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Iraq
war veteran cries foul against U.S.
immigration policy
WSN Network
Throwing U.S.
immigration policies and their arbitrary application into stark
focus, an Iraq war veteran who suffered brain damage and back and
joint injuries while serving in the U.S. army has returned home,
only to find that an outstanding deportation order is pending
against his wife.
Jack Barrios, 25,
who lives in
Los Angeles
with his wife and two small children said his wife, emigrated from
Guatemala, and has lived in the United States for 15 years.
When the couple
sought to legalize her status, they learned she had an outstanding
deportation order from a court in Nebraska – where she never lived.
Her father once applied for asylum when she was a minor and included
her name on the application.
Unfortunately,
Barrios’ experience is not unprecedented and echoes the plight of
thousands of illegal immigrants who see the United States as the
land of opportunity but are unprepared for extreme backlash against
immigrants by advocates for tighter restrictions against illegal
immigrants. The situation only worsened in a post-9/11 world.
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Guatemalan
wife of Iraq war veteran faces deportation after living in the
United States for 15 years |
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Immigration
applicants in the
U.S.
are made to navigate a labyrinth of federal paperwork, lengthy
backlogs, and undergo unpredictable rule changes. Even permanent
legal residents can be detained and deported over an innocent
misstep, minor infraction, or government error.
And in addition to
this long winding process, they also have to deal with the overt
hostility of groups like the Center on Immigration Studies who have
been very successful in affecting a step up in Federal law
enforcement and counter-terrorism efforts against immigrants.
They have lobbied
successfully for measures at the federal, state, and local levels
they hope will wear down the will of immigrants to live and work in
the United States, as well as to dissuade potential newcomers.
Across the country, state and local officials actively denied public
services to illegal immigrants, banning landlords from renting to
them, and making it a crime to transport them.
The situation got
worse in 2006 as federal agencies jacked up the annual immigration
arrest quota from 125 to 1,000, and dropped its initial directive
that 75 percent of those arrested had to be guilty of something
other than a routine immigration violation.
In the program’s
five years, nearly three-quarters of the nearly 97,000 immigrants
arrested had no criminal records. 40 percent of those arrested in
2007 didn’t even have outstanding deportation orders. Meanwhile, the
budget for the operations rocketed from $9 million to $218 million
in five years, faster than that of any other Department of Homeland
Security immigration enforcement program.
The Department of
Justice’s (DoJ) prosecutions of petty immigration violations doubled
from 2000 to 2007 and then doubled again in 2008 to more than 70,000
cases, taking money and manpower away from tracking down dangerous
felons like weapons smugglers, organized crime syndicates and drug
kingpins.
But the Obama
administration is trying to reverse its enforcement priorities. In a
joint White House press conference recently, DHS Secretary Janet
Napolitano and other top officials said they plan to redeploy
hundreds of ICE, Border Patrol, and other federal agents to the
border. “We are suspending other small-scale stuff,” said one
Homeland Security official. “We are focusing our priorities.”
8 April 2009
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