"Inflicting Maximum Punishment" On Immigrants

 

The cruelty is the point, part infinity:

Liset Fernandez spent most of the summer worried about her dad, Luis, but a few weeks ago she got some good news. After being held in Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) custody for weeks, an immigration judge in Texas granted him release on a $5,000 bond.

Luis, came to the US from Ecuador in 1994, had been held in detention at a facility in Livingston, Texas, thousands of miles away from his home in Queens. Liset, 17, had taken on extra shifts working a retail job to support her mom and nine-year-old brother. Luis’s co-workers at the Square diner, a railcar-style greasy spoon in Manhattan’s Tribeca neighborhood for over 100 years, had raised more than $20,000 to support him and his family.

But when Liset logged on to a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) website to pay the bond, she got a message telling her that her dad was ineligible for release. It fell to her to tell her dad that instead of coming home that day, he would remain detained. “It was upsetting for everyone,” Liset said. “His voice sounded completely disappointed.”

Luis was being detained because of a new DHS policy arguing that all people who enter the US illegally are ineligible for bond, regardless of how long they have been here and whether or not they pose a flight risk. In Fernandez’s case, DHS went even further, deploying a rarely used maneuver to pause the immigration judge’s bond ruling while it appealed his ruling. Federal regulations allow the agency to automatically stay an immigration judge’s bond decision while they appeal the case to the board of immigration appeals.

The maneuver means Fernandez will remain detained while his case is pending before the board of immigration appeals. Since the board is being bogged down with appeals, it’s unclear how long it could take to resolve the case, said Craig Relles, an immigration attorney representing Fernandez.

Fernandez’s case shows how the Trump administration is “ratcheting up every aspect of the immigration system” for people who have been in the US no matter how long they’ve been in the US, said Suchita Mathur, a lawyer at the American Immigration Council.

“At every step of the way, they’re inflicting the maximum punishment on people,” she said. “It’s all part and parcel of the administration’s effort to make this process so punitive and unbearable that people give up.”...  (our emphasis)

What makes all of this so eternally galling to us, beyond the abject cruelty and injustice, is that any one of these hard- working, family- oriented immigrants like Mr. Fernandez is worth infinitely more to his community and this country than the sociopathic convicted felon/ sexual abuser and his hypocritical gang of cross- wearing fascists ever could.  These afflicted people have more of what's left of the soul of America in them than all of those fascist fuckers rounding them up and the malevolent regime behind it.

(Image:  screenshot via MSNBC)