While the immigration enforcement surge in Minneapolis has wound down, targeted arrests,
including in Wisconsin continue.
The mass deportation policy has the immigration system scrambling to keep up.
What kind of limbo does this leave people in?
And what is happening in the immigration system?
We turn to immigration attorney Grant Sovereign.
Thanks very much for being here.
Thank you for your interest.
So you have described the immigration system right now as an emergency on two fronts.
How so?
Well, on one side, there are just so many more people being picked up than there ever have
been before.
I mean, it appears that there's some sort of quota that ICE and Border Patrol have to
reach.
So it's just an unbelievable, unprecedented volume of people that we have to address.
And we have to get to them quickly.
If we don't find them within a day or two days or at the most three, they get moved
to a facility away from their family, away from a lawyer who can help them in a jurisdiction
that's often much more difficult.
But on the second side, the government is just changing the rules.
Every day, every week, something that lawyers have to find out about when you're in court
and waiting for a hearing, and they're just changing the rules that make due process almost
impossible for anybody to get.
Speaking of changing the rules, what do you think among people who have followed all the
rules to become U.S. citizens?
Or they're here on some kind of protected status or refugee status or something like
that?
Yeah, I think we hear from the government that all immigrants are criminals, and therefore
they should be deported.
And then we also hear, if only you wait in line, like everybody else, if only you file
the right application, which frankly does not exist anymore, but successive presidential
administrations have come up with their own programs because Congress basically hasn't
done an overhaul of the immigration system since 1952.
But we can look back at presidents, Ronald Reagan presided over the biggest amnesty that
there ever was.
George Bush created the temporary protected status.
Barack Obama created the DACA for dreamer kids.
So there have been programs that all sorts of presidential administrations came up with
because Congress hasn't done anything to create a law in a real visa category or program.
But because of that, the next president can just cancel those things.
And this administration has been doing that left and right.
So people who followed every rule they're supposed to fill out the right application
weighted when they should, paid the right fee, are now being told that we are making
you illegal.
If that's a term that can be used that the administration uses, but they have done everything
right, especially now we're talking about people from really problematic places like
Ukraine and Venezuela and places with civil wars and natural disasters where people have
gotten the application, been approved, and are here in a legal path.
The government just pulls the rug out from under says, you're no longer illegal.
And the worst that I can think of from our own perspective are the 800 family people
from Afghanistan who are airlifted out of Kabul, who helped us and our government, who
are now being told that the programs that they have temporary protected status or humanitarian
parole are no longer valid.
And so we're going to pick you up if you are still in that status.
And there's a brand new rule out this week about refugees.
This is something it has been going on for almost 75 years in the United States where
we take people who have been languishing in refugee camps around the world for 10 or
15 years and give them a new life in the United States.
That's called refugee status.
Asylum status are people who come to the United States and apply for permission not to be
sent back because they're personally being persecuted because of their race, their political
opinion, their membership in a particular social group.
And we grant them refugee status or asylum status.
The government gets to pick how many people get to be refugees and this government has
decided we will have basically none except for maybe some people from South Africa.
But all these people are ones who have participated in this program, have been granted status
by the State Department or by the Immigration Service.
And they're allowed to stay in the United States indefinitely because they can't be
sent back.
They shouldn't be sent back.
The law says they shouldn't be sent back.
And yet just this week the government turned a rule that says you may apply for a green
card within a year from your refugee asylum status so you can have permanent residence
status, stay, work wherever you want, travel in and out of the United States.
They've now turned that rule around to say if you didn't apply for a green card within
a year, we reserve the right to detain you, to investigate you and potentially deport
you for no stated reason whatsoever except it seems like to have more numbers to be able
to say to the American people, we've deported a lot of people.
What kind of scramble is this for people in your line of work?
Yeah, I can't tell you, times are difficult enough, like where I work at the Community
Immigration Law Center, there are lawyers who are fighting every day and it's a really
tough job just normally between the volume and the stories and the humanitarian side,
kids and families.
But now the government is just changing everything they do and it is a very difficult situation
to try and represent somebody.
If you don't have a lawyer right now, I can tell you you have a hundred percent chance
of being deported because the rules have changed so much, the ground on which we are standing
in immigration court is changing every day or every week.
So without a lawyer, without the legal system that we have, and I know lots of people will
say, well the government isn't paying attention to court orders, they are for the most part
in immigration court where we work, but as those all change, you don't even know what the rules
are going to be the next day, for example.
If you do have a lawyer, what are your odds?
Starting from the other side, you have zero chance, but with a lawyer, the problem right
now is the government isn't giving us any data about what's happening in court.
I can tell you that we have people who are succeeding who have a lawyer in their deportation
cases in whether or not they get picked up and whether or not they get bombed, the government
is currently saying that nobody is eligible for a bond basically.
We file habeas corpus petitions in federal court to demand that immigration judges give
somebody a bond hearing, but I mean I could tell you a case that happened just in the
past few weeks with our organization is somebody was applying for asylum from Latin America
because they had a very bona fide claim of persecution that would happen to them if they
got sent back to their home country and fortunately came to us at the last minute and said,
will you please come with us and we didn't have time to prepare?
But when we went there, we found out about these alternative country agreements that
the government is using to say, well, we can't send you back to your home country because
of persecution, but we're going to send you to some third country to which you've never
been before and without a lawyer to know that that's going to happen and to prepare a case
about what would happen to that person if they got sent, for example, in Latin America,
the government has arranged this agreement to send almost everybody to Honduras.
If you're from Africa, everybody is sent to Uganda and without a lawyer, there's almost
no way for you to prepare that and even with the lawyer, it is extremely difficult.
Where does this end up?
I try not to look too far into the future.
We are so day to day trying to find enough lawyers, trying to make sure that people get
some form of due process, both for the families but also for our community.
The fact that you can be picked up, sent to another country and in the middle put in
prison for a potential civil violation without any due process is something that I and people
in our community in Wisconsin can't abide.
Everybody should have a fair shot at least.
The rules, you might have an opinion one way or the other about what our immigration rules
say, but let's at least apply the rules to everybody and I think everybody can get
behind that.
So, I think every day I and the lawyers who work at the Community Immigration Law Center
are trying just to make sure today's people are getting some due process.
So all we can do is see what's in front of us today and do the best we can.
All right.
We leave it there.
Grant Sauver.
Thanks very much.
Thank you.
It's really interesting and it's kind of an enforcement, you know, actions and that
kind of things.
Yeah, I would suggest, you know, the ACLU is doing a bunch and the folks who are in their
Milwaukee office and there's some here too, but they're at the front end of like the civil
right side of it, like what was happening in Minneapolis, but yeah, the other side of
it, like just the immigration law part of it is what we're dealing with.
But you know, the shocking part is who gets picked up and people getting shot and all
that, which, you know, we're not even addressing.
There's plenty to address.
Isn't there?
Yeah.
Wow.
Well, thank you.
We'll take the rest of the day off.
You've done a great job on this one.
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