Torn Apart by Homeland Security, Immigrant Families Struggle to Stay Together

By Julianne Hing and Seth Wessler, ColorLines RaceWire. Posted October 23, 2009.

In recent months, the Obama administration has announced plans to expand the 287(g) program despite widespread abuses and racial profiling. It’s also pouring money into “Secure Communities,” a program that puts immigration agents into local jails. Meanwhile, more beds are being added to the vast and notoriously flawed detention system.

The White House officially put immigration reform on the back burner at the same time that they’re heating up enforcement tactics on the side.

Families are being torn apart by deportation at the treacherous intersection of immigration enforcement and the criminal justice system. ColorLines went on the road from the US to Jamaica to report their stories.

In Kingston, Jamaica, Marlene Brown labors tirelessly with the Family Unification and Resettlement Initiative, also known as FURI, an organization that helps ease the adjustment of deportees who arrive on Department of Homeland Security’s weekly charter flights into Norman Manley International Airport.

Brown was deported herself, after being found guilty by association when her boyfriend at the time was caught driving her car with drugs inside. She’s been gone for three years now and longs daily to be back with her two sons who are growing up without her.

Since her deportation, Brown’s older son graduated from West Point, and her younger son from high school. She was absent for both ceremonies.

All her fire to change the future for other families, if not for her own, is poured into counseling newly deported people to help them find footing in a country many have not seen since their childhood and where they have nobody.

Obama’s enforcement tactics, taken from Bush’s toolbox, exacerbate a law passed back in 1996, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Individual Responsibility Act. With the bill’s passage, any non-citizen, even if they’ve lived in the U.S. for almost their entire lives and have families, homes and businesses to worry about, are vulnerable to detention and deportation if they come into contact with the criminal justice system.

Deportation is now the mandatory result of a long list of convictions including many low level misdemeanors, overwhelmingly for drugs.

See more stories tagged with: immigration, detention, 287(g)

Julianne Hing is co-editor of the ColorLines magazine blog, RaceWire, and editorial assistant of ColorLines magazine. Seth Wessler is a writer and Research Associate with Applied Research Center. They coauthored a ColorLines magazine investigative series on families torn apart by deportation from New York to Jamaica. The Torn Apart article series and multimedia project is available at http://www.colorlines.com/tornapart.

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