An adverse court ruling has further weakened protections against deportation for half a million beneficiaries of the DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) program. A three-judge immigration appeals panel ruled Friday in favor of Department of Homeland Security (DHS) attorneys, who had appealed a decision by Immigration Judge Michael Pleters to end removal proceedings against Catherine Xochitl Santiago, DACA beneficiary.
“The immigration judge erred in terminating the removal proceedings based solely on the fact that the respondent has been granted Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), and without considering the grounds for any opposition to such termination,” ruled the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA)an administrative court that is part of the Department of Justice.
Santiago’s case became public when she was detained by Customs and Border Protection agents in August while boarding a domestic flight at the El Paso (Texas) airport bound for Houston. She was addressing a conference as part of her work at the nonprofit organization The Working Woman. She was detained until a federal judge ordered her release last October. Since then he has been fighting the threat of deportation in the immigration court system.
Santiago is the typical DACA beneficiary. She came to the United States with her family, who are of Zapotec origin, from her native Oaxaca (Mexico) when she was a child. Two decades later he has made his life in the United States. An activist in favor of migrants, she is married to a US citizen. When she was detained, her DACA program was active, which was created by the Barack Obama Administration in 2012 to protect from deportation people who arrived illegally in the United States as children before 2007. Most of them feel the United States is their own country. They have been there for more than two decades, they are professionals, they have raised families and built their lives. However, the protection is only temporary, it does not provide a path to citizenship and every two years they have to renew their residence and work permit.
Trump already tried to end the program in his first term, but the Supreme Court prevented it. Now, since he returned to the White House, his Government has attacked the program on several fronts. It has eliminated access to medical coverage for its beneficiaries and aid for access to education. Furthermore, the delay in renewing their permits by the Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has caused many to lose their work permits and, consequently, their jobs. With all this harassment, the Trump Administration wants DACA beneficiaries to be deported and thus contribute to its goal of achieving the largest deportation in history.
“For months, the Trump Administration has slowed down the renewal of DACA and the processing of work permits. Now it is paving the way for them to be deported even before their DACA expires,” Democratic Senator Dick Durbin, promoter of the Dreamer Law, which seeks to protect those who arrived as children (called dreamers or dreamers) and open a path to citizenship for them. “Congress must act once and for all to protect these young people, who know no other home, and pass the Dream law. “This is a simple matter of American fairness and justice,” he added.
The BIA’s public decisions set the precedent and set the tone for how immigration judges across the country should rule. They are technically considered a provisional decision and can be appealed by both parties. Friday’s ruling marks the latest step by the Trump Administration to strip DACA recipients of their protections.
“This decision constitutes another step in the dismantling of the programwithout the Government assuming the responsibility of putting a definitive end to it… This is a silent setback in protections, and our communities are paying the price in real time,” declared Juliana Macedo do Nascimento, deputy director of Advocacy and Campaigns at United We Dream, an organization that fights for the rights of immigrants, to the public radio network NPR.
According to a recent analysis by the station, BIA decisions supported government lawyers in 97% of cases published last year; This represents an increase of at least 30 percentage points above the average recorded in the last 16 years.
The Board’s decisions have made it difficult for immigration courts to grant immigrants bail instead of detention. In addition, they have paved the way for deporting migrants to countries other than their own.
The guarantee of protection offered by DACA has been called into question in recent months. In March, the Government rectified the case of two beneficiaries who were deported to Mexico. In one of them, a judge ordered the return of Mexican citizen María Jesús Estrada Juárez, deported after living 27 years in the United States. He had arrived in the country when he was 15 years old and lived with his daughter in Sacramento, California. District Judge Dena Coggins called María’s deportation a “flagrant violation” of DACA’s promise of protection and forced the Government to urgently return her.
In the case of Luis Roldán-Cerda, an electrician married to a US citizen and father of two, he was detained when he went to a routine immigration court date. The Government deported him to Mexico, but allowed his re-entry after Roldán-Cerda’s lawyer filed a lawsuit.
They have not been the only dreamers deported. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) acknowledged earlier this year that between January and November of last year, 261 DACA recipients were arrested and 86 were removed from the country.
In the Santiago case, the BIA also ruled that another immigration judge handle the case, since Pleters’ wife, Verónica Escobar, is a Democratic congresswoman who has spoken out against eliminating immigration protections. dreamers. “Given these particular circumstances, we conclude that referring the file to a different immigration judge constitutes the most appropriate course of action to avoid the appearance of partiality or bias and to safeguard the integrity of the removal procedure,” he concluded without mentioning the name of the judge or his wife.
