Panic mounts over US immigration deadline
WASHINGTON POST
US PRESIDENT Donald Trump’s decision to wipe out deportation reprieves for young undocumented immigrants has unleashed a frenzied rush to renew 154 000 permits before an October 5 deadline, a process advocacy group says will cost millions of dollars in fees and stretch their resources to the limit.
In hurricane-ravaged Houston, lawyers are clearing their calendars to help immigrants fill out the forms. In Maryland and Virginia, advocates are holding emergency meetings and recruiting volunteers. Nationwide, immigrants and non-profits are raising money online to help cover the $495 (more than R6 000) renewal fees.
“It’s definitely one disaster after another: one of natural causes and one man-made,” said María Rodriguez, executive director of the Florida Immigrant Coalition, based in Miami, which was preparing for Hurricane Irma on Friday. “It’s heartbreaking.”
The Trump administration announced that it will eliminate Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or Daca, an Obama-era executive action that protected hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants who were brought to the US as children. Nearly 700 000 people have that protection now, government officials said last week. Critics say then-president Barack Obama did not have the authority to create the programme when he set it up in 2012, and they say Daca beneficiaries take jobs and other benefits that should go to legal residents.
Those whose deferred-action status is expiring between September 5 and March 5, 2018, have a month to apply to renew their work permits. A successful application would be only a reprieve, valid for two years.
“It fell on people like a bag of bricks… and it’s only starting to sink in,” said Joshua Hoyt, executive director of the National Partnership for New Americans, a coalition of organisations providing legal services to immigrants. “It’s 5 133 [renewal applications] every day, including today. That’s 214 per hour, if we work all night long.”
Advocates are urging Trump to extend the October 5 deadline to give immigrants a chance to raise money to pay the renewal fees.
They also say that immigrants in Texas and Florida, which have large undocumented populations, could miss the deadline because of the extreme disruption caused by Hurricane Harvey.
“There are whole neighbourhoods that are still flooded,” said Leslie Crow, a lawyer with BakerRipley, a Texas non-profit organisation helping immigrants apply for work permit renewals. “People have lost their cars. People have lost all of their belongings… I have heard from a few parents: ‘I have no idea how I’m going to be able to make that payment now’.”
In Virginia and Maryland, advocates are mobilising volunteers to quickly review renewal applications, tapping into a network of lawyers that formed after Trump’s January executive order banning entry to the US by citizens of certain majority-Muslim countries. The stakes, the advocates say, are high.