Deportation Action Plans

I recently heard a story on NPR concerning "deportation wills." When someone is deported, he may have substantial assets that need to be disposed of appropriately. For example, someone may own a house, a car, a business, some real estate. He may have children. A deportation action plan is a combination of legal instruments designed to protect a deported person's assets and children. It could involve setting up trusts for property, guardianships for children, powers of attorney, contracts to protect business interests, and probably much more. This seems to be a very new area and there is not much information on it. If anyone has any thoughts about this topic, they would be very much appreciated.

Secure Communities

A controversial program recently started by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is called Secure Communities, or S-Comm. This program sends all fingerprints taken by local law enforcement to ICE. The result is that every person taken into custody, no matter if the charges are dropped, will have his/her immigration status revealed to ICE.

There is actually a way for counties to opt out of this program and several have chosen this path including San Francisco, Santa Clara, and Arlington, VA. Why have they opted out? Many seem to think this program is wonderful and will help to discover undocumented people. However, civil rights groups think that S-Comm is horrible.

For those that subscribe to the view that undocumented individuals are breaking the law, I can see how S-Comm would seem attractive. For those who feel that undocumented people are discriminated against and not given the rights they deserve, I can see how S-Comm would seem such an terrible thing.

However, there are practical concerns as to why a county would not want to use S-Comm that should be considered no matter your philosophy on undocumented people. Very large percentages of some cities are made up of undocumented people. If you were undocumented and knew about S-Comm, how willing would you be to assist law enforcement, even if you were completely innocent and in a position to assist? I personally would be very scared that I could somehow be placed in removal proceedings from my encounter with the police. With S-Comm, local police become pseudo-ICE agents, seeking out undocumented people. How can we inspire trust in immigrant communities when all peace officers working among us are also agents for ICE (in some sense).

I personally think opting out is wise for counties that have large immigrant communities, if for no better reason than public safety and trust of peace officers.

Immigration status of children of Russian spies

My mom sent me a text earlier pointing out this issue. I also wrote to my immigration professor about it. The children that were born in the US are citizens. The only way to be born in the US and not be a citizen is to not be subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. The only people that fall into this category, as far as I know, are the children of diplomats. The spies were not diplomats by any means.
Interestingly, immigration laws were used to officially deport the spies even though it was really just a political spy-swap. After the spies plead guilty, the judge removed all the other charges and found them in violation of immigration laws. The spies chose voluntary departure.

Here's an article about the children of the spies. Some of the older ones are staying here, it seems.
href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/09/russian-spies-children-face-trauma">

Here's the article where I got my info on the deportation of the spies. It's in Russian.
href="http://korrespondent.net/world/1096150">

The myth of anchor babies

I wanted to address this issue because it seems to get brought up a good deal. The idea of an anchor baby is that someone illegally enters the US, has a child, and that child then immigrates the parent. While this is technically possible, it's not what I would call a feasible plan to gain citizenship.

My immigration professor explained why the idea of an anchor baby is not a great pull for undocumented immigrants. Let's say that a 20-year-old pregnant woman comes to the US undocumented and has a child. First, she will need to wait until the child is 21 before he can initiate a visa petition in her behalf. So she won't be a citizen until she's 41. That doesn't seem so bad. But wait. She entered illegally. It's my understanding that the mother would need to leave the country to petition. She would then have a 10-year wait before she could petition for a green card because she entered the US illegally. Assuming she is from Mexico, she could have a many-year wait time after filing her petition before she reaches her priority date. It will likely be 40 years before she can receive a green card.

Considering the extemely attenuated benefit of an anchor baby, changing the US's time-honored law of citizenship by being born on American soil does not seem worth it.

The following article addresses this issue.

In 1848, the discovery of gold brought hordes of prospectors to California. In 1889, millions of acres of free land set off a rush of settlers into Oklahoma. Today, we are told, the chance to get U.S. citizenship for their unborn children is rapidly filling the country with illegal immigrants.

Critics see this as a malignant phenomenon that ought to be stopped. So Arizona State Sen. Russell Pearce, author of the new law directing police to check the immigration status of people they stop whom they suspect of being here illegally, has another idea: denying citizenship privileges to anyone born in his state to undocumented parents.

He plans to offer legislation refusing a birth certificate to any child unless a parent can prove legal residence, a clever attempt to nullify birthright citizenship. He says the change would eliminate "the greatest inducement for breaking our laws," since having an "anchor baby" yields all sorts of benefits.

A Rasmussen poll found a plurality of Americans favor repealing birthright citizenship. Kentucky Republican Senate nominee Rand Paul has endorsed legislation to that end, which has attracted 91 sponsors in the U.S. House of Representatives. Groups like the Federation for American Immigration Reform are all for it.

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But the idea fails on a couple of grounds. The first is constitutional. The policy originates with the 14th Amendment, ratified after the Civil War, which says, "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States."

Pearce and his allies say illegal immigrants can be excluded because they are not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. But that provision was included only to exempt children born to foreign diplomats.

The Supreme Court has left little room for argument. In 1898, it ruled that birth on American soil is "declared by the Constitution to constitute a sufficient and complete right to citizenship."

In 1982, it concluded that illegal immigrants are indeed "within the jurisdiction" of the state where they are present. To deny a U.S.-born child a birth certificate would almost certainly violate the right to the equal protection of the laws.

It would be bad for common-sense reasons as well. To start with, it would call into question the status of every new baby. A report by the Immigration Policy Center pointed out that "all American parents would, going forward, have to prove the citizenship of their children through a cumbersome bureaucratic process."

This obligation is not something "we" are going to impose on "them." It would be a burden on all new parents, including those whose ancestors debarked at Plymouth Rock.

Supporters of the change regard birthright citizenship as an irresistible magnet for foreigners to sneak in. But the effect is vastly exaggerated.

One study cited in Peter Brimelow's 1996 anti-immigration screed, "Alien Nation," found that 15 percent of new Hispanic mothers whose babies were born in Southern California hospitals said they came over the border to give birth, with 25 percent of that group saying they did so to gain citizenship for the child.

But this evidence actually contradicts the claim. It means that 96 percent of these women were not lured by the desire to have an "anchor baby."

That makes perfect sense. The value of a citizen child is too remote to compete with the other attractions that draw people to come illegally — such as jobs and opportunity unavailable in their native countries.

True, an undocumented adult can be sponsored for a resident visa by a citizen child — but not till the kid reaches age 21. To imagine that Mexicans are risking their lives crossing the border in 2010 to gain legal status in 2031 assumes they put an excessive weight on the distant future.

Nor are the other alleged freebies very enticing. Some of the main benefits available to undocumented foreigners, such as emergency room care and public education for children, don't require them to have a U.S. citizen child. Illegal immigrant parents are ineligible for welfare, Medicaid, food stamps and the like. They can be deported.

Barring citizenship to their newborn babies wouldn't make these families pack up and go home. It would just put the kids into a legal jeopardy that impedes their assimilation into American society — without appreciably diminishing the number of people going over, under, around or through the border fence.

Punishing innocents without accomplishing anything useful? The opponents of birthright citizenship need an anchor in reality

href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/ct-oped-0627-chapman-20100627,0,5132447.column">

The Department of Labor decides to enforce wage requirements no matter your immigration status

My friend Deirdre pointed this new policy out to me earlier today. The Department of Labor will now enforce labor laws including wage laws for any worker in the US. That means that a worker, whether or not he's undocumented, will have recourse if treated unfairly by his employer.

News Release

WHD News Release: [04/01/2010]
Contact Name: Dolline Hatchett
Phone Number: (202) 251-7929 cell or 202-693-4651 office
Release Number: 10-0411-NAT

US Labor Secretary sends message to America’s under-paid and under-protected:‘We Can Help!’
Solis announces national campaign and commits to bringing justice to nation’s working poor

CHICAGO — Secretary of Labor Hilda L. Solis today used the historic setting of Chicago’s famed Jane Addams Hull-House Museum, on the Chicago campus of the University of Illinois, to unveil the U.S. Department of Labor’s "We Can Help" campaign. Solis committed to helping the nation’s low-wage and vulnerable workers, and reminded them that her agency’s personnel will not waver in protecting the rights guaranteed by law to every worker in America.

"I'm here to tell you that your president, your secretary of labor and this department will not allow anyone to be denied his or her rightful pay — especially when so many in our nation are working long, hard and often dangerous hours," Secretary Solis told an energized crowd of workers, community advocates and leaders. "We can help, and we will help. If you work in this country, you are protected by our laws. And you can count on the U.S. Department of Labor to see to it that those protections work for you."

Today's event marked the beginning of the "We Can Help" nationwide campaign. The effort, which is being spearheaded by the department's Wage and Hour Division, will help connect America's most vulnerable and low-wage workers with the broad array of services offered by the Department of Labor. The campaign will place a special focus on reaching employees in such industries as construction, janitorial work, hotel/motel services, food services and home health care. It also will address such topics as rights in the workplace and how to file a complaint with the Wage and Hour Division to recover wages owed.

Through the use of Spanish/English bilingual public service announcements — featuring activist Dolores Huerta and actors Jimmy Smits and Esai Morales, the launch of a new Web site at http://www.dol.gov/wecanhelp and a toll-free hotline, 866-4US-WAGE (487-9243), the department is renewing its emphasis on reaching and assisting workers who often find themselves denied the pay legally guaranteed to them by law. The campaign also underscores that wage and hour laws apply to all workers in the United States, regardless of immigration status.

"The nation's laws are for the protection of everyone who works in this country," said Secretary Solis, speaking from the site where President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Labor Secretary Frances Perkins once worked. "It is appropriate and correct that vulnerable workers receive what the law promises, and that no employer gain a marketplace advantage by using threats or coercion to cheat workers from their rightful wages. I have added more than 250 new field investigators nationwide — an increase of a third — to help in this effort. If you are a worker in America, on this day, we promise you a new beginning and a new partnership to ensure you receive the wages you deserve."

Chicago's Hull-House opened in 1889 when Jane Addams, the first American woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize, rented the site to institute and maintain educational and philanthropic enterprises to improve conditions in the industrial districts of Chicago. By its second year of existence, Hull-House was host to 2,000 people every week and today remains a central force in reaching out to Chicago's poor.

http://www.dol.gov/opa/media/press/whd/WHD20100411.htm

Today's US Supreme Court decision

For committing many crimes, a person legally in the US but not a citizen can be deported. There is a discretionary waiver available as long as the person has not committed an "aggravated felony." What constitutes an aggravated felony can be a nuanced discussion. The Supreme Court set some new law today concerning this topic.
The defendant in this case was charged with two different misdemeanor counts of simple possession. When someone has two simple possession charges, the prosecutor has discretion to charge him as a "recidivist," meaning he has relapsed into previous illegal behavior. Being charged in this way would constitute an aggravated felony for purposes of immigration law.
The defendant in this case was not charged as a recidivist. He simply received two separate convictions for simple possession. So in reality, he is not an aggravated felon. The lower courts used a theoretical approach, though. The idea is that if the defendant could have been an aggravated felon, he is not eligible for any waiver.
The Supreme Court decided today that a defendant must actually be an aggravated felon to be barred from the waiver. In this case, the defendant only had two misdemeanors and was not given the opportunity to defend against a felony.
Thanks to the Supreme Court for clearing up this point of law - I'm sure it will be very helpful.

http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/09pdf/09-60.pdf

New Secure Communities Program

I first heard about this program in the article posted below. It's an interesting concept. It looks like police departments are being asked to participate in a voluntary program to fingerprint every arrested person in order for those fingerprints to be cross-referenced with the ICE database. Immigration advocates are of course outraged and the intermingling of federal immigration duties and those of local law enforcement. This intermingling of federal and local enformcement is becoming quite the hot topic.

Oppose Secure Communities Program
In the wake of Arizona's misguided SB1070, the California Department of Justice has called on San Francisco to participate in a new collaboration between local police and Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE), known as "Secure Communities" beginning on June 8, 2010. This new police/ICE collaboration program will automatically investigate the immigration status of anyone, citizen or non‐citizen, who is arrested and fingerprinted for any crime, no matter the severity, by electronically crosschecking their fingerprints against an ICE database.

The new, voluntary "Secure Communities" program is extremely worrisome for the community. Like SB 1070, "Secure Communities" compromises public safety by eroding the hard‐earned trust built over the past decades between community members and local law enforcement. "S-Comm" also promotes racial profiling because the police can use pre‐textual arrests such as a minor traffic violation to investigate the immigration status of individuals they encounter.

CAA opposes the implementation of "Secure Communities." Both S-Comm and Arizona's disastrous SB1070 are outgrowths of a disturbing trend of police-ICE entanglements. These misguided efforts to put immigration enforcement into local hands are sabotaging trust between immigrant communities and local law enforcement. Like SB1070, S-Comm gives dangerous discretion to individual police officers to falsely arrest or overcharge innocent immigrant residents based on their appearance and thereby cause their deportation.

On June 1, the day that S-Comm was originally planned to go into effect, CAA joined Latino, Labor, and fellow Asian American allies of the San Francisco Immigrant Rights Defense Committee to launch a picket outside ICE's San Francisco office. San Francisco Sheriff Michael Hennessey has also requested to opt-out of S-Comm, but Attorney General Jerry Brown has denied his request. Meanwhile, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors approved a non-binding resolution on June 8 calling for local law enforcement to opt-out of S-Comm, and community and legal advocates continue to explore other options.

As one community, we need to stop this disturbing trend of police-ICE cooperation and ensure that community members are not targeted based on their perceived immigration status. Please take a look at the list of actions you can take and work with us to act now.

http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/immigration/