It’s become the Trump administration’s playbook.
An attorney with the Department of Homeland Security moves to dismiss asylum-seekers’ cases during hearings, rendering the asylum-seekers without the protection from deportation they had when their cases were active.
Next, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement officers swoop in, “re-encounter” the asylum-seekers as if they are back at the border, and fast-track them out of the country.
In San Francisco, judges rarely grant those motions to dismiss. But ICE officers nearly always arrest immigrants whose cases DHS has moved to dismiss anyway.
On Friday, ICE officers in San Francisco went a step further: Arresting an indigenous-language speaker whose case the DHS attorney did not even move to dismiss. In fact, the Trump administration attorney agreed to hear her case in two months’ time, but that did not matter to ICE.
A woman from Guatemala, who appeared to be middle-aged, attended her hearing in Judge Joseph Park’s courtroom, at 630 Sansome St.
The woman spoke only Mam, a Mayan language. Park, who appeared via video, tried to speak to the woman through the court’s Spanish interpreter.
Do you speak Spanish? the interpreter asked.
“Very little,” she responded in Spanish.
Park tried to find a Mam interpreter who could dial in over the phone. The task proved tricky. Park eventually gave up, and asked the woman to come back in October, when he had already scheduled several other hearings with Mam-speakers and would have an interpreter available.
By that point in the morning, the attorney representing DHS had already moved to dismiss three other cases.
Two of the three asylum-seekers had been arrested in the hallway the moment they left the courtroom.
The third, a woman from Colombia, clearly petrified, was still inside the courtroom. She would stay there for another hour, completely inconsolable, saying she was worried about her children.
Unlike the first three cases, the DHS attorney did not move to dismiss the Mam woman’s case. Instead, the attorney agreed to pick the case back up in October, when there would be an interpreter.
A lawyer with the Attorney of the Day program, which provides free legal advice to immigrants at their asylum hearings, seemed concerned anyway.
She pulled the woman aside, and tried to explain to her in Spanish that she could be arrested. The attorney resorted to communicating with the woman by phoning in a family member who could interpret from Mam to Spanish.
When the Guatemalan woman finally did leave the courtroom, ICE officers were waiting. They called her name.
The attorney of the day tried to protest: She told the ICE officers that the DHS attorney had not moved to dismiss the case.
It did not seem to matter. Two male ICE officers immediately whisked the woman out of the hallway and through an unmarked door.
Asylum-seekers who are held in immigration court are typically taken to be processed at an ICE field office on the sixth floor of 630 Sansome St. A lucky few have been released from there with habeas corpus petitions. Most are sent from there to longer-term detention facilities elsewhere in California, or the country.
Back inside the courtroom, Park wrapped up his 8:30 a.m. hearings, then called for a 45-minute break. He switched off his camera. The DHS attorney stayed in her seat at the front of the courtroom, working on her computer. She did not look back once at the rest of the courtroom.
The final of the four asylum-seekers who would be arrested that day — the woman from Colombia — was still inside the court, and still crying. The DHS attorney had moved to dismiss her case almost an hour earlier.
Around 10:30 a.m., with a volunteer court observer and the attorney of the day, the woman managed to collect herself, and stood up to walk outside.
When the door swung open, and she saw the ICE officers waiting for her, she panicked. She started to cry again, and turned around and immediately sat down in the courtroom.
It took another 30 minutes or so for her to calm down enough to stand up and leave the courtroom again.
ICE officers immediately arrested her.
You keep using that word “indigenous.” I do not think it means what you think it means.
A gang of thugs are torturing & kidnapping people. Enough waving signs and shouting slogans: these folks don’t even support in the rule of law, let alone have a sense of humanity. Stop playing by the rules and coloring between the lines: slashing tires on their van would be an effective start…
This is nothing but evil, pure and simple. It’s disgusting and makes me ashamed to be an American. Yet, I am more American than these cowardly ICE “Agents”. They have no American ideals, fake Christians, and should be deported themselves, I don’t care where. Of course that wont happen. The media, those in power, and those who capitulate to trump should be shunned and banned from public life. They should feel no rest or peace. We should make it too uncomfortable for them to show their faces publicly, until the end of their days.
Trump and those supporting this should be driven from office and jailed.
This is a good start. Adios muchachos.
This is just so wrong. These DHS attorneys and ice agents should be ashamed of themselves. They have no humanity. They have no empathy. They apparently have no soul.
Unless someone is wanted for a violent crime, they should be allowed to attend their court proceedings – whether it be immigration, civil or criminal court – without being arrested or detained.
So an indigenous person in the United States is a Native American, correct? How then can one be deported? Aren’t Native Americans born in the US citizens, even if they were born on a reservation?
There really needs to be more people protesting on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays at both 101 Montgomery and at 630 Sansome. We need to be working to make it as difficult as possible for ICE to to do their job. So far there’s only a very small amount of people out there and we need to be outnumbering ICE by a serious amount. LA has been great at organizing, and In San Francisco we should step up in much greater numbers.
The protest just doesn’t look like a gathering that “normies” can join, unfortunately. Everyone has their face wrapped in keffiyehs, and it’s nothing against Palestinian solidarity (I assume the protestors are doing double duty at the Israeli consulate down the street), but outreach to recruit some people that don’t look like full-time activists would go a long way to attract the downtown crowd you’re handing flyers to. There are a lot of people who are angry, and a lot of people that want this to stop, but so many people also assume their demographic isn’t welcomed in the activist community (think: tech workers, home owners, “moderates”). Big tents are hard to build in San Francisco because the local rhetoric has been so divisive for so long.
As Adam Serwer has written in The Atlantic, “The Cruelty is the Point.”
So tough. How many ICE did it take to arrest a defenseless woman? Did the cuff her, throw her in a van, beat her, starve her, keep her locked up and sent to South Sudan? O sorry, Sudan is reserved for Palestinians who will be sent there after they are tortured and starved first. El Salvador? So tough. Real Patriots!
Waffen SS at work..traitors to their country, traitors to the constitution..History won’t have a kind look at those nazi goons and their mentors..And when you see their eyes above their masks, you notice asians goons, black goons and probably latino goons as well..they should know this administration don’t give a damn about them, they are not white. When they are done with “their jobs” they are next.
Why should we have to pay for a lawyer, interpreter and housing/food for a person in middle age that doesn’t even speak English or Spanish, I’m sure she will need healthcare, who pays for that? Send her home, how did she get here?
Because they have the right to due process.
Swift and sure deportation is the only answer to curb the deluge of illegal immigration this country he experienced. 99.9% of asyllum claims are simply economic in nature and therefore bogus.
These people regardless of status have the right to due process under law.