This piece is published in partnership with NYR Daily.
In February, I visited Minerva García, an undocumented immigrant originally from Mexico who has quietly lived and worked in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, for almost 20 years. She is the mother of two young children who are U.S. citizens and an older child who is a recipient of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). In April 2017, García went for her regular check-in with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the federal agency charged with enforcing immigration law, as she had been doing for years. Usually it’s been a routine visit, but this time—her first appointment since Donald Trump was elected president—she was told she had 30 days to leave the country and would have to purchase her own bus ticket back to Mexico.
Called “silent raids” by advocates, this use of regularly scheduled immigration check-ins to threaten with detainment and deportation undocumented immigrants who have deep ties to the United States and no criminal records has become a favorite tactic of ICE under the Trump administration. To avoid deportation, García sought sanctuary in a church in Greensboro, where she stayed for 96 days. She was there when President Trump rescinded DACA, the federal program that offered some undocumented youth work authorization and protection from deportation. Thankfully, her son Eduardo had renewed his DACA just beforehand. At the time, when asked about the prospect of DACA ending for good, Eduardo said he was “hoping for the best, but preparing for the worst.” (A federal judge recently ruled that DACA must be reinstated, after a 90-day delay.)
As for García, she was relieved when a federal judge in Texas ruled that her removal order be vacated, allowing her to leave sanctuary and regain a home life. But she faces a very uncertain future. About a month after leaving sanctuary, García was called into ICE’s Charlotte field office again. She feared being detained on the spot; instead, she was fitted with a GPS ankle shackle so that ICE could track her movements. Everything changed, she said, after Trump took office—the tone of ICE agents at the field office was totally different.
[For more on this story by Tina Vasquez, go to https://rewire.news/article/20...ge-agency-unleashed/]
For another story on a similar topic, see HIGHER RISKS, FEWER PROTECTIONS FOR AMERICA'S IMMIGRANTS.
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