Over 900K face delayed deportation
Causes for setbacks vary; only felons were seen as priority during Obama administration
There are a little more than two weeks between Juan, an electrician in the Bronx, and the date he cannot forget: 8 a.m. March 21, when the federal government has told him to report for deportation.
Two weeks to decide: Avoid it, and try to preserve the American life he has built for a little longer, even as a fugitive. Go, and lose it all: his wife and son, his job, his apartment, his world.
“I would feel like an animal if I stay here and hide,” said Juan, 29, who asked that his last name not be used. “I want to prove that I can follow the laws. I want to make my case at this meeting, but I know that if I go, they’re going to deport me.”
In an immigration system mottled with escape hatches and hobbled by scant resources, Juan, who fled Colombia six years ago, is one of nearly 1 million people who have managed to linger in the United States despite having been ordered out of the country by an immigration judge — some of them more than a decade ago.
And with the Trump administration intent on sweeping perhaps millions of immigrants without legal status out of the country, the White House has not had to look far to make a quick mark. Because people with deportation orders have had their day in court, most of them can be sent out of the country without seeing a judge, sometimes within hours of being arrested.
“People who have been ordered deported and who are still here are the low-hanging fruit,” said Stephen Yale-Loehr, an immigration law professor at Cornell University. “Trump has said he has wanted to deport more people. The easiest way to get those numbers up are to take those people who’ve been ordered deported and go after them.”
President Donald Trump’s immigration agency has offered what looks like a preview: Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents recently deported to Mexico an Arizona mother who had been ordered out of the country four years ago.
But the follow-up will be complicated. The backlog of what the government calls “fugitive aliens” has persisted through Republican and Democratic administrations, inflamed conservatives who oppose illegal immigration, and resisted the immigration authorities’ attempts at enforcement.
Since 2006, even as the overall total of unauthorized immigrants in the United States has dipped, the number facing outstanding deportation orders has grown by more than half, to around 962,000 people from 632,726. More than half of them come from Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala or Honduras.
Despite the Bush and Obama administrations’ oft-stated commitments to focus on expelling those who pose a serious danger to their communities, slightly less than 1 in 5 people facing deportation has been convicted of a crime in the United States. The causes for delays can vary. Deportations have been deferred for humanitarian reasons — like allowing mothers to stay with sick children in the United States — or they have been frozen while an appeal is mounted. The Obama administration put off deportations for thousands of immigrants it did not consider priorities, including Juan, the Bronx electrician.
“Felons, not families; criminals, not children,” President Barack Obama said in 2014, describing the kinds of people he wanted deported.
The White House has sought to make it harder for immigrants to be remain free inside the United States while their requests for asylum plod through the courts. They will be detained more often, or asked to wait in Mexico until a judge can rule.
In a significant break from his predecessor, Trump is directing immigration agents to go after virtually anyone who is in the United States illegally, ending the reprieve for people who had not been considered priorities. “Ensure that aliens ordered removed from the United States are promptly removed,” one line of Trump’s executive order on immigration reads.
In the case of Juan, the electrician, nothing remains to stop the government from acting on the deportation order he first received in 2013. Juan had requested asylum after paramilitary forces in Colombia tried to kill him, he said, but he lost his final appeal the month Trump was elected president.
“I feel hopeless,” Juan said. “My wife is here, my son is here, they are my world. I have nowhere else to run to. I’ve run out of options. I don’t know what to do.”