El Magonista Newsletter | Vol. 11, No. 11 | MAR. 29, 2023

CIUDAD JUAREZ, Mexico —  The surveillance video is short, but brutal. 

Taken from inside a migrant detention center in northern Mexico, it shows flames spreading quickly inside a locked cell, and detainees pleading for help. 

As black smoke billows, several guards are seen hurrying away without attempting to rescue the prisoners from the growing fire. 

At least 38 migrants were killed and dozens more were injured Monday night in the blaze at a National Migration Institute lockup in Ciudad Juarez, just south of the U.S. border, according to authorities.

It was the deadliest incident in recent memory at Mexico’s notoriously crowded immigration holding centers and another reminder of the many perils faced by migrants trying to reach the United States.

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said the fire began around 10 p.m. after migrants learned that they were going to be deported to their home countries — and ignited mattresses in protest. He said most of the dead were from Central and South America.

“They never imagined it would cause this terrible tragedy,” López Obrador said.

A Mexican federal official with knowledge of the case who spoke on condition of anonymity offered a different motive for the protest, saying it began because 68 men were packed into a cell meant for no more than 50 people — with no access to drinking water... READ MORE

WASHINGTON —  Top Democrats are warning President Biden against restarting the controversial practice of detaining migrant families who cross the U.S. southern border without authorization. 

“I urge you to learn from the mistakes of your predecessors and abandon any plans to implement this failed policy,” Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.), the second-ranking Democrat in the Senate, Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and 17 other senators wrote in a letter sent to the White House on Sunday and shared exclusively with The Times. Family detention, the senators argued, is “ineffective and impractical as an immigration management tool.”

As he prepares for an expected 2024 presidential campaign, Biden has tried to distance himself from the left, showing more willingness to crack down on illegal immigration and approving a GOP-backed bill to block an overhaul of the District of Columbia’s criminal code. The Senate Democrats’ letter amounts to an attempt to warn Biden against taking that effort too far.

The missive is also an indication of the potential of immigration issues to divide Democrats as Biden tries to reduce the large number of migrants seeking to enter the U.S. and claim asylum.

Most of the letter’s signatories — just over one-third of the Senate Democratic caucus — come from the party’s progressive wing, including California’s Alex Padilla and former presidential candidates Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.). Some moderates, including Sens. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) and Catherine Cortez Masto, added their names too.

Resuming family detentions would represent a significant shift from Biden’s previous positions. The president ended the practice and unwound a series of Trump-era immigration restrictions during the first few months of his administration, vowing a more humane approach.

“I’m not making new law. I’m eliminating bad policy,” he declared on his first day in office.

In recent months, however, Biden administration officials studying how to manage the record number of migrants showing up at the southern border have discussed the possibility of once again locking up migrant children and their parents. 

During fiscal year 2022, 2.76 million immigrants crossed the U.S. border illegally, shattering the previous annual record by more than 1 million, according to Customs and Border Protection data. 

“No decisions have been made” about family detention, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said... READ MORE

President Biden’s plan to limit some migrants’ access to asylum could force federal asylum officers to break U.S. law, the union that represents asylum officers argued Monday in a formal filing opposing the proposal.

Enforcing Biden’s policy would violate asylum officers’ oath to carry out the immigration laws set out by Congress and “could make them complicit in violations of U.S. and international law,” attorneys for the American Federation of Government Employees Council 119 wrote in a comment submitted to the Department of Homeland Security. 

The same union regularly protested the Trump administration’s efforts to restrict asylum at the southern U.S. border, including by joining lawsuits that sought to block his policies. Its decision to oppose Biden’s asylum proposal is one indication of the plan’s similarities to Trump-era efforts.

“At their core, the measures that the Proposed Rule seeks to implement are inconsistent with the asylum law enacted by Congress, the treaties the United States has ratified, and our country’s moral fabric and longstanding tradition of providing safe haven to the persecuted,” the union argued. “Rather, it is draconian and represents the elevation of a single policy goal — reducing the number of migrants crossing the southwest border — over human life and our country’s commitment to refugees.”

Biden’s plan, unveiled in February, is his latest attempt to deter migrants from entering the U.S. without authorization. If enacted, it would make immigrants who cross into the U.S. without permission and fail to apply for protections on the way to the southern border ineligible for asylum.

The proposal has to go through a regulatory process, including allowing the public to send comments on it, before it can be finalized and take effect. Some administration officials hope that the new measure will lessen the impact of the end of Title 42, a Trump-era policy set to expire in May that allows border agents to quickly turn back migrants. 

The union also opposes Biden’s plan because it would erode commitments to providing shelter to those fleeing from persecution, is inconsistent with asylum law, and would undermine the asylum screening process, according to the comment... READ MORE

More than a decade ago, three states banned Undocumented students from public colleges. For the post-DACA generation, the toll has been steeper.

During his junior year in high school, Steven was asked by a guidance counselor to list his top three colleges. Like many ambitious high-schoolers in South Carolina, his first choice was a no-brainer: Clemson University. He grew up watching football games with his family and had envisioned himself going there since he was a little kid. “Clemson has always been a huge part of my life,” he says.

As a freshman in high school, Steven visited the campus, about 45 minutes away from home, for the Men of Color National Summit, a two-day event designed for young African American and Hispanic men. It encouraged him to dream big and further solidified his conviction that he would apply to Clemson.

So Steven was surprised when his guidance counselor, whispering to ensure privacy in a shared high-school office, broke the news to him: By law, he couldn’t attend Clemson because undocumented students are banned from enrolling in any public college in the state. (Steven is being identified by first name only because of his immigration status.)

Born in Mexico, Steven moved to the United States before his first birthday. South Carolina is the only home he’s known. “My parents have told me stories about crossing the border,” he says. “I was in a little baby carriage, but I don’t remember anything at all.”

If things had worked out a little differently, he’d have been referred to as a “Dreamer.” When Steven turned 16, he applied to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA, but his application was never completed because, after President Donald J. Trump sought to end the program in 2017, the government stopped processing new applications.

As a high-school senior this year, Steven is in one of the first classes to navigate the college-application process without the protections afforded by DACA. His experience is likely to be an increasingly common one for undocumented students who apply to colleges that have for the past decade shaped their policies to accommodate recipients of the DACA program.

Learning about the state’s ban left him feeling worried and scared. “Going to Clemson was something that motivated me,” he says. “I thought it ended my opportunity to go to college... READ MORE

The Chronicle of Higher Education wrote about the group of students that had to navigate the college-application process without immigrant protection in some Southern states.

An estimated 11 million people living in the United States are undocumented — approximately 2.1 million of them 24 or younger, meaning they are college prospects. 

Protected by the U.S. Supreme Court since 1982, undocumented children have had the right to attend the K-12 public education system, but the decision doesn’t offer the same protection to higher education. Each state can determine whether undocumented students can or can’t attend college. 

The Chronicle of Higher Education shared this week an article featuring the challenges students have faced since the banning of undocumented people from public colleges in certain states, more than a decade ago. Three states have enacted the enrollment ban: South Carolina, in 2008; Georgia, in 2010; and Alabama, in 2011. According to The Chronicle, the goal was to prevent undocumented immigrants from realizing any kind of public benefit, which included access to state-funded institutions. 

In 2012, President Barack Obama announced the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which allowed undocumented students who arrived in the United States before age 16 to get Social Security numbers, work authorization, and driver’s licenses. All these perks eased the barriers preventing access to college to these students. 

However, in 2017, President Donald J. Trump tried ending DACA — which made the government stop processing new applications — but the high court blocked it. 

Because of the increase in the undocumented population in the country, which nearly quadrupled from 1990 to 2007 — peaking at 12.2 million, according to the Pew Research Center — each state was motivated by its political tradition to take action. While Democratic-led states eased the process for undocumented students to attend public higher education, Republican-led ones enhanced the challenges.  

Since then, students living in South Carolina, Georgia and Alabama have been choosing to either go to other states for college or attend private institutions in the state. Some of them also just give up their dreams of pursuing higher education. 

An estimation by The Chronicle stated that at least 500,000 undocumented people have lived in the three states since the bans... READ MORE

Lerner College researcher examines employment data connected to DACA.

If you want to quickly start an intense debate, a decent way to do it is by bringing up immigration policy. There’s no shortage of strong feelings or opinions. 

While most of what is out there is speculation, what we could use more of is hard data, numbers about immigration that help us make up our minds in an educated way. And that’s what University of Delaware researcher Emily Battaglia offers with a recent study on the economic impacts of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy. 

Battaglia, an assistant professor of economics at the Alfred Lerner College of Business and Economics, discovered in her research on data from 2005 to 2018 that the policy better known as DACA does not seem to have a negative impact on jobs or income. The policy might even have improved the economic climate for some people. Her paper was published in the Journal of Urban Economics.   

The DACA immigration policy was put in place by President Barack Obama in 2012. His executive order allowed certain people brought to the country illegally as children to apply for protection from deportation and get legal working status. (It’s not the same as the proposed DREAM Act, which also deals with immigrants in similar circumstances. The DREAM Act was an effort to address the problem legislatively that began in 2001 and never became law.) 

Obama’s move was an effort to take some kind of action despite the lack of partisan consensus. 

“The president was facing growing pressure from Latino leaders and Democrats who warned that because of his harsh immigration enforcement, his support was lagging among Latinos who could be crucial voters in his race for re-election,” the New York Times reported in its coverage at the time.  

In the years since, one criticism of DACA has been that it could cost native-born Americans jobs. Battaglia notes in her paper that Republicans sent a letter to Obama in 2012 expressing just that concern, worried that it was poor timing because of struggles with the economy. 

This criticism was one of the rationales for President Donald Trump to overturn the order in 2017. At least he tried to. It was the beginning of a court battle that continues until now, with a Texas judge ruling in 2021 that Obama had overstepped his authority... READ MORE

WASHINGTON —  Is it a crime or free speech for someone to “encourage” immigrants to come to this country illegally, or remain here after their visas have expired?

The Supreme Court grappled with that question Monday in a clash between immigration law and the 1st Amendment.

It arose in the case of Sacramento man who charged immigrants $500 to $10,000 and falsely promised he could help them obtain U.S. citizenship. More than 470 immigrants paid for the bad advice from Helaman Hansen, and he was convicted of 15 counts of fraud as well as two counts of encouraging two immigrants to overstay their visas.

That latter charge won him a partial acquittal before the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals and sent his case to the high court. 

Since 1952, federal law has made it a crime to “encourage or induce an alien to come to, enter, or reside in the United States, knowing or in reckless disregard of the fact” that doing so would be illegal.

Pointing to those broad words, the 9th Circuit ruled that the provision violated the 1st Amendment because it could be read to make it a crime for family members or friends to encourage a person to come to this country or to remain here illegally. 

“We apply the overbreadth doctrine so that legitimate speech relating to immigration law shall not be chilled and foreclosed,” the San Francisco-based appeals court said. The 15 fraud counts against the defendant were upheld along with a 20-year prison term.

The justices agreed to hear the government’s defense of the “encourage” provision of the law, and most of them sounded skeptical of the free-speech claim, at least in this case.

Justice Neil M. Gorsuch said it was odd to argue that Hansen’s right to free speech was violated.

“I don’t think anybody could say he’s been chilled from speaking. He’s had no problem soliciting people here in this country and defrauding them to the tune of lots and lots of money,” Gorsuch said, adding “this law has been on the books for 50 years.” 

Justice Amy Coney Barrett agreed, noting there is no record of the law being used to prosecute otherwise innocent people for encouraging immigrants to stay in this country. 

“The statute’s been on the books for a long time. There’s an absence of prosecutions. There is also an absence of demonstrated chilling effect,” she said. 

But the court’s liberals said they saw a potential free-speech problem... READ MORE

This immigration policy discourages immigrants from adjusting their status; because they face the risk of seeing their families separated, more immigrants have chosen to remain undocumented in the U.S. long term.

When individuals remain in the U.S. without authorization for more than 12 months and then depart, they are barred from re-entering the U.S. through any legal channel for at least 10 years.

This is the situation facing millions of mixed-status families across the U.S., like Sylvia Alvera Flores and her husband and children, who are subject to re-entry bars like the three- and ten-year bars. She came to the U.S. undocumented when she was 7, and has lived here ever since. And even though her husband and three children are all U.S. citizens, there is no way for them to sponsor Sylvia for legal status, unless she takes the tremendous risk of leaving the U.S.—and her family—to wait out her re-entry bars before applying to return many years later.

These legal re-entry bars make it impossible for long-term undocumented immigrants, many of them spouses and parents of U.S. citizens, to “get in line” to receive a valid visa. Since the re-entry bars were created, the number of undocumented immigrants remaining permanently in the U.S. has grown substantially.

By repealing the bars and allowing immigrants with deep ties to the U.S. to access the legal pathways for which they qualify, Congress could help keep American families together.

Re-entry bars prevent immigrants who voluntarily leave the U.S. from returning legally for years

Legal re-entry bars, also referred to as “unlawful presence” bars or “three- and ten-year bars,” are punishments applied to undocumented immigrants who remain in the United States without authorization.
Undocumented immigrants, whether they entered unlawfully or overstayed a visa, who remain in the U.S. without authorization for more than six consecutive months are considered to be “unlawfully present.”

If they then leave the United States, even voluntarily, re-entry bars are applied to prohibit them from re-entering through any legal channel for some years.1 The duration of the re-entry bar depends on how long they were unlawfully present in the U.S.—less than a year is a three-year bar, and anything longer is a ten-year bar. If they have entered the U.S. without authorization multiple times, even as children, they may be subject to permanent bars.2 The re-entry bars separate families and bar integral members of our communities for years.

The re-entry bars are a relatively recent policy, created as part of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 (IIRIRA) signed into law by President Bill Clinton. However, migration trends and the makeup of families and communities living in the United States have changed significantly since they were implemented, warranting renewed consideration of their effectiveness... READ MORE