Immigrants who are detained by ICE often get deported out of state so quickly that their attorneys don’t have time to file petitions to keep them in the state where they were arrested.
AILSA CHANG, HOST:
Immigration officials are transporting thousands of people across the country to detention centers in states like Texas and Louisiana. Michigan Public’s Beenish Ahmed reports that some of these flights take off so fast that lawyers must scramble to keep their cases in their home states.
BEENISH AHMED, BYLINE: Western High School (ph) in Detroit has a special program for new arrivals to the U.S. Santiago Jesus Zamora Perez is a junior and the pitcher for the school’s baseball team.
KRISTEN SCHOETTLE: Santiago is a personality.
AHMED: This is his English teacher, Kristen Schoettle.
SCHOETTLE: He often wears this, like, bright pink sweatshirt that I’m picturing him in right now.
AHMED: But she hasn’t seen him lately. Perez and his mother are Venezuelan asylum seekers. They were driving through a suburb about 20 miles outside of Detroit on a Sunday evening in early December when they were stopped for a broken tail light. Local police turned them over to immigration authorities. The next afternoon, the mother and son were waiting on a plane to take them to an out-of-state detention center. Meanwhile, a judge had just granted their attorney, George Washington, a temporary restraining order that would keep them in Michigan.
GEORGE WASHINGTON: We beat the clock by about 90 minutes.
AHMED: But it wasn’t enough. ICE still flew Perez and his mother to a Texas detention center. Washington thinks ICE acted so quickly to keep them from contesting their detention in a Michigan court.
WASHINGTON: Arrested them and had them out of town in less than 24 hours. They treated them like they were criminals, and the worst thing they had was a broken tail light and driving too slow.
AHMED: The Trump administration has claimed its immigration enforcement efforts are focused on people involved in criminal activity, but data shows the vast majority of people ICE arrests have no criminal record. The Department of Homeland Security didn’t respond to our request for comment about the Perez case. They are among tens of thousands of people detained by ICE in out-of-state facilities.
RAUL PINTO: It is much, much harder to prepare with a client that is thousands of miles away.
AHMED: Attorney Raul Pinto is with the Immigration Council of America (ph), which advocates for immigrants’ rights.
PINTO: It is also no secret that some of the immigration courts with jurisdiction over the new destinations were more difficult to try to get out on bond.
AHMED: He says judges in Louisiana and Texas are also less likely to grant asylum. It’s a process that can take years. Asylum seekers can stay in the U.S. while they wait on backlogged courts to make a decision. But now, thousands of asylum seekers are getting picked up by ICE and often deported. Attorney Washington says the Perezes fled persecution in Venezuela and arrived in the U.S. about a year ago. He believes Perez and his mom have an excellent case for asylum if ICE releases them.
WASHINGTON: The problem is they’re trying to force them to drop it by telling him they’ll hold him in jail for two years until they get around to a holding hearing.
AHMED: So now, instead of being in school in Detroit and preparing for the start of baseball season, Perez is detained in an ICE facility in Texas. Last week, a judge ruled that the Perezes should be returned to Michigan for a bond hearing. It’s not clear when that will happen. His English teacher, Kristen Schoettle, says she’s been getting online messages from Perez.
SCHOETTLE: He’s been, like, fluctuating between being hopeful and being really unhopeful and really miserable and, like, resigned to a fate where he is deported.
AHMED: And she says, Perez’s empty desk makes his immigrant classmates worry they could be next as ICE arrests continue.
For NPR News, I’m Beenish Ahmed in Detroit.
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