Family Releases Continue In Arizona As Trump Promises Tent Cities For Migrants
Published: Friday, November 2, 2018 - 3:39pm
"President Donald Trump said he will order that any migrants attempting to cross the southern border be held in what he described as massive tent cities while their immigration case is heard. Meanwhile, immigration authorities are still releasing groups of undocumented families and asylum seekers in Arizona.About 90 undocumented families were expected to be released on Friday, and another 400 people currently being held in Yuma will start to arrive in metro-Phoenix as early as Sunday, said Rev. Magdalena Schwartz, a pastor with Capellania Cristiana Llamados Para Servir.
Schwartz has been receiving families since early October.
“And more churches (are) calling me now, ‘I want to open my church.’ More people calling me say, ‘I want to help,'” she said.
Schwartz said stopping the releases is up to the president. But she thinks it's better if the families aren’t in detention.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said it continues to work with faith groups as it releases families. In October, the agency said the releases were due to volume and the need to follow a court settlement limiting how long kids can be detained.
The Stark Geography of U.S. Immigration Raids
According to a new report from CityLab, 24 out of 3,200 counties see around half of all of ICE’s community arrests.
While both Democratic and Republican administrations have used ICE raids to enforce immigration laws, the current one has expressed a particular enthusiasm for this traumatizing technique: Community arrests have risen in the first two years of the Trump administration compared to the last years of the Obama administration. But while the news of raids may have a widespread chilling effect on immigrant communities, the majority of ICE’s arrests via this method are concentrated in a few places, according to a new report by Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), a data gathering and research organization at Syracuse University. Between October 2017 and May 2018, community arrests happened in a total of 574 of 3,200 counties. But just 10 saw around 28 percent of ICE community arrests. And half of all the raids were conducted in just 24 counties.
Below are the ten counties with the highest number of community arrests:
After the Trump administration broadened the criteria for who can be deported, ICE agents have targeted “low-hanging fruit”—people without criminal records who are being arrested at routine immigration check-ins or after testifying against a crime in court.
The TRAC report shows that ICE heavily relies on local police to do this.
Of the 1,528 counties where ICE made arrests, only 38 percent were community arrests. The rest were made when local law enforcement transferred a suspected undocumented person to ICE’s custody
