48 arrested in Chicago area in last week's immigration raids (Chicago Tribune)

48 arrested in Chicago area in last week's immigration raids
By Marwa Eltagouri
Chicago Tribune
February 14 2017 12:21

Federal authorities arrested 48 unauthorized immigrants across the Chicago area last week in a series of immigration enforcement raids, officials said.

Of those arrested, 45 were convicted criminals and 20 were previously deported, a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement official said.

Chicago's enforcement office made 235 arrests across six states — Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, Kentucky, Kansas and Missouri — during an operation that began Feb. 4 and concluded Friday, spokeswoman Gail Montenegro said.

While ICE officials said the raids were routine, the timing of the operation less than one month into President Donald Trump's administration has intensified fear and anxiety in immigrant communities, even among families with legal status. In neighborhoods where immigrants are still shaken by Trump's immigration order last month banning travel into the U.S. from seven largely Muslim countries, news of the raids and rumored inquiries by federal agents have led to a climate of helplessness.

In Chicago, 15 people were arrested, including an Iraqi citizen with a previous conviction of criminal sexual abuse of a victim unable to consent. A Mexican citizen with previous convictions of aggravated sexual abuse of a minor, attempted criminal sexual abuse and solicitation for sex was also arrested in the Chicago area, officials said.

Others arrested included six people in Bensenville, five in Aurora, four in Cicero, two in Addison, and one each in Arlington Heights, Bolingbrook, Carpentersville, Elgin, Markham, Melrose Park, Mundelein, Plainfield, Rolling Meadows, Roselle, Skokie, Waukegan, Wheaton, Wheeling, Wood Dale and Hammond, Ind., an ICE official said.

Thirty-three of those immigrants are from Mexico, and seven are from Guatemala. One immigrant each is from Canada, Chad, China, the Czech Republic, El Salvador, Iraq, the Philippines and Poland, an ICE official said.

Those arrested had been convicted on charges such as prostitution, DUI, cocaine possession, burglary, criminal sexual assault, assault, and aggravated sexual abuse of a minor, an ICE official said.

On Jan. 25, Trump issued an executive order to crack down on the estimated 11 million immigrants living in the country without legal status. Trump's order expanded the list of deportation priorities to include any noncitizen who is charged with a criminal offense of any kind or who is suspected of committing criminal acts, fraud or willful dishonesty while interacting with immigration officials, is the subject of a pending order of removal or has previously been deported and re-entered the country.

The order gave much broader leeway to ICE officers in deciding whether someone posed a "risk to public safety" and therefore could be detained.

Under the Obama administration, the government focused on targeting immigrants living in the country illegally who posed a threat to national security or public safety, as well as recent border crosses. Still, despite the narrower focus, more than 2 million people were deported during Obama's eight years in office.

During an operation that occurred over a five-week period last year under the Obama administration, 331 unauthorized immigrants were arrested in the Midwest, including 107 in Illinois. The majority of people were arrested in Chicago, Cicero and Waukegan, according to an ICE news report from June 2016.

Methodist Sunday school teacher detained in immigration raids (Think Progress)

Methodist Sunday school teacher detained in immigration raids
By Jack Jenkins and Esther Yu His Lee
February 14, 2017

A Methodist Sunday school teacher in Kansas has reportedly been detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and is now believed to be set for deportation, sparking concern among local faith leaders unsettled by the surge of immigration raids under President Donald Trump.

According to an account published by the United Methodist Church’s (UMC) communications office, Humberto Barralaga reportedly heard a knock at his door on Tuesday morning, February 7. He allowed two immigration officials — who were allegedly not wearing anything that identified themselves as ICE agents — into his home to give them refuge from the cold.

But according to his pastor, as soon as Barralaga opened the door, the men reportedly called other officers into the house and detained him. Officials for the Great Plains Conference—the regional UMC governing body—told ThinkProgress that Barralaga is an active member of House United Methodist Church in Dodge City, Kansas, where he is also a Sunday school teacher and the men’s evangelism leader. GPC officials said he had been waiting for his son, a U.S. citizen, to turn 21 so Barralaga could petition to adjust his immigration status. His wife, they said, is also a legal resident.

They added they were not aware of where Barralaga is being detained or what, if anything, he is being charged with.

“We cannot find anything that can lead us to indicate that he has had any criminal activity,” said Todd Seifert, the communications director for the conference. Seifert said that Barralaga’s role as a Sunday school teacher was a “well-connected” ministry position for the tiny church, where he oversaw men’s ministry.

When ThinkProgress reached out ICE for confirmation, however, officials were initially slow to reply, and calls to local ICE detention centers were hastily redirected to answering machines without a response. It was only after several hours that ICE finally stated they were holding a man by the name of Pablo Barralaga-Escobar, 51, who was arrested in Dodge City. They added that Barralaga-Escobar has “since been placed into removal proceedings due to his three DUI convictions and a which separate misdemeanor conviction”—in other words, scheduled for deportation. A mugshot of a man named “Pablo Barralaga-Escoba” resembling the UMC’s image of Humberto is dated the same day as Humberto’s arrest.

It’s possible that ICE was unable to find Barralaga in their locator system because of a name discrepancy. But immigrant advocates say opaque or even deceptive tactics by ICE are routine, and there are concerns it will only get worse under Trump.

“On multiple occasions, ICE has refused to speak to us despite having an ICE privacy waiver from the person in detention or ICE has just remained unresponsive to us,” said Christina M. Fialho, Executive Director of Community Initiatives for Visiting Immigrants in Confinement. “Now with the change in the Administration, we are concerned this will happen with more frequency, as more of our community members are disappeared into the detention and deportation system.”

The shift is being felt in other ways as well. Even if Barralaga has as criminal record, for instance, he may not have been detained under Barack Obama’s administration — which issued directives asking ICE agents to exercise leniency towards immigrants with U.S. citizen children. According to pastor Juan Carlos, a UMC minister in the conference who is helping spearhead efforts to aid immigrants in the region, the bond for Barralaga’s release is set at $7,000.

Carlos noted that developing coalitions to help handle such situations is rapidly becoming a primary concern for churchgoers in the area, which has historically been a haven for immigrant and refugee communities. Developing structures to respond to cases like Barralaga’s is now “one of the priorities in our conference,” he said.

Although Barralaga has longstanding ties to the United States and deep connections in his community, deportations of people like him may become increasingly common under the Trump administration. ICE officials said he is one of more than 680 immigrants swept up in immigration raids this past week, with direct assistance from local police in places such as Dodge City. According to the Kansas City Star, Barralaga was one of 32 people arrested in Wichita, Dodge City, Garden City, and surrounding area alone.

Jeania Ree V. Moore, Director of Civil and Human Rights at the United Methodist Church’s General Board of Church and Society, noted that aggressive deportation policies were also used during the Obama administration. She said that UMC leaders affirmed and updated the denomination’s progressive resolution on immigration in 2016 in response, and that the UMC’s pro-immigrant stance is rooted in their Christian faith.

“Jesus’ own life begins as a refugee to Africa as a part of state-sponsored killing,” she said. “We recognize that the situation is casted as political… but we also know that it’s also moral and ethical, and, for us, deeply a matter of faith.”

Churches and other faith groups are rapidly becoming an increasingly vocal opponent of deportations and restrictive immigration polices. The UMC is also one of several Christian, Jewish, and Muslim institutions that have lent their support for the “New Sanctuary Movement.” Participating churches, synagogues, and mosques offer up their sanctuaries to immigrants at risk of deportation, making use of an internal ICE policy that dissuades agents from raiding churches, schools, or hospitals. However, DHS has not issued clear guidance on whether these memos have continued since Trump took office.

“The UMC has stood behind sanctuary as an option and a recourse, and continues to do so explicitly,” Moore said.

The strategy successfully pressured ICE to drop or delay the deportation orders for several immigrants during Barack Obama’s administration, but it remains unclear whether the policy will remain in place under Trump.

Nevertheless, Trump’s election — fueled in part by a spate of anti-immigrant rhetoric and violence — has inspired a bevy of new worship communities to sign on as potential sanctuaries for immigrants.

In Apparent Case of Mistaken Identity, Father Caught in ICE Sting (El Paso Herald-Post)

In Apparent Case of Mistaken Identity, Father Caught in ICE Sting
MARIANA ALFARO AND JAY ROOT
The Texas Tribune
February 14, 2017

Undocumented immigrant Miguel Angel Torres was on his way to deliver Valentine’s Day chocolates to his daughter last week near Austin. Now, in what his family calls a case of mistaken identity, Torres is in an immigration lock-up near San Antonio.

With Donald Trump in the White House and rumors of widespread law enforcement raids percolating throughout her heavily immigrant community in North Austin, Irma Perez said she decided to help pay off her brother’s unpaid tickets to help him avoid any trouble.

It would lead to her own family’s undoing.

On Friday, Perez got a call from a neighbor with disastrous news: Her husband — not her brother — got picked up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement after dropping off their three daughters at school in Pflugerville.

What began as an apparent case of mistaken identity soon mushroomed into a full-blown family crisis. Their dreams of opening a food truck in North Austin were dashed, and the family abandoned their home because it was now on ICE’s radar. On Monday, their girls, all U.S. citizens, were on their way to an immigrant detention facility in Pearsall, 150 miles from Austin, to see their father.

Miguel Angel Torres, who has lived in Austin for 14 years as an undocumented immigrant, worked as a cook at an Austin restaurant. Perez, his wife, is also undocumented, and so is her brother, Jose Manuel Perez.

Torres was one of an undetermined number of people detained in Texas in the past few days as part of national ICE operations that sent panic through immigrant communities. In a written statement released to reporters Monday, Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly said that ICE, in “targeted” operations last week, detained more than 680 individuals nationwide, 75 percent of whom had criminal records, including homicide and sexual abuse.

“These operations targeted public safety threats, such as convicted criminal aliens and gang members, as well as those who have violated our immigration laws, including those who illegally re-entered the country after being removed and immigration fugitives ordered removed by federal immigration judges,” Kelly said in the statement.

Torres’ family wasn’t expecting him to get caught up in the mix.

“[My husband] is a person who’s never done anything wrong and who complies with the law,” Perez said in her native Spanish. “We don’t know why they detained him. He was driving his own car, not my brother’s. He has nothing to do with my brother.”

On Friday morning, she said ICE officers wearing civilian clothes and driving an unmarked van detained Torres. She said he was on his way to deliver a box of Valentine’s Day chocolates to their youngest daughter when he was stopped by agents who asked if he was Jose Manuel Perez — her brother.

When he said he wasn’t, Irma Perez said, they forced him out of his car anyway and said, “Well, we’re detaining you.”

She says four days before her husband was detained, she provided her own address instead of her brother’s when submitting payment for her brother’s tickets in Manor, a town in Travis County just northeast of Austin.

Lawyers working on her case believe ICE officers waited outside the family’s home thinking Torres was Irma Perez’s brother, who she said had been previously deported.

The Tribune reached out to ICE about the Torres case, and the agency said it was still working on that request as of late Monday afternoon.

The ICE field office in San Antonio, which includes Austin, said Monday the agency detained 51 foreign nationals, 23 with criminal convictions, in the Austin area last week. The Mexican Consulate in Austin reported 44 Mexican citizens were picked up on Thursday and Friday in the Texas capital — a number that included a few whom Consul General Carlos Gonzalez Gutierrez said happened to be “in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Mark Kinzler, an immigration lawyer who has helped Irma Perez, told The Texas Tribune that “all kind of things look wrong” in the case against her husband.

“They were looking, apparently, for someone else, and he wasn’t that person but then they took him anyway,” Kinzler said.

ICE has criticized immigrant advocates for spreading “false” and “irresponsible” reports of widespread raids in immigrant communities. But Kinzler said the Torres detention fits a pattern of increased enforcement that goes beyond immigrants with criminal records.

“Even though ICE’s PR campaign is that they’re picking up criminals and picking up people with prior deports, and I’m sure some of them are, it already seems like a lot of them are not those people,” Kinzler said. “People who work every day and try to take care of their families are getting swept up [too].”

After the call from the neighbor alerting her to her husband’s detention, Perez said she immediately began looking for him. She and her parents spent hours trying to track him down before she finally got a call from a toll-free number. It was her husband telling her to go pick up the car he left behind.

Ever since, Irma Perez said she has remained close to a phone, waiting for more news from her husband.

“I’m in shock because we always saw this in the news and it only happened to other people,” she said. “It had never happened in my family, and it feels awful because it changes your life.”

Kinzler said they can expect at least two weeks of legal procedures to get Torres out of detention. However, the timing depends on how full the court is.

“Because of the time he’s been here, because he has a clean history and U.S. citizen kids, I will be able to get him out on a bond,” Kinzler said.

Perez said her family will have to start rounding up money to free her husband and pay for attorney’s fees as he fights removal from the country.

Immigration lawyers advised Perez and her family to leave their home since ICE has their address on record. On Friday night, she moved her children and parents, who live with her, into her sister’s house.

Friday was the day Torres was going to open his own food truck, Sabor del Rancho, a dream his family said he’d nourished for years. Now, the trailer sits empty on North Lamar.

The family went to church Sunday and sang in the choir as they regularly do — without Torres, who was supposed to do his first solo performance at church. After mass, Irma and her daughters returned to her sister’s home. Sitting next to a candlelit altar with a statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe, they tearfully retold how quickly their lives had been turned upside down.

Torres’ 12-year-old daughter Melani — who is part of a college readiness program and hopes to become a computer engineer one day — said her father would always drop her off and pick her up from school, so she was surprised when her mother picked her up on Friday.

“I saw her with teary eyes, and she said, ‘You have no idea what happened,'” Melani said, speaking in both Spanish and English during the interview. “I thought she was kidding because my dad would never be caught by ICE, but then our neighbor confirmed the news, and my sisters and I started crying.”

Reuters: immigration agents arrest 'Dreamer' in Seattle (The Hill)

Reuters: immigration agents arrest 'Dreamer' in Seattle
BY NIKITA VLADIMIROV - 02/14/17 06:49 PM EST

An immigrant from Mexico who has obtained a work permit since being brought into the country illegally as a child was arrested by authorities in Seattle, Reuters reported Tuesday. The arrest could mark the first immigration detention of its sort in President Trump's administration.

According to the report, the arrest of a 23-year-old Daniel Ramirez Medina was conducted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers who originally showed up at Ramirez's residence to arrest the man's father.

Ramirez was a beneficiary of former President Barack Obama's Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which was designed to protect illegal immigrants who came to the U.S. as children from deportation and make them eligible to work legally.

DACA was established in 2012 and applies to approximately 750,000 immigrants, often called "Dreamers," Reuters noted.

President Trump has pledged to strengthen the U.S. immigration policy and significantly reduce illegal immigration within the country.

According to the report, Ramirez filed a legal challenge to his detention on Monday, arguing that the action was illegal due to his legitimate work permit. He also does not have a criminal record.

Ethan Dettmer, an attorney representing Ramirez, said that he hopes "this detention was a mistake."

Hundreds of immigrants have been detained and arrested during the last week, as the administration seeks to ramp up its deportation efforts.

ICE arrest witnessed by students in Charlotte causes alarm across NC (Triad City Beat)

ICE arrest witnessed by students in Charlotte causes alarm across NC

By Jordan Green - February 10, 2017

President Trump’s recent executive orders on immigration enforcement have caused mounting anxiety among undocumented people, educators and advocates across North Carolina, but a spokesperson for ICE says it’s business as usual.

Incidents that have caused alarm include a confirmed arrest witnessed by elementary students and school personnel on the west side of Charlotte on Thursday morning. The incident prompted an email from the principal to her staff.

“As many of you have heard or seen this morning, Immigration is arresting illegal immigrants in this area this morning,” Principal Cara Heath wrote to staff at Berryhill School in an email provided to Triad City Beat by Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools. “I know this is upsetting for the kids as well as all of you. Both staff and students watched as some immigrants were taken in on their routes to school this morning.

“Some of you may require counseling help today,” Heath continued, adding that a psychologist would be on site to assist.

Bryan D. Cox, the Southern region communications director for Immigrations Customs Enforcement, said he is aware of only one arrest in the vicinity of Berryhill School. He said the arrest took place 2.3 miles away from the school, on Wallace Neel Road, which runs along the perimeter of Charlotte-Douglas International Airport. Cox said the arrest was carried out by ICE’s fugitive operation team, and the individual taken into custody was a convicted felon with a felony forgery conviction, along with five driving while intoxicated convictions.

News of the arrest set off alarm among parents of students at Berryhill School, and Heath assured parents in an email on Thursday afternoon that, contrary to rumors, no immigration officers had set foot on the school campus.

“Teaching and learning was conducted as planned in every classroom today,” Heath told parents in the email. “We realize that reports of immigration activity is a very sensitive matter for our students and school families. Please know that we have counselors on site to provide any social emotional support needed at this time.”

Cox said ICE has not conducted enforcement actions at any schools in North Carolina, citing a 2011 memo from then Director John Morton directing agents to avoid making arrests at so-called “sensitive locations,” including schools, churches, hospitals, funerals and weddings, and public demonstrations. Cox emphasized that the order is still in force.

As a gauge of enforcement activity in the past week, Cox said ICE has made about 200 arrests in North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia, mostly involving individuals convicted of crimes, including murder, robbery, battery and domestic violence-related offenses.

“There’s been a lot of rumor this week alleging something new or expanded,” Cox said. “The fugitive operation team was focused on identifying and arresting individuals who pose the greatest threat to public safety. ICE only conducts targeted immigration enforcement. When they leave for the day they have a list of individuals that we’re looking for. We’re looking for specific individuals. It’s lead-driven enforcement and targeted enforcement. We do not conduct any random enforcement. The claims that have been floating around that have suggested this is something new — this is ongoing enforcement activity.”

Notwithstanding his insistence that ICE is prioritizing undocumented individuals who hold criminal convictions, Cox acknowledged that President Trump’s Jan. 25 executive order flattens distinctions by treating those with criminal convictions the same as individuals who “have abused any program related to receipt of public benefits” or are even suspected of having committed a crime. He said he couldn’t “speculate” on how the executive order might be implemented in the field, and otherwise referred questions about it to the media office at the Department of Homeland Security in Washington.

Meanwhile, the Washington Post reported that ICE launched a series of raids across the country on Thursday and Friday, marking what the newspaper called “the first largescale episode of immigration enforcement inside the United States” since the Jan. 25 executive order. The report said “immigration activists” had documented ICE raids in a dozen locations across the country, including Charlotte and Burlington in North Carolina, along with an ICE checkpoint somewhere in North Carolina.

Triad City Beat could not confirm the reports.

Viridiana Martinez, an organizer in Raleigh with Alerta Migratoria NC who advocates for undocumented people, said she had only heard about an immigration checkpoint in Apex, a town in Wake County, but emphasized that her group was never able to confirm the reports.

Cox said he had not read the Post article and said he didn’t know anything about the alleged incidents in North Carolina.

“If we were in fact there I can tell you categorically it was not a checkpoint or a raid,” he said. “We do not conduct any type of vehicle checkpoint, raid or indiscriminate sweep.”

The irony of the heightened concern about immigration enforcement under the Trump administration, Martinez said, is that undocumented people who had committed no offense other than being in the country illegally were already being deported in contravention to an Obama-era policy stating that only those with criminal records would be targeted. As an example, Martinez said her organization advocated on behalf of an Appalachian State University student who was arrested by ICE in 2016 without having committed any criminal offense other than being in the country illegally.

A series of arrests across the state in the early months of 2016 caused particular anxiety.

“The reality is that all of this stuff was happening already,” Martinez said. “I can’t tell you how afraid people were when the raids were leaked to the Washington Post in December 2015…. It was a bunch of teens picked up on their way to school that the Obama administration categorized as national security threats just so they could send this message to Latin America that we’re not going to welcome them.”

Trump’s election and the indiscriminate enforcement codified in the executive order at least brings the agency’s activity’s out into the open, she said.

“In a way I’m like, ‘Yay, I’m so glad we have this asshole who’s not trying to hide who he is, so people understand we have to fight these injustices,’” Martinez said. “He’s ugly and he doesn’t make any effort to hide it.”

If anything, Martinez said, the level of fear among immigrant families she’s encountered as an activist and legal assistant, was higher one year ago than it is today.

“We hadn’t seen that kind of thing before — I’ve heard of all kinds of stories of what they did last year to pick up these kids whose only crime was fleeing these countries [in Central America] that are overwhelmed by criminal cartels and gangs,” she said. “We’re picking them up and intercepting the cars they’re riding in and literally kidnapping them and asking for ransom.”

Andrew Willis Garcés, an organizer who works with undocumented young people in Guilford County, indicated that it remains to be seen whether ICE enforcement activities in North Carolina are playing out in a different way than they did in the past. Citing a recent report about an undocumented woman who was arrested on Wednesday after checking into an ICE office in Phoenix, Garcés said in an email: “It’s not clear yet if some of the other targeted actions [in North Carolina] in the past week or so (they were looking for specific people with convictions) were also somehow indiscriminate, more like the raids of 10 years ago, or not. But clearly in at least a few instances, supervising ICE agents are using a much broader definition of who is a ‘priority’ for deportation. Which is exactly what the orders directed ICE to do.”

Garcés credited local officials like Greensboro Mayor Nancy Vaughan for publicly affirming a welcoming stance towards immigrants, but said many undocumented people are understandably worried that local governments will have little ability to intervene if the federal government undertakes a massive crackdown.

“I think as a community that we have to decide what risks we are willing to take in order to protect communities who are targeted, whether those communities are African-American or immigrant,” Garcés said. “What are we willing to do to create safety? How do we respond to laws that are designed only to harass, intimidate and even separate our neighbors from their families?”

Martinez said the horrified reaction of teachers across the state to deportations carried out against high school students under the Obama administration has created a foundation for resistance in the Trump era.

“Kids were being picked up on the way to school,” she said. “This is how the teachers got involved. Their kids are telling them they’re terrified.”

Martinez applauded a group of parents who addressed the Guilford County School Board with the support of their children’s teachers on Thursday evening.

“These moms are talking to local leaders, saying, ‘Please make the school safe for my kid,’” Martinez said. “That is what needs to be happening. I think there’s the win. With all the chaos, there’s all these people saying, ‘I can no longer sit idly by.’”