Immigrants pulled from plane before being deported (Houston Chronicle)

Immigrants pulled from plane before being deported

 By Lomi Kriel
 January 7, 2016

 Three Salvadoran mothers and their children were removed Thursday from a plane in Laredo that was returning them to their native country after the nation's highest immigration court agreed to halt their deportations while evaluating their asylum petitions.

Two of the mothers already had claims pending with the Board of Immigration Appeals, and attorneys said they were filing one for the third.

The last-minute stay comes a day after the court also temporarily stopped the removal of five other Salvadoran families, raising questions about the government's claims that the immigrants have exhausted their options to legally stay here and that removing them is justified.

They are part of 28 Central American families - 121 women and children in all - detained last weekend in a high-profile national operation, the first of its kind to target immigrants whose unprecedented arrival in 2014 overwhelmed the Obama administration and became a political flash-point.

The New Year's weekend operation, occurring mainly in Texas, North Carolina and Georgia, targeted adults and children caught crossing the border after May 1, 2014, who have been told to leave the country by an immigration court and who Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said this week were ineligible to stay in the U.S. by seeking asylum or through other means. But the decision by the court to delay the deportation of some of the mothers and children casts doubt on whether that's actually the case.

A spokeswoman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement said the agency does not comment on pending litigation. She said the recent operation targeted families who were subject to final orders of deportation and who didn't have pending appeals at the time of their arrest. So far the agency has removed 77 women and children to Honduras, Guatemala and Mexico.

Legal representation

Attorneys at the Dilley detention center where the immigrants are being held said they have been able to interview 12 mostly Salvadoran families of the 28 Central American families detained there. But they said they couldn't get access to the remaining 16 families.

The operation has sparked furor among immigrant advocates who say the women and children are being denied their rights to due process. Proponents for reducing immigration, meanwhile, say the 121 migrants are such a tiny fraction of the tens of thousands of Central American families who have flooded over the southwest border in the past two years that it doesn't make a dent in the crisis.

The issue highlights the lack of quality legal representation in immigration courts, which unlike criminal courts do not provide attorneys for those who cannot afford them. Advocates say the fact that most of the small pool of immigrants who received legal assistance this week obtained a temporary delay in their deportation shows they are being wrongly removed and could be returned to harm. They say many face deportation orders simply because they don't know they must show up to court or because they lack legal help to navigate the complex asylum process.

Of 905 cases that have been adjudicated of parents who were apprehended with their children at the southwest border, 80 percent ended with migrants ordered deported. In more than two-thirds of those cases, judges issued the orders in absentia because migrants did not appear for their hearings. Families were allowed to legally remain in only 17 percent of the cases.

Fear of persecution

By contrast, 82 percent of more than 16,000 Central American women screened by asylum officers after crossing the border were found to have a credible fear of persecution if they return to their home countries, a criteria for applying for asylum, according to government statistics.

Yet only 30 percent of 26,300 Central American mothers with children who arrived after 2014 had attorneys, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University. Without counsel, only 1.5 percent were allowed to stay compared to more than a quarter of those with attorneys.

"This whole issue shows yet again how important it is to have good representation" said Doris Meissner, former commissioner of the then-U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service. "The whole system moves much more efficiently both for people with hearings in the courts and for the enforcement agencies if there's representation."