The way he was taken was not the America that I know like our own government basically kidnapped my dad and it was, it terrified me. Early on a Sunday morning in late May Jose Garcia was walking to his car to grab a coffee mug when several armed agents in bulletproof vests approached and told him he was under arrest. They just grabbed me by the shoulders and I asked them can you please let me talk to my daughter, my wife. They said no and I started screaming to Natalie. I started hearing him scream out for my name and so I ran out, like three agents stopped me, didn’t identify themselves so I didn’t know who they were.
Natalie Garcia eventually realized that the agents who arrested her father were with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, ICE. His arrest was part of an ICE sweep that had picked up 162 people including at least 8 green card holders like Garcia. And I had never expected ICE to take my parent because my dad has legal status. Her dad was a lawful permanent resident who’d lived in Southern California for more than 50 years and raised children, grand children and great grand children there. I come to America for the American dream and build a family as well.
You can actually get whatever you want when you work hard. ICE targeted Garcia based on a 17 year old domestic violence misdemeanor which he says happened when a neighbor called the police after overhearing an argument between him and his wife. The courthouse didn’t retain any documents describing the incident in any further detail.
But Garcia’s guilty plea in 2001 made him technically eligible for deportation. At the time of Garcia’s arrest, national attention was focused on the family separation crisis at the US Mexico border.
Protesters railed against the Trump administration action that separates children from parents accused of violating immigration laws. I have put in place a zero tolerance policy for illegal entry on our southwest border. And soon Garcia’s case began to receive national attention. Natalie found herself standing at the center of a media storm and defending her father. They should not even be separating families.
I became the poster child for this whole entire situation. I’m a private person in general, being in front of the camera it was never something that I wanted to do. But the more that I was the more that know it was helping my father. She told me she was going to get me out of there.
And I believed in her and I knew she was going to do it one way or the other.
The judge granted Jose’s case during the very first hearing a highly unusual move according to his Los Angeles based immigration attorney Mickenzy Mackens. The fact that mister Garcia’s case was granted at the first court hearing is extraordinary. I think the judge and the government attorney were effected by the fact that there was so much community support for mister Garcia and media attention on the case, I think it helped. After three weeks in jail, he was free again. At 11 0 clock tonight the family finally reunited but as you can imagine it’s been a long few weeks for them.
When he called out my name the first time he was arrested it was like I was called to finish this, like to help him and once everything got resolved it was like I could breathe again. Mister Garcia’s case is just once example of many where people who are members of our community, hard workers, have been picked up by ICE and targeted for reasons that are beyond comprehension for most Americans.
Donald Trump ran for president on the promise of ridding the country of illegal immigrants. We will begin removing the more than 2 million criminal illegal immigrants from the country. Five days after being sworn in as president he began making good on that promise by signing an executive order directing ICE to begin targeting all removable aliens living in the country.
The Department of Homeland Security followed suit by releasing a memo rescinding much of the discretion that ICE agents, prosecutors and judges were previously allowed to exercise in prosecuting cases. The administration has basically unshackled ICE, given it free reign to do whatever it wants and said no group is off limits. Alex Nowrasteh is an immigration policy analyst at the CATO Institute. He says the administration’s policies are an escalation of what began during the Obama years. When Obama came into office and until 2012 he was rightfully known as the deporter in chief.
He basically broke every deportation record no matter how you measure it. Now beginning about 2012, he started to roll it back, the deportation numbers are still not up to what they were for the first several years of the Obama administration.
And it’s my prediction they will never get up there again. While arrests at the border have actually decreased since trump took office, ICE arrests from the interior of the country increased by 30% between 2016 and 2017. Trump’s executive order means that they’re basically trying to draft every police officer in the country into being an immigration enforcer, while also increasing the amount of power that the federal agents already have.
It’s sort of an effort to roll back the clock in a sense to go back to the way that immigration enforcement was during the first 3 to 4 years of the Obama administration and to really go back to that deporter in chief mode.
Mackins also represents Sergio Quiroz, a 23 year old man who came over the border with his mother when he was 7 months old and has lived in the US ever since. As a kid I knew I came from Hispanic parents and a family you know but I felt like I was American you know ’cause my first language was English. Quiroz ran into trouble with immigration enforcement after getting into a fight with his ex girlfriend in 2017 he says he grabbed and threw her iphone. His court disposition says he admitted to ‘unlawfully and willfully touching another person’ which qualifies as simple battery.
The misdemeanor itself is not a deportable offence but ICE has increasingly used what are called detainers to pick up undocumented immigrants like Quiroz from local jails. I was in county for a month approximately and after that when I was getting released the same night immigration came for me and took me down to San Diego to the federal. I was just like very overwhelmed because there’s been guys in there that have been for like ten years. That’s why so many states and localities do not cooperate with ICE detainers. They see ICE detainers as a way to cast a wide net to arrest people who should not be deported.
Quiroz is now in removal proceedings and has to do regular check ins with ICE. When I think about getting deported I would have to live with the doubt and fear that I may get executed or robbed or something may happen to me out there cause I’m just a complete stranger, it’s pretty scary you know. In the same way that I think all of us would be repelled by the sense that somebody was accused of shoplifting say 20 dollars worth of merchandise and their punishment would be to be removed from the country that they know and love to be separated from all their human relationships and their property we’d all realize that that was a grossly disproportionate punishment to the offence.
And that is exactly what I’d say about this. The administration often talks about cracking down on criminals and dangerous gangs like MS13.
These are animals , they’re coming into our country, we’re getting them out, they come in again, we’re getting them out. So Garcia’s arrest shows just how little ICE has to do and how little actual threat from illegal immigrants is from a national security and public safety perspective. That they have to target somebody with a 17 year old offense that they have to target folks like him shows just how safe the situation is and how small the public safety threat is from immigrants.
When Trump got into office he made it seem like he was going after the cartels, the drug lords, the gang members and everything and who he’s actually going after and what he’s doing he’s deceiving his own supporters to be honest with you. And mister Trump has got to change his policy, he’s got to do something about it.
I still like this man, I thought he was going to do a better job but he’s doing, he don’t do- to this point he’s not doing a good job.
ICE officials declined interview requests for this story but Nawrasteh says the justice department’s policy of removing discretion from ICE agents, prosecutors and judges has exacerbated the problems of America’s overtaxed immigration system. The administration is trying to charge anyone it possibly can with an immigration offense and the maximum offense possible. The problem with this is that this clogs up the court system dramatically I mean there are almost 800,000 court cases pending in the immigration court prior to Jeff Sessions earlier in 2018 announcing that they’re gonna prosecute every border crosser so the likely numbers now are probably above a million in terms of backlog cases.
The problem with that is that the courts are so backlogged that they can’t really clear anything.
So even if ICE arrests a lot of people. they’re going to be sitting in immigration detention, they’re going to be out there on bond, they’re going to be out there on ankle bracelets so they’re really just not gonna be able to ramp up this deportation machine. Several prominent Democrats have called for the complete abolition of ICE which has existed since 2003. In order for us to feel safer in our streets, our churches, our schools and our homes we must abolish ICE. I believe you should get rid of it, start over, re-imagine it.
The abolish ICE movement is mostly just an optical one, of propaganda and phrase and slogan. The problem is if you abolish ICE now and you do not change any of the other immigration laws that are on the books another law enforcement agency is just gonna do the same thing they’re going to do it in probably about the same way and you’ve really accomplished nothing.
Rather than focusing on ICE, Nawrasteh suggest abolishing actual immigration crimes, such as illegal border crossings, and treating such an act like a civil infraction akin to a parking ticket rather than a criminal offence. And he advocates abolishing Enforcement and Removal Operations or ERO, a division of ICE. Two thirds of ERO’s arrests are for non criminal offenses or victim-less crimes.
Abolishing ERO would leave interior enforcement duties with Homeland Security Investigations or HSI. Which he says should only focus on violent criminals and national security threats. Doing that won’t abolish ICE but what it will do is get rid of the worst parts of ICE and preserve the portions that I think should exist. 100% of ICE resources should be focused on removing national security, violent and property criminals.
Abolishing ERO and focusing entirely on HSI would accomplish that goal.
Sergio Quiroz and his mother continue to fight his removal order. As for Jose Garcia, he’s back with his family but plans to finally obtain full citizenship to protect himself going forward. To me this is my country and I love it and I want to stay here for the longest I can. I want to be buried over here when the time comes.
https://www.trafficwave.net/members/yosekbaez24in/marketers.html
Discover more from Making Money Is Easy
Subscribe to get the latest posts to your email.
