Special Report: Trump's catch-and-detain policy snares illegal immigrants long in U.S
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By Mica Rosenberg and Reade Levinson
OCILLA,
Georgia (Reuters) - Morena Vasquez didn’t want to drive that February
night last year, but a co-worker at her job cleaning offices near
Atlanta needed some keys dropped off.
“I knew it was my responsibility,” Vasquez said.
Driving
was always risky for the 38-year-old mother of six. An El Salvador
native, she had crossed illegally into the United States as a teenager,
and though she had lived in Georgia for 23 years, she was unable to get a
driver’s license under state law.
Within minutes of heading out, Vasquez saw police lights flashing in her rearview mirror.
She
panicked and sped up. Then she thought better of it. After all, two
previous traffic violations had resulted in only a ticket or a court
date. She pulled the car over and stopped.
And
with that, a 15-minute errand turned into a nightmarish entanglement in
the toughened-up immigration policies of U.S. President Donald Trump –
an experience that tore apart the life she had spent more than two
decades building for herself and her family.
Local
police arrested Vasquez and quickly handed her over to U.S. Immigration
and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials, who packed her off to the
agency’s detention center in Ocilla, Georgia, at the other end of the
state. There, ICE officers decided against releasing her on bond. She
would have to stay behind bars while awaiting the outcome of the
deportation proceedings brought against her.
For
the next year, Vasquez languished in the crowded detention center. She
repeatedly asked an immigration judge for bond so she could await her
day in court back with her family. And repeatedly, bond was denied as
ICE argued that she was a flight risk. Even after a judge ruled that she
had the right to stay legally and permanently in the United States, she
was kept locked up for five more months as ICE fought the decision.
She
lost her two jobs – teaching Spanish at a preschool, as well as the
office-cleaning gig. She lost the five-bedroom house she rented. Her six
children, ages 4 to 17 at the time of her arrest and all of them U.S.
citizens, had to relocate in the middle of the school year to live near
their ailing grandfather in another town, far from the detention center.
In
one of the letters Vasquez’s children sent to the immigration court
during their mother’s incarceration, 9-year-old Kevyn pleaded: “Pless.
Pless. (Please. Please.) I want my mom to take care of me and my little
brother. I don’t want my mom to go to Salvador.”
“ANIMALS” AND PEOPLE
President
Trump has often pointed to Central American gang members and other
criminal “animals” as the main targets of his strengthened
immigration-law enforcement. But as his administration has expanded its
dragnet under a series of executive orders, ICE has locked up thousands
of people like Vasquez – people with little or no criminal history, with
deep roots in their communities, who present little flight risk.
In
earlier years, ICE would have released many of these people on bond
soon after their arrest, allowing them to live with their families while
awaiting legal proceedings that can take years. Now, ICE is denying
bond for many of those people and pushing to keep them in detention for
the duration of their cases, Reuters found, based on an analysis of
government data and dozens of interviews with immigration judges,
lawyers and current and former officials.
“There
has been a noticeable change since the administration took over of
greater reluctance, if not outright unwillingness, by ICE to entertain
or grant bond,” said Greg Chen, director of government relations at the
American Immigration Lawyers Association.
ICE
officials did not respond directly to that assertion, and the agency
declined to provide complete data on the number of bonds it has issued.
ICE spokesman Matthew Bourke said that decisions are made on “a
case-by-case basis, taking into account factors like immigration
history, criminal history and community ties.”
While
ICE bond numbers are not available, data from the Executive Office for
Immigration Review (EOIR), which oversees the nation’s immigration
courts, provide evidence that immigration officials are increasingly
denying bond in the Trump era.
The
number of detained immigrants requesting bond hearings in immigration
court – their only option if ICE denies them bond when they are arrested
– surged 38 percent during the first year of the Trump administration
from the previous year to 73,000, a two-decade high, a Reuters analysis
of EOIR data shows.
At
the same time, immigrants are being held in detention far longer, as
many initially denied bond by ICE are forced to await the outcome of
subsequent bond hearings in court. The average length of detention for
non-criminals reached 63 days in April 2017, double what it was a year
earlier and the longest monthly average since at least 2010, according
to the most recent ICE data.
The Department of Justice, which oversees EOIR, declined to comment on the Reuters data analysis.
The
increasing number of bond hearings is also thwarting the Trump
administration in its effort to reduce a ballooning backlog of cases in
immigration courts. As judges have been forced to shift their dockets to
make room for bond hearings, the backlog has surged, reaching an
all-time high of 711,142 pending cases in May this year.
Recent
media attention has focused on the Trump administration’s policy of
removing children from parents caught crossing the U.S.-Mexico border
illegally. The Reuters findings show that denial of bond is also
separating families that have been in the country for years and include
children who are U.S. citizens.
“It’s
not like criminal proceedings where in 48 hours somebody is deciding
whether or not you need to be in jail,” said Katherine Evans, who
directs the immigration clinic at the University of Idaho College of
Law. “This is four to six weeks later. … You’ve already lost your job,
you have no income, all of the consequences of being in jail are imposed
before you can get any review of whether or not you need to be in
jail.”
“It’s
an absurd, let alone inhumane, expenditure of resources,” said
Elizabeth Matherne, Vasquez’s lawyer. “You are putting people in cages
that are not harmful to society.”
“CATCH AND RELEASE”
Under
longstanding U.S. policy, immigrants caught crossing the border
illegally and those with serious criminal records are subject to
mandatory detention, allowing for exceptions on humanitarian grounds.
Most
of the rest – those without serious criminal records already living in
the United States and often with deep ties to their communities, like
Vasquez – in earlier years were typically released on bond, immigration
lawyers said.
But
in one of his earliest executive orders, Trump put all immigrants
living in the country illegally on notice: Officials were directed to
“ensure the detention of aliens apprehended for violations of
immigration law pending the outcome of their removal proceedings.”
In
other words, anyone apprehended on immigration violations could be
locked up. The move was strongly backed by U.S. Attorney General Jeff
Sessions and other longtime critics of the practice they derisively call
“catch and release,” whereby immigrants deemed low-risk are released
soon after arrest to fight their deportation cases.
To
conform to Trump’s policies, Reuters has learned, ICE modified a tool
officers have been using since 2013 when deciding whether an immigrant
should be detained or released on bond. The computer-based Risk
Classification Assessment uses statistics to determine an immigrant’s
flight risk and danger to society.
Previously,
the tool automatically recommended either “detain” or “release.” Last
year, ICE spokesman Bourke said, the agency removed the “release”
recommendation, but he noted that ICE personnel can override it.
The
impact of these changes was immediate. The number of immigrants with no
criminal history that ICE booked into detention tripled to more than
43,000 in 2017 from a year earlier, according to agency data.
And
while ICE continues to arrest more immigrants with criminal records
than those without, the most recent data that the agency provided show
that in the first 100 days of the Trump administration, the most serious
crime committed by nearly half of those arrested was an immigration or
traffic violation, not including drunken driving.
POLICE HELP
When
Vasquez was arrested last year, her record showed two convictions in
2014 for driving without a license and other traffic violations. It also
showed that in 2004, Vasquez was sentenced to probation for
contributing to the delinquency of a minor after a child she was
babysitting wandered too close to a highway.
Douglas
County police held Vasquez briefly, she said, before they transferred
her to adjacent Cobb County, one of several jurisdictions in Georgia
where local police are deputized to act as federal immigration agents.
The number of these so-called 287(g) agreements has more than doubled
under Trump.
Sean
Gallagher, director of ICE’s enforcement and removal operations in the
Atlanta field office, covering Georgia, North Carolina and South
Carolina, said he strongly supports the partnerships. He said some of
his officers were frustrated by Obama-era policies that targeted
high-priority immigrants for deportation but ignored others.
Now, Gallagher said. “the policy is really, really clear. It’s that we will make no exceptions.”
The
Atlanta field office arrested more than 5,700 non-criminals in 2017,
nearly six times as many as the year before and the highest increase in
the nation.
Police
records show that because Vasquez had failed to appear in court for one
of her traffic tickets, ICE in 2015 had issued a “detainer” for her
arrest – a notice to local authorities of her illegal presence in the
United States. Cooperating police departments automatically turn over to
federal authorities any immigrants with outstanding detainers who are
picked up in their jurisdictions.
After
her arrest, Vasquez was frantic. She had left her sleeping children in
the care of her 17-year-old daughter. She called the pastor at her
church to pick up her car and alert everyone at home.
“I
know how hard all of this has been on her … and on all the kids,” said
Ruth Negron, pastor at Iglesia Cristo Reina, where Vasquez attended
services several times a week and led a drama group.
Vasquez
was just getting back on her feet, Negron said, after her Mexican
husband was deported five years earlier and subsequently disabled in a
car accident. She had only recently moved herself and the children out
of a trailer and into their larger rental home.
When
ICE denied Vasquez bond at the time of her arrest, any hope she had
that she would be released soon and back with her family evaporated.
Within days, she was taken to the agency’s Irwin County Detention Center
in Ocilla, Georgia, near the Florida border.
A
month later, Vasquez had her first hearing in front of Judge William
Cassidy, broadcast via grainy video feed from his Atlanta courtroom.
“I
was going ... to see if you could give me a bond, because I have six
children and I am the head of my household,” Vasquez told the judge,
according to a transcript.
The
ICE prosecutor countered that Vasquez was a flight risk because of her
failure to appear in court on earlier traffic charges.
Judge Cassidy agreed. He urged her to get a lawyer and sent her back to detention.
The entire proceeding lasted less than five minutes.
Matherne,
the lawyer who later took Vasquez’s case, and other immigrant advocates
said that before Trump took office, such a case — involving an
immigrant with a relatively clean record and long-established in the
United States — would never have gone this far.
“How
it used to work is they would go through the ICE processing center and
some sort of analysis would take place and you wouldn’t even see people
like Morena in detention,” Matherne said. “They would be released under
supervision or on their own recognizance” and given a court date to
contest their deportation order.
Supporters
of the Trump administration’s tough enforcement say that’s the problem –
that releasing immigrants on bond encourages them to skip court dates
and go into hiding. Making that argument last October, Attorney General
Sessions noted that deportation orders issued in absentia “have doubled
since 2012, with nearly 40,000 in the 2017 fiscal year.”
EOIR
data confirm the increase, but also show that most immigrants still
show up for their court dates: 74 percent of immigrants appeared at
their final hearings in 2017, down from 90 percent in 2012.
MONEY PROBLEMS
While
the number of people requesting bond hearings in immigration court has
surged, they are no more likely to succeed at winning release than they
were during the Obama administration. Last year, immigration judges
granted bond in 42 percent of cases, similar to the rate in prior years,
according to the Reuters analysis.
Judge
Cassidy, who denied Vasquez’s bond request, fell below the national
average, granting bond in 35 percent of cases over the past decade. (In
an investigation last year
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-immigration-asylum,
Reuters found that decisions on whether to deport illegal immigrants or
allow them to stay in the country vary widely among immigration courts.
Judges in Georgia and North Carolina were among the toughest.)
In
more than 30 bond hearings Reuters observed in February and March at
immigration courts in New York City, Los Angeles, Atlanta and at the
Stewart Detention Center, another Georgia facility, ICE prosecutors
agreed to negotiate bonds in only three cases. And in each of those,
bond was set at more than $10,000, far above the $1,500 legal minimum.
Sums
like that can be prohibitive. Unlike U.S. criminal defendants, who can
usually put up 10 percent of their bail amount with a bondsman and
secure their release, immigrants must post their bonds in full.
Arturo
Flores, a 45-year-old Mexican immigrant and single father, had been
living illegally in the United States for more than 17 years when he was
arrested in November 2017 in North Carolina for driving 15 miles an
hour over the limit and without a license. In North Carolina, as in
Georgia, people without legal immigration status can’t get licenses.
ICE set his bond at $12,000.
The
family didn’t have enough to pay. His two teenage children, living with
an uncle after their father was placed in the Irwin County Detention
Center, had just sent what little money they had to Mexico to help pay
for their mother’s funeral, who died while their father was in custody.
In
January, Judge Michael Baird granted Flores’s request to lower the
amount, to $5,000. It took the family another two months to scrape
together the cash.
Flores
said his health deteriorated during nearly four months in detention.
Less than a week after his release in March, he had a stroke and was
hospitalized.
He
thinks the ordeal contributed to his health problems. “I was very
stressed out and worried about my children surviving without their
mother or their father,” he said from his home in North Carolina, where
he is waiting for his next hearing in immigration court.
JUST GIVE UP
Some immigrants facing long incarcerations decide to give up and leave the country.
Hender
Huerta, a 30-year-old former police detective from Venezuela, applied
for asylum in December 2016, six months after coming to the United
States with his pregnant wife and his daughter on a tourist visa. Huerta
had been active in opposition politics back home, and in his asylum
application, he said he had received death threats for his
anti-government activities.
Huerta
could remain free while pursuing his asylum claim because he and his
family had entered on legal visas. But on Feb. 17 last year, he was
pulled over on a traffic stop in Georgia. He said the officer told him
his Venezuelan driver’s license was not valid in the state.
He
tried to explain his situation, including that he had a newborn at
home, but the Gwinnett County Sheriff’s Office, which has an enforcement
agreement with ICE, handed him over to federal authorities.
“The
ICE officer told me because of Trump’s policies anyone who has a
pending process will move on to immigration detention,” Huerta said.
He
waited four months at the Irwin County Detention Center for a bond
hearing. Last June, Judge Earl Wilson in Atlanta refused to release him
because his asylum hearing was just a few days away. Then at that
hearing, Judge Wilson denied Huerta’s asylum claim, saying he had not
provided enough corroborating evidence to support his claims of
persecution.
Huerta’s lawyer, Sarah Owings, said her client could have gathered the necessary documents if he hadn’t been incarcerated.
“I can’t believe the court found this man a flight risk,” Owings said, according to a recording of the hearing.
Owings
told Reuters she thought Huerta would have had a strong case on appeal,
but to Huerta, the prospect of remaining in detention was unbearable.
He waived his right to appeal. The judge ordered him deported. Huerta
thought Venezuela was too dangerous, so he made his way to Mexico, where
he now works for a food distribution company.
“At
first, I had hope I would get out,” Huerta said via phone from
Hermosillo, Mexico. “But my wife and daughters didn’t have anywhere to
go, and I had no way to help them.”
“WHAT’S THE HOLD UP?”
In detention, Vasquez, too, had no way to help her children.
After
her church persuaded her landlord to let her out of her lease, her
children slept on the floor of a cousin’s house for several weeks. Then
their grandfather, a U.S. green-card holder ill with diabetes, found a
place where all of them could live in Rome, Georgia, an hour from their
old home.
The
eight-hour round-trip drive to the detention center made it hard for
Vasquez’s children to visit. They wrote their letters to the court to
plead to have their mother back.
Vasquez
earned $1 a day washing dishes in the detention center kitchen. She
felt humiliated when she joined the other inmates as the guards herded
them into the cafeteria for what they called “chow time.” The phrase
reminded her of a dog food commercial. She lost 20 pounds.
In
May 2017, her case was moved from Judge Cassidy to Judge Wilson, the
judge who had denied Huerta’s asylum claim. In a series of hearings
through spring and summer last year, Vasquez’s repeated requests for
bond were denied.
Vasquez
despaired. Giving up and returning to El Salvador, a country unknown to
her children, was not an option. When she was a teenager, a friend had
tried to recruit her to join a violent street gang. When her mother
found out, she sent Vasquez to live with her father in the United
States.
Vasquez’s
sister stayed in El Salvador. She was murdered by gangs in 2012, her
face mutilated with stab wounds, local police records show.
Vasquez’s
mother, Ana Henriquez, wrote to the court from El Salvador, pleading
with the judge to let her daughter stay in the United States. “The
situation here is horrible,” Henriquez wrote. “I cannot feed or look
after my daughter and my grandchildren. They are North Americans and I
am very poor.”
In
September, Vasquez had a hearing on the merits of her case. Judge
Wilson found that she had “worked hard in the United States, and has
taken care of her family, and for the most part has stayed out of
trouble.”
As
a result, he ruled that Vasquez was eligible for “cancellation of
removal,” meaning that her deportation order would be withdrawn and she
could live and work legally in the United States.
The
government appealed the ruling, arguing that Vasquez had failed to
prove that her father, a permanent U.S. resident, and her six children,
citizens all, would suffer “exceptional and extremely unusual hardship”
if she was deported, the standard required.
She was sent back to detention.
All
hope seemed lost. But unbeknownst to Vasquez, her eldest daughter had
told her teachers about the family’s predicament, and that the school
had helped them contact pro-bono lawyers from the Southern Poverty Law
Center.
Now
with legal counsel, Vasquez asked for another bond hearing. And on Feb.
20 — a year since her arrest — she found herself again facing Wilson on
the video feed.
“I was so nervous … my feet were shaking,” she said. “I think I told him my name three times.”
Her
lawyer, Matherne, reminded Wilson that he had granted Vasquez’s request
to stay legally in the country more than five months earlier.
“Well, what’s the hold up?” Wilson said. “Why isn’t she released?”
The
prosecutor at the hearing, Alex Brown, argued that Judge Wilson’s
cancellation of Vasquez’s deportation order would probably be overturned
on ICE’s appeal, which would give Vasquez an incentive to go
underground if she were released. He suggested a $7,500 bond.
Matherne
said the amount was unreasonable. “The respondent’s father has been
taking care of six children on his own,” she said. “He’s diabetic, and
he has heart problems. He’s exhausted his savings.”
Judge Wilson agreed. “She’s not going anywhere,” he said. “I think this is a $1,500 bond case.”
When the judge announced he would grant the lowest level of bond allowed, other detainees in the room burst into applause.
Vasquez’s family scrambled to borrow the money to pay the bond that day.
A
week later, the Board of Immigration Appeals threw out the government’s
appeal, clearing the path for Vasquez to stay permanently in the United
States.
Vasquez
is now working odd jobs on construction sites and staying with
roommates in Cobb County, looking for a place to settle with her
children while she waits to complete all the steps needed to obtain her
green card.
“I feel knocked out and confused,” Vasquez said. “It’s a big adjustment getting back into society again.”
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