Life for America's immigrants
Le quotidien des immigrés clandestins dans l’Amérique de Donald Trump.
Aux États-Unis, depuis l’élection de Donald Trump, la question de l’immigration est au centre de tous les débats. Le président américain, qui a été élu sur des promesses de campagne telles que la construction d’un mur à la frontière mexicaine, n’a eu de cesse, depuis le début de son mandat, de prendre des mesures pour endiguer l’immigration illégale. Comment cela affecte-t-il les quelque 12 millions d’immigrés clandestins que compte le pays ?
When Nak Kim “Rickie” Chhoeun arrived at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) field office in Los Angeles last October, he thought it would be a routine check-in. Instead, he was arrested and detained for six months, unsure whether he would ever see his family, friends or apartment again.
2. Chhoeun is one of the nearly 12 million people in the US who are looking over their shoulders for Ice, the interior enforcement immigration agency emboldened by Donald Trump to round up every undocumented immigrant. Ice agents show up unannounced at workplaces, doorsteps and courthouses, ready to arrest anyone without legal papers and send them through the agency’s detention centers and back to the country they came from.
3. A year after his arrest, Chhoeun has now learned routine check-ins are a thing of the past and under Trump life is dramatically different for the millions of other undocumented people, just like him, who have spent decades building lives in the US. “I’m actually living like I’m still locked up because any minute they could come and pick me up and deport me,” Chhoeun, a 43-year-old who came to the US as a Cambodian refugee in 1981, told the Guardian. “Everything I have now is just temporary.”
ICE’S NEW ROLE
4. Five days after taking office, Trump signed an executive order that effectively stopped Ice from prioritizing criminals for deportation. Instead, they are now going after all the estimated 11.3 million undocumented immigrants in the US at once – drawing little distinction between hardened criminals and productive community members who have started businesses, bought homes and paid their taxes. This includes a 10-year-old with cerebral palsy Ice arrested in October 2017 after she left a Texas
hospital for treatment.
5. “The idea is to try to send the message to communities that everybody is at risk of deportation by arresting all sorts of people who are no kind of threat and who very well may be productive members of their communities,” said Omar Jadwat, director of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project.
INCREASE IN ARRESTS
6. From January to October 2017, Ice arrested 37,670 people who had no criminal convictions, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (Trac) a non-profit, non-partisan data center at Syracuse University. That’s a 125% increase from the year before, when Ice arrested 16,673 people with no criminal convictions, according to Trac data published last month. That jump is what has alarmed immigrant communities most, because it represents people picked up in a variety of scenarios, including outside courthouses, in workplace raids and at their homes.
IN THE SPOTLIGHT
7. The increase in non-criminal arrests has not gone unnoticed by the American public. Indeed it has thrust Ice into the national debate over immigration; the agency is now feared, dreaded and hated by some, and lionized and exulted by others.
8. San Antonio-based consultant Alonzo Peña was Ice’s deputy director from 2008 to 2010 and worked in the agency and one of its precursors, the US Customs Service, since 1984. He said until Trump took office, Ice went largely unnoticed outside the immigration community. Now, it regularly receives praise from Trump and attacks from the left, where an “abolish Ice” movement has emerged.
9. Ice was designated in 2003 under the homeland security department formed in response 7. in the spotlight sous le feu des projecteurs, à la une de l'actualité / to go, went, gone unnoticed passer inaperçu / to thrust, thrust, thrust propulser / to dread redouter, craindre / to lionize encenser / to exult ici, porter aux nues. 8. deputy director directeur adjoint / praise louanges, éloges. 9. homeland security department département de la Sécurité intérieure (chargé d'organiser et d'assurer la sécurité intérieure du pays) /
Until Trump took office, Ice went largely unnoticed outside the immigration community.
to 9/11. It succeeded the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), an agency whose tasks were divided among three other immigration agencies including Ice, which took up the investigation and enforcement role. Where Customs and Border Patrol is focused on border apprehensions, Ice is focused on interior enforcement and has the authority to investigate anything that crosses the border including drugs, money, weapons and people.
10. Peña said it was “absolutely not” a realistic goal for Ice to deport all undocumented immigrants in the US and that the country needs comprehensive immigration reform to address the problems Trump claims to be resolving. “Why would you take that budget that’s limited and not use it to say we’re going to go after the worst people who are illegal and here?”
A TARGET FOR LAWYERS
11. Ice’s higher profile and more aggressive arrests have made the agency a target for lawyers nationwide. In June, Ice arrested Pablo Villavicencio, a pizza delivery man in New York City, when he arrived with a bulk lunch order at Fort Hamilton army base. The father of two, who had applied for a green card before arrest, was fast-tracked for deportation but the government dropped the case in October after it received international media attention.
12. Chhoeun has been able to stay in the US because of a lawsuit filed by the Asian Law Caucus, Asian Americans Advancing Justice – Los Angeles (AAJC) and Sidley Austin LLP, on behalf of 1,900 Cambodian refugees subject to final orders of removal. Like Chhoeun, most of the class members moved to the US decades ago seeking refuge from the Khmer Rouge, whose rule left a quarter of Cambodia’s population dead from starvation, disease or execution.
13. Chhoeun said he does not have strong ties to the country. Before coming to the US at age six, he mostly lived in a Thai refugee camp. His mother, three brothers and three sisters are US citizens. He said he can’t buy a new television, car or house because he doesn’t want to spend the money if he could be whisked away at any moment while his lawsuit plods on. “It’s hard to live like that,” Chhoeun said. “I live in fear.”