Calls Lead To Man's Release From ICE Center (WDIV-MI)

Calls Lead To Man's Release From ICE Center
October 14, 2011

A Michigan Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center has released Francisco Ascencio after more than 600 calls for justice on his behalf. The release followed a campaign launched by a coalition of immigration rights advocates and the Alliance for Immigrants Rights and Reform Michigan.

A Michigan native for more than 13 years, Ascencio was detained by ICE following a routine traffic stop and spent seven weeks in an ICE facility away from his wife and three children. On Wednesday, AIR launched an email and social media campaign asking supporters to contact ICE, members of congress and/or President Barack Obama to demand relief for Ascensio. By Thursday, over 600 calls and messages resulted in Ascensio’s release.

ICE has stated they will hold off action on his case for one year, but after that his fate it unknown.

In August, the Obama administration announced a new deportation relief policy, which concentrates resources on prosecuting and deporting criminals. The move played a key part in the online campaign for Ascencio’s release; he has no criminal record. Despite the new policy which seeks to concentrate deportation efforts on criminals, families like Ascensios are still being torn apart, since new guidelines have not been released.

Although Ascencio has been reunited with his family, he can’t work or provide for them and his wife hasn’t found work in the past seven weeks. Their future remains uncertain until true reforms are made.

Long, risky road leads to heartache for Coconut Creek immigrant family (South Florida Sun-Sentinel)

Long, risky road leads to heartache for Coconut Creek immigrant family
Teen split from parents after deportations

Michael Mayo
Sun Sentinel Columnist
3:14 p.m. EDT, October 15, 2011

Nearly 18 years after arriving in the United States and six weeks after federal immigration agents raided her family's Coconut Creek home, Shamsun Nahar's American dream ended with tears and heart-piercing wails.

Before dawn Friday, she peeled herself away from a final hug with her son Simon, 14, and daughter Nadia Sultana, 22, then disappeared down a corridor atFort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport.

Nahar, 43, took a three-flight journey back to her native Bangladesh. There, she joined her husband, Mohammed Rafiuddin, and 19-year-old son, Emon, who were deported last month.

"My life is gone," Emon, formerly a student at Palm Beach State College, told me in a phone interview from Bangladesh.

The parents and two eldest children came to South Florida to visit relatives in 1994. They didn't leave after their bid for asylum was denied. Nahar said things became complicated when Simon was born — in Plantation, making him a U.S. citizen — with a heart defect.

Decades later, things unraveled quickly. The family said it began with a 6 a.m. knock on the door on Aug. 31, with Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents seizing the parents and Emon. Nahar was released so that she could take care of Simon, but she agreed to leave the country by Friday.

ICE spokesman Nestor Yglesias said the family agreed to voluntary departure in 1997 but failed to comply. He said the family's arrest and deportation was "consistent with ICE's priorities."

Perhaps the get-tough-on-illegal-immigration crowd will cheer a story like this.

But up close, watching this family get torn apart last week was simply brutal.

And it doesn't seem to jibe with the Obama administration's stated policy of "prosecutorial discretion" when it comes to deportations, with priority given to criminals and national security threats. Rafiuddin, who ran a Pompano Beach convenience store, had only a minor criminal blemish, pleading no contest to selling cigarettes to a minor in 1998.

The family breakup also doesn't seem to make much sense, with Simon (a high school freshman) separated from his parents, Emon uprooted from his education and friends, and Nadia (a green-card holder who now lives in Daytona Beach) thrust into the role of caretaker for her younger brother.

Barring a change in policy or special dispensation, the parents and Emon will not be allowed to return for 10 years.

After the anguished airport goodbye, Nadia went to the Broward County Courthouse to get custody of Simon so he could enroll at a Daytona Beach school.

My intent isn't to paint the family as victims, but to show the parents as human beings who broke the law for the most understandable of reasons — their kids. "We just wanted a better life for our family," Nahar told me.

They made a whopper of a miscalculation: That they could get away with staying here forever.

The family's abrupt departure will leave a ghost house in an upscale subdivision. Over the last decade, Rafiuddin and Nahar paid roughly $70,000 in property taxes on the home they bought for $278,000 in 2001, according to county records. Even with three kids going through public schools, that's hardly being a sponge on society.

Like many South Floridians, the family had recent financial problems. Saddled with credit card and other debt, the parents filed for bankruptcy in 2010. The family seemed to live large: The four-bedroom house was loaded with nice furniture and all the American luxuries, like a big-screen TV.

Now the house is empty and likely headed to foreclosure, the furnishings shipped to Bangladesh.

Call that gaming the system if you want. But in this case, nobody wins.

South side neighborhood evacuated after bomb scare (Arizona Daily Star)

South side neighborhood evacuated after bomb scare

Arizona Daily Star | Posted: Saturday, October 15, 2011 3:13 pm

Residents in a southside neighborhood were evacuated Friday night while the Tucson Police Department bomb squad investigated a suspicious package found in a mobile home.

Officers were called to a trailer court in the 5900 block of South Stewart Boulevard just before 9 p.m. after receiving a report of shots being fired at one of the trailers.

Officers found shell casings outside the home, said Sgt. Matt Ronstadt, a TPD spokesman. Inside they found about 25 undocumented immigrants. No gunshot victims were found, but during a search of the premises, officers discovered a suspicious package and the bomb squad was called in. They remained on-site into the early morning hours. Agents from the U.S. Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement joined the investigation.

About seven homes in the area were evacuated and SunTran brought in a bus where the displaced residents could wait out the investigation.

Bomb squad personnel determined the object to be a mock explosive device and destroyed the package, Ronstadt said in a news release.

Border Patrol and ICE interviewed the immigrants at the scene before taking them to a federal facility for further processing.

Tucson police detectived determined that there was a fight between a group of people outside of the home before the shots were fired.

Detectives were still trying to figure out if the group was affiliated with the mobile home.

New deportation policy hasn't trickled down to BP (Tucson Sentinel)

New deportation policy hasn't trickled down to BP
ICE memo urged that cases be considered carefully

Posted Sep 7, 2011, 10:42 am

Julian Aguilar
The Texas Tribune

When Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) announced in June it was urging prosecutors to use discretion when placing illegal immigrants in deportation proceedings, skeptics urged caution. We’ve heard this before, they claimed.

People like Roxann Lara give them one more reason to say they were right.

Lara, originally from Delicias, Chihuahua, is five months pregnant and the mother of two U.S. citizen children. She is in the country illegally because she overstayed a visa. Her attorney says she’s the “poster child” for leniency under the June directive.

Instead, Lara was detained and processed by immigration authorities in Anthony, N.M., last week after she admitted to having expired documents when local police and U.S. Border Patrol agents came to the door looking for her sister.

It means the “left hand isn’t aware of what the right hand is doing,” said Carlos Spector, Lara’s El Paso-based attorney. "I think it’s important to note that this [directive] has not reached the lowest levels of ICE... because [Border Patrol agents] are still picking up pregnant women."

In the June directive, ICE Director John Morton told prosecutors to evaluate several factors when determining which illegal immigrants to place in deportation proceedings, part of a plan to concentrate ICE’s finite resources on removing the most dangerous criminal aliens. These factors included the immigrant’s health, their children’s immigration status, how long they had been in the country, and whether or not they were “low profile” — the government’s term for non-violent, non-essential deportees.

That memo was followed last month by an announcement that the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE and Customs and Border Protection, would review the cases of the 300,000 people currently in deportation proceedings to determine if any should be released and subsequently allowed to apply for work authorization

Lara was released from detention, but not until she was hospitalized after becoming panic stricken and physically ill during her stay. She says an agent threatened to deport her to Ciudad Juárez, where drug cartel violence is widespread.

“He said, ‘We have to go get your kids.’ I said ‘No, do what you want with me but leave my kids alone,’” a sobbing Lara told the Tribune by telephone from El Paso. “I told him I was sick and he said it didn’t matter to him.”

Spector said despite Lara's release, she has been issued a notice to appear before a judge. He said he intends to ask the judge to dismiss the case based on the Morton memo.

“The new policy says they shouldn’t pick up pregnant women or sick people," Spector said. "What we want to see and ask is, what does the Border Patrol think of the Morton memo?”

When asked if the Border Patrol has amended its policies since the Morton memo was issued, a spokesman for the U.S. Border Patrol El Paso sector told the Tribune agents are required to detain anyone who is unauthorized to be in the country. They can't give out warnings the way police officers can, he said; the immigration courts are the ones that ultimately make the decisions.

In Lara's case, Agent Ramiro Cordero said, Border Patrol "did exactly what we were supposed to do. If the courts grant that person some type of legal document, then the system works." Cordero added that the Morton memo was directed at federal prosecutors, who are overseen by ICE. U.S. Border Patrol, he said, is under the purview of Customs and Border Protection.

"Until there is policy and guidance from DHS, we still do what we have to do," he said.

'Not a revolutionary concept'
By the government’s own admission, internal policy changes can be slow-going. The agency's plan for reviewing deportation cases is still being crafted, so no individual cases have been closed, according to a Department of Homeland Security spokesman who asked not to be identified.

Immigration policy experts say they’re not surprised that there hasn’t been an immediate and sweeping change in policy. The Morton memo doesn’t reinvent the system, they say.

“Prosecutorial discretion is not new. It’s not a revolutionary concept," said Muzaffar Chishti, an attorney and director of the Migration Policy Institute at the New York University School of Law. "In an immigration context there have been guidelines about discretion for a very long time.”

A prosecutorial discretion memo issued in November 2000 by then-Immigration and Naturalization Services Commissioner Doris Meissner, now a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute, said the agency had finite resources, and prosecuting all immigration cases was “not possible.” It instructed prosecutors to consider immigrants' criminal history, immigration history, cooperation with authorities, military service and humanitarian concerns, like conditions in the peron's home country and their health.

But when the Morton memo was issued in June, it still caused an uproar among Republican hardliners like U.S. Rep. Lamar Smith, R-San Antonio, who called it “backdoor amnesty” and introduced a still-pending bill to dilute the administration’s immigration enforcement powers.

What's different about the agency's current policy, Chishti said, is that the government has stated it will review pending cases, not just use new standards for future ones. But he said it’s unclear how these policies will be implemented at the local level.

“The most critical part of this policy is going to be how they monitor it in the field,” Chishti said. “How are you going to notify people... and what is the accountability if an officer chooses not to exercise the discretion on the basis of the guidelines?"

Lara’s case indicates that, at least in certain Border Patrol sectors, the jury is still out.

Local immigrant won't be deported (Winston-Salem Journal)

Local immigrant won't be deported
By: BERTRAND M. GUTIERREZ | Winston-Salem Journal
Published: September 07, 2011

Federal authorities have opted not to initiate deportation proceedings against Yadkin County resident Martin Rodriguez and at least six other immigrants arrested during a rally in Charlotte this week, immigration attorneys and jail officials said Wednesday.

But Rodriguez, who is not authorized to be in the United States, remained in the Mecklenburg County Jail on Wednesday evening on misdemeanor charges related to the rally because he refused to sign paperwork for his own release, said jail officials, citing a note in Rodriguez's file from the magistrate.

It is unclear why Rodriguez refused to sign the paperwork. His sister, Silvia Rodriguez, 18, who heard about her brother's refusal from a reporter, guessed that he may have done it as a sign of solidarity with others who were arrested.

"Do you know if everyone is getting released? It could be that he doesn't want to come out until everyone comes out," she said.

Martin Rodriguez, 20, was one of 15 protesters arrested Tuesday after they and a crowd of about 300 protesters held a sit-in rally near Central Piedmont Community College. Most were initially charged with misdemeanor disorderly conduct and impeding traffic, police said.

If Rodriguez does not sign paperwork to get out of jail, he could stay there until his misdemeanor charges are heard in court. A court date was not available Wednesday afternoon on the jail website.

His immigration status and misdemeanor charges are separate matters because being in the U.S. without authorization is a civil offense, not a criminal offense, and it is handled by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Ivan Ortiz-Delgado, an ICE spokesman, explained why the federal agency sometimes opts not to detain illegal immigrants.

"ICE is focused on sensible, effective immigration enforcement that prioritizes efforts first on those serious criminal aliens who present the greatest risk to the security of our communities, not sweeps or raids to target undocumented immigrants indiscriminately," Ortiz-Delgado said in an email.

Following a directive written in a letter dated June 17 from ICE Director John Morton and publicly supported by President Barack Obama last month, the immigration agency has been exercising prosecutorial discretion on a case-by-case basis.

Helen Parsonage, a Winston-Salem immigration attorney helping with some of the cases, said ICE's decision to forgo deportation proceedings against Rodriguez is a sign that the Morton letter is filtering through the agency.

"This is a huge sea change to me — to see undocumented migrants being arrested and not put in deportation proceedings is such a relief, especially after the last couple of years when people have been deported after being in a traffic stop," Parsonage said. "Finally, there seems to be some sanity and balance about who we deport and who we don't."

Rodriguez was a good student, is an active church member and had never gotten in trouble with the law, according to his priest and former teachers.

"He was a well-above-average student — almost had 100 average in the class I taught, which was an upper-level math class," said Stephen Brown, his teacher at Starmount High School in Boonville.

Principal Junior Luffman echoed that sentiment.

"He was never a problem in school. He didn't get in any trouble. He was very respectful and followed the rules," he said.

The Rev. Jose Enrique Gonzalez, who is the pastor at Divine Redeemer Parish in Boonville, said in Spanish that Rodriguez does a lot of work with the church's youth group.

"I hope he can fix his situation, and I hope I can see him back at church soon," Gonzalez said. "He is doing this not just for himself but for others who are also going through the same challenges."

The rally and subsequent arrests were aimed at raising awareness about immigrants such as Rodriguez, who was brought to the U.S. from Mexico as a toddler and has grown up here. They want Congress to pass legislation known as the Dream Act, which would allow young, educated immigrants to correct their immigration status and go to college or join the military.

Ten of the 15 arrested are not authorized to be in the U.S., according to the N.C. Dream Team, the advocacy group that organized the rally.

Parsonage was helping with seven of the immigration cases. On Wednesday evening, it was still unclear whether ICE officials had opened deportation proceedings against the other three immigrants.