Dear 2016 Presidential Candidates:
As the 2016 race just begins to get its first official contestants, the American people, especially Latino and immigrant communities, want to know where they will stand on one of the most important issues facing this nation: immigration.
Congress has shown, time and time again, that it is completely unwilling to address immigration, allowing only bills attacking Dreamers to pass through the House of Representatives and never touching even the rightward-leaning Gang of 8 bill that passed the Senate with strong bipartisan support.
Ferrying legislation through Congress will not be easy or quick, and will require executive solutions to bridge the gap between now and the enactment of new laws. Mere rhetorical support for immigration legislation built around the same tired talking points will not be enough to win our support or the support of a powerful Latino electorate.
Legal experts from around the country agree that a President has expansive legal authority to act to temporarily protect additional groups from removal — and that this authority is rooted in statute, court opinion, regulations, and precedent. President Barack Obama took such action on immigration but did not go far enough in exercising executive power.
Needless to say, the latest lawsuit against President Obama’s immigration actions are nothing more than political theatrics by the far right of the Republican party and not based on law.
Nevertheless, what will be the fate of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and Deferred Action for Parental Accountability (DAPA), programs that provide deportation relief to Dreamers and undocumented parents of US Citizens? Would the candidates strip young people and parents of their only chance to keep their families together while Congress struggles to put together a legislative solution?
There are still, however, many young people and parents of children raised in the U.S. with deep roots in the country that didn’t qualify for DACA and DAPA: these programs should be extended to help keep more talent and families intact and in the US. Additionally, the President should allow Dreamers to serve in the Armed Forces to ensure our military has its pick of the largest talent pool possible to train the next generation of soldiers and officers.
Much like the African-American community, the Latino community in general, and the Latino immigrant community in particular, have had serious issues with both policing and incarcerations: the example of Anastasio Rojas being beaten and tased to death on video by the Border Patrol while on the ground and handcuffed and Arizona’s Joe Arpaio attack on immigrants and Latinos are only two of many examples of racial profiling around the issue of immigration.
At a time when so much criticism is being leveled against a lack of transparency for the police, agencies like the Border Patrol are literally the least transparent, least accountable law enforcement agencies in the country. As a nation that values respect for human rights, the next President must ensure border patrol agents respect the lives and dignity of those they police.
When local law enforcement is used to enforce immigration law, it puts a strong wedge between the community and police, especially when women who go to the police to report victimization or reach out for help wind up detained and then deported by the same police they approached.
We need a President who will break the ties between local and immigration enforcement for all nonviolent offenses, as well as address the broad, systemic problems between police agencies, such as the Border Patrol and Immigration Custom Enforcement (ICE), and minority communities.
Significantly, the bed mandate is an arbitrary policy offensive to contemporary notions of due process written into the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Security Appropriations Act of 2010. ICE has interpreted this as a mandate to contract for and fill 33,400 beds in detention centers, which was increased in 2013 to 34,000.
As an agency DHS is, of course, subject to Executive authority: if the President were to direct DHS to interpret the funding differently, such as interpreting the 34,000 beds as an upper limit rather than a minimum, this could drastically change immigration detention.
While Congress is still re-learning to tie its shoes, the country needs an Executive who will protect our families, that our broken immigration system, and equally broken Congress, have failed.
We, the undersigned, and through this memo, outline the expectations that we have for the next President of the United States. We hope that the person elected will overcome the hyperbolic politics surrounding immigration, rather than being dragged by it. Dreamers will be watching and we will be holding accountable those who refuse to accept our principles that promote unity in our families.
Sincerely,
Add Your Name or Organization to Endorse the OPEN LETTER TO 2016 PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES
The 2016 presidential season has kicked off, and candidates from all sides are talking about immigration, expressing their support or opposition to offering status to the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. As directly affected individuals who have been at the forefront of the immigration battle, we are writing this memo to outline our expectations from a presidential candidate that truly wants to fix our broken immigration system.
Immigration reform is an easy talking point to use for candidates when reaching out to the immigrant and Latino electorate as everyone agrees the current system is broken and ultimately needs a permanent legislative solution. We, however, expect that the our future President will not only work with Congress, but also demonstrate leadership and take action to bring needed changes.
After years of Congressional failure and pressure from Dreamers, immigrant and Latino communities, President Obama was pushed to issue the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program that would offer deportation relief to Dreamers, young people brought into the country as children. After several more years of pressure, Obama recently came out with Deferred Action for Parental Accountability (DAPA), which was set to expand relief to the parents of US Citizens and legal permanent residents before being tied up in a lawsuit -- initiated by the far right of the GOP -- days before implementation through a preliminary injunction.
While legislation passed by both chambers of Congress and signed by the President is our ultimate goal, the political reality is that legislation will not happen in the next few years, even if there is enough support lined up behind reform to push it through Congress again.
In the absence of of congressional action, our community expects executive solutions that will provide protections to undocumented parents and workers who should qualify for immigration reform legislation, such as the way DACA has offered protection to some Dreamers.
Also important is that we do not get pulled to the right on militaristic border enforcement: if the Corker-Hoeven Amendment wasn’t enough, there is no amount of money, fencing, troops or Predator drones that will appease the the nay-sayers who use border security as an excuse to do nothing.
DACA has granted Dreamers temporary legal presence and allowed us to apply for driver’s licenses and working papers. DACA has also enjoyed broad support from the American people. That is why we are asking the current and future President to allow those who came under 21 years old to qualify for DACA.
Back in November of 2014, President Obama announced his Deferred Action for Parental Accountability (DAPA). DAPA offers protections similar to DACA to the parents of US Citizens and legal permanent residents.
We need to know that the next President would not only keep DAPA, but also expand on the program established by President Obama. While it may be a temporary solution, it will protect many parents and workers that would obviously be low-priority according to agency guidelines yet are consistently deported, at least until a legislative solution can be found.
Part of a larger narrative of rampant incarceration within the United States, the immigration detention industry has grown considerably in recent years. Considering the conditions in detention facilities in general, as well as the conditions in women and children’s facilities in particular, it is no surprise that immigration detention has been one of the most controversial topics in immigration.
The “bed mandate” has often being decried across most of the political spectrum: it’s called as arbitrary and unnecessarily cruel by immigrant rights activists, as well as unnecessarily expensive by conservatives. With horror stories coming from detainees in general (and the LGBT community and women in particular) about treatment inside detention centers, it’s no wonder that immigrant rights organizations, women’s rights groups and the LGBT community have organized against the treatment in detention, such as the recent mothers’ hunger strikes within Karnes detention centers and the demonstrations stopping deportation busses.
Private prison centers currently make up 62% of all detention beds. The two largest private prison companies control the vast majority of the privatized immigration detention center beds, while the Federal Bureau of Prisons spends around 5.1 billion dollars to keep immigrants in detention centers.
One factor which keeps coming up is the triviality of the offenses of those incarcerated in these cut-rate prisons: often the first point of contact between the undocumented immigrants in detention facilities with the authorities is a traffic violation. While the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) found that the average national detention time was around 31 days, nearly 5,000 people had spent at least 6 months in ICE custody, and some of them will spent years in detention before even getting a hearing.
A. Conditions in Detention Facilities
The conditions in detention facilities are similar to prisons, however, detainees are known to have fewer legal protections, can often easily be deported and, since their conditions are often even less understood than most prison facilities, are even further marginalized.
Conditions in general have been deplorable as the push to cut expenses for a large population of inmates, often a popular political move, has taken its toll on food, medicine and other services inside detention facilities. Some of the abuse in these facilities includes: impeding family contact and exclusion from rehabilitative programs; arbitrary, long sentences of solitary confinement for offenses like not speaking English or as retaliation for protesting conditions; overcrowding so bad that it led to a large settlement in 2008 that resulted in spreading disease, psychological damage and poor sanitation; patterns of unchecked violence from guards with little to no accountability; allegations of rampant sexual abuse in women’s facilities; maggot-infested food and feces-smeared walls, and this is only a short version of what is a very long list of civil and human rights abuses that stem from private companies cutting every corner possible to give their shareholders the margin of profit required by their fiduciary duty.
Of particular concern are at-risk populations like women, children and the LGBT community. For example, poor background checks resulted in convicted sex offenders repeatedly sexually assaulting the young girls they were in charge of; after a string of sexual assault allegations against the guards, Karnes detention center for women and children had repeated hunger strikes organized by mothers detained within the center; LGBT detainees are 15 times more likely to be sexually assaulted, and, again, this is the short list.
The next president must act to see the number of people crammed into these facilities reduced, practices like arbitrary solitary confinement (fought by Amnesty International as a human rights violation) done away with and the companies who profit from and continue to push for more arbitrary imprisonment to be kept in check. This should include special protections for at-risk populations like women, children and LGBT detainees.
B. Bed Mandate
The bed mandate is an arbitrary policy offensive to contemporary notions of due process written into the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Security Appropriations Act of 2010: “… funding made available under this heading shall maintain a level of not less than 33,400 detention beds.”
ICE interpreted this as a mandate to contract for and fill 33,400 beds in detention centers, which was increased in 2013 to 34,000. The quota remains despite congressional attempts to eliminate it from the 2014 DHS appropriations bill.
As an agency DHS is, of course, subject to Executive authority: if the President were to direct DHS to interpret the funding differently, such as interpreting the 34,000 beds as an upper limit rather than a minimum, this could drastically change immigration detention. Such changes would have an immediate, positive effect in communities that will see the return of many members of their community through alternative forms of keeping tabs on people with immigration cases, such as reporting in or wearing ankle bracelets, rather than detention in privatized prisons that have shown themselves to often give sub-human care to inmates.
These changes could also save the government millions as non-detention alternatives often cost a fraction of what locking someone up would, and these are often people with no criminal records whose first point of contact with authority is often over something as minor as a traffic ticket.
Alternatively, the President could negotiate that the next budget be written specifically with language that does away with this mandate or reinterprets it.
C. Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) and GEO Group
With private prison companies becoming larger and more profitable as we continue to keep record numbers of people in prison, a large growth sector prisons have seen is in immigrant detention: it’s no wonder that companies which all but control a multi-billion dollar industry have gained a say in Congress. In addition to spending millions on lobbying, they have donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to individual candidates on both sides of the aisle, such as the Gang of 8’s Sen. Chuck Schumer, though after Citizen’s United it is difficult to tell how much they give indirectly to whom.
The CCA and GEO Group have extensively lobbied Congress on the issue of immigration. For example, the CCA spent nearly $10 million on lobbying the DHS Appropriations Subcommittee since 2008 alone. The Appropriations Subcommittee maintains the immigration detention quota language and directs the way in which the language is interpreted. These are the same companies cutting every corner possible on detainee health and safety.
Presidential candidates and a future President must break connections with companies who actively encourage the environment in which particular types of human rights violations are known to occur.
DACA, which grants a work permit and social security number, currently does not change military enlistment policy as only U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents are able to enlist or be commissioned as officers; thus, DREAMers cannot enlist in the armed services. There is precedent, however, to allow non-citizens to serve in the military.
On November 25, 2008, U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates signed a memorandum authorizing the Secretaries of the Army, Navy, and Air Force to implement a new non-citizen recruiting pilot program for the United States Armed Services titled “Military Accessions Vital to the National Interest” (MAVNI). Significantly, the MAVNI program expanded the categories of persons who could lawfully enlist.
Utilizing Section 504(b)(2) of the enlistment statute, the secretary of Defense determined that the enlistment of certain high quality legal immigrants without green cards was “vital to the national interest” and authorized the military branches to commence the MAVNI pilot program. The MAVNI program sought to recruit healthcare professionals and persons who spoke strategic languages.
Under the same authority, the President and secretary of Defense could supplement the DHS Deferred Action policy by directing the service secretaries to allow DREAMers with deferred action to enlist because their enlistment is “vital to the national interest.” If updated, DREAMers who serve honorably under the secretary’s directive would be able to apply for U.S. Citizenship immediately. No further legislative action would be required if President Obama promulgates a directive to the Department of Defense, though Congress can step in if it sees the importance of the issue.
As America struggles to deal with the issue of minorities and the abuse of police authority, the Border Patrol is a particularly glaring example. Because the Border Patrol does not have to report when they kill someone, it is impossible to get accurate data on how often this occurs, but it has happened to at least 28 people between 2010 and May 2014.
Despite the overall lack of accountability and transparency, a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request on complaints discovered 809 abuse complaints between January 2009 and January 2012 alone, with abuse ranging from physical to verbal to sexual. 97% of these cases resulted in “No Action Taken.” which has created a culture of absolute impunity, one that feeds directly into the narrative surrounding the lack of charges in Anastasio Rojas’ case.
In a story with many parallels to that of Eric Garner, Anastasio Rojas was an undocumented immigrant beaten severely by the Border Patrol, who died the next day in the hospital after he threatened to report his poor treatment by Border Patrol agents. The Border Patrol agents brought Rojas outside, then handcuffed, beat and tazed him in front of several witnesses, several of whom pleaded for the agents to stop. None of the border guards had criminal charges filed against them. The resulting cellphone video became the subject of a PBS investigative report, “Crossing the Line at the Border.”
Over the past several years, the resources of Border Patrol and other immigration enforcement agencies has greatly increased, but with little or no change to responsibility. Like other aspects of American law enforcement, we need to see more transparency and accountability brought to agencies like the Border Patrol and ICE.
A. Failure of SCOMM and now PEP
Secure Communities (SCOMM), like other programs that utilize local police to enforce immigration law, has been deemed a failure across the board: this has ranged from LGBT rights organizations to immigrant rights organizations to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Jeh Johnson, and was ultimately ended. This was because it placed a strong wedge between the community and police, and did not end up making communities safer.
This isn’t particularly surprising: the program would often turn over immigrants who were going to the police to report crimes, victimization or for emergency assistance, over to ICE. Once word would spread in the community that the police were turning people over to ICE, undocumented members of the community, or even US Citizens with undocumented family members, would refuse to interact with police. This then gives the signal to criminals that they can prey on the undocumented community, and becomes especially bad when women are afraid to report sexual assault or domestic violence to the police, one of many reasons why women’s groups have come out strongly against SCOMM.
Because SCOMM was an expensive program accompanied by distrust between communities and police, jurisdictions like Miami-Dade County in Florida, cities like San Francisco and even entire states like California figured out ways to opt out of SCOMM until it was finally replaced by the Priority Enforcement Program (PEP).
While the lessons of SCOMM are generally applicable, there are still programs in place like 287(g) to the Immigration and Nationality Act that allow DHS agents to deputize local law enforcement to enforce immigration law.
We need executive action, such as clear agency guidelines with force behind them, that prevent the sort of cooperation between immigration and local police over nonviolent, often trivial offenses: this can arbitrarily result in deportation if the wrong immigrant runs into the wrong police officer on a bad day, and that results in a level of distrust that makes policing difficult.
B. Expand “low priority” criteria, and put more force behind guidelines
Guidelines for deportation have been largely ignored: we can look to the fact that Erika Andiola’s mother, the head of her family with a previous deportation, was put on a deportation bus after getting a traffic ticket: it was only through immediate mobilization of many groups and even members of Congress that we were able to keep her in the country. She still has to report to ICE, and every year her family goes through the drama of not knowing whether or not they will have another year with mom in the country. If she were deported, it would be to a place where much of her family will never be able to see her again out of fear of their own immigration status.
We have seen ICE define people convicted of minor misdemeanors as “criminal aliens,” those previously ordered deported as high priority “fugitive aliens” and those who presented false papers as “egregious immigration law violators.” This has been done without regard to the fact that many were involved in nonviolent, victimless offenses.
There have been guidelines to go after fugitives and not families, with a recent DHS memo from Jeh Johnson to “continue to prioritize threats to national security, public safety and border security.” This is much the same rhetoric as we saw in the Morton Memo, however, and initial reports on this reprioritization have shown that they are similarly not being obeyed.
We need a President who would be able to push as many of these low-priority cases into some sort of status, perhaps similar to DACA or DAPA, as possible. We need to see agents being held accountable for ignoring guidelines and put force behind agency priorities to make sure that immigration resources are not being wasted in tracking down and incarcerating non-violent offenders indefinitely.
C. Operation Streamline
Operation streamline is a “zero tolerance” enforcement program, one which focuses on bulk prosecutions on the border and brings in tens of thousands of migrant workers. In this program, the initial appearance, arraignment, plea and sentencing is combined into one mass hearing for 70-80 defendants.
Defendants have little access to counsel, and are pressured to plea more intensely than in other areas of the criminal justice system in light of lengthy maximum sentences. Most first-time border crossers are sentenced to time served, whereas reentrants without criminal records typically receive 30-90 day sentences, despite the fact that many of those sentenced would be entitled to relief.
Operation Streamline needs to be eliminated by a future President as it has caused a flood of immigration cases along the border and wasted resources going after low-priority border crossers. In addition, while the program purports to catch every border crosser possible, it is simply impossible to stop every border crosser; in the end, it is a large waste of resources that denies defendants even the most basic protections of Due Process spent in a futile attempt to seal up the border that profits nobody but the private prison companies who hold the undocumented immigrants caught in this deeply flawed, arbitrary net.
When making the dangerous journey from Central America to the U.S., 80% of the refugee children do not have enough food or water. The trip is so exploitative that around 80% of the women and young girls that make the trip are raped, and those are only the ones that survive the trip (and sometimes escape sex traffickers) to tell their story.
Part of the reason we saw a flood of undocumented children in courts is because the United States passed a law requiring some legal processes to prevent sex trafficking among at-risk young people, such as the children who show up on our border that we know are at a higher risk of being trafficked. It was so uncontroversial at the time it was passed that even one of the most hyperbolically anti-immigrant members of Congress, Louie Gohmert (R-TX), voted for it.
We need a President who will appreciate the human rights of those that we find on our doorstep, especially children that we know have escaped poverty, violence and exploitation, survived a hellish experience to get here and will have even worse waiting for them if they were to be deported. A President who will cut through the politics of abortion amendments and presidential appointments like Loretta Lynch to get to the heart of the human trafficking matter; push back strongly against the hyperbolic rhetoric to humiliate those who stand against the rights of the trafficked; and make adjustments at the agency level, and perhaps at the executive order level, that will help to guarantee the basic human rights of the children that we continue to see coming.