Immigration and Children

Article from The Hill Blog:

It’s encouraging to hear Democrats and Republicans talking about children in the immigration debate. Children of immigrants are one-fourth of the kids in America, and one million of America’s unauthorized aspiring citizens are children. So getting immigration reform done means getting it right for kids.
 
This bipartisan focus on kids is critical, because current law subjects children to serious hardship and harm. As Michigan State Law School professor David Thronson recently wrote, today’s immigration law “devalues” children. He concludes that it treats children as objects, instead of people with rights and a say in their own lives. Not surprisingly, when children interact with the system, the outcomes are not good. For example a person inadmissible to the U.S. can qualify for relief by showing hardship to a U.S. citizen spouse or other close adult relative, but the law systematically ignores the same hardship to a U.S. citizen child. Similar double-standards for deportation routinely subject kids to harm, by ignoring the common-sense reality that children experience traumatic separation in more damaging and lasting ways than adults.The consequences are devastating. Recently, over the course of about two years, the federal government deported more than 200,000 parents of U.S. citizen children – that’s 250 parents every day. Each deportation means children’s lives are overturned, as they are forced to either move to a land they’ve never known or face the trauma of losing a parent.

 
An estimated 5,000 children are currently living in our states’ overworked, under-resourced foster care systems due to their parent’s detention or deportation. In many cases, their parents were not abusive or neglectful. These children have been separated from their parents – sometimes permanently – simply because their parents did not go through normal legal channels when they brought their children to the land of freedom, opportunity, and justice.
 
Some policymakers have acknowledged the high stakes for children in immigration reform, responding with a call for passage of the DREAM Act or similar legislation. DREAM, which provides a roadmap to citizenship for some young people brought without authorization to the United States as children, is an important part of any immigration reform solution that works for children. And we welcome the upcoming introduction of a bipartisan DREAM Act in the House of Representatives. But while DREAM is a necessary element, it is by no means sufficient to ensure that reform works for all kids.
 
What America needs is immigration reform that addresses the full range of problems kids face. In partnership with more than 200 national, state, and local organizations, we and the Women’s Refugee Commission recently released a set of principles for immigration reform that meets children’s needs. These partners, representing faith traditions, advocates for civil rights, immigrant families, and children, all agree that Congress must:
 
    1.    Provide a roadmap to citizenship that is direct, clear, affordable, and reasonable;
    2.    Protect  children’s basic rights, including access to public services for children and families;
    3.    Reform enforcement to protect children’s safety and well-being, including protections for the thousands of immigrant children who enter the U.S. each year not accompanied by an adult; and,
    4.    Commit to keeping families together, by modernizing the family-based immigration system, prioritizing children’s interests in immigration law, and adopting family-friendly enforcement policies.
 
We understand that such things are easier said than done. Like the principles released by President Obama and a bipartisan group in the U.S. Senate, moving from broad concepts to specific legislative language will be difficult. But we are committed to working with any policymaker – Democrat or Republican – who is serious about building an immigration system that meets children’s needs.
 
Reform is an urgent priority for kids, because every day we delay means more denials, more deportations, more foster care placements, and more families torn apart. But whether children’s lives are better or worse depends on whether lawmakers make kids a priority or continue to devalue their interests.
 
We urge members of Congress to confront the tragedies children experience every day under current law, and commit to delivering a better immigration law that reflects our nation’s family values and advances our national interest in the success of every child. Because, in the long run, getting immigration reform done means getting it right for kids.
 
Lesley is president of First Focus.

Release of Detainees

The New York Times has reported:

Federal immigration officials have released hundreds of detainees from detention centers around the country in recent days in a highly unusual effort to save money as automatic budget cuts loom in Washington, officials said Tuesday.

The government has not dropped the deportation cases against the immigrants, however. The detainees have been freed on supervised release while their cases continue in court, officials said.

But the decision angered many Republicans, including Representative Robert W. Goodlatte of Virginia, who said the releases were a political gambit by the Obama administration that undermined the continuing negotiations over comprehensive immigration reform and jeopardized public safety.

“It’s abhorrent that President Obama is releasing criminals into our communities to promote his political agenda on sequestration,” said Mr. Goodlatte, who, as chairman of the Judiciary Committee, is running the House hearings on immigration reform. “By releasing criminal immigrants onto the streets, the administration is needlessly endangering American lives.”

A spokeswoman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, an arm of the Department of Homeland Security, said the detainees selected for release were “noncriminals and other low-risk offenders who do not have serious criminal histories.”

Officials said the releases, which began last week and continued on Tuesday, were a response to the possibility of automatic governmentwide budget cuts, known as sequestration, which are scheduled to take effect on Friday.

“As fiscal uncertainty remains over the continuing resolution and possible sequestration, ICE has reviewed its detained population to ensure detention levels stay within ICE’s current budget,” the agency’s spokeswoman, Gillian M. Christensen, said in a statement. The agency’s budget for custody operations in the current fiscal year is $2.05 billion, officials said, and as of Saturday, ICE was holding 30,773 people in its detention system.

Immigration officials said Tuesday that they had no plans to release substantially more detainees this week, though they warned that more releases were still possible depending on the outcome of budget negotiations.

They refused to specify exactly how many detainees were released, or where the releases took place. But immigrants’ advocates around the country have reported that detainees were freed in several places, including Hudson County, N.J.; Polk County, Tex.; Broward County, Fla.; New Orleans; and from centers in Alabama, Arizona, Georgia and New York.

While immigration officials occasionally free detainees on supervised release, immigration advocates said that the surge of recent releases — so many in such a short span of time — was extraordinary.

Under supervised release, defendants in immigration cases have to adhere to a strict reporting schedule that might include attending appointments at a regional immigration office as well as wearing electronic monitoring bracelets, officials said.

Advocacy groups, citing the cost of detaining immigrants, have for years argued that the federal government should make greater use of less expensive alternatives to detention for low-risk defendants being held on administrative charges.

One such group, the National Immigration Forum, estimated last year that it cost from $122 to $164 a day to hold a detainee in the federal immigration system. In contrast, the organization said, alternative forms of detention could cost from 30 cents to $14 a day per immigrant.

Among those released in the past week was Anthony Orlando Williams, 52, a Jamaican immigrant who spent nearly three years in a detention center in Georgia. “I’m good, man,” he said. “I’m free.”

Mr. Williams, in a telephone interview from Stone Mountain, Ga., said he became an illegal immigrant when he overstayed a visa in 1991. He was detained in 2010 by a sheriff’s deputy in Gwinnett County, Ga., when it was discovered that he had violated probation for a conviction in 2005 of simple assault, simple battery and child abuse, charges that sprung from a domestic dispute with his wife at the time. He was transferred to ICE custody and has been fighting a deportation order with the help of Families for Freedom, an immigrant support group in New York.

Jonathan Weisman contributed reporting

Immigration Reform will pass....

Article written by : Noam N. Levey from the La Times 

February 3, 2013, 10:06 a.m.

WASHINGTON – Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said Sunday he is optimistic the Senate will pass immigration legislation, suggesting Republicans will have no choice but to join the push for a sweeping overhaul.

“Things are looking really good,” the Nevada Democrat said in an interview on ABC News’ “This Week.” “Republicans can no longer stop this. They’ve tried it; it hasn’t worked.”

A bipartisan group of senators – four Democrats and four Republicans – last week unveiled a blueprint for comprehensive legislation that would tighten border security and set up a path for illegal immigrants to get citizenship.

U.S. immigration law: Decades of debate

And several leading GOP lawmakers have noted that the party, which lost heavily among Latino voters in the 2012 presidential election, must take action on the immigration issue.

But many conservatives, particularly in the House, remain leery of allowing the estimated 11 million immigrants who entered the country illegally to become citizens.

Other issues important to Democrats – such as giving the foreign partners of gay and lesbian Americans a family preference in the immigration system – also remain major partisan stumbling blocks.

Reid brushed that issue aside. “If they’re looking for an excuse not to support this legislation, this is another one, but the American people are past excuses. They want this legislation passed,” he said.

The Senate leader also was bullish on prospects for passing new gun control legislation, another one of President Obama’s top priorities for his second term.

But the veteran lawmaker – who has won the backing in the past from the National Rifle Assn. – would not commit to a key goal of gun control advocates: limits on the size of high-capacity ammunition magazines.

Reid would only say: “I think that's something we definitely have to take a look at.”

Looking ahead to the next round of budget negotiations, the majority leader continued to insist that any more efforts to reduce federal deficits must include new tax revenue.

Republicans, by contrast, are insisting on only spending cuts.

“The American people are on our side,” Reid said. “The American people don’t believe in these austere things. We believe that the rich should contribute. We believe we should fill those tax loopholes, get rid of them, I should say. And that’s where we need to go.”

noam.levey@latimes.com

Twitter: @noamlevey