Star

The San Juan Daily Star Monday, March 21, 2016 11 Mainland
DHS Using Unpopular Raids to Curb Border Crossings
The Obama administration is openly
stepping up efforts to find and deport
immigrants who were part of the 2014
surge of illegal crossings by unaccompanied
children and families.
The politically fraught endeavor is a
follow-through on a nearly 2-year-old warning
that those immigrants who don’t win
permission to stay in the United States
would be sent packing. It comes at a time
when Republican presidential candidates
are pushing for tougher immigration action.
Homeland Security officials have kept
a wary eye on the border since more than
68,000 unaccompanied children and roughly
as many people traveling as families were
caught crossing the border illegally in 2014.
The effort to step up enforcement against families
and young immigrants started in the
midst of a new flood of such immigrants.
Previous efforts to curb illegal crossings
seemed to work initially, as the number of
children and families crossing illegally dropped
about 40 percent between 2014 and
2015. But that number started to rise again
late last summer. At the same time, the immigration
court system faced a backlog of
more than 474,000 cases.
Now the Obama administration is
touting its efforts to find and deport families
as well as those unaccompanied children
who are now adults who have been ordered
home. Homeland Security Secretary Jeh
Johnson has highlighted his department’s
deportation efforts.
One of those unaccompanied childrenturned-adults
targeted by Immigration and
Customs Enforcement is 19-year-old Wildin
David Guillen Acosta. He said he came to
the United States from Honduras by bus,
car and on foot after a gang member threatened
to kill him.
“I wouldn’t go out at night. He’d call me
and say, ‘I’m going to kill you, I’m going to
kill you,’ “ Acosta said in Spanish. “I told
my mother and she told me to come to the
United States.”
Acosta, speaking from an immigration
jail in rural Georgia, said he was afraid to
go home.
“I’m scared. I don’t want to go back.
There’s a lot of violence, a lot of death,”
Acosta said. “They’ll kill you for a telephone.
How is this possible?”
His mother, Dilsia Acosta, said her son
came to the U.S. in June 2014 at the peak of
a wave of immigrant children. His father,
Hector Guillen, came to the United States
illegally in 2005 and his mother followed in
2013. Wildin Acosta was arrested in January
after a judge ruled that he should be deported.
Wildin Acosta, who had been going to
school and working since arriving in North
Carolina, said now he hopes to win asylum.
But the odds are against him because he has
a pending deportation order.
Immigration advocates have rallied
around Wildin Acosta and others and are
pressing the administration to reverse course.
But U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement
isn’t backing down.
Since October, more than 800 immigrants
who arrived as unaccompanied children
have been sent home, according to ICE
statistics. Other formerly unaccompanied
child immigrants with pending deportation
orders have been detained in preparation
for deportation.
ICE’s head of enforcement operations,
Tom Homan, told Congress in February
that his agents are aggressively pursuing
unaccompanied former-child immigrants
and families.
“We have sent out thousands of leads on
(unaccompanied children) who have final
orders issued by the immigration courts,
some in absentia, some in person, and we
are out looking for those leads,” Homan
told lawmakers. “I have 129 (fugitive operations)
teams out there every day.”
About 10,000 unaccompanied children
have been ordered out of the country since
July 2014, but roughly 87 percent of those
orders were issued in absentia, according to
Justice Department figures.
In early January, DHS started targeting
families who had lost their bid to stay in
the United States, and ICE announced the
arrests of 121 people — more than half of
whom have been sent home so far.
Johnson said the arrests should come as
no surprise since he announced in late 2014
that new border crossers were an enforcement
priority.
“We do not have, and cannot have, an
open border so we have to have enforcement
at the border,” Johnson told The Associated
Press. “Are enforcement actions against families
pleasant? No, of course not. In a very
personal way, I recognize that.”
Nonetheless, he added, “We have to enforce
the law.”
The arrests have angered immigration
advocates and Democrats who argue it is
dangerous to send families and young immigrants
back to dangerous and impoverished
Central American countries.
And the efforts come at a complicated
time for Democratic presidential candidates
Hillary Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders,
who are both vying for the Hispanic vote.
Clinton and Sanders have both denounced
the January arrests of families and promised
to be more lenient in enforcing immigration
laws than President Barack Obama.
Kevin Appleby, director of international
migration policy for the Center for Migration
Studies, said the administration is
“caught in a difficult spot.”
“Before they start deporting unaccompanied
children wholesale they have to fix
... the legal system so these children have
a fair opportunity” to fight to stay in the
country, Appleby said.
Johnson said it’s a matter of adhering to
the agency’s priorities.
“We can’t have a policy that if you come
here and you do not qualify for asylum or
other relief, and you’ve been ordered removed
by an immigration court” you can stay
anyway, Johnson said.