Immigration Reform

After they married, the Crawfords filled out paperwork to seek legal residency for Elia and learned she was under deportation orders.

“We’ve been fighting this for years,” Bob Crawford said, listing the filings and attorneys the family has pursued to get Elia legal status.

The pair has two sons, ages 12 and 9, and Elia has been the foundation that has allowed Bob to keep deploying — as many as two or three times a year — first as an active duty soldier and now as a Defense Department contractor.

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Spouses of active-duty troops or veterans are eligible for “Parole in Place,” or PIP, a relief that allows spouses, children and parents of active duty, National Guard and Reserve troops and veterans who entered the U.S. illegally to remain in the country and pursue a green card.
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The PIP provision has been “extraordinarily important for military families,” said Leticia Corona, the Crawfords’ attorney. “It’s a tremendous amount of stress for military personnel in general who deploy to dangerous places to be worried about their loved ones who are undocumented back home.”

That policy has not helped the Crawfords, because they can’t file for the relief while a deportation order remains, and the Department of Homeland Security won’t clear Elia Crawford’s order.

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Homeland Security has deployed that tortured logic recently in defending its treatment of a 39-year-old mother and her 7-year-old daughter, asylum seekers who fled Congo, fearing violence. The two presented themselves in November to officials at the border in Southern California, cleared an initial screening interview in which a U.S. official determined that they stood a decent chance of being granted asylum — and, within days, were forcibly separated by immigration agents. The mother, known in court papers as Ms. L., was taken to a detention facility near San Diego; the little girl, known as S.S., who screamed when separated from her parent, was taken to a facility in Chicago.
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And what of the little girl, Ms. L.’s daughter? She remains at the facility in Chicago, from which she has been allowed just a handful of telephone conversations with her mother in four months. Ms. L., according to her lawyers, intends to pursue her asylum claim but remains desperate to be reunited with her daughter. Will Ms. Nielsen and her Homeland Security agents continue to traumatize an innocent child, or will they permit the girl to be where she belongs: with her mother?

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Schwab said the statements about immigrants evading arrest, which were widely quoted in an array of media outlets, were misleading “because we were not ever going to be able to capture 100 percent of the target list” of roughly 1,000 undocumented immigrants in Northern California.

“I didn’t feel like fabricating the truth to defend ourselves against (Schaaf’s) actions was the way to go about it,” he said. “We were never going to pick up that many people. To say that 100 percent are dangerous criminals on the street, or that those people weren’t picked up because of the misguided actions of the mayor, is just wrong.”

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avalon said:

The U.S. separates a mother and daughter fleeing violence in Congo

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An attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union told me late Monday that a DNA test has confirmed that Ms. L. — as she’s identified in court papers — is the mother of S.S., the 7-year-old girl who has been detained here in Chicago since November.

The government separated the two without explanation after they arrived at a U.S. port of entry near San Diego and asked for asylum, with the mother fearing death if she returned to the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Ms. L. followed the rules in seeking asylum, and an initial screening found she has a solid case.

But immigration officials took her daughter away, even though there was no allegation of abuse or neglect. The mother had only scant identification, common among people who have fled their homes. Department of Homeland Security attorneys have claimed in court papers that without documentation proving the child was hers, agents had no choice but to separate the mother and treat the child like an unaccompanied minor.

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So the girls said farewell to their father, expecting he'd pick them up after school.

They haven't seen him since.

He was detained and deported that day, says his family, for entering the country illegally multiple times, decades ago.

"We went home, packed all of our things, and we never went back," says the 18-year-old, tears rolling down her face. They left their father's new car and their mother's furniture behind. They grabbed a few changes of clothes. They left their home in under an hour and haven't returned.

"ICE destroyed my home," their mother recalls. But she had little time to grieve the loss of her husband or her possessions. Also originally from Mexico, she had overstayed a tourist visa many years ago and had no legal documents. If she was next, who would care for her children?

"Where would they live? Where would they go to school? Who would feed them?"

She begged friends for couches. The three of them spent hours, day after day, in malls, trying to figure out where they could sleep next. The mother, who trained in culinary school, was feeding fast food meals to her daughters.

"We became homeless for five months," says the older sister. "We moved schools. We went somewhere else because we had to leave the city. We were sleeping from house to house, anywhere we could find."

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Afraid the couple wouldn't be able to go on with their wedding, Krisha, 23, raced home to get Alexander's paperwork and prove he was in the U.S. legally. But she says as soon as she left, Judge Elizabeth Beckley, who had been meant to marry the young couple, called Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to have her fiance arrested.

Krisha said ICE officers "scared the hell out of [Alexander]," when they showed up, threatening to take him to an immigration detention center if they couldn't confirm he was in the U.S. legally.

Alexander said officers fingerprinted him without asking for his permission and warned him that instead of celebrating his wedding, he could end up spending the evening at an immigration detention center in Harrisburg.

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Worse, Krisha said, was that this wasn't the only time Beckley had called ICE agents to her courtroom. The mother of two said she was contacted by a lawyer who said she was representing at least one other couple who had immigration enforcement officers called by Beckley on their wedding day. ​

That couple was not as lucky as Krisha and Alex, with the groom and his best man allegedly being led away in handcuffs, according to a report from ProPublica.

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Adults charged with illegal entry will be turned over to U.S. Marshals and sent directly to federal court. Their children will be transferred to the Office of Refugee Resettlement, part of the Department of Health and Human Services, which refers them to relatives in the US or to shelters run by private organizations.

The Department of Homeland Services says 700 children have been separated from their parents since the fiscal year began last October.

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