Hundreds of migrants who have had their visa applications refused are to be deported in the coming weeks following the Government's hardening of its immigration policy. On foot of the suspension of the visa waiver for migrants from 20 safe countries, migrants still seeking to come to Ireland under the International Protection programme now face delays of between 8 and 14 weeks before they can arrive here. Senior Government sources say that while the number of people affected at present is small, it is accepted that this move will have a “sufficient chilling effect” to deter large number of migrants from coming to Ireland. They say that in addition to the country running out of accommodation for Ukrainian refugees, the direct provision system is also buckling under “unprecedented pressure”. The Government has rejected criticism of the move by opposition parties and leading migrant advocacy and civil liberty groups. Measure is 'Wise'Speaking in Japan, Taoiseach Micheál Martin claimed the measure is “wise” as up to five times more refugees are coming to Ireland this year compared to previous years.
The suspension of the visa programme is being defended on the grounds that the number of people seeking international protection has grown sharply since the lifting of the pandemic-related travel restrictions. The numbers seeking asylum in Ireland rose from 956 in 2012 to 4,781 in 2019 before the numbers dropped significantly because of the pandemic. So far this year there have been 6,498 applications, according to official figures. Last week, the Government ran out of space for Ukrainian refugees and asylum seekers in State-provided accommodation at the Citywest, forcing more than 300 people to stay in the old Dublin Airport terminal building. Ministers have been given documents which show that, to the end of June the largest group of migrants arriving in Ireland were from Georgia (1,181), followed by Somalia (938), Algeria (798), Zimbabwe (572), and Nigeria (492). Deportations effectively stopped during the Covid-19 pandemic. In conjunction with the decision to suspend the visa waiver, the removal of people from the State is now once again seen as “a necessary part of the immigration system”. Jose Martin Hercules Aleman had to show up to immigration court alone, twice. He remembers feeling fearful, appearing in front of a judge without any legal representation by his side for two removal hearings, once in mid-March and again in April.
“It’s really scary because you don’t know what you should respond,” Hercules Aleman, 36, said in a phone interview from detention. “You don’t know anything.” Hercules Aleman, who is from El Salvador, has been in U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention at the Moshannon Valley Processing Center in Philipsburg, Pennsylvania for about four months. What Hercules Aleman didn’t know when he arrived was that there was a network of state-funded New Jersey immigration legal providers searching through every avenue they could to find people like him to represent. He lived in New Jersey before being picked up by ICE and taken out of state, so he qualifies for a state-funded program that represents immigrants in detention or deportation proceedings. ICE is moving New Jersey immigrants like Hercules Aleman – who face charges in criminal or family court – to out-of-state immigration detention facilities. But the agency is usually not notifying the group of immigration legal providers funded by the state to represent these detained immigrants. The situation also makes it challenging for immigrants to resolve their charges in criminal or family court from outside of New Jersey, advocates say, and even to access public defenders. Without resolving other charges, immigrants are more likely to be denied immigration relief and released on bond, limiting the possibility for them to travel to New Jersey to deal with their other cases. In immigration court, the presumption of innocence doesn’t apply. Priscila Abraham, a Detention Fellow with the Rutgers Immigrant Rights Clinic, said that ICE and immigration courts do not look “favorably” on an individual who has pending criminal cases. “So we’re kind of caught in this [catch] 22 where we’re trying to resolve these cases without ICE cooperating with us,” Abraham said. So if an immigrant goes into ICE custody with criminal charges pending, said Susannah Volpe, an assistant deputy public defender at the New Jersey Office of the Public Defender, “you have a really hard time proving that you’re not a danger to other people in the community, because those charges can be assessed in sort of the totality of the evidence–even though in the criminal case, you’re innocent until proven guilty.” Immigrant advocates and elected officials have asked ICE to provide more information about individuals the agency is moving to out-of-state facilities. But ICE has repeatedly denied these requests, according to emails from immigration legal providers and an ICE official, and people familiar with these communications. In its policy on transfers, ICE says it is not required to notify family members “or other third parties” of a transfer. If a detained immigrant has an attorney registered with the court, ICE will notify the attorney, the policy says. But many of the individuals taken out of New Jersey do not yet have an immigration attorney on record, advocates said, so it becomes difficult to locate those who need representation. “These are our New Jersey community members and residents, and they might not know about us until it’s too late,” said Raquiba Huq, the Chief Attorney for the Immigration Representation Project at the Legal Services of New Jersey (LSNJ). Emilio Dabul, a spokesperson for ICE, said that the agency adheres to its transfer policy, and takes into consideration “immediate family, attorney of record, and status of removal proceedings.” “Due to operational security, ICE does not announce and/or discuss projected transportation operations,” Dabul said. Hercules Aleman had been living in New Jersey since 2008, he said, and was detained by ICE in early March after he faced criminal charges of simple assault and violation of a domestic violence restraining order, according to Department of Homeland Security (DHS) documents and New Jersey court documents his immigration attorney shared with Documented. The attorney said the charges were related to a fight with his landlord. The charges were downgraded and transferred to family court. Hercules Aleman was convicted of a separate simple assault charge in 2019, and sentenced to a year of probation, including an anger management program, according to court documents. He has also faced a list of other criminal charges in the past — involving simple assault, criminal mischief, and theft — which were dismissed, according to the DHS documents. In 2016, he was also arrested by the Woodbrige, New Jersey police department for assault by auto, though there is no disposition for the charge, according to DHS documents. Once ICE moved Hercules Aleman to detention in Pennsylvania, it created additional barriers for him to resolve these separate cases. He likely spent extra time in detention than necessary because he could not find the New Jersey pro-bono representation program until a month and a half in, his attorney said, and showed up to immigration court removal dates alone. He still has not been able to access a lawyer for his case in family court, and was denied immigration bond at a May 25th bond hearing while his other charges were still pending, according to his attorney. Hercules Aleman said when he was taken into immigration detention in early March, he was given a sheet of paper that listed attorneys, but none of them answered his calls. Eventually, a friend inside the detention center who lived in New Jersey shared the number for the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), a group that provides pro-bono legal representation for New Jersey immigrants, he said. Now, Hercules Aleman is giving the AFSC hotline number to others in detention, where he said many people are struggling to find attorneys. “For all the new people who are arriving here, the situation is frustrating,” he said. “The days and the weeks pass, and the lawyers that [ICE] give you don’t answer. And then from there you start asking friends if they know any lawyers.” Last year, after a lengthy push by advocates and elected leaders in New Jersey, county jails stopped holding detained immigrants for ICE. Since then, ICE has been transporting New Jersey residents to detention facilities out of state. In August of 2021, New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy signed a bill that would prevent new or renewed contracts for immigration detention in the state. The Elizabeth Detention Center is the only immigration detention center that remains in New Jersey. It is a privately-owned facility which mostly holds migrants who have recently crossed through the southern border. New Jersey residents are usually only processed there briefly before being moved out of state, immigration legal providers said. Many immigrants, like Hercules Aleman, are now being detained at the Moshannon facility, hundreds of miles away from their New Jersey homes, according to various legal providers, cutting off their access to resolve charges in criminal or family court in-person, and making it challenging to connect with immigration groups that are state-funded to represent them. “ICE understands that detainees may have ties to the community and a support network near the location that they are detained,” said Dabul, the ICE spokesperson. “ICE takes that into account when moving to a new facility to keep them as close as possible to their support network.” Before three county jails shut their doors to ICE last year, the agency shared information with specific legal providers about the immigrants who were arriving in detention at the Hudson County jail, and the Essex County jail more recently, allowing these attorneys to locate people they were funded to represent, said Huq, of LSNJ. This information included lists of names and A-numbers, or partial A-numbers, which the government assigns to every person in immigration proceedings, and providers can use to locate immigrants in detention. LSNJ is part of a coalition of four groups that have been allocated money in the New Jersey Governor’s budget since 2018 to provide immigration legal services for state residents facing detention, deportation, or both. The coalition is called the Detention and Deportation Defense Initiative (DDDI), and includes LSNJ, AFSC, the Rutgers Immigrant Justice Clinic and the Seton Hall Law School Immigrants’ Rights/International Human Rights Clinic. But now, providers say that ICE has largely stopped providing the information that they used to locate potential clients, ever since the county jails stopped holding detained immigrants. The agency still gives attorneys information about immigrants who are staying long-term at Elizabeth Detention Center, but that group does not usually include New Jersey residents, Huq said. Funds have been specifically allocated in the state budget for DDDI providers to represent immigrants in deportation proceedings. But providers are still receiving this money to represent detained immigrants who they now may not be able to find. “We don’t know how big the scope of the problem is, because we have no official way of knowing how many people they’re detaining out of state,” said Jordan Weiner, Hercules Aleman’s attorney at AFSC. Last year, shortly after Essex and Bergen stopped holding people in ICE detention, LSNJ had heard “informally” that about ten people a week were being apprehended by ICE in New Jersey, Huq said, and sent to detention out of state. But the group has not received any updated information since then. One lesson of Donald Trump’s rise is that Republican leadership, if it is seen as ignoring rank-and-file conservatives as it tries to cut deals with Democrats, can lose its grip on the party. Anger at the bipartisan push for immigration reform in 2013 helped fuel Trump’s anti-immigration campaign in 2016.
So Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and Minority Whip John Cornyn (R-Tex.) know they are taking a political risk in supporting a gun-control compromise, which advanced in the Senate Tuesday with the support of all 50 Democrats and just 14 Republicans. Populists on the right are blasting the legislation as a surrender to liberals and infringement on Second Amendment rights, and activists booed Cornyn at the recent Texas GOP convention. But here’s a prediction: The GOP won’t muster a significant grass-roots political backlash to this bill, for the simple reason that it will have a minimal effect on the great mass of legal gun owners and buyers. Over the long run, the bill’s punitive sentencing provisions might be more likely to prompt a progressive backlash. The gun buyers most directly affected by the legislation are those aged 18, 19 and 20 — a small group that is not a driving force in GOP politics. If the bill passes, buyers under 21 will be subject to a more-intensive background-check process, which could increase their wait time to 10 business days (from three) between buying a gun and picking it up. Some conservatives are denouncing the bill’s funding for red-flag laws — legal processes currently in effect in 19 states to remove guns from people deemed a danger to themselves or others. After local officials restricted liberty during the coronavirus pandemic, it’s understandable that GOP voters would be wary of expanding those officials’ prerogatives over Second Amendment rights. But the legislation might not lead to a proliferation of red-flag laws beyond states that would have adopted them anyway. The bill also authorizes funding for mental health courts, drug courts and other “crisis intervention” programs, so states that decline to enact red-flag laws won’t have to lose out on federal cash. And those states that do use the money for red-flag laws will be required to rely on “heightened evidentiary standards and proof” and may not deny respondents the right to a lawyer. The fact that the legislation is advancing just as the Supreme Court expands the scope of the Constitution’s Second Amendment protections also improves the political position of the GOP compromisers. The court’s decision striking down New York’s restrictions on concealed-carry licenses could allay conservative concerns about overweening local officials. It also implicitly puts McConnell and Cornyn back on the side of the GOP base in defending gun rights against progressive criticism. Most legislation has unforeseen consequences, and this gun-control bill could increase incarceration, especially among minorities. Lying on federal forms to get a gun is punishable by up to 10 years’ imprisonment under current law, but the Senate bill explicitly makes buying a gun for someone who is ineligible (an overlapping offense) punishable by up to 15 years. It also bars more people convicted of domestic violence misdemeanors from gun ownership. According to the U.S. Sentencing Commission, 56 percent of those in federal prison for unlawful possession of a firearm are Black. Don’t be surprised if a handful of House progressives balk on principle at this increased criminalization. |