The Trump administration’s narrative that ICE activity is focused on removing criminals has in the past few days been shredded by disparate actions, attempting to remove persons who can in no way be considered criminals and in one case even an immigrant. As these types of cases proliferate, as they must for ICE to triple its number of cases, public opinion will swing hard against the administration.
April 8: Zhuoer Chen, a graduate student at UC Berkeley, learned that ICE revoked her F-1. A Chinese national in the U.S. since 2017, she has maintained full academic and immigration compliance. According to SFGate, the revocation was reportedly due to an arrest that resulted in no charges, and the record was expunged. She, along with three other international students, filed a lawsuit alleging that the visa terminations were arbitrary and violated due process rights. The case highlighted concerns over ICE’s reliance on entries in the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) database, which included minor infractions or expunged records.
Roughly 1,000 of the 1.2 million international students have had their student visas revoked. In response to very many legal challenges, the Trump administration announced on April 25 that it would reinstate the legal status of affected students and halt the policy of revoking visas based solely on crime database entries.
April 22: ICE detained a mother who is unauthorized and two U.S. born children, one two years old, and put them into detention in the Alexandria, LA area. Federal district judge Terry Doughty received a petition for a temporary restraining order on April 24. By the time the judge made inquiries, the mother and her two children had been flown to Honduras. This confirms the importance of instant filing of a TRO petition. A hearing in district court is scheduled for May 16. There are five million persons under the age of 18 with at least one unauthorized parent. (Go here and here.)
April 24: The spouse of an active duty of the Coast Guardsman with an expired visa was arrested in the family residential section at U.S. Naval Air Station at Key West, Florida. According to the AP, The official said that when the woman and her Coast Guard husband were preparing to move into their on-base housing on Wednesday, they went to the visitor control center to get a pass so she could access the Key West installation. During the routine security screening required for base access, the woman’s name was flagged as a problem. Base personnel contacted the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, which looked into the matter, said the official. NCIS and Coast Guard security personnel got permission from the base commander to enter the installation and then went to the Coast Guardsman’s home on Thursday, the official said. They were joined by personnel from Homeland Security Investigations, a unit ICE. There are over one million “mixed status couples” in the U.S (go here).