Deporting Students

Student’s Deportation Shows a Pattern of US Government Targeting Iranians

Iranian students coming to the United States are being stopped at airports, having their visas revoked, and are being deported. Advocates warn this trend is emerging less than a month after hundreds of Iranian Americans were stopped and interrogated at a port of entry between Washington State and Vancouver, Canada.


Shahab Dehghani, an Iranian student studying economics at Northeastern University, was detained at Boston Logan International Airport on Monday. He had previously studied in the United States for two years and was returning for the new year with a new student visa issued last week.


After hours in the custody of Customs and Border Protection (CBP), Dehghani was deported. The 24-year-old was removed even though a federal judge had ordered the deportation to be temporarily blocked.


Advocates argue that CBP defied the judge’s order, issued late Monday night. Although the exact timeline is still in dispute, one of Dehghani’s lawyers indicated that the plane he was on did not depart until more than 30 minutes after the order came down.

Illegal Crossings

Illegal crossings plunge as US extends policy across border

Adolfo Cardenas smiles faintly at the memory of traveling with his 14-year-old son from Honduras to the U.S.-Mexico border in only nine days, riding buses and paying a smuggler $6,000 to ensure passage through highway checkpoints.

Father and son walked about 10 minutes in Arizona's stifling June heat before surrendering to border agents. Instead of being released with paperwork to appear in immigration court in Dallas, where Cardenas hopes to live with a cousin, they were bused more than an hour to wait in the Mexican border city of Mexicali.

“It was a surprise. I never imagined this would happen," Cardenas, 39, said while waiting at a Mexicali migrant shelter for his fifth court appearance in San Diego, on Jan. 24.

Illegal crossings plummeted across the border after the Trump administration made more asylum-seekers wait in Mexico for hearings in U.S. court. The drop has been most striking on the western Arizona border, a pancake-flat desert with a vast canal system from the Colorado River that turns bone-dry soil into fields of melons and wheat and orchards of dates and lemons.

Arrests in the Border Patrol's Yuma sector nearly hit 14,000 in May, when the policy to make asylum-seekers wait in Mexico took effect there. By October, they fell 94%, to less than 800, and have stayed there since, making Yuma the second-slowest of the agency's nine sectors on the Mexican border, just ahead of the perennially quiet Big Bend sector in Texas.

Illegal crossings in western Arizona have swung sharply before, and there are several reasons for the recent drop. But Anthony Porvaznik, chief of the Border Patrol's Yuma sector, said the so-called Migration Protection Protocols have been a huge deterrent, based on agents' interviews with people arrested.

“Their whole goal was to be released into the United States, and once that was taken off the shelf for them, and they couldn't be released into the United States anymore, then that really diminished the amount of traffic that came through here,” Porvaznik said.

Proposed Fee

Ways USCIS’ Proposed Fee Increase Fails to Solve the Agency’s Problems

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ (USCIS) recent proposal to increase most of their fees has been met with strong opposition. The proposal drew widespread attention, garnering nearly 10,000 comments.

The agency claims the new fees will help reduce the growing application backlog. Yet the agency offers no solution as to how that will be achieved. Instead, the proposed rule may create unnecessary financial barriers to many of USCIS’ services.

Here are ways the recently proposed rule could hurt both USCIS and their customers if it becomes finalized:

1. Increased Fees for Decreased Services
The quality of USCIS’ services has decreased over the years. It takes longer to process cases, adjudications have slowed, and access to case information assistance has decreased.
Yet the proposed rule does not address how the agency’s own policies contributed to the decline in quality services. Instead, it places the burden on customers to pay for inefficiencies with higher fees.

2. Unnecessary Financial Barriers
USCIS’ increased fees could price many people out of accessing the legal immigration system.
The cost of a naturalization application would rise to over $1,000 for the first time in history, an 80% increase. Many people, including citizenship applicants, would be prohibited from applying for a fee waiver.

The new rule would also impose a $50 fee for affirmative asylum applications—when no fee has ever been charged before. The fee could be insurmountable to many who had just fled their countries.

3. Failure to Properly Assess USCIS Policies
The agency claims they are assessing how changes to their policies have driven the increase in costs. Yet nowhere in the proposed rule does USCIS outline what those policy changes were or how they have contributed to the need for increased fees.

The proposal only makes vague references to the “growing complexity of the case adjudication process” and “increased background investigations” of applicants. It does not, however, say how the agency’s policies shifted to accommodate those changes.

By not taking clear stock of their own internal changes and affected costs, USCIS keeps their customers in the dark about how their money is used. It’s also shortsighted of the agency to not take their own policy shifts into account.

Detention of Pregnant Women

Detention of Pregnant Women Increases 52% in ICE

The rate at which U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detained pregnant women increased 52% during the first two years of the Trump administration, according to a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report released last week. 2,098 pregnant women were detained by ICE in 2018, compared to 1,380 in 2016.

The increase aligns with a December 2017 ICE policy change, ending a presumption of release for pregnant women. Instead, they are now subjected to the same case-by-case custody determinations applied to the general detained population. The change was publicly announced in March 2018, four months after it had gone into effect.

Previously, ICE’s policy was to release any pregnant women not legally subject to mandatory detention, absent “extraordinary circumstances.” This policy understood that the health of a pregnant woman and her pregnancy could not be appropriately cared for in a detained setting.

Unofficial policies shifted at some ICE detention centers, even before the official change.

Higher numbers of pregnant women arriving to the United States were detained by ICE at the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas. Before then, they were almost always released from the border and permitted to fight their immigration cases outside a detention center.

H-1B Cap Filing

USCIS Announces Major Change to H-1B ‘Cap’ Filing With Electronic Registration

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) recently announced that U.S. employers will have to pay a $10 fee and register to have a chance at filing an H-1B petition subject to the statutory “cap” of 65,000 workers per fiscal year (FY). The annual “cap” filing also includes 20,000 additional visa numbers for foreign workers with a master’s or higher degree from a qualified U.S. college or university.

The H-1B visa classification allows highly educated foreign professionals to work in the United States on a temporary basis.

The new registration process is a major change from last year, when USCIS received 201,011 petitions in April 2019 for the 65,000 “regular” and 20,000 “master’s exemption” visa numbers available for FY 2020, which began on October 1, 2019.

USCIS expects electronic registration to “dramatically streamline processing.” For at least the past seven years, USCIS has been overwhelmed by an enormous volume of H-1B petitions delivered during the first five business days of April. USCIS had to initially process this pool of petitions so it could run two random selections (“lotteries”) of petitions eligible for actual filing.

Although USCIS created the new registration process in 2019, the agency suspended its use as no system was yet in place. For FY 2021 H-1B visa numbers, USCIS will open an initial registration period from March 1 through March 20, 2020. If USCIS receives more registrations than needed to use the available H-1B visa numbers, it will run a lottery to select the registrants authorized to file a petition. A lottery is likely given past demand.

An employer may register to file H-1B petitions for several foreign workers. However, USCIS limits the employer to one registration for an individual in a FY.

Zero Tolerance?

‘Zero Tolerance’ Overwhelmed Courts and Diverted Resources From Criminal Investigations

Attorney General Sessions’ orders to prioritize prosecuting people for immigration-related offenses in 2017 and 2018 put a significant strain on law enforcement across the border, diverting resources away from drug and organized crime prosecutions. The increase in immigration prosecutions, which played a primary role in the family separation crisis, also led to overcrowded jails, backed up court dockets, and overwhelmed prosecutors and federal public defenders.

These findings come from a new report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO).

The report also concludes that increased immigration prosecutions cost the government tens of millions of dollars across multiple government agencies. Agents were forced to work overtime for days on end, military prosecutors were detailed to the border, and federal judges were reassigned to the border from courts around the country.

The report mirrors findings from Syracuse University’s TRAC center, which found last year that during the height of Zero Tolerance, non-immigration prosecutions at the border dropped by 35%.

Federal prosecutors explained that “the more time prosecutors spend on reactive work—such as misdemeanor or felony immigration-related cases—the less time [they] have to work on other issue areas, including proactive cases that may take months or years of work to build.”

Increased caseload also had ripple effects on other criminal defendants.

Asylum Seekers to Guatemala?

The U.S. Administration Begins Sending Asylum Seekers to Guatemala

In yet another major blow to America’s asylum system, on Wednesday the Trump administration reportedly began sending some asylum seekers from Honduras and El Salvador to Guatemala rather than permit them to seek protection in the United States.

Under the “Asylum Cooperative Agreement” deal signed with Guatemala in July, the Guatemalan government will process the asylum claims of people who arrive at the U.S. border without visas.
For the first time in American history, large numbers of refugees can now be returned to a third country without their consent.

This denies them any opportunity to seek protection in the United States. Instead, people will be required to apply for asylum in Guatemala, a country with one of the highest rates of poverty and malnutrition in the entire Western Hemisphere.

The new agreement went into effect on Tuesday. Under the new rules put in place to implement the agreement, there is only one way individuals can avoid getting sent to Guatemala. They must prove to an asylum officer that it is “more likely than not” they will be persecuted or tortured in Guatemala.

This is a high, likely unreachable bar for people locked in detention with no access to lawyers as well as those first arriving at the border.

The agreement with Guatemala is sweeping. It applies to any person who enters the United States without a visa or permission to enter, regardless of whether they ask for asylum at a port of entry or after crossing the border.

There is also nothing in the agreement that limits it to people who have first traveled through Guatemala on their way to the United States. This raises fears that the agreement could be applied against Mexicans too.