The Obama administration this weekend began detaining Central Americans who have evaded deportation orders, launching a crackdown on people illegally in the country amid an increase in migrants trying to cross the southwest border.

Just before Christmas, government officials confirmed that the Department of Homeland Security was planning a clampdown on Central American migrants in January that would include women and children. The operation began in Georgia and Texas, immigration attorneys and advocates said Sunday.

Representatives of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Georgia and Texas declined to comment, saying the Homeland Security agency doesn’t discuss ongoing operations. It was unclear Sunday how many people had been taken into custody.

If the raids spread across the country, they would mark the first large-scale operation mounted specifically against Central Americans.

“We are expecting these raids to occur on a national level” since “these families are all over the country,” said Michelle Mendez, a lawyer with Catholic Legal Immigration Network Inc., a national immigrant-rights organization.

A DHS official said Sunday that “attempting to unlawfully enter the United States as a family unit does not protect individuals from being subject to the immigration laws of this country.”

“The repatriation of individuals with final orders of removal—including families and unaccompanied minors—to their home countries is part of our broader ongoing effort to address the rising surge of families and individuals arriving at our southern border,” the official added.

Victor Nieblas, president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said the plight of the immigrants needs to be taken into account. “These Central American women and children are truly refugees seeking asylum; they fear for their lives. These women and children must have a meaningful chance to claim protection instead of being rushed back into harm’s way,” he said.

Charles Kuck, an immigration attorney in Atlanta, said that “we had a mother and her three children taken by ICE, pretending to be looking for a ‘criminal’ and asked to enter the house to check whether he was there.” Mr. Kuck added, “We do not yet know where they were taken.”

Many Central Americans likely to be targeted for removal missed court dates to fight their deportation because they lacked an attorney, advocates say. Public defenders aren’t provided to those in the country illegally.

“Instead of ensuring access to legal counsel and due process so eligibility for asylum can be properly determined, the federal government is sending these families back to the terror and violence they fled. America is better than this,” said Ali Noorani, executive director of the National Immigration Forum.

On Thursday, more than 150 national and local civil rights groups and religious, children’s and women’s organizations sent a letter to the president opposing planned raids.

The last time targeted roundups occurred on a large scale was about a decade ago, when the George W. Bush administration conducted high-profile raids at meatpacking plants and other work sites to detain undocumented workers.

The number of families trying to enter the U.S. illegally has jumped in recent months as gang-related violence grips El Salvador and Honduras. The region also has been plagued by drought.

Typically, the migrants turn themselves in at the border and make asylum claims. U.S. authorities then release them, often to live with relatives in the U.S., while their cases are adjudicated. Agents can track many of them down with relative ease because the government has their addresses.

DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson in recent months warned that those whose claims are denied in immigration court could be removed from the country.

Despite an overall sharp drop in illegal entries in recent years, the Obama administration has been bracing for a surge of unaccompanied children and families from Central America in coming months.

In recent weeks, the federal government began to add capacity to handle the increase, because migrants are housed at least temporarily in government facilities.

More than 12,000 individuals in family units were apprehended at the border in October and November, compared with about 4,500 in the same months of 2014. The number of unaccompanied minors caught during those two months topped 10,000, compared with about 5,000 in the same period a year earlier.

That has raised concerns that the number of Central Americans trying to enter the country could jump in 2016, as it did in the summer of 2014, when more than 10,000 Central American minors a month came into the U.S.

In interviews, many of the migrants said they had heard they could remain in the U.S. if they reached the interior of the country.

Some mothers who had crossed with their children were forced to wear electronic bracelets to track their movements and ensure they reported for immigration hearings.

Many families remained detained at the border for months, drawing strong criticism from human-rights groups and immigration attorneys.

A federal judge ruled last year that immigration officials must quickly release from detention centers families with children, posing a further challenge to the administration’s efforts to curb the flow. The administration has appealed.

The Obama administration has been criticized by both immigrant advocates and immigration hard-liners over its border policy. Advocates dub President Barack Obama “deporter in chief” while Republicans accuse him of failing to secure the border.

GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump tweeted last week about the looming raids: “Democrats and President Obama are now, because of me, starting to deport people who are here illegally.”

Xandu posted:

The article didn't go into much detail about the asylum claims, which would presumably prevent deportation until they've been resolved. Are those claims just being rejected en masse?

quote:

While most public attention focused on minors who were crossing the border alone, the number of children who came with a family member — known as “family units’’ in DHS parlance — also spiked dramatically.

With the government overwhelmed at first, many of the families were simply released and told to appear at later immigration court dates to determine if they would be granted asylum.

Some never showed up or had their asylum claims rejected and were ordered deported by immigration judges, officials familiar with the process said. That population is among those expected to be targeted in the upcoming raids, they said.

Immigrant rights advocates and legal experts say the families and minors were in many cases not granted adequate representation and were confused by the asylum procedures in court.

JeffersonClay posted:

I'm not really sure how Hillary Clinton organizing states in the Western Hemisphere to demand Honduras hold elections after the coup did anything to further destabilize the country. And an opinion piece by a hardcore Chavista doesn't help to answer the question.

quote:

The US Department of Homeland Security chief forcefully defended the start of a controversial deportation operation that resulted in the apprehension of 121 adults and children, mostly Central American immigrants who sought legal asylum in the United States but were ordered to leave the country.

“As I have said repeatedly, our borders are not open to illegal migration; if you come here illegally, we will send you back consistent with our laws and values,” Jeh Johnson, the secretary of homeland security, said on Monday.

Johnson and other officials said those who were detained over the weekend were largely Central American migrants who had crossed the southern border illegally after 1 May 2014 and were subject to final orders of removal from an immigration court. Raids in Georgia, North Carolina and Texas accounted for the majority of those now in custody, though Johnson characterized them as part of “concerted, nationwide enforcement operations”.

While harsh and, at times, inflammatory rhetoric about immigrants has emerged on the 2016 presidential campaign trail, a senior administration official said the raids had “nothing to do with the caterwaulings of any member of the political class”. Instead, the action reflected, the official said, a longstanding reaction to the increase in Central American families and unaccompanied children attempting to cross the US-Mexico border.

Johnson said that additional surges in immigration enforcement “will continue to occur as appropriate”.

The deportation campaign amounts to the first large-scale effort to deport people who fled violence from drug wars in Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador and Belize.

quote:

U.S. immigration officials are planning a month-long series of raids in May and June to deport hundreds of Central American mothers and children found to have entered the country illegally, according to sources and an internal document seen by Reuters.

The operation would likely be the largest deportation sweep targeting immigrant families by the administration of President Barack Obama this year after a similar drive over two days in January that focused on Georgia, Texas, and North Carolina.

Those raids, which resulted in the detention of 121 people, mostly women and children, sparked an outcry from immigration advocates and criticism from some Democrats, including the party's presidential election frontrunner Hillary Clinton.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has now told field offices nationwide to launch a 30-day "surge" of arrests focused on mothers and children who have already been told to leave the United States, the document seen by Reuters said. The operation would also cover minors who have entered the country without a guardian and since turned 18 years of age, the document said. Two sources confirmed the details of the plan.

The exact dates of the latest series of raids were not known and the details of the operation could change.

The operation in January marked a departure for ICE, part of the Department of Homeland Security, from one-off deportations to high-profile raids meant to deter migrants from coming to the United States.

An ICE spokeswoman said the agency does not "confirm or deny the existence of specific ongoing or future law enforcement actions." The spokeswoman said immigrants who arrived illegally after Jan. 1, 2014 are priorities for removal.

Federal resources were strained in 2014 under a wave of illegal migrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, especially women and children fleeing violence in Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala.