Two More Legal Residents Caught in the Maw of our Immigration-Security-State
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Over the past several months, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has made concerted efforts to overhaul our flawed immigration detention system—aiming for more transparency and broadened federal oversight. Deserving of equal attention, however, is Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) loose enforcement policy, which also ensnares legal immigrants.
Last week, the L.A. Times
reported that ICE wrongfully detained two legal immigrant women who were permitted to be in the country under the Violence Against Women Act
(VAWA). According to the article, Maria de Barrera was arrested in her Los Angeles home after ICE showed up looking for people who no longer lived at the residence. Even though she showed ICE agents her worker’s permit, she was taken to an immigration detention center until her lawyer showed up with VAWA documentation.
Another legal immigrant permitted to live in the U.S., Elvira Ayon, was arrested in Delano, CA and carted off to an immigration detention center in Arizona where she stayed for one month. Again, she was released only after her lawyer arranged for her release.
ICE spokeswoman, Virginia Kice, chalked the wrongful detentions up to ICE’s lack of access to DHS’s databases where information on immigration permits and benefits are kept. Kice also suggested that wrongful detention cases like these “don’t occur very often.”
See more stories tagged with: immigration, ice, legal immigration
Seth Hoy is a writer at Immigration Impact.
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