‘Poster child’ remains on deportation list
Homeland Security refusing favorable consideration
When Lansana Gottor filled out his information at a voter registration drive in 2016, the then-19-year-old high school senior had no idea that a simple form would lead to an immigration nightmare years later.
Gottor, 26, a Columbus resident, has been a permanent U.S. resident since he first came here from Sierra Leone at age 15 to reunite with his mother, who has since become a U.S. citizen.
In late 2020, however, Gotto was put in deportation proceedings after U.S. immigration authorities discovered that he cast a ballot in the 2016 primary election as a teenager. He said he did not know that green card holders are not eligible to vote.
Gottor, who has no criminal record, is a “poster child” for the type of noncitizens who should receive favorable consideration under President Joe Biden’s immigration enforcement priorities, according to Emmanuel
Olawale, a Westerville immigration and civil rights attorney representing him.
But prosecutors at the Department of Homeland Security’s Detroit office, which covers the state of Ohio, have refused to dismiss Gottor’s case due to his “history of illegal voting in the U.S.,” according to email exchanges between DHS officials and Olawale that the attorney shared with the Dispatch.
“My client is not a security threat, and his whole life and family are in the U.S.,” Olawale said. “This is a clear case where local officers are not following what Biden is asking them to do and are using their personal judgment to hinder the administration’s own directive.”
Representatives for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) did not respond to a request from the Dispatch to comment on Gottor’s case or the implementation of the Biden administration’s immigration enforcement rules.
“This is a clear case where local officers are not following what Biden is asking them to do ...” Emmanuel Olawale, Westerville immigration and civil rights attorney
The U.S. immigration system is now facing the largest court backlog of immigration cases on record at more than 1.7 million, compared with only 325,000 a decade ago, according to statistics compiled by Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a data-driven research institute at Syracuse University.
To unclog the backlog, President Joe Biden has made several policy changes since he came into office, directing Department of Homeland Security officials to focus their limited resources on noncitizens deemed threats to national security, public safety or border security.
These directives were aimed at Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers in charge of arresting and deporting immigrants as well as at attorneys at the Office of the Principal Legal Advisor (OPLA) who act as DHS prosecutors in court.
In April, the Biden administration issued another memo to OPLA attorneys, which built on an interim memo that came out about a year ago and offered further clarifications on the department’s authority to drop low-priority cases.
Despite all the administration’s efforts, it still can be a struggle for eligible immigrants to argue for relief, according to Jorge Loweree, policy director at the American Immigration Council, a Washington, D.c.-based nonprofit.
“There are some serious cultural issues within DHS that historically has limited the government’s ability to try to constrain enforcement activities, and we see this continue to play out within this administration,” Loweree said. “This is not only harmful to the hundreds of thousands of immigrants who are directly impacted, but will also limit the government’s ability to meet its own goals.”
Meanwhile, Biden’s policies have been the subject of multiple lawsuits. In December, for example, Republicans in Ohio, Arizona and Montana filed a lawsuit against the Biden administration over a September 2021 memo that set out the parameters for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers’ arrest and deportation efforts.
These lawsuits have created confusion on the ground and contributed to the inconsistent application of Biden’s policies, according to Loweree.
“There’s been a great deal of confusion, and at one point, it seemed like some of the DHS officers were taking the position that the memos no longer applied to them,” he said. “There have also been new memos coming out to replace the old ones, and that also raised questions as to which ones still applied to them.”
In Cleveland, where the only immigration court in Ohio is located, DHS attorneys have not been consistently granting prosecutorial discretion to all qualified cases, according to Emily Brown, director of the Immigration Clinic at the Ohio State University’s Moritz College of Law.
“DHS attorneys might interpret these
memos in their own way and act differently in different field offices around the country,” Brown said. “In my experience, sometimes DHS attorneys in Cleveland would just ignore or deny immigrants’ requests for prosecutorial discretion.”
Brown said she is optimistic that the latest Biden administration memo issued in April — which more clearly stated that DHS attorneys are authorized to dismiss all non-priority cases — could lead to improved situations for immigrants in Ohio. But it is still unclear how big of an impact the new policy will have because it is still up to individual officers to make these decisions on a caseby-case basis, she said.
After the latest memo was issued, Olawale made another request for dismissal of Gottor’s proposed deportation. He said he has not yet heard back
from the DHS’S Detroit field office.
Gottor, whose grandfather was a sergeant in the Sierra Leone military, said he dreams of enlisting in the U.S. military or getting an education in criminal justice so he can become a police officer — dreams that he has had to put on hold due to his ongoing deportation case.
“This whole situation has taken a toll on me. I’ve been in the U.S. since I was 15, and Sierra Leone is like a foreign country to me now,” Gottor said. “I can’t go back.”
Yilun Cheng is a Report for America corps member and covers immigration issues for the Dispatch. Your donation to match our RFA grant helps keep her writing stories like this one. Please consider making a tax-deductible donation at https://bit.ly/3fnsgaz. ycheng@dispatch.com @Chengyilun