Deportations for non-criminals soar

Even the good hombres……

Andres Magana Ortiz, 43, a businessman in Hawaii who has lived in the United States for nearly three decades. He has fathered three children born in the United States, the oldest of whom is 20 years old and attends the University of Hawaii. His wife is a U.S. citizen. He is well established in Hawaii’s coffee farming industry and worked with the U.S. Department of Agriculture in researching pests afflicting the island’s coffee crops, allowing the government to use his farm without charge to conduct a five-year study. A federal judge, Stephen Reinhardt, called him “by all accounts a pillar of his community.”

The Department of Homeland Security began proceedings to remove Magana Ortiz when it filed a notice for him to appear in 2011 with the Immigration Court in Honolulu. He is about to be deported, having lost all appeals, removed to Mexico and will be subject to a 10-year bar against his return to the United States. He has no black marks against him, except two drunk driving incidents long ago that were not the grounds for his deportment.

The Washington Post wrote that in Trump’s first 100 days in office, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested 41,318 immigrants, up 37.6 percent over the same period last year, the agency said Wednesday. Almost 3 out of 4 of those arrested have criminal records, including gang members and fugitives wanted for murder. But the biggest increase by far is among immigrants with no criminal records.

“This administration is fully implementing its mass-deportation agenda,” said Gregory Chen, government relations director for the American Immigration Lawyers Association. “They’re going after people who have lived here for a long time.”

Acting ICE director Thomas Homan said the statistics released Wednesday show that agents still prioritize lawbreakers: 30,473 criminals were arrested from Jan. 22 to April 29, an 18 percent increase from the same period in 2016.

Meanwhile, arrests of immigrants with no criminal records more than doubled to nearly 11,000, the fastest-growing category by far.

“Will the number of noncriminal arrests and removals increase this year? Absolutely,” Homan said. “That’s enforcing the laws that are on the books.”

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