By Michael Derek Roberts, Associate Editor Caribbean Times News
Mass arrests. National dragnet and round up. In the first 100 days of the Donald Trump Administration, the new U.S. President made good on his promise to be tough on immigration. To date, 41,318 undocumented immigrants have been arrested between January 22 and the end of April, according to a Caribbean Times News investigative report. at’s a 38% spike in arrests the direct result of the new Executive Orders on Immigration signed by the president that triggered a nationwide crackdown on the undocumented. That was a campaign pledge made by President Trump during the 2016 Presidential Elections.
According to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) the present arrests are up from the 30,028 carried out in about the same period last year. e ongoing dragnet follows presidential orders widening the scope of who can be targeted for immigration violations and removal. ICE said that about two-thirds of those arrested had existing criminal convictions. But more than half of the increase in arrests was of immigrants who were simply living in the US without legal documents.
Thomas Homan, Acting ICE Di- rector, said that immigrants who posed a threat to national security or had criminal records were still a priority for his agency. But he ominously warned: “ ere is no category of aliens o the table” (using the pejorative word “aliens” for the first time in a long period to describe undocumented immigrants). ICE will also continue to target people who have been issued a nal order of removal by an immigration judge, even if they did not commit another crime, he said.
“ Those that enter the country illegally, they do violate the law, that is a criminal act. When a federal judge makes a decision and issues an order that order needs to mean something,” Homan stressed.
Former President Barack Obama was routinely criticized for deporting large numbers of undocumented immigrants most of whom were recent illegal border crossers. President Trump’s signature campaign pledge to build an expanded wall on the US-Mexico border to keep out undocumented border crossers is still in limbo because Congress recently denied funding for it in a budget deal to keep the federal government functioning. However, his tough rhetoric on border security appears to be having an impact on immigration enforcement. e number of people caught crossing the border with Mexico is down significantly since the beginning of the year, ac- cording to information from the US Customs and Border Protection data.
Immigration advocates have raised concerns about the ramped up heavy enforcement raids and round ups across the country. While roughly 75 percent of those arrested were convicted of non-immigration offenses, approximately 10,800 were non-criminal arrests, up more than 150 percent from 2016. is spike in mass arrests will be a major headache for the Trump Administration: e big increase in noncriminal arrests will create a frenzy in immigration courts that are already overloaded, overworked, and back- logged with existing cases stretching years.
In fact, on the one hand the Trump Ad- ministration is saying that their immigration priorities are about arresting and deporting the worst of the worst undocumented immigrants – including violent criminals and gang members. But the reality is that ALL
undocumented immigrants are now subject to arbitrary arrest, detention, and deportation. When President Trump took o ce, he admittedly inherited a broken and problematic immigration court system. ere was a backlog of over 500,000 pending cases with even basic hearings dragging on for years be- fore resolution. As of last April that situation has grown progressively worse with a back- log caseload now numbering over 585, 930 cases [Source: Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. www.trac.syr.edu].
The increased enforcement is aggravating an old problem – not enough judges to process the increase in immigration arrests. Presently, there are now 318 immigration judges nationwide out of 374 positions authorized by Congress. Acknowledging this as a major fetter and hindrance to his immigration deportation plans, in March this year, President Trump asked Congress for an $80 million increase for the Justice Department to hire just 75 more immigration judges to ease and unblock the bottleneck in the system. But that’s not nearly enough. According to Human Rights First [www.humanrights- rst.org] the immigration court system would need about 524 judges to deal with the growing backlog of cases.
So to bypass this challenge and to whittle down the decades old backlog of cases, the Trump Administration is now toying with a technique called “expedited removal.” is would result in undocumented immigrants being arbitrarily deported without “due process” rights to have their cases heard before an immigration judge. While this legal technique and strategy has come under re from immigration rights advocates, the Trump Administration and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) point to the fact that under the Immigration and Nationality Act, anyone who arrives in the U.S. without valid documents or is apprehended within 100 miles of the border within 14 days of arrival is subject to expedited removal. And too, the DHS has the authority to apply the expedited process to anyone apprehended in the United States if they can’t show they’ve consistently lived here for two years.
and then 