Legal status:
Deportations are not expected to be a priority, but they are a possibility.
It won’t be open season on the nearly 800,000 so-called Dreamers — immigrants who entered the U.S. without legal papers before turning 16 and have maintained a clean record — if Congress doesn’t pass a law protecting them. But they won’t be able to breathe easy.
“I don’t think we’re going to see wholesale arrests of former DACA recipients,” said Bill Ong Hing, a University of San Francisco law professor and founder of the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, referring to the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that President Trump plans to terminate.
But virtually every week, Hing said, “we read about people who are not enforcement priorities, not criminals. They would go in for a routine check and they would get arrested” and placed in deportation proceedings. The same fate, he said, awaits DACA recipients who find themselves “in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
The program, established by President Barack Obama in 2012, grants participants a renewable two-year reprieve from deportation and allows them to seek employment.
In California, the 230,000 Dreamers will remain eligible to attend college with tuition breaks and financial aid like other residents, said Pratheepan Gulasekaram, an immigration law professor at Santa Clara University. But they’ll be likely to “hide that status from classmates and co-workers,” he said, because of their ineligibility for above-ground employment and the constant threat of deportation.
Trump, who at times during the presidential campaign promised to deport all 11.5 million unauthorized migrants, has backed off since taking office — for financial reasons, among others. But he has revoked Obama’s guidelines that put certain classes of criminals and repeat entrants at the top of the list for deportation while holding out the possibility of reprieves for others.
A local example of the Trump administration’s policy came last month when Maria Mendoza-Sanchez, an Oakland nurse, and her husband, Eusebio Sanchez, were deported to Mexico. The couple had lived in the U.S. for more than two decades, owned a home, had clean records, raised children who have legal status, and had been granted earlier reprieves from deportation.
“Any time an (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agent encounters someone believed to be in violation of immigration laws, there isn’t a priority” for dangerous criminals, said Jayashri Srikantiah, a Stanford law professor and founder of the school’s Immigrants’ Rights Clinic. Under this administration, she said, agents have taken the position that deportation is mandatory for all categories.
Gulasekaram said earlier administrations chose different targets for removal. Under President George W. Bush, he said, enforcement often focused on high-profile raids on meatpacking plants and other sites where 50 or 100 immigrants might be working illegally.
Obama, after taking office in 2009, said he would focus on deporting criminals and others posing risks to public safety. But both Gulasekaram and Hing said the ground-level agents charged with carrying out the president’s guidelines often disregarded them — prompting Obama to enact DACA by executive order in June 2012, after legislation to the same effect was scuttled in Congress.
Obama nonetheless oversaw a record 3.1 million deportations during his two terms, though some analysts say the numbers were inflated by reclassifying many Border Patrol rejections of would-be entrants as deportations. Under Trump, arrests by immigration agents have increased, but deportations have declined slightly from their pace under Obama.
In announcing his plan Tuesday to revoke DACA in six months unless Congress enacts it by law, Trump said he would allow current participants in the program to apply for a final two-year renewal. He declared his “love” for the Dreamers and said they would not be singled out as targets for deportation if their program expired.
That might not reassure Jessica Colotl, a 28-year-old college student in Georgia whose DACA status was challenged by federal agents after she became an outspoken advocate of changing immigration laws.
Saying Colotl had made false statements in a court case six years ago, the Trump administration removed her from DACA in May and cleared the way for her deportation to Mexico, which she had left with her parents at age 11. A federal judge issued an injunction in June that allows her to remain while she reapplies to the program.
Observed Gulasekaram: “It looked like the administration was going after people who were vocal.”