Trump bond rule leaves more people stuck in immigration custody indefinitely

This article was produced by Capital Main It is published here with permission After Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested a man who was filling up at a gas station in El Monte the agency sent him to Otay Mesa Detention Center in San Diego his attorney reported in court The man had been in the U S since his attorney declared He and other people in this story with pending immigration proceedings are not being identified due to safety concerns Prior to President Donald Trump s return to office the man would likely have qualified for a bond as long as he had no key criminal history meaning that an immigration judge could set an amount for him to pay to be issued from custody while his development proceeded But since May a published decision from the Board of Immigration Appeals has dramatically changed the rules for bond hearings leaving plenty of stuck in detention for indefinite periods of time It expanded the number of people who were not entitled to bond hearings in front of an immigration judge declared Ginger Jacobs a San Diego immigration attorney Numerous under pressure from ICE officers and weary of conditions in custody have decided to give up their cases and accept deportation Immigration account When ICE arrests U S citizens there s little clear path for what happens next The newest arrest of a grandmother in San Diego is an example playing out across California where federal agents in pursuit of undocumented immigrants also detain U S citizens who they say get in their way One man who was in recent times distributed from custody stated Capital Main during an interview that the night before his bond hearing ICE came to him and pressured him to give up They declared Sign and you ll get out of here early the next day he noted ICE did not respond to a request for comment In July the man arrested in El Monte sat for a bond hearing in a courtroom at the San Diego detention center while Immigration Judge Guy Grande appeared on a television screen Grande opened with a question Do I have jurisdiction He was asking whether he was even allowed to hold a bond hearing for the man ICE attorney Jonathan Grant instantly brought up the Board of Immigration Appeals decision known as the Matter of Q Li U S law separates people apprehended by immigration leaders into several categories two of which are major to the decision First there are those who are arriving meaning they re in the process of entering the U S For example people coming to a port of entry to request asylum who don t have visas or other entry documents would be considered arriving People who are arriving generally do not qualify for bond hearings under immigration law Second there are people who are present in the U S without inspection Historically someone who crossed the margin and was later apprehended on U S soil would generally be considered present and could seek a bond hearing But that s now changing with the Q Li decision In that incident Territory line Patrol apprehended Q Li a woman from China shortly after she crossed into the U S in June according to court records Li was about yards north of the territory line at the time The Department of Homeland Defense disclosed her the next day on parole with the condition that she check in periodically with ICE according to court records In October Interpol narrated the department that the woman was desired in Spain for movement document forgery and human smuggling court records say Officers arrested her and began an immigration circumstance against her A judge denied her bond Li appealed The Board of Immigration Appeals decided that Li should not have a bond hearing at all The outcome of Li s immigration episode is unclear The decision says that people initially apprehended soon after passing the edge should not have a right to bond hearings even if they were paroled into the U S after that initial apprehension according to immigration attorney Kevin A Gregg who runs the Immigration Review Podcast The decision has meant that various of the people whom ICE arrested after immigration court hearings have not been able to request bond to get out of custody Gregg declared What you re doing is taking thousands of people if not more pursuing cases in nondetained proceedings and putting them in detained proceedings for no other reason than to fill private prisons and make it more hard to bring cases Gregg announced And people give up because being detained for months and years is a very harsh thing Gregg reported one of the issues with the decision is that it doesn t define how close to the demarcation or how soon after navigating the demarcation the apprehension has to happen in order to trigger mandatory detention Both Gregg and Jacobs declared that ICE attorneys are incorrectly pushing to use the Q Li decision to take bond hearings away even from people who have been in the U S for years and were not initially apprehended when they crossed into the country I don t see that in the occurrence Jacobs reported But ICE isn t constantly winning its arguments In July an ICE attorney argued that the Q Li decision should apply in another affair before Judge Grande this time regarding a man from Vietnam who had been arrested after an immigration court hearing But Matthew Springmeyer an attorney representing the man argued that both his initial parole paperwork after spanning the territory line with CBP One a phone app that the Biden administration used to schedule asylum seekers to come to ports of entry and the warrant issued for his arrest after an immigration court date referred to the part of immigration law for people present in the U S not people who are arriving The regime is trying to go back in time and change its own process Springmeyer announced They can t walk that back now Grande decided he had the authority to make a bond decision He inquired the ICE attorney whether the man was a danger to the society or a flight danger the two reasons why someone can be held in immigration detention which is civil rather than criminal custody The ICE attorney reported the Vietnamese man had no criminal history She argued that he was a flight liability because his immigration event was dismissed though the man had appealed that decision Grande reasoned that prior to the man being detained he was showing up to his court hearings and granted the man a bond of One of the factors that the Board of Immigration Appeals used in the Q Li decision to distinguish between who should be mandatorily detained and who should get bond hearings is whether the arrest involved a warrant according to Gregg Someone initially arrested with a warrant is considered present while someone arrested without a warrant might be arriving Margin executives and ICE can make arrests without judicial warrants but they cannot force their way into homes to make those arrests without judicial warrants But countless of the people swept up in fresh ICE raids around the country are arrested without warrants because bureaucrats are using tactics including racial profiling to stop people they believe to be undocumented In the event of the man arrested in El Monte Grande noted that there was no warrant for the man s arrest He urged whether the attorney representing the man wished time to write a brief on whether Q Li applied in his matter He reported the attorney that in his initial take the decision would apply The way I read Q Li is pretty expansive Grande explained In the end the attorney withdrew the bond request to try to figure out how to better present the development In late July according to immigration court records the man gave up his event and required to leave voluntarily Capital Main is an award-winning nonprofit publication that reports from California on the majority pressing economic environmental and social issues of our time including economic inequality conditions change medical care threats to democracy hate and extremism and immigration Copyright 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