Greyhound will stop

Greyhound will stop allowing immigration checks on buses

Greyhound, the U.S.’s largest bus company, said on Friday that it will stop allowing Border Patrol agents without a warrant to board its buses to conduct routine immigration checks.

Greyhound Lines will no longer allow Border Patrol agents to conduct immigration checks on its buses without warrants, the company announced on Friday — one week after a leaked government memo revealed that agents could not board buses without consent.

The memo appeared to take Greyhound by surprise. For years, the company, the largest operator of intercity buses in America, had been allowing border agents to board its vehicles without warrants, citing a law that it said it didn’t agree with.

“C.B.P. searches have negatively impacted both our customers and our operations,” the company said in 2018, referring to Customs and Border Protection, the Border Patrol’s parent agency. “Greyhound does not coordinate with C.B.P., nor do we support these actions.”

But in the leaked memo, which was first reported by The Associated Press, the Border Patrol chief confirmed that agents were prohibited from boarding buses and questioning passengers without warrants or the company’s consent.

Immigration Restrictions

Immigration Restrictions Extend to Nearly 7% of the Entire World


The President issued the fourth travel ban of his presidency on Friday. This ban comes almost three years to the day after the first one brought thousands of protesters to airports around the country.

People from Nigeria, Eritrea, Myanmar, and Kyrgyzstan are now barred from immigrating to the United States. Those from Sudan and Tanzania will also be barred from the diversity visa program under the new ban. In total, people from 13 countries now face immigration restrictions based on where they were born.

Individuals from the newly affected countries will still be able to travel to the United States on other visas, such as student or tourist visas. But they cannot, however, become permanent U.S. residents.

Although the ban is supposedly based in national security, it only blocks those who had ties to the United States strong enough to permanently immigrate. This fact has long undermined the administration’s national security rationales.

This will have the greatest effect on U.S. citizens seeking to bring over family members, including spouses and children. Many Americans fear that they won’t be able to bring over adopted children under the new ban.

As with the last travel ban, some people can apply for waivers that would let them immigrate. But the current waiver process is often criticized as inadequate.

Voter Registration Error

Voter registration error risks deportation for immigrants

CHICAGO (AP) — The day Margarita Del Pilar Fitzpatrick applied for an Illinois driver's license upended her life. When a clerk offered to register her to vote in 2005, the Peruvian citizen mistakenly accepted, leading to long legal battles and eventually deportation.

A decade and a half later, she struggles to find work at 52, is nearly homeless and hasn't seen two of her three American citizen daughters in years because of a secretary of state's office mishap.
“It has derailed our lives,” she said in a phone interview from Lima. “Immigrants should not be put in this situation.”

A handful of other immigrants could face a similar fate, or criminal charges, after a mistake in Illinois' automatic voter registration system allowed of hundreds of people who identified themselves as non-U.S. citizens to register. Sixteen cast ballots.

The fiasco in a state with a reputation for election shenanigans triggered a partisan battle, infuriated voter advocacy groups and left immigrant rights activists doing damage control.
“It’s disappointing because the situation could have been avoided,” said Lawrence Benito, head of the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights.

Separations at the Border

Judge Allows Certain Family Separations at the Border to Continue

The Trump administration received an unfortunate victory in the case against their family separation policy.

On January 13, 2020, Federal Judge Dana Sabraw sided with the government in a lawsuit challenging continued separations at the border. Although the judge ordered an end to most family separations in 2018, he has allowed families to be separated under certain exceptions.

These exceptions have let the practice continue on a smaller—yet still devastating—scale. Over 1,000 children have been separated since the judge’s earlier ruling.

Under the administration’s “zero tolerance” policy, immigrant parents were systematically separated from their children at the U.S.-Mexico border and prosecuted for entering the United States without authorization. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a lawsuit shortly after the policy was announced in April 2018. Judge Sabraw ordered an end to the policy two months later. He also ordered the reunification of the over 2,800 families who had been separated under the policy.
He allowed, however, for separations when there is “a determination that the parent is unfit or presents a danger to the child.”

Since that 2018 decision, thousands of children have been separated. The government relies on different “exceptions” to continue the separations.

In some cases, the government cites the parent’s criminal history or health condition. In others, they have expressed doubts of a legitimate parent-child relationship. They allege criminal history—even if the offense took place years ago and was non-violent. It can be as simple as a traffic citation. In some cases, the parent has not been charged with a crime but is simply suspected of one by the U.S. government.

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.