Every two years, Congress huffs and puffs about immigration reform. Every two years, it does nothing. Although everybody acknowledges that the U.S. immigration system is broken, the last major immigration legislation was passed in 1996. That legislation was more about deportation and punishment than reform.

Piecemeal proposals now before Congress now echo failures of the past, like the foolish and punitive Davis-Oliver Act, HR2431, which failed to pass in 2013 and 2015. The Trump budget proposes withholding funding for jurisdictions that do not help enforce immigration laws. Aimed at “sanctuary cities,” the provision would codify an anti-sanctuary executive order that has already been halted by the courts. The budget also calls for funding more immigration officers, more border patrol officers, and more jail cells for immigrants. Like all presidential budgets, this one is a wish list, with not much likely to pass as proposed.

Competing interests want different fixes to various temporary worker programs, such as scaling back the H-1B visa program for highly skilled technical workers, protecting undocumented farm workers with a “blue card,” protecting veterans from deportation, and doing something to change the investor visa.

Some of these bills might pass. Most will not. None of them offers anything like the comprehensive immigration reform that is needed to fix this broken system.

The biggest changes in immigration come not from Congress, but from the Trump administration’s push to arrest and deport as many people as possible, regardless of family ties, length of residence in the United States, good character, or humanitarian considerations. The new policy is to “take the shackles off” ICE and Border Patrol agents, removing any limits on who is targeted for immediate deportation. Early on, the New York Times reported:

“But for those with ICE badges, perhaps the biggest change was the erasing of the Obama administration’s hierarchy of priorities, which forced agents to concentrate on deporting gang members and other violent and serious criminals, and mostly leave everyone else alone….

“Two officials in Washington said that the shift — and the new enthusiasm that has come with it — seems to have encouraged pro-Trump political comments and banter that struck the officials as brazen or gung-ho, like remarks about their jobs becoming ‘fun.’ Those who take less of a hard line on unauthorized immigrants feel silenced, the officials said.”

This change of direction seems larger than anything Congress is likely to do.

 

 

Minnesota REAL ID was one of the first orders of business that the state legislature worked on this session and one of the last bills signed into law. The federal REAL ID act, signed by President Bush in 2005, requires proof of U.S. citizenship for a ‘compliant’ license that can be used as identification to enter some federal buildings and board flights. Thirteen states also provide for a second kind of license, ‘non-compliant’ licenses that are available to all residents regardless of citizenship status.

Minnesota is one of the last states to bring its own licenses into compliance. ILCM and advocates knew that the issue that stalled the bill in 2016, licenses for the undocumented, would once again be in play this year. This year’s fight over adopting REAL ID included a protracted debate around granting driver’s licenses to undocumented immigrants.

The key issue of disagreement between the House and the Senate versions of the REAL ID bill was the immigration issue. The House bill required proof of legal status for receiving any Minnesota driver’s license, while the Senate version effectively did the same by preventing the Department of Public Safety from changing its rules on requirements for a license.  This anti-rulemaking provision sought to move the current prohibition on driver’s licenses from administrative rules into a harder-to-change statute.

The House approved their version 72 to 58, mostly along party lines. The Senate, however, failed to pass their bill, with the restrictive language, by a 29-32 vote. The Senate brought back the bill without the anti-immigrant language and it passed with broad bipartisan support.

A conference committee was called to work out the difference and after several meetings, it eventually passed a clean REAL ID bill that did not restrict rulemaking on licenses for immigrants. The governor signed that bill.

Unfortunately, the fight wasn’t over: it had simply moved elsewhere. At what seemed like the last minute of the legislative session, language restricting driver’s licenses for immigrants was inserted into the public safety omnibus funding bill. The regular session ended without agreement on most spending bills and the anti-immigrant language was now included in the global debate about public safety, judiciary funding and the possibility of a government shutdown. Ultimately, as part of an agreement to avoid a government shutdown, the anti-rulemaking, anti-immigrant language became part of the global budget negotiations and was signed into law by the governor.

That may not be the end of the story. Immigrant leaders and community members ultimately spent the final week of the session protesting the bill and sought a veto from the Governor, all to no avail. While Governor Dayton signed the omnibus funding bills, he line-item vetoed funding for the House and Senate, essentially forcing legislators to come back for further negotiations if they want to continue to be paid. One of his explicit demands is a removal of the anti-immigrant language from the Omnibus Public Safety bill. After meeting with leaders from the community and ILCM’s executive director, Dayton also promised to  continue to meet with immigrant community leaders and committed his Administration to doing everything it can to protect immigrants over the remainder of his term.

Throughout this entire process, your phone calls and messages to legislators urging support of immigrants and their families made a real difference. One legislator told me they’d received 15 calls about REAL ID in just one morning! More than 300 calls were made via Action Alerts from ILCM, and probably at least as many more by people who made calls but did not report them on the page.

While we are obviously disappointed with the final outcome, we are hopeful that some new opportunities arose to help build a more welcoming state and to build on-going support to restore driver’s licenses for all in the near future. ILCM and the immigrant community thank each of you for your efforts and support. The fight to make Minnesota a welcoming state for all people is going strong and we are in it together. If you aren’t already receiving our Action Alerts, sign up here and follow us on Facebook.

by Nick Rea, Advocacy & Policy Intern

On Mother’s Day, Ricardo Levins Morales filmed an MTC officer asking Ariel Vences-Lopez about his immigration status. That’s not supposed to happen, but it did. Later, Vences-Lopez was arrested and tasered, then held in custody by the Hennepin County Sheriff, then turned over to immigration officials. As of June 12, when this article was written, an emergency stay of removal had been granted while the immigration court considers motions submitted by his attorneys. Vences-Lopez is represented by Danielle Robinson Briand in the immigration proceeding and another attorney is representing him in the Hennepin County court proceedings.

MTC has said the officer had no business asking about immigration status, that this is not their policy or practice.

“This afternoon, community members and partners alerted me to a situation in which one of my part time officers was witnessed asking an individual whether he was in the state illegally. I immediately called for an Internal Affairs investigation to gather the details about this incident and to report back to me as quickly as possible.

“It is not the practice of the Metro Transit police to inquire about the immigration status of our riders. …”

The officer who questioned Vences-Lopez resigned from the MTC, where he worked part-time, but is still employed as a full-time police officer in New Hope.

The MTC officer asking about legal status was only the first violation of policy and practice – Vences-Lopez was held in secret, his name was “redacted” from the MTC arrest report, and inquiries about the case were stalled, evaded, or just not answered. According to the Pioneer Press, which followed the story closely, officials said that the report contained all the information that would be released. When the newspaper pressed MTC to identify the specific provision of the state Data Privacy Act that authorized hiding the name of the person arrested, they conferred with attorneys and then finally released his name.

A carefully documented blog post by Tony Webster, who identifies himself as a “web engineer, public records researcher, and policy nerd,” raises important questions, including:

“Surely the Chief knew his officer had tasered the young man and booked him into jail, so why did the public find out for the first time on May 24 that he went to jail, and on May 25 that he was tasered?

“Was the arrest record suppressed from public view, or was it just a coincidence of timing? Is there a policy on when arrests are suppressed from the jail roster and the reasons why an arrest can be manually suppressed?”

Webster included links to the official statements from the MTC and Hennepin County Sheriff in his blog post on May 27, observing:

 “Neither statement addresses the full gamut of questions, nor details the timeline in how Metro Transit addressed the controversy. The statements said Metro Transit found out the man was in ICE custody because a Pioneer Press reporter told them so, late Friday night. Chair Duininck said prior to learning of the deportation order, the agency was working on possibly placing the Metro rider in a diversion program or having charges dropped.

“Both statements seemed to imply Metro Transit was given false information, perhaps by officials at the Hennepin County jail. Chief Harrington stated, “we understood that Vences-Lopez had been released from the custody of the Hennepin County Sheriff’s Office,” and Chair Duininck said, “At the time we were told the rider had been released from custody, he had actually been in ICE custody for nearly a week.” The statements promised to look into why the agency was allegedly given inaccurate information, and promised to uncover “what went wrong.”

 

Read the rest of the story here: MTC and immigration video: The rest of the story

Ricardo Levins-Morales was returning home on May 14, exhausted from a long trip and eager to get home. On the Blue Line train from the airport, he saw an MTC officer interrogating a fellow passenger. He recalls thinking that “maybe this wasn’t going to be routine,” aware of “how quickly and easily police interactions can escalate.” So he fumbled in his backpack for his phone, turned it on and started filming.

Levins-Morales called out the officer on his questions about immigration status. The officer seemed to back down as a result of his question. Then the train arrived at 38th Street, and everyone had to get off and take a bus, because of weekend work on the line. In the confusion, Levins-Morales lost sight of the young man. He saw one on the two transit officers, now by himself, and “made the mistake of assuming that the young man had gotten free.”

Later in the week, he posted the video, which has gone viral, with millions of views around the world. That led to an investigation by the Pioneer Press, revealing that the Ariel Vences-Lopez had not gotten free, but had been tasered, arrested, and turned over to ICE to be deported.

Though the video did not get Vences-Lopez free, it had far-reaching impact.

“I’ve gotten people responding to me on Facebook, saying, ‘Now I know what to do in a situation like that,” Levins-Morales says. “It’s important that the impulse be to intervene to try to shift the balance of power at the moment, but there’s no template for what’s right in any given moment.

“When I spoke up, the cop first looked at my face and then glanced down and saw the phone — I’m sure that made a difference in his response. So if my phone wasn’t working or had bene out of charge, even that would have helped to give a little more leverage in the moment to try to interrupt what was going on.

“It’s not the tools that are important — it’s the understanding that you need to quickly reach for an appropriate tool, and that might change, depending on circumstances.”

The video also led to action from the Met Council and MTC. As an internal investigation began, the police officer resigned his MTC job. MTC police chief John Harrington strongly reiterated MTC policy against any questions about immigration status.

 

For more of the story, read Cell phone video caught MTC officer asking immigration status – the rest of the story still unfolding

 

The Ninth Circuit ruling gave an additional rationale for finding the travel ban illegitimate: it violates the Immigration and Nationality Act prohibition against discrimination on the basis of nationality, which meant Trump “exceeded the scope of the authority delegated to him by Congress.”

The unanimous ruling also allows the Trump administration to proceed with internal studies of security measures — which gives the Supreme Court even less reason to expedite its own consideration of the case, or to stay the 4th and 9th Circuit rulings.

“But history may record this term as a blockbuster in one area that has become eerily relevant to America in 2017: how much due process is owed to immigrants, undocumented aliens, aliens outside the United States—and even naturalized citizens. In this area, no fewer than eight cases remain to be announced. The Court granted review in most of them before the election, when they seemed legally important but not overwhelmingly so. But in the surreal post-election era of Donald Trump—the era of the deportation force, mass immigrant roundups, expanding detention of allegedly unlawful immigrants, and hypertrophy of the Department of Homeland Security’s already overgrown enforcement apparatus–they may, together, become literal matters of life and death.  “

Advocates including the Immigrant Law Center of Minnesota (ILCM) are fighting back against the Department of Justice (DOJ) attempt to limit immigrant access to non-profit legal assistance. In April, the DOJ sent a warning letter to the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project (NWIRP) in Seattle, telling the organization to “cease and desist” from assisting immigrants in deportation proceedings unless NWIRP has entered a formal notice of representation with the immigration court.

A brief in support of NWIRP (called an “amicus brief”) was submitted by more than a dozen legal assistance organizations, including ILCM. The amicus brief describes why immigrants need advice and assistance even if lawyers cannot commit to full representation:

“A day in any immigration court in America would be an enlightening experience for most U.S. citizens, including for much of the bar. Respondent after respondent pleads for a continuance to find a lawyer. Shackled detainees ask anyone in a suit for a card. Detainees who have run out of continuances stare blankly at an overworked judge who asks the most basic questions, or they ask for help understanding a form, or they unknowingly provide incomplete responses that seal their fate.”

Immigration courts have no public defenders. Immigrants in deportation proceedings have lawyers only if they can afford them. Non-profit organizations offer some help, but they do not have enough capacity to represent everyone. Even if immigrants have money, they often cannot find a qualified immigration attorney, especially in detention centers that are far from major cities.

In its cease and desist letter to NWIRP, DOJ objected to a situation in which an attorney from NWIRP helped with a motion to reopen drafted on behalf of a woman and her two children. NWIRP did not have an attorney available to take the case for representation, which would take hundreds of hours, and so the attorney instead offered advice and limited help in drafting the motion. The attorney noted this assistance on the court documents. And the woman desperately needed help: she spoke Mam (a Mayan language), waited for months for a credible-fear interview that never happened, and then missed her hearing because of a mistranslation of her hearing notice.

Because full representation on an immigration case is enormously time-consuming, NWIRP, ILCM, and other non-profit legal organizations often provide advice and education, multiplying their effectiveness and assisting many more people than can be helped through representation alone. As noted in the amicus brief,

“Some amici organize workshops to teach general immigration concepts to immigrants or attorneys; some help answer questions on forms such as the I-589 asylum application; some provide templates for petitions, motions, and briefs; and some help draft documents that a pro se litigant will file in immigration court.”

While this assistance is not as helpful as full representation, the amicus brief noted that “the ideal that all persons in immigration proceedings have full-scope legal representation is a far cry from reality.”

These strategies for delivering help to as many immigrants as possible are exactly what the Trump DOJ’s cease-and-desist letter threaten. The interpretation that DOJ sets forth in its letter could prevent tens of thousands of immigrants from getting individualized legal advice and assistance.

Immigration court judges know that this assistance is valuable. The amicus brief quoted former Immigration Judge Eliza Klein:

“Without the assistance of these non-profit organizations, there is a real danger that people with valid asylum claims will not seek relief or may not present their claim in such a way that the judge will understand the validity of the claim. Even when they are able to present their case, if they have had no prior assistance in filling out forms, writing statements and obtaining supporting evidence, the amount of time the court must dedicate to the case (both in questioning the Respondent about unexplored avenues of relevant information and in continuing a case to obtain evidence) is greatly increased. In essence, by preventing these organizations from assisting asylum seekers in preparing their applications, EOIR would deprive asylum applicants of the “full and fair hearing” to which they are entitled.”

Federal District Court Judge Richard Jones (Seattle) found that NWIRP “is likely to succeed on the claims that entitle it to relief,” and that granting a temporary restraining order “is in the public interest.” He issued a nationwide temporary restraining order against the Department of Justice on May 17, ordering that the DOJ not attempt to enforce the cease-and-desist letter against NWIRP, or against any non-profit organizations that provide legal services, while the court considers NWIRP’s request for a preliminary injunction.

 

For more information, see:

• The Airport Lawyers Who Stood Up to Trump Are Under Attack (The Nation,5/19/17)
• Seattle Judge Rules Justice Department Can’t Limit Legal Assistance to Immigrants (YES! Magazine, 5/18/17)
• Federal Judge Blocks Restriction on Immigrant Legal Help (Honolulu Star Advertiser, 5/17/17)
• Mtn. for Leave to File Amicus (Ex. A – Proposed Amicus Brief w Exhibits)…
• NWIRP Cease and Desist 4-5-17
• 2017-05-17 Order Granting TRO
• NWIRP challenges order from Department o fJustice to cease and desist providing legal assistance to unrepresented individuals in deportation proceedings (NWIRP)

Minneapolis artist Ricardo Levins Morales filmed a Metro Transit officer interrogating someone on a Blue Line train – asking him “Are you here legally?” Immigration enforcement is not an assignment for Metro Transit officers, and Levins Morales challenged him. After the video was posted to Facebook, Metro Transit police chief John Harrington said he “called for an Internal Affairs investigation to gather the details about this incident and to report back to me as quickly as possible.”

You’ve heard it many times, maybe even said it – why don’t they just get in line? Minnesota has an estimated 90,000 – 100,000 undocumented immigrants, many of them living here for five, ten, twenty years, raising families, working, paying taxes – why don’t they just get in line? The answer is pretty simple: for most people, there is no line.

Immigrants make up 13.5 percent of the national population but only 8.3 percent of Minnesota’s population in 2015. The “Getting to know new Minnesotans” series explores some of Minnesota’s immigration picture. Click to read Part One: How many immigrants? and Part Two: Where do they come from?

Immigration to the United States is severely restricted. If you want a permanent resident visa, you need to have special qualifications. Since 1920, a quota system has restricted the numbers of immigrants by category and by country. That quota system has changed in various ways – mostly becoming more complicated – over the years, but most immigration today is still based on quotas and special statuses.

One exception to quotas: Spouses and unmarried minor children of U.S. citizens, and parents of adult U.S. citizens can generally immigrate “quickly.” With processing delays, “quickly” usually means a year or more.

Not all spouses, parents and children of U.S. citizens can get these visas. If a spouse or parent or child has previously entered the United States without authorization, they still might be barred from getting a visa, sometimes for three years, sometimes for 10 years, sometimes longer.

Except for these immediate relatives of U.S. citizens, an immigrant needs special qualifications to be allowed even to apply for a visa – to “get in line” for the limited number of visas available each year.

• Family preference –An adult child or a brother or sister of a U.S. citizen or as a spouse, a minor child, or an unmarried adult child of a legal permanent resident can apply. If you qualify for a family preference visa, you can get in line. The lines stretch out for years and sometimes for decades.
• Refugee or asylum – People can apply if they can prove they are in danger of persecution because of race, religion, political opinion, nationality, or membership in a social group. The vetting process for a refugee application takes years. And, again, the United States strictly limits the number of people who can enter as refugees.
• Employment – A highly skilled or exceptional individual (think Einstein or a major league baseball star) who is sponsored by an employer can apply for one of a very limited number of visas;
• Investment – Somebody with half a million dollars or more to invest in the United States can apply for a permanent resident visa. Someone like the investors meeting with Jared Kushner’s sister in Beijing, for example.
• The lottery – USCIS describes it: “The Diversity Immigrant Visa Program (DV Program) makes up to 50,000 immigrant visas available annually, drawn from random selection among all entries to individuals who are from countries with low rates of immigration to the United States.” That last phrase is important: countries with low rates of immigration to the United States means no one from these countries is eligible to even enter the lottery: Bangladesh, Brazil, Canada, China (mainland-born), Colombia, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Haiti, India, Jamaica, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, Peru, Philippines, South Korea, United Kingdom (except Northern Ireland) and its dependent territories, and Vietnam.

Twenty-four years ago, Juana left an abusive relationship, taking her twelve-year-old son and her ten- and eight-year-old daughters with her. Together they walked for six hours across the desert, leaving Mexico for the promise of a safer life in the United States.

The family was captured by the border patrol. Juana and her children ended up back in Tijuana—and in jail. Her son was jailed with the men, separated from his mother and sisters for long, fearful hours, until they were all released. Once again, they headed back to the border, this time making it across.

They came to Minnesota, a place Juana called “more beautiful than the movies.”  Juana and her children lived here for 14 years. She worked hard and paid taxes, raised her children, and saw their children born as U.S. citizens. Then, ten years ago, Juana was arrested and deported again.

Juana never had a chance to stand in line. There was no line for her – not in 1993, not in 2007, not today.Our immigration system is broken. Comprehensive immigration reform is needed, but comprehensive immigration reform has been blocked for years.

 

The Intercept summarizes the “little noticed bills, marked up in the House Judiciary Committee Thursday” that would “bring sweeping changes to the nation’s immigration enforcement apparatus, adding thousands of new deportation officers and, among other things, equipping each of them with body armor and an assault rifle.”