'Freedom to say goodbye' — Judge says Trump immigrant deportations resemble 'regimes we revile'

[xeni]

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/01/29/freedom-to-say-goodbye.html

…

[iquitos46]

Chief about the right to say goodbye should be our right to say goodbye to the vile orange bastard in the whitehouse… Goodbye and good riddance you foul blight on humanity.

[law]

Perhaps I’m missing something, but if his deportation was ordered in 2006, hasn’t he had 12 years to “say goodbye”? That’s great that he’s an activist, but I feel the more accurate headline would be ‘convicted felon deported 12 years after original order’, right? This doesn’t feel like a ‘blame Trump’ thing, the guy was convicted in the Dubya years and just… hung around for the next decade, waiting for the hammer to drop apparently.

[someguy]

What you are missing is that he had a reprieve from being deported that required him to go to have regular ‘check-ins’ with ICE. It is when he shows up at that meeting that he gets arrested and put on a plane.

You can disagree with the reprieve, or you can agree that it shouldn’t have been extended, but given that he was coming to his appointments and otherwise following the rules of his reprieve, basic human decency would say that, if he is going to be deported, ICE should inform him that the reprieve has not been granted and he should report at Time and Place for deportation.

Often that is how it is done for jail even - you get convicted, you get sentenced, you get told when to report to jail.

If you don’t show up at the appointed time and place, then it becomes a different story.

[law]

Ahh, most excellent, I wasn’t super clear on that point. Thank you for the clarification! Alrighty then, snark retracted - dude was following the rules, and the gov’t changed the rules out from under him. Eff 'em then, right in the ear-holes.

[Nom_de_plume]

I don’t know what he did - and served time for - but he’s married to an American citizen and he’s lived here productively for many years serving the immigrant community as an activist. Plus, according to his wife’s article in the NY Times, the Trump administration appears to be politically targeting activist immigrants for deportation which is unconstitutional. They are supposed to prioritizing and finding people who are truly dangerous criminals - rapists and murderers, as per Dumpity’s big show on the campaign trail with people who said family members were murdered or assaulted by undocumented immigrants.

That being said, I’m not understanding why his wife is so terrified (in her article) about him being sent (back) to Trinidad. I don’t know much about Trinidad, but from what I’ve read, it sounds like a very nice little country in a beautiful area with a parliamentary democracy (which I’m understanding work better than ours), a liberal government, universal healthcare, free prescription drugs, too, for its citizens. She could most likely and easily follow him there, if they so chose. Hey, I wouldn’t mind living there myself, given their healthcare system, great food and climate, warm and welcoming culture (what I’m reading, at least).

So what is the story here?

I agree this man should have citizenship- but this isn’t like sending someone off to Somalia (as in some cases) with a dysfunctional government and people arriving in the airport and literally being killed before they can even hail a cab; i.e. because the situation is so violent. Which is something that was being done under either Bush or Obama or both … I can’t remember when I read about it.

In short, however, he is not a refugee, as far as I am understanding.

But again, I do think he should be given citizenship and allowed to go on with his life. It is not right what the Trump administration is doing. Meanwhile, as they throw out activists, they are probably fast-tracking citizenship and green cards for Nazis in their Nazis-Without-Borders program.

[ArchStanton]

Interesting case, at least what I can learn of it. As I understand the facts of the case,
He entered the US in 1991 on a visitor’s visa
He was granted a green card in 1994
He was convicted of felony wire fraud in 2001, and served five years in prison
In 2006, he was ordered deported (fraud related felonies are among those that make a person deportable), and held in custody by ICE
In 2008, he was allowed out on an “order of supervision”, where the subject is released from physical custody until removal is processed
In 2011, he was issued a temporary stay of removal.
Last year, an article was published in the Observer about him facing this possibility when he filed for a new deferral. http://observer.com/2017/03/trinidadian-activist-avoids-deportation/
A stay of removal normally allows deportation to be delayed for a period of time “when an appeal, a motion to reopen, or a motion to reconsider is pending before the board”. If there are no pending grounds to issue another deferral, deportation is initiated.
It seems like there was little question that he was going to be deported once all the appeals were exhausted. Deferral is a postponement, not a reversal.

But the system seems to really have issues. It sort of makes sense that after all the appeals and deferrals are exhausted, you have to go. But it is sort of like the Dread Pirate Roberts saying that he will probably kill you tomorrow.

[JimJim]

Yeah, I really don’t see any reason for sympathy. Final removal order over a decade ago. Convicted felon. It’s crazy that he was given a reprieve under such circumstances. He should have used the past 12 years to organize his affairs and say goodbye. Why do we want convicted felons to stay here? Citizenship or residents opportunities are a scare resource, and I would like to see those slots go only to the best and most desirable, not to anyone with a felony conviction.

[Bob_Smith1]

yea, cuz someone who has willfully defied a legal order to leave the country as a convicted felon will totally be honest and not go into hiding after being told “hey man, this last one is serious, like serious!” Pathetic judge.

[Wanderfound]

Ravi Ragbir’s story was covered in this week’s Intercepted podcast.

Intercepted Podcast: First They Came for the Immigrants

The most relevant bit of the transcript is this:

JS: The rapid deportations of two high-profile immigrant community leaders from the New Sanctuary Coalition of New York City has sent shockwaves across the immigrant rights community.

And now a new report from The Intercept details the unprecedented surveillance and attempted warrantless searches and stakeouts of New York churches and the homes of activist leaders Jean Montrevil and Ravi Ragbir by ICE agents.

New York’s Mayor Bill de Blasio has vowed that his is a sanctuary city, but The Intercept article lays out how the NYPD assisted ICE agents in their attempt to deport Ragbir.

Jean Montrevil was deported to Haiti last week after being snatched by federal agents as he walked down a street near his home. This raised the stakes for Ragbir, who feared that ICE agents may try to take him, even though he is in the midst of an appeals process.

Ragbir’s case is a complex one. He’s a legal permanent resident in the U.S. He has a green card.

But a decade ago he was convicted of a nonviolent crime involving fraud and served time in prison. In the years since, he’s become a public figure in the immigrant rights movement and with Trump’s radical commitment to deportations, especially of people with criminal records, Ragbir has found himself in the crosshairs of the Department of Homeland Security and ICE.

Ragbir is the executive director of the New Sanctuary Coalition, which is an interfaith network devoted to resisting detention and deportation of immigrants in New York. He’s now scheduled to be deported to Trinidad and Tobago after living as a legal permanent resident in the U.S. for 20 years. Jean Montrevil, who was deported last week, had lived in the U.S. for 30 years.

To talk about all of these events, we’re joined by journalist Nick Pinto. He wrote this report for The Intercept.

JS: Nick, welcome to Intercepted.

Nick Pinto: Thanks for having me.

JS: So Ravi goes for this hearing last March, March of 2017, a few months into Trump’s presidency, a big crowd of people show up, what happens then in his check-in with ICE?

NP: Sure. So, in that instance he did walk out, again, a free man. But they shortened the leash on him and said, “You need to check in on a shorter interval than you you’ve been checking in.” So he was next due to check in with ICE January 11, this year. And I think talking to him and to his legal team in the lead-up to that, I think they had been feeling fairly secure that whatever else might happen, he was not going to be taken into custody that day. And I think that confidence first began to be rattled a week beforehand when another immigrant, who also was sort of had a leadership, high-profile leadership position in New York’s New Sanctuary Coalition, a Haitian guy named Jean Montrevil was picked up by ICE officers. He was coming home from work, going home to his place in Queens and there were a bunch of ICE officers outside his door who picked him up.

He was scheduled for a check-in March. He hadn’t given ICE any cause to expect that he wouldn’t show up there. He has a family, runs a business, he was hardly a flight risk and yet he was picked up at his home and moved very quickly to a detention center in Florida, and, from there, deported to Haiti. And so that was the first alarming thing that sort of made Ragbir and his team wonder if something had changed in the rules.

And the second thing was that that same day Montrevil was picked up, Ragbir’s legal team was meeting in Judson Memorial Church in the Village to sort of plan for his upcoming hearing, and a number of the people who were coming in and out of the building were, noticed some suspicious cars outside the building. They had dark, tinted windows, distinctive unusual antennae, they had unremarkable New York State plates. But following the thing with Montrevil, they wondered, “What’s going on with these cars?” And at a certain point some of them decided to go out and sort of actively check in with these guys.

And one woman rolled down her window and said, “No, I’m not with ICE, but I’m not going to tell you why I’m here either.” Another car that they sort of rapped on the window of rolled down his window and when he did, one of the people I spoke to looked into the foot well on the passenger side of his car and saw a DHS license plate, which certainly led him to conclude that this was an ICE car.

So, this starts to get them quite rattled, the feeling that they might be under some sort of surveillance. They begin to wonder, “Well, if Montrevil was picked up at his house and there are cars here outside the church, what’s going on outside of Ravi Ragbir’s home in downtown Brooklyn.”

And so, they send some people out to his home to look at what’s going on that block and those people tell me that they saw several more cars also with unusually dark, tinted windows, also with these strange antennae, also idling.

Now, I should say, I asked ICE whether they were engaged in surveillance of Ragbir’s home, of Judson, of any other churches and they declined to answer that question. They did, however, tell clergy associated with the New Sanctuary Movement who had come in to talk with them that they were not involved. So while they haven’t denied that to The Intercept, they did deny it in a private conversation with clergy.

JS: But also, when you described that meeting that clergy had with Scott Mechkowski, ICE’s deputy field office director for New York, this ICE official seemed to already know why they were coming in there to talk to him and actually drew a connection between the two cases you’re referring to.

NP: Right. The clergy had gone intending only to talk about Montrevil’s case, but they say that very quickly Mechkowski himself drew the connection and said, “Look, these are the two highest-profile cases we’re dealing with right now and what you have to understand is that our hands here in the field office are tied. These people are eligible for deportation and we’re going to make determinations based on what we have to do. We’re not going to keep kicking this can down the road. We’re going to make a determination one way or the other on it now.”

JS: So, then what happened?

NP: The day for the check-in came and Ragbir went in with some family members and his lawyers and first they met in the cafeteria on the sixth floor of the Federal Center and I was in there with them. Meanwhile there was a substantial crowd outside and the appointed hour came and he had been asked not to check in in the usual place where ICE usually handles scheduled check-ins but rather to check in at Mechkowski’s personal office. And, at the time, I think they didn’t really know what to make of that. They thought maybe ICE was sensitive about the possibility because this is a high-profile case of creating some disorder and they wanted to contain that. But as soon as he sat down it became clear that they intended to take him in.

He was informed that as of that moment he was in custody. For whatever reason, he briefly fainted. I think he hadn’t eaten a whole lot going into this meeting, I think he was anxious. He recovered in short order but nonetheless he left the building in an ambulance, handcuffed in an ambulance, and his supporters outside had reluctantly planned for the possibility that he might not be coming out. As the ambulance was leaving the building, there was a rush to physically block the ambulance. There was a sense that they were taking this high-profile symbol of the movement away and they were trying to deport him and there was just a spontaneous immediate movement to, people were hurling their bodies in front of this ambulance.

[Chanting on the street: Ravi! Ravi! Ravi!]

JS: How were they moving the people that had hurled themselves in front of the ambulance out of the way?

NP: With some fairly unrestrained laying on of hands. Both DHS, law enforcement and members of the NYPD’s strategic response group.

JS: That’s interesting, because New York is a sanctuary city according to Mayor Bill de Blasio. But you what you’re saying is NYPD did facilitate the removal of Ragbir in this ambulance by assisting in moving demonstrators or his supporters out of the way. NP: They assisted in that way, and they also assisted in that when the ambulance ultimately shook free of these supporters, the strategic response group provided a police escort for the vehicles transporting Ragbir first to one hospital, then to another, then to a temporary detention and then escorted them all the way to the city border at the mouth of the Holland Tunnel.

So, in that sense, they certainly did assist in, you know, the early stages of the deportation of Ragbir. Now, I asked both the police and city hall about this and their position is: We don’t do this. Ordinarily we are not ordinarily in the business of providing ICE with escorts for people detained for deportation. We got involved because there was disorder in the streets and it’s our job to prevent disorder and we continued to provide this escort because there had been disorder earlier and we wanted to be able to assist if there was any more.

Eighteen people were arrested, including several clergy members and a pair of city council members.

JS: Ultimately they take him to Newark Airport, which is in New Jersey and then fly him to Florida.

NP: That’s right. Things do not usually move this quickly for someone taken into custody in New York City. From the moment that they saw which way things were going, Ragbir’s lawyers had taken steps to file for a habeas writ in the Southern District to prevent him from being deported or even taken from the New York area. And, indeed the court did order that he not be taken from the New York area.

ICE says that it didn’t get that information until he was already in transit.

JS: Interesting. So, courts in New York order this. He’s in Florida anyway, regardless of what whether they knew or didn’t know. And then he gets returned at some point to New York.

NP: Right. It took, it took a couple more hearings and some argument back and forth as to whether ICE was obligated to bring him back to New York. As I understand it, the judge strongly suggested that ICE might want to consider bringing him back and without saying that they were bound to do so, the next day ICE said that they had decided to bring him back.

JS: So, he is returned to New York and what is the current status of Ravi Ragbir’s case?

NP: He’s being held in detention in Orange County in the Hudson Valley — Orange County in New York state. So, he has a couple of things pending — this was also important, is that there a number of open proceedings which could have a real effect on his deportability.

So, his lawyers are making the point that if indeed one of these motions is basically asking the federal court in New Jersey that convicted him initially of wire fraud to reconsider its decision in that case. If they did that, the underlying cause for his deportability would vanish and that is open. That petition has not been resolved. And ICE is attempting to deport him, even though conceivably they could deport him and the next day he could be back to being a legal permanent resident.

JS: Is the argument that his lawyers have been making basically that: This was not a violent crime, he did his time for it, he’s an upstanding member of our society and that he shouldn’t be have his green card stripped?

NP: So, I think there are, it’s confusing because there are many levels of argument here. There are some strict legal arguments that his initial conviction, there were some actual problems with his legal conviction, with the counsel he got and with how that unfolded.

JS: The hypocrisy also of you know, look who went to jail for this massive fraud against so many homeowners and others in this country, and it’s like, this is the guy they pin it on?

NP: Right. There are technical legal arguments for why his conviction was inappropriate. But then, you know, I think there are also, his lawyers certainly make the case that this is someone who has paid his debt to society, who has family here, who has deep roots here, who hasn’t lived in Trinidad for more than a quarter of a century.

And then, I think there’s an even higher level of argument that comes from many of his supporters in the New Sanctuary Movement, which is that: No one is illegal and that the violence of deportation and banishment is never appropriate.

Full transcript at the podcast link.

[gatto]

@JimJim

Citizenship or residents opportunities are a scare resource

how so? only because we make them so. it’s well known that immigrants by and large add to the economic output of the us, they don’t decrease it.

and while i don’t feel that money is the sole measure of a person, there’s really no reason not to have people here who are able to add to our common wealth.

@JimJim

and I would like to see those slots go only to the best and most desirable, not to anyone with a felony conviction.

the whole point of serving time is that you receive your punishment and you do better.
if it’s not possible to rehabilitate people then why do we bother? why not make all sentences life sentences and be done with it?

do i think that people in this category should just be blindly allowed to become citizens? of course, not – but a clear path for people who lack documents to become citizens will actually help keep them on the straight and narrow.

people forget that we created this problem by not having good migrant worker visas in the first place and by not ever cracking down on the employers who are hiring those workers.

( and more over – not just cracking down – but actually encouraging those employers by allowing them to pay sub-par wages, by allowing them to avoid paying employee taxes, by allowing them to avoid safety regulations, overtime pay, etc. )

we allowed this situation to happen, and now we have a responsibility to the people who are here. especially those who are playing by the rules.

[Wanderfound]

Democracy Now! (democracynow)

[Agfish]

Agreed. There was little question he was going to be deported. The judge took issue with the summary manner in which it was effected (detention, uncertain timeline etc) … it was cruel and unusual (you know, I think that concept is one of the finest things you guys have given the world - it’s a really good starting point for understanding exceptional power) and beyond the remit of an ordered, structured approach to deportation.

[someguy]

Eh, if people who have just been convicted of a crime are given time to show up at jail on their own, I’m not too worried about someone who has been doing all he is asked to do for the last 12 years, is well integrated into his community, has a wife and family who would suffer from being in hiding, etc, etc, etc.

ETA: Welcome to BoingBoing, Bob_Smith1!

[JimJim]

@gatto

how so? only because we make them so. it’s well known that immigrants by and large add to the economic output of the us, they don’t decrease it.

One way to estimate how many people would like to move here is to look at how many people apply for the diversity lottery. According to Wiki, 20 million people apply for the diversity lottery every year, and that program excludes the two biggest countries in the world (India and China). If Chinese and Indians could also apply for the diversity lottery, it might easily be 40 million people per year. If people knew their visas would be approved, the number would also be higher. So let’s say that if we had easy immigration here, we would likely get at least 40 million a year new arrivals, based on very conservative extrapolation from current diversity lottery facts.

Most of these people are poor, uneducated, and don’t speak English. They will become and immediate burden on our system, as our economy doesn’t pay much to poor, uneducated, non-English-speaking people. They can only live with subsidized health care, housing, and food. And that’s 20 million a year applicants. That means building an entire new state of California, every two years, filled with poor uneducated people who need a variety of support programs.

No, we can’t do that. No one can. California already can’t take care of its poor and uneducated. There are a limited number of slots available for people to come here.

Looking at another data point, “extreme poverty” is defined as living at less than $1.25 per day, and there are over a billion people in the world in such “extreme poverty”. It’s reasonable to think many of them would want to come here for our welfare programs. We provide free health care, food, and some amount of housing.

We can’t provide our safety net, however deficient it may be, to the billions of poor, uneducated, and needy in the world.

[gracchus]

Judge says Drumpf immigrant deportations resemble ‘regimes we revile’

Perhaps the “president” doesn’t want immigrants from “sh*thole countries” because he wants to turn the U.S. into one without any outside help.

[moortaktheundea]

Why on earth would you assume that the number of people who apply annually is likely to be anything like the annual rate? People apply each year and once they migrate they have done it. Your number would be an estimate that most global immigration would come to the US, given that a lot of migration is things like movement within the EU I consider that incredibly unlikely. www.global-migration.info/VID_Global_Migration_Datasheet_web.pdf

[anon63581570]

@ArchStanton

But the system seems to really have issues. It sort of makes sense that after all the appeals and deferrals are exhausted, you have to go. But it is sort of like the Dread Pirate Roberts saying that he will probably kill you tomorrow.

The part htat angers me is they arrested him when he showed up for a checkin as if he were a bail jumper. I mean yea congradufrakkinglations on ‘trapping’ someone who came in expecting a civil checkin with ICE and oh hey bro you’re under arrest.

I mean if the guy is going to get deported, fine. However he’s someone that apparently has been following the rules so a low flight risk. It really does smell like activists are being targeted for removal.

[Brainspore]

@JimJim

I really don’t see any reason for sympathy.

Challenge: Describe the GOP platform in eight words or less.

[gatto]

@JimJim

We can’t provide our safety net, however deficient it may be, to the billions of poor, uneducated, and needy in the world.

don’t worry. i don’t even think we have the technology to move that many people at once. your worst fears are thus deftly avoided.