's prisoner population showed that about 68% had no prior criminal conviction. According to the agency's deportation data, one of the most common criminal convictions is illegal reentry.

Cox said that all ICE detainees are "evaluated on a case-by-case basis based upon the totality of their circumstances" and that those kept in detention are "generally those with criminality or other public safety or flight-risk factors."

With ICE's release of 250,000 "family units" apprehended along the border, the agency released 50% more people in fiscal 2019 than in the previous year, Cox said.

- - -

Madjitov was born in 1981 into a family of musicians in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, which was then part of the Soviet Union. His father taught him to play the karnay, a long, hornlike instrument, and he joined an ensemble of traditional musicians.

The family was religious, and as a young man in 2005, Madjitov joined thousands of others in a mass protest of the brutal regime of Uzbek President Islam Karimov, who was infamous for his persecution of political dissidents and the devout. Government forces opened fire on the crowds, killing hundreds, and they arrested scores of others, including Madjitov. After being released from prison weeks later, Madjitov resolved to leave Uzbekistan.

A music festival in Austin several months later provided the ticket out. Madjitov and a dozen other folk musicians landed there in 2006, on P-3 temporary visas for entertainers.

He traveled from the festival to live with friends - other Uzbek immigrants - in Kissimmee, Florida. He found a job working at a Disney hotel and applied for asylum.

His application was rejected, so he appealed it. And when the appeal was rejected, he appealed that, his case bumping along through the dense bureaucracy with hundreds of thousands of others.

Madjitov received a final order of removal in 2011. But with no criminal conduct on his record, he was deemed a low priority for deportation by the Obama administration.

Ten years after Madjitov's arrival, Trump came to office on a vow to deport "criminal illegal aliens," the murderers, rapists and gang members who Trump claimed were gaming the immigration system, preying on U.S. citizens and their tax dollars.

Madjitov was taken into custody in 2017.

"My family, myself, we never did anything wrong," Madjitov said in a phone interview from the Etowah County Detention Center in Alabama, where he is being held, a thousand miles from his family in Connecticut. "That's why we chose to stay in this country, because of the freedom."

After nearly three years in office, Trump has made good on part of his promise. Between Oct. 1, 2018, and the end of September, the administration initiated more than 419,000 deportation proceedings, more than at any point in at least 25 years, according to government statistics compiled by Syracuse University's Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.

Unlike under Obama, deporting the migrants has proved more difficult. Many of those crossing the southern border have requested asylum, which entitles them to a certain amount of due process in the immigration court system - protections that the administration also is working to dismantle.

Immigrant advocates believe the system has become overwhelmed because of the administration's zeal to deport, even though in many cases it lacks the resources or legal standing to do so.

"The Obama administration, because they had enforcement priorities, were able to streamline deportations," said Sophia Genovese, an attorney with the Southern Poverty Law Center's Southeast Immigrant Freedom Initiative. "The Trump administration is making it harder for people to obtain visas or legal status, and at the same time their deportation priority is everyone. So because of that, they clog the system."

Most of the serious criminals slated for deportation come to ICE by way of the criminal justice system, according to ICE and defense lawyers. Convicted murderers or drug offenders finish their sentences in state or federal prisons and then are transferred into ICE's custody.

In Georgia, lawyers say they have noticed a ballooning number of immigrants who have no criminal records but have been pulled into ICE detention because of violations such as driving without a license or without insurance. They include victims of domestic violence and speakers of Central American indigenous languages, Genovese said.

"It's been really difficult to provide them with representation," she said. "In court, their cases aren't being translated. And a lot of them are just giving up."

In 2018, a federal judge granted a preliminary injunction in a class-action lawsuit filed on behalf of Ansly Damus, a Haitian ethics professor who claimed asylum but was kept in ICE detention for two years afterward despite not having a criminal record or posing a flight risk. U.S. District Judge James Boasburg recognized that such people normally would have been "overwhelmingly released," and prohibited five ICE field offices from denying parole without individual determinations that a person poses a flight risk or danger to the public. Tan said the ACLU is now monitoring ICE's compliance with the injunction and is seeing mixed results.

- - -

The U.S. government might have valid reasons to be suspicious of Madjitov, but officials declined to say what they are.

According to federal court filings that do not name Madjitov, his wife's brother, also an Uzbek immigrant, traveled to Syria in 2013 to join the al-Nusra Front, an extremist group with ties to al-Qaida. Saidjon Mamadjonov was killed shortly thereafter. And the FBI later accused Madjitov's other brother-in-law, Sidikjon Mamadjonov, of hiding what he knew about Saidjon's death during interviews with federal investigators.

But no one ever accused Madjitov or his wife, Madina Mamadjonova, of wrongdoing.

The couple settled in Windsor, Connecticut, where Madjitov worked as a home health aide and Mamadjonova gave birth to two boys.

Madjitov planted a garden of tomatoes, cucumbers, eggplant and apple trees in the family's yard. On Fridays, they would go to the mosque together, and on weekends they would go to the park and out for pizza or Chinese food.

"I always worked with my lawyer wherever I lived - I always notified DHS where I lived, and they always gave me a work permit," Madjitov said.

"We were a very happy couple," said Mamadjonova, who said she has struggled to support the family since his arrest and has been battling depression. "He was very affectionate, a very kind and caring father."

On Oct. 31, 2017, another Uzbek immigrant who claimed to have been inspired by the Islamic State terrorist group drove a rented truck onto a crowded bike path in New York, killing eight people.

A few weeks later, law enforcement officials came to Madjitov's house searching for information about the brother-in-law who had died in Syria three years earlier. The couple said they told investigators they didn't have anything. A month after that, on a cold December morning, ICE showed up and arrested Madjitov because hehad a final order of removal.

Mamadjonova said her husband was still in his pajamas when ICE asked her to go retrieve his identification documents from the bedroom. "When I came back, he was handcuffed," said Mamadjonova, who was 39 weeks pregnant with the couple's third child at the time. "He was crying."

The Trump administration, which increased its removals of Uzbek nationals by 46% in 2017, never again asked Madjitov about Saidjon or terrorism. ICE said Madjitov's file contained no criminal record, nor was he marked as a "known or suspected terrorist."

He is still in captivity.

ICE says that Madjitov's crime is his failure to leave the United States after receiving a final order of removal, and that the agency is authorized to continue holding him because he refused to board a deportation flight in June 2019, when ICE tried to remove him.

The Etowah County Detention Center, where Madjitov is being held, is known among immigration attorneys as a facility that holds people ICE wants to put away for a long time. There, Madjitov is one of about 120 people in a unit, surrounded by immigrants with a shared sense of desperation.

"All of them are from different countries, from Africa, from Asia, from different religions. Most of them - like 90% - have families in this country. So all of them are fighting for their cases," he said. "Every day I pray to God. Every day I'm scared they're going to try to remove me. Every day, I have nightmares."

Continued here:
Immigration jails in Trump era are packed, but deportations are fewer than in Obama's - The Advocate