How Legal Immigration Became a Deportation Trap

[Nevilledog]

https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-immigration/how-legal-immigration-became-a-deportation-trap

No paywall link
https://archive.li/Kp2Nx

One morning last month, a Minneapolis resident, whom I’ll call Anna, was pulling into the parking lot at work when she noticed a fleet of dark, unmarked S.U.V.s idling nearby. A group of immigration agents dressed in street clothes emerged from the vehicles before she could get out of her car. One of them called her by her name. “I know who you are,” he said. “I know you’re a refugee.”

Anna’s first thought was to explain that there was some mistake. “I wasn’t afraid,” she later told me. At the end of 2024, she and her family, including her four children, who are from a country in Central Africa, were granted refugee status in the U.S. The federal government had resettled them in Minnesota, a state which they found cold and strange but mercifully quiet. Her immigration papers, which she always carried with her, were in order. “I thought I was going to talk to the man and show him my documents,” Anna said. Instead, as soon as she opened her car door, he put her in handcuffs.

For the next several hours, Anna sat in a room at a local Immigration and Customs Enforcement office, forbidden from calling her family or a lawyer. No one told her what was happening. At around eleven that night, wearing shackles around her wrists and ankles, she was put on a plane and flown to an immigration jail in Texas. Outside the cell where she would spend the next five days was a makeshift sign that read “USCIS Cases.”

Anna knew the abbreviation: U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services was the government agency to which she’d been submitting her legal documents. Since its creation, in 2002, U.S.C.I.S. has been the lone immigration agency at the Department of Homeland Security that doesn’t make arrests or participate in enforcement sweeps. Unlike the armed agents of ice and Border Patrol, the roughly twenty thousand officials at U.S.C.I.S., none of whom have traditionally carried weapons, primarily act as administrators of the legal-immigration system. Almost all of the agency’s budget is funded by fees paid by immigrants applying for visas, residency status, and benefits. The applicants are often referred to as “customers” by agency staff. At U.S.C.I.S., one former official told me, “We were seen as the friendly, supportive side—the agency that tried to help people.”

*snip*