While according to official figures, more
than 63,000 immigrants have been detained over the past
year, Richard Iandoli, an immigration lawyer, estimates
the number at 100,000.
Of those detained, as many as 70 percent,
most of them legal residents, have been deported, according
to the Department of Homeland Security, reports the Pacific
News Service.
On Sept 30, 1996, a new immigration act
was introduced called the “Immigrant Responsibility
Act of 1996.” This act allows for the deportation
or removal of any alien - illegal, legal and non-immigrant
– convicted of a misdemeanor or felony that carries
a punishment of at least one year in jail, regardless
of whether they served the sentence or whether it was
reduced to simple probation. The most disturbing parts
of this Act are that the law is retroactive and the definition
of “felony” has been expanded.
The Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration
Services states that the “primary purpose of the
1996 amendment was to expand laws regarding the removal/deportation
of criminal aliens”, no matter when the crime was
committed, expanding a whole class of people who are now
deportable. People who committed a crime in the 1970s
are already facing deportation without hope of appeal.
“They are putting a more serious penalty on something
that a person has already done,” according to defence
lawyer Ricardo M Barros.
If a legal immigrant had committed a crime
years earlier, paid his penalty through jail or probation,
he now has to worry about being deported even if the offence
was committed 20 years ago. “If you commit one of
these crimes and you are married to a United States citizen,
there used to be a waiver appeal because of the marriage.
That has been struck; you don’t have that process
anymore. It does not matter if you have four children
who are American citizens or not. The waiver, the relief
that legal immigrants got, has been eliminated,”
says Barros.
According to the Pacific News Agency,
“Moreover, prior to the introduction of this law,
a legal immigrant could face deportation if he had been
convicted of an aggravated felony which meant murder,
any illicit trafficking, including firearms, money laundering,
or any crime or violence for which a prison term of five
years or more was imposed. The new Immigration Act has
changed all that. The meaning of ‘aggravated felony’
for immigration purposes has changed and it now includes
less serious crimes such as: shoplifting, driving under
the influence of liquour, fraud, burglary, minor technical
violations of immigration law - such as failure to update
addresses and other required information within mandated
deadlines - and many other misdemeanors where a one-year
sentence or imprisonment was ordered by the court regardless
of any suspension or withholding of execution.”
The definition of aggravated felony was
also made retroactive, so that someone with a conviction
20 years ago that was not grounds for deportation when
the crime was committed is now deportable without any
possible relief, even though they may have lived an exemplary
life since. Although the law was introduced by the Clinton
administration, it was unevenly enforced until after the
9/11 catastrophe. Since then, all those arrested are being
held without bond until a deportation hearing or until
they waive their rights to such a hearing. If the crime
was committed after the act was enacted, the right of
a hearing is waived. Many of the legal residents apprehended
had been living quiet, law-abiding lives for many years.
They now face removal charges for a crime they may have
committed decades ago and for which they have already
paid The old saying that once an offender has been punished
he can be said to have “paid his debt to society”,
no longer applies to those who are not US citizens.
Immigration experts describe the new revised
law as a massive and complicated piece of legislation
which curtails and in most cases ends American life for
an alien, and in numerous cases causes extreme hardship
and undue separation of families.
