A chilling estate sale, today

[Cirsium]

132. I am not skirting anything

Point one: the anti-immigrant agenda led by Trump is not really about immigration, it is about targeting particular minority groups.

Agree or disagree?

Point two: the stated plan to ignore birthright citizenship is certainly for the purpose of treating people from particular ethnic groups who are not immigrants as though they were.

Agree or disagree?

Third point: citizens from particular ethnic groups who are not immigrants have been incarcerated and deported.

U.S. Citizens Mistakenly Snared, Deported by DHS and ICE

An increasing number of American citizens have been questioned, detained and even deported by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), as a result of databases that incorrectly identify them as undocumented immigrants.

According to the New York Times, “Detentions of citizens are part of the widening impact on Americans, as well as on immigrants, of President Obama’s enforcement strategies, which have led to more than 1.1 million deportations since the beginning of his term, the highest numbers in six decades.” In fiscal year (FY) 2012, 409,849 immigrants were deported – a record number.

With growing criticism of law enforcement sweeps of immigrant neighborhoods and job sites that result in complaints about racial profiling, as well as widespread condemnation of immigration detention facilities, the issue of U.S. citizens being caught up in immigration raids has become more pronounced. Across the country, according to the Times, “citizens have been confined in local jails after federal immigration agents, acting on flawed information from Department of Homeland Security databases, instructed the police to hold them for investigation and possible deportation.”

https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2013/mar/15/us-citizens-mistakenly-snared-deported-by-dhs-and-ice/

Yes, the U.S. Wrongfully Deports Its Own Citizens

The New Yorker article by William Finnegan, "The Deportation Machine," highlights many of the continuing systemic problems with ICE policies, including its use of the flawed Secure Communities program, the prevalence of racial profiling, and the lack of any right to appointed counsel for individuals in immigration court. This lack of counsel is particularly problematic for people such as Lyttle, who, because of their mental disabilities, may not understand the immigration proceeding enough to be able to represent themselves adequately.

https://www.aclu.org/news/immigrants-rights/yes-us-wrongfully-deports-its-own-citizens

The US Keeps Mistakenly Deporting Its Own Citizens

The story is strikingly common: thousands of citizens have been unlawfully deported or detained by ICE in recent years, according to extensive research undertaken by Jacqueline Stevens, a political science professor at Northwestern University who directs the school’s Deportation Research Clinic.

“Recent data suggests that in 2010 well over 4,000 US citizens were detained or deported as aliens, raising the total since 2003 to more than 20,000, a figure that may strike some as so high as to lack credibility,” Stevens wrote in a 2011 report. “But the deportation laws and regulations in place since the late 1980s have been mandating detention and deportation for hundreds of thousands of incarcerated people each year without attorneys or, in many cases, administrative hearings. It would be truly shocking if this did not result in the deportation of US citizens.”

https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-us-keeps-mistakenly-deporting-its-own-citizens/

ICE held an American man in custody for 1,273 days. He’s not the only one who had to prove his citizenship

A former senior attorney for ICE’s regional office in Los Angeles said the 2009 directive to conduct legal reviews of all citizenship claims brought dozens of cases to her desk every week. The people were all in custody, and agents, she said, generally assumed they were lying.

“The automatic response was, ‘Yeah, you’re just doing that to get out of our custody,’ ” said Patty Corrales, who left the federal agency in 2012 and now works in private practice. Most citizenship claims were false, she said, but “there were real citizens out there.”

In the seven and a half years ending in February, ICE reviewed 8,043 citizenship claims of people in custody, according to figures provided by Department of Homeland Security. In 1,488 -- nearly a fifth of those cases -- ICE lawyers concluded the evidence “tended to show that the individual may, in fact, be a U.S. citizen,” a DHS spokeswoman said.

https://www.latimes.com/archives/story/2018-04-27/ice-held-an-american-man-in-custody-for-1273-days