by Jorge Mujica
Mexico del Norte
That Immigration make a mistake here ant there and deports a US citizen is not a novelty. Of course, such a citizen has to be Latino for that to happen; it would be a real mistake if they deport a 6-foot tall blonde guy, although it has happen on occasion. That means you have to have a certain profile to become a wrongful suspect for La Migra.
In any case, a recent analysis reveals that, contrary of what the saying says, the exception seems to be the rule in thousands of cases. In the last three months of fiscal year 2010, the year Barack Obama’s regime broke the World Record of Deportations, Immigration Courts rejected one out of every three proposals to deport people. Maybe the hurry to break the record was such that La Migra misinterpreted the orders and made an extraordinary effort to also increase its previous year’s numbers, which were of one rejection in every four cases.
And that’s nothing. Counting the whole Fiscal Year 2010, Immigration Courts rejected about half of all cases! Worse, the rejection percentage in New York was about 70 percent; in Oregon was 63 percent, same as Los Angeles; in Miami was 59 percent, and in Philadelphia was 55 percent.
In the last five years, according to the report, rejections by the Courts because immigrants had the right to remain in the United States, added up to a quarter of a million. The report was put together by TRAC, based on information obtained under a Freedom of Information Act petition, after several negative responses from La Migra to release the data.
By the way, and before someone thinks this is just a communist plot to badmouth La Migra, TRAC stands for Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, from the Executive Offi ce for Immigration Review (EOIR), a unit within the Department of Justice, where Immigration Courts are housed. Meaning, besides the tremendous name, it happens to be a government offi ce.
Effectively Ineffective
TRAC went through the records of 3.4 million cases to put out its report, which covers the last 12 years, from 1998 until 2010. In the last fi ve years, they found 94,949 cases in which the judges closed the case because there was no reason for the solicited removal, and 151,682 other cases in which the judges, instead of granting the deportation, granted legal residency to undocumented immigrants! Taking those numbers into account, the reports’ authors have to pose a big question: Is La Migra being effective, meaning, are they trying to deport the bad guys, or are they just trying to deport anyone?
The answer is more than obvious. No, La Migra is not being effective and it is not trying to deport the deportables, the famous “criminal aliens” Obama says was going to get rid of to secure the country instead of deporting Pedro and Juanita. In other words, it seems that every time they look for a serial killer and don’t find him, just to justify the operation they try to deport the upstairs neighbor and the barrio shoemaker.
When those cases reach the Immigration Court, they bounce because Pedro and Juanita happen to have a pretty decent working record, US born sons and daughters and have nor harmed anyone.
In many cases the explanation is that La Migra is chasing legal residents who half a million years ago committed some kind of offense, today considered by law as a “deportable offense”. But since cases are so old and the offense is not a major one, the judges reject the cases. Among the bouncing game, says the TRAC report, there are a myriad of cases of immigrants who have the right to be granted legal residence, even a conditional one, and the majority are simple cases where deportation was not guaranteed. That proves, by the way, the poor action of a bunch of immigration officers who had previously rejected asylum petitions or residency to a bunch of immigrants. That’s why when La Migra gets to them and tries to deport them, the Judge does what the desk bureaucrat should have done and did not, and grants them residency.
The conclusion is the same as always, but now it is based on numbers: both the law and the authorities’ actions are worth nothing, and the solution is to give people the possibility to become legal instead of wasting money, saliva and time. A second conclusion is… if you get caught… fight back! You have a pretty good chance to stay here legally!
