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Mostrando entradas con la etiqueta Department of Homeland Security. Mostrar todas las entradas
Mostrando entradas con la etiqueta Department of Homeland Security. Mostrar todas las entradas

viernes, 28 de septiembre de 2018

This Citizenship Day Marred by Government’s Focus on Stripping People of Their Citizenship

Written by Emily Creighton

Each year on September 17, America marks Citizenship Day, an annual opportunity to reflect on the benefits and responsibilities of U.S. citizenship. In years past, it was used as a day to celebrate new Americans and encourage others who are eligible to become U.S. citizens. However, this year is different, as the security associated with becoming a U.S. citizen may be slipping away. 

A new focus on “denaturalization” by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) takes the agency’s mandate in a troubling direction. Instead of finding ways to preserve, they are devoting resources to stripping people of their citizenship. In June, USCIS Director Francis Cissna revealed the agency’s efforts to staff a new office in Los Angeles focused on evaluating whether individuals should have been naturalized in the first place. 

The targets of this focus on denaturalization are individuals such as Norma Borgoño, a U.S. citizen and grandmother originally from Peru. A denaturalization suit was filed against her alleging she should have revealed her role in a fraud scheme during her citizenship process—a scheme that benefitted her boss, not her—and where she cooperated with the FBI in making a case against her former boss. At the time she applied for naturalization, she had not been charged with any crime, yet the agency will attempt to use this as a way to strip her of her citizenship. 

The Trump administration’s decision to reinvigorate and coordinate denaturalization efforts also comes with a hefty price tag. 

In its proposed 2019 budget , the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) explains that $207 million will be used to fund hundreds of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents focused on “the prevention and detection of immigration benefit fraud and the investigative work necessary to adjudicate applications.” 

Initiatives include Operation Second Look —an attempt to review approximately 700,000 case files of naturalized individuals to find who may be ineligible for citizenship—and Operation Janus, an initiative that formally began in 2010 where USCIS refers cases to the Department of Justice (DOJ) to pursue denaturalization. 

Though a 2016 government inspection detailed some improper naturalizations as a result of incomplete fingerprint record keeping by USCIS (approximately 800 citizenship grants were reportedly made to individuals who were previously ordered deported), the number of individuals stripped of their citizenship has been very low. According to some reporting , only about 300 denaturalization cases were pursued between 1990 to 2017. 

More information is being sought about the administration’s denaturalization efforts through requests under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). 

One FOIA request asks for documents detailing organized efforts to review naturalized citizens’ files in order to identify misrepresentations in their naturalization applications. The request highlights “denaturalization complaints” filed in the Middle District of Florida, District of Connecticut, and District of New Jersey “against two men of Pakistani origin and one man of Indian origin.” After DOJ and ICE failed to respond to the request, Muslim Advocates filed a lawsuit in federal court in Washington D.C. 

Another request asks for information about the process of denaturalization review, the establishment of any new offices focused on denaturalization, and any new recommendations for denaturalization. 

There is a history of revoking citizenship in this country, but this administration’s hyper focus on immigration fraud gives good reason for concern that denaturalization initiatives will be overzealous and that minor mistakes in the citizenship application process may result in a person having to defend their citizenship in court. 

In addition, there is a great and demonstrated need for USCIS to address citizenship cases that are already pending. A recent report pointed out there has been a 35 percent increase in the backlog of citizenship applications from July 2017 to July 2018 and a 77 percent increase since July 2016. 

Given the extraordinarily small number of individuals against whom denaturalization cases are brought, there should be widespread agreement that the focus of USCIS resources should be on processing immigration benefits, not rooting out imaginary fraud.

 

Source: www.immigrationimpact.com  

http://www.inmigracionyvisas.com/a3908-Citizenship-Day-on-Stripping-People-of-Their-Citizenship.html

lunes, 13 de agosto de 2018

DHS To Restart Deportation Cases For Hundreds Of Thousands Of Immigrants

Written by Aaron Reichlin-Melnick

Recently released internal communications at Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) reveal a plan to restart the deportation cases of hundreds of thousands of people whose cases are currently administratively closed. This initiative has the potential to swell the immigration court backlog (currently at 730,000 cases) to over one million cases.

Administrative closure is a docket-management tool which allows immigration judges to temporarily take a case off of their docket. Immigration judges typically grant administrative closure to allow an immigrant to seek relief outside of immigration court or because ICE exercised prosecutorial discretion and decided not to move forward with a case. Once ICE or an immigrant in removal proceedings chooses to move forward with the case, they can ask the judge to “recalendar” the case by placing it back on the docket. .

When Attorney General Jeff Sessions overturned decades of precedent in May 2018 by stripping immigration judges and the Board of Immigration Appeals of their general authority to administratively close cases, he left ICE with the decision to recalendar over 355,000 cases currently administratively closed. The newly-released instructions to ICE prosecutors reveal that ICE intends to recalendar virtually all of those cases. .

ICE prosecutors are instructed to prioritize recalendaring cases where the immigrant is detained, followed by all cases where the immigrant has a criminal record. Next, the agency will prioritize cases where ICE’s most recent motion to recalendar was denied, followed by those that administratively closed over ICE’s objections. Finally, it directs local offices to recalendar the remaining cases through a “case-by-case determination … considering available resources and the existing backlog in the local docket.” .

This last instruction has the potential to seriously limit the effect of ICE’s new policy. Because the agency’s resources are already strained by prosecuting new cases brought under the Trump administration, local ICE offices may not have the resources to recalendar many of the cases included in that last group. However, by indicating that the agency views virtually all 355,000 cases as legitimate targets for future enforcement, any immigrant whose case is currently administratively closed now faces an uncertain future. .

If fully implemented, ICE’s new guidance would have a significant effect on the tens of thousands of people who had their cases administratively closed from 2012 to 2016. Most cases administratively closed had benefited from a favorable exercise of prosecutorial discretion after the Obama administration determined that they were not an enforcement priority. Now, with the elimination of immigration enforcement priorities under the current administration, ICE may haul them back to immigration court again. .

ICE’s plan shows that the agency is eager to seek deportation of all who cross their path, regardless of whether they should be a priority for immigration enforcement or whether the agency will overwhelm the immigration court system in the process. In fact, an independent report commissioned by the immigration courts in 2017 recommended that more cases be administratively closed as an effective tool to reduce the backlog. .

The administration must make smarter use of its limited resources to ensure that enforcement does not needlessly harm countless people who pose no risk to public safety.

 

Source: www. immigrationimpact.com  

http://www.inmigracionyvisas.com/a3871-DHS-To-Restart-Deportation-Cases-For-Of-Immigrants.html

martes, 7 de febrero de 2017

Nazis Once Published List of Jewish Crimes, Trump Now Pushing to Do the Same for Immigrant Crimes



The Trump administration has announced plans to publish a weekly list of crimes committed by unauthorized immigrants living in so-called sanctuary cities, where local officials and law enforcement are refusing to comply with federal immigration authorities’ efforts to speed up deportations. The plans for the weekly list, to be published by the Department of Homeland Security, were included in Trump’s executive orders signed last week. We speak to Andrea Pitzer. Her upcoming book is called "One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps." 

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form. 

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about what President Trump has said he’s going to do: keep a list of, quote, "immigrant crimes"?

ANDREA PITZER: Well, this weekly report that he has called for recalls a number of things from the past that we have seen before, which is this move to isolate and identify and then vilify a vulnerable minority community in order to move against it. When he—I just went back last night and reread his speech from when he declared his candidacy, and the Mexican rapist comment was in from the beginning, and so this has been a theme throughout. And we see back in Nazi Germany there was a paper called—a Nazi paper called Der Stürmer, and they had a department called "Letter Box," and readers were invited to send in stories of supposed Jewish crimes. And Der Stürmer would publish them, and they would include some pretty horrific graphic illustrations of these crimes, as well. And there was even a sort of a lite version of it, if you will, racism lite, in which the Neues Volk, which was more like a Look or a Life magazine, which normally highlighted beautiful Aryan families and their beautiful homes, would run a feature like "The Criminal Jew," and they would show photos of "Jewish-looking," as they called it, people who represented different kinds of crimes that one ought to watch out for from Jews. 

So this preoccupation with focusing in on one subset of the population’s crimes and then depicting that as somehow depraved and abnormal from the main population is something we’ve seen quite a bit in the past, even in the U.S. Before Japanese-American internment, you had newspapers like the San Francisco Chronicle running about the unassimilability of the Japanese immigrants and also the crime tendencies and depravities they had, which were distinguished from the main American population. 

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, of course, this flies in the face of all studies that have shown that the crime rate among immigrant populations in the United States is actually lower than it is among ordinary American citizens, but yet this is attempting to take isolated incidents or particular crimes and sort of raise them to the level of a general trend, isn’t it? 

ANDREA PITZER: It is. And I think it’s part of a disturbing narrative in which you strip out the broader context and the specificity of actions like this, and you try to weave them into this preset narrative of good and evil somehow, that really ends up being simple and dishonest and very counterproductive for the society as a whole. But yes, in general, these groups would want to keep a lower profile. They would want to stay off law enforcement’s radar. And so, this is one of the reasons that’s been suspected that it’s actually a lower crime rate. But if you get a few dramatic images—and don’t forget now, this won’t be coming out—you know, Breitbart has had this "black crimes" tag that they’ve used to try to do a similar thing in the past. And now we have Bannon in the White House. And it’s sort of a scaling-up and doing this with a different minority group, and you’ll have these, what will no doubt be, very dramatic narratives that will come forward that will eclipse the larger picture. And they’re going to have the imprimatur of a government report, which I think is another disturbing aspect. 

AMY GOODMAN: I wanted to ask you, Andrea Pitzer, about the White House considering a plan to make visitors reveal cellphone, internet data. Describe the role mass surveillance plays in authoritarian societies. 

ANDREA PITZER: Well, over time, we’ve seen that it’s very hard to have an authoritarian or a totalitarian society, a state that runs, without a secret police. And you can’t—what you need the secret police for is to gather information secretly. The surveillance techniques and abilities that we have today are really unparalleled in history. And while we can’t yet be sure what the Trump administration’s motives are, what they have at their disposal is far greater than what was had in Soviet Russia, in Nazi Germany. I’m thinking in particular of Himmler complaining that he had trouble keeping track of all the people he needed to, because he needed so many agents. But when you have the kind of technology that we do, you don’t need as many people, if you have the right tools to use. And so, the ability to gather that kind of information and then potentially use it, domestically or on foreigners who happen to be here, I think is something that’s worth paying attention to and to be concerned about. 

AMY GOODMAN: That’s Andrea Pitzer, journalist and author who writes about lost and forgotten history. Her upcoming book, One Long Night: A Global History of Concentration Camps. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. Stay with us. 

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http://inmigracionyvisas.com/a3531-Trump-against-immigrant-crimes.html
Source: https://www.democracynow.org