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San Francisco Chronicle
2 days ago
- Politics
- San Francisco Chronicle
‘Everybody is scared:' Trump's travel ban leaves Bay Area residents on edge
Hundreds of people arrived at Raimondi Park in West Oakland Friday morning to pray in observance of Eid al-Adha, a Muslim celebration. Men lined up on a massive white tarp on the baseball field, removing their shoes and laying down their prayer rugs. Women did the same but in a smaller section under a white tent. As people arrived, Ali Albasiery, a business owner and president of the As-Salam Mosque in Oakland, greeted them with a smile, a pat on the back and a kiss on the cheek. Despite his smile and the warm greetings from his peers, Albasiery, who was born in Yemen and moved to the U.S. at 10, was preoccupied by President Donald Trump's recent travel ban on citizens from his home country and 11 others. And he could sense apprehension and fear in those gathering to pray. 'Everybody is scared,' Albasiery said. 'Everybody is rushing and people are panicking.' This past Wednesday, Trump reintroduced the policy from his first term that, when it goes into effect on Monday, will prohibit travel to the U.S. by citizens of Yemen, Sudan, Afghanistan, Burma, Chad, Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya and Somalia. It limits travel from Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan and Venezuela. Trump said the move — which includes the input of the secretary of state, attorney general, secretary of homeland security and director of national intelligence — will protect the U.S. from terrorist attacks and national security threats. 'As President, I must act to protect the national security and national interest of the United States and its people,' Trump said. Trump did not point to any specific examples of terrorist attacks against the U.S. involving the countries banned. He spoke of the recent Colorado attack in which an Egyptian national, who had overstayed his visa, injured Jewish marchers supporting Israeli hostages held in Gaza, but Egypt is not included in the bans. Another justification for the move, according to the president's order, is to target countries whose visitors frequently overstay their visas. Courts blocked Trump's first two attempts to ban travel from certain countries, but in 2018 the U.S. Supreme Court upheld his third try, based on the president's authority over matters of national security. The issue of overstayed visas could give opponents fresh ammunition against the new order, and critics have already argued that it appears to arbitrarily target countries on those grounds. Bay Area groups that advocate for immigrants said they are preparing for a fight, noting that the administration's strategy has extended beyond countries with Muslim majorities and African nations. 'The administration is using a mish-mash of justifications (including what screening measures the targeted countries' governments employ, whether the targeted countries accept deportation flights, and the visa overstay rates from these countries) to assert its actions,' Carole Vigne, legal director at the Asian Law Caucus, said in a statement to the Chronicle. 'The fight to stop this new ban will require more creative and strategic approaches to expose the underlying racism and xenophobia.' Hundreds of people protested at major airports nationwide when Trump announced his first travel ban in 2017. But this week, as Trump issued a new ban involving more countries than he did in his first term, many remain warily silent. Many had been expecting the move, as Trump promised repeatedly to reinstate his bans in his campaign last year. The muted response isn't lost on Albasiery, owner of Shoprite and four other small convenience stores in Oakland, who said he is focusing on helping members of his community. The day after Trump's announcement, he was awakened at 1 a.m. by a Yemeni friend who said his father was forced to leave his mother in Yemen. His father had received a visa, but his mother had not yet; his father was worried he'd be banned from entering the U.S. if he did not leave right away. 'Everyone that has received their visa within the past week or two weeks, they are rushing to get into the states,' Albasiery said. 'They don't know, if they come (whether) they'll be turned back.' The Bay Area is home to more than 4,800 people born in Yemen. The total number of Bay Area residents who come from the 12 countries targeted by the full travel ban is at least 76,000, led by Iran and Afghanistan, according to the U.S. Census. The communities are even larger than those numbers indicate, with more having ancestry from the countries. These diasporas are spread throughout the Bay Area, and many are clustered in the East Bay. Fremont is known for its large Afghan population; Union City is home to a Myanmar community and cultural center; Hayward is a center for the Sudanese community; while the Iranian population is more dispersed throughout the region. Many first-generation immigrants here send money back to their families. Some people are concerned about traveling to their homelands to see their loved ones and possibly not being able to return, depending on their own immigration status. Alaa Suliman, a Hayward resident and professional development officer at the Sudanese Association for Northern California, which represents over 1,000 people from the country in the Bay Area, said this week's announcement is more painful than Trump's first round of travel bans. Sudan is in the midst of a civil war that has killed thousands of people. 'The Sudanese people are literally in the most dire need for support and for international attention,' Suliman said. 'We have to speak up, we have to protest, we have to resist. This is just the beginning of a really long, corrupted journey.' Suliman planned to attend a morning prayer in Hayward with her community on Friday to celebrate the Muslim holiday of Eid al-Adha. Albasiery, who organized the event in Oakland, said he was spending the rest of the day with his sisters and cousins in Oakland to have cake and sandwiches. He fretted for his friends and for the current state of Yemen, where an 11-year civil war has resulted in 233,000 deaths, 131,000 of those caused by lack of food, services and infrastructure, according to the United Nations. On Friday, Albasiery said most people were trying to stay focused on the holiday. One man, who was standing with a group of friends at the end of the prayer, said he didn't want to talk about Trump's travel ban. 'Not today,' he said. Others said the ban made it hard to concentrate on the holiday. 'It's very discriminatory,' said Waleed Nasser, a 57-year-old San Leandro resident who is originally from Yemen. 'People are trying to come over here and have a better life. I really don't understand what Trump is doing.' Nasser and his son, Mohammed, 19, attended Friday's prayer together. Their mood was somber — they worried about the effect of the ban on their friends and family overseas. 'There's nothing to celebrate when your close Muslim brothers and sisters are struggling back home. 'People can't get food. Children are dying, " Mohammed Nasser said. He said he didn't understand the rationale behind Trump's ban.
Yahoo
13-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
What's at Stake as Trump's Assault on Birthright Citizenship Heads to the Supreme Court
The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments over President Donald Trump's executive order to end birthright citizenship on Thursday. Trump signed the order, 'Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship,' on the first day of his second term, but it has since been halted by nationwide injunctions issued by three separate federal district courts. The Supreme Court is taking up the issue after the Trump administration filed emergency appeals asking the justices to narrow the injunction orders so the policy could move forward in some capacity while the issue is battled out in courts around the country. Twenty-two states have sued over the ostensibly unconstitutional executive order, which seeks to end the practice of granting citizenship to anyone born on U.S. soil. Rolling Stone spoke with legal experts Christopher M. Lapinig and Christopher W. Schmidt about the significance of the Supreme Court's decision to hear oral arguments, the merits of the cases challenging the order, and the broader impact of the Trump administration's attack on the 14th Amendment. Lapinig is an attorney with Asian Law Caucus, co-counsel alongside American Civil Liberties Union Foundation Immigrants' Rights Project, State Democracy Defenders Fund, NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, and others on New Hampshire Indonesian Community Support, et al v. Donald J. Trump, et al (this birthright citizenship case is separate from those the Supreme Court is convening over on May 15). Schmidt is a law professor and co-director of the Institute on the Supreme Court of the United States at Chicago Kent College of Law and a research professor at the American Bar Foundation. It's unclear exactly which questions the Supreme Court will take up on Thursday. But the oral arguments will likely have less to do with the constitutionality of birthright citizenship, and more to do with judicial authority and a contentious issue that has affected both parties in recent administrations: how lower courts can issue nationwide injunctions essentially inhibiting a president from instituting policies nationwide. The decision on that issue would not only impact these birthright citizenship cases, but the hundreds of other lawsuits challenging the Trump administration's actions that are in the pipeline. Here's what else is at stake: The 14th Amendment, passed by Congress in 1866 and ratified in 1868, is pretty cut and dry regarding birthright citizenship: 'All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.' It has long been widely interpreted that anyone born on U.S. soil is an American citizen, regardless of the citizenship of the child's parents. 'It essentially was part of the efforts to make sure that slavery would not happen again, or anything resembling slavery would not happen again. And so the drafters of the 14th Amendment were abolitionists, right? They were anti-slavery, and they created this language with the idea of anti-subordination in mind,' Lapinig says. 'And what that means is essentially that they wanted to make sure that no person in the United States would be subordinated or relegated to second-class citizens or something else by virtue of their race or their ethnicity or national origin.' Drafters built 'subject to the jurisdiction thereof' into the amendment's language. Lapinig says they 'contemplated that birthright citizenship should not extend to invaders, for example,' but that 'it's otherwise clear from the sort of discussions leading up to the enactment of the 14th Amendment that, of course, the 14th Amendment was to make sure that children of formerly enslaved people would be citizens by birth.' 'They also made clear,' he continues, 'that they knew that, for example, children of immigrants from places like China or anywhere else would also be U.S. citizens by birth if they were born in the United States.' The 'subject to the jurisdiction thereof' line in the 14th Amendment is the key to the Trump administration's argument. 'They are arguing that the categories of people that they are attempting to exclude are not subject to jurisdiction,' Schmidt says. 'Their argument being that if you're not legally in the country, [or] temporarily, you're not, in some sense, subject to the jurisdiction of the United States. Now, even as I talk through that, it doesn't seem to really resonate in any meaningful way when people think about why you're subject to jurisdiction.' 'That was put in there to exclude people like someone born to a foreign diplomat who is subject to a different set of rules, even when they're in the United States, perhaps also Native American populations who are not fully subject to the control of the United States. So, there were certain groups of people who were thought to fit in that category at the time.' Both the text and the amendment's history are not favorable to Trump's argument. ''Subject to jurisdiction' basically means, does the United States sovereign have control, or can it regulate you, like it can regulate other people? And whether you're in the country legally or not, you're subject to the sovereign authority of the United States, which is why [the jurisdiction argument] just doesn't seem to make a lot of sense, just in terms of the language,' Schmidt says. 'Also, for those people who studied immigration policy around the time of the 14th Amendment … the categories of 'legal,' 'illegal,' 'documented,' 'undocumented' — they were not categories that had much or any meaning at the time. The process by which someone would enter the country or leave the country was not nearly as regulated … And there wasn't this sort of idea that there is a separate category of people who are undocumented or illegal immigrants.' He adds: 'This is a provision of the Constitution that has always struck me as being more clear than much of the Constitution.' Notably, beyond the text and history arguments when interpreting the Constitution against Trump's executive order, there is also strong precedent against it with the Supreme Court's ruling in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, in which the justices decided 6-2 in favor of Wong Kim Ark. In the New Hampshire lawsuit, along with the other cases involving birthright citizenship, lawyers cite the 1898 case. Wong Kim Ark was a Chinese-American cook born in San Francisco in 1873. 'His parents, who were from China, because of the Chinese Exclusion Act, were ineligible to be U.S. citizens,' Lapinig says. Wong Kim Ark left the U.S. for China to see his family and his wife, whom he married on a previous trip ('Chinese immigration, especially Chinese women, were restricted' at the time, Lapinig says), but when he returned home to San Francisco, he was denied reentry by immigration officials on the claim that he was not a U.S. citizen, despite being born in San Francisco. He and his lawyers argued he was a U.S. citizen under the 14th Amendment. The case made it all the way to the Supreme Court, which sided with Wong Kim Ark. The ruling 'enshrined the right to birthright citizenship for all babies, all children born in the United States to this day,' says Lapinig. In addition to the pretty straightforward legal precedent against Trump's executive order, Schmidt notes that it's 'just established practice' that birthright citizenship applies to anyone born in the U.S., even if their parents are undocumented, and that 'Congress has been operating under the assumption this is the proper reading of the 14th Amendment for generations.' The Supreme Court's move to hear oral arguments is unusual because typically when the Supreme Court schedules oral arguments, it's after granting certiorari, meaning the court has agreed to review a decision from a lower court. 'The striking thing about the granting of oral arguments in the birthright citizenship cases is that they did not grant certiorari in any of the cases, nor did they identify a question presented that they're going to be talking about,' Schmidt says. There are a couple of topics that could be addressed on May 15. The first is the one Trump brought to the court: the validity of nationwide injunctions, which the district courts involved in the cases issued after deeming the executive order likely unconstitutional. 'This is what the Trump administration went to the court saying: 'We want you to lift these nationwide injunctions, because it's an abuse of judicial authority,'' says Schmidt. 'So, it's highly likely that the court will want to hear some discussion simply about that problem, which certainly is sharply put into focus with this case, but it actually transcends this particular case. It's just about the scope of district court authority on these national issues.' The other topic is the substantive question of the lawsuits, which is unlikely to be discussed on Thursday as the administration only asked the court, so far, to narrow the nationwide injunctions. The question is a big one, though: 'The constitutionality of a redefinition of birthright citizenship away from what's been understood for over 100 years, to make it more narrowly applied, namely, at least according to the Trump executive order, to not apply to people who were born in the United States but to parents who are not in the United States with legal documentation or are only here temporarily,' Schmidt says. Babies born after Feb. 19, 2025 to parents who do not have U.S. citizenship or permanent immigration status in the U.S. are the target of the executive order, should it stand. It is unclear how this would be enforced if the courts do ultimately allow it to stand. 'Anyone that is even on a visa that, in theory, could lead to a green card, like, say, an H-1B visa, which is a very common sort of skilled worker visa that is issued in the United States [would be vulnerable],' Lapinig says. 'If at that point, they're only put only on an H-1B and have not quite obtained legal permanent residents in the United States, then the executive order would consider their children, their babies, born to be ineligible for their birthright citizenship.' Other visa holders, such as students, exchange visitors, tourists, athletes, and entertainers would also fall under this umbrella, as would Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival (DACA) recipients, and people with humanitarian visas, among others. 'This is the president of the United States declaring what at least takes the form of an authoritative interpretation of the Constitution. So simply the significance of who is making the claim and the significance of how much the claim would affect people does seem to indicate that allowing lower court decisions to do the work for the Supreme Court … it has always struck me as unlikely,' says Schmidt. There is also likely a strategic reason the Supreme Court might want to take this case up. While the GOP-controlled court may give Trump some wins, like it did with the Trump immunity case last July, it's likely 'the court really wants to assert that it's not just simply a rubber stamp for the Trump administration, and it wants to find opportunities to also assert its role in this whole process,' Schmidt says. 'So therefore, it wants to find some Trump administration initiatives to strike down, and this has always struck me as easy pickings. The law is so clear, so well-established, and the impact of this on American society would be very disruptive, quite radical, quite harmful.' 'It is just head spinning, the amount of activity coming out of the executive branch that is constitutionally and legally questionable, and the burden that's going to place on the courts,' Schmidt adds. 'It's a question about whether the courts are going to be spread so thin with these really major issues, and whether they want to be a little strategic about which cases they're going to take on. … They might just allow the lower courts to take this one. I still don't think that's likely, but it is an option.' Should Trump's executive order be implemented as is, the policy would create an 'underclass of individuals,' says Lapinig, which is something the drafters of the 14th Amendment worked to combat. 'The 14th Amendment was truly an effort to make sure that slavery itself would not happen again in the United States, but also that nothing like slavery would happen again, as in that there would never be the creation and growth of an underclass of people in the United States that were denied off their race or ethnicity or ancestry, equal rights to others.' 'This executive order would create, dramatically, a large underclass of people in the United States that, in turn, would not be eligible for any public benefits, or [other] aspects of public support — and all Americans would be affected, because they are in your communities,' he adds. 'The fabric of every community in the United States would be affected in some way because there would be the presence of folks who would unfortunately be part of this underclass of people. And so those communities would have to — whether on an individual level or on a community level — deal with the ramifications of children who are or who have been, who will be excluded from membership among the ranks of U.S. citizens.' As for the New Hampshire v. Trump lawsuit, which was filed hours after Trump signed the birthright citizenship executive order on his first day in office on Jan. 20, Judge Joseph Laplante issued a preliminary injunction on Feb. 10. On April 10, Trump and his administration filed a notice of appeal. 'We are very confident in our lawsuit, in the legal merits of our lawsuit, and our position that this executive order is completely and flagrantly unconstitutional,' Lapinig says. 'We know that the law — has stood for as I mentioned over 120 years — is clearly on our side, and so we will just continue to litigate our lawsuit and do what we can to make sure that this executive order is never implemented.' More from Rolling Stone Jon Stewart Criticizes Trump for Taking Free Jet: 'He's Like the Reverse Oprah' Latin Music Festivals Scramble Amid Visa Uncertainty: 'It's Scary' Trump Is Trying to Take Control of Congress Through Its Library Best of Rolling Stone The Useful Idiots New Guide to the Most Stoned Moments of the 2020 Presidential Campaign Anatomy of a Fake News Scandal The Radical Crusade of Mike Pence
South China Morning Post
22-04-2025
- Politics
- South China Morning Post
Southeast Asians in Los Angeles are being detained, deported at routine ICE check-ins
A growing number of Southeast Asian immigrants in Los Angeles and Orange counties whose deportation orders have been on indefinite hold for years are being detained, and in some cases, deported after showing up for routine check-ins at US Immigration and Customs Enforcement offices, according to immigrant lawyers and advocacy groups. Advertisement In recent months, a number of Cambodian Laotian and Vietnamese immigrants have been told that deportation orders that had been stayed – in some cases for decades – are now being enforced as President Donald Trump 's administration seeks to increase the number of deportations. The immigrants being targeted are generally people who were convicted of a crime after arriving in the US, making them eligible for deportation after their release from jail or prison. In most cases, ICE never followed through with the deportations because the immigrants had lived in the US long enough that their home countries no longer recognised them as citizens, or as is the case with Laos, the home country does not readily issue repatriation documents. Instead, under long-standing policies, these immigrants have been allowed to remain in the US with the condition that they checked in with ICE agents regularly to show they were working and staying out of trouble. The check-ins generally start out monthly, but over time become an annual visit. They are also afraid to report based on what they have seen on the news Lee Ann Felder-Heim, lawyer According to the Asian Law Caucus, as of 2024 there were roughly 15,100 Cambodians, Laotians and Vietnamese nationals living in this situation across the US
Yahoo
22-04-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Southeast Asians in L.A. region are being detained, deported at routine ICE check-ins
A growing number of Southeast Asian immigrants in Los Angeles and Orange counties whose deportation orders have been on indefinite hold for years are being detained, and in some cases, deported after showing up for routine check-ins at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement offices, according to immigrant attorneys and advocacy groups. In recent months, a number of Cambodian, Laotian and Vietnamese immigrants have been told that deportation orders that had been stayed — in some cases for decades — are now being enforced as the Trump administration seeks to increase the number of deportations. The immigrants being targeted are generally people who were convicted of a crime after arriving in the U.S., making them eligible for deportation after their release from jail or prison. In most cases, ICE never followed through with the deportations because the immigrants had lived in the U.S. long enough that their home countries no longer recognized them as citizens, or as is the case with Laos, the home country does not readily issue repatriation documents. Instead, under longstanding policies, these immigrants have been allowed to remain in the U.S. with the condition that they checked in with ICE agents regularly to show they were working and staying out of trouble. The check-ins generally start out monthly, but over time become an annual visit. According to the Asian Law Caucus, as of 2024 there were roughly 15,100 Cambodians, Laotians and Vietnamese nationals living in this situation across the U.S. 'People are very worried about their check-ins. They are dedicated to complying with their reporting requirements and want to continue to comply as they have been doing for years, but they are also afraid to report based on what they have seen on the news,' said Lee Ann Felder-Heim, a staff attorney at the Asian Law Caucus. Connie Chung Joe, the chief executive of Asian Americans Advancing Justice Southern California, said that in the last month her organization has been made aware of at least 17 community members in Los Angeles and Orange counties who have gone in for scheduled check-ins, only to be detained or deported. 'These are folks who've been here for decades,' Chung Joe said. 'It just breaks the community and their families apart.' Orange County is home to the largest diaspora of Vietnamese outside of their home country, many of them refugees who fled the fall of Saigon. The county's Little Saigon is home to more than 100,000 Vietnamese Americans. In addition, tens of thousands of Cambodians and Laotians have settled in the Los Angeles area, according to the Pew Research Center. Many Southeast Asian refugees were brought over as children, and not all got adequate support as they coped with the upheaval, said Laura Urias, program director at Immigrant Defenders Law Center. Some fell in with gangs as they struggled to assimilate, and that's when they got caught up in the criminal system. Although they may have gotten in trouble as youths, Urias said, many served their time and went on to get jobs and put down roots. In one instance, a Cambodian immigrant went in for his ICE check-in and came out with an order to produce a plane ticket to Cambodia within 60 days, she said. Urias said none of the center's clients have been deported at this point, but that she has heard about people without legal representation who were deported after a check-in. 'It's definitely something that we haven't really seen before,' Urias said. 'It aligns with the overall message that this administration came in with — threatening to deport as many people as possible.' The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, did not respond to a list of questions from The Times about the reasons behind the policy shift and whether the immigrants' home countries will accept them. Urias said she suspects that the Trump administration's looming tariff threats have made some countries more willing to cooperate and accept deportees. Richard Wilner said his firm, Wilner & O'Reilly, in Orange, has seen an uptick in requests for consultations from the families of immigrants who have been detained. His firm does not take on clients who have been convicted of serious crimes such as sexual offenses and murder. 'In the past two weeks, I've gotten more phone calls than I have in the past 15 years or longer, because people are getting arrested,' he said. He added that he hasn't been able to figure out why some immigrants with delayed deportation orders are being targeted for removal and not others. 'These are people with outstanding orders of deportation, some of whom have gone on to lead remarkable lives, started families, businesses, good folks. Others have gone on to re-offend," he said. "I don't know what the parameters are, because not everyone is getting snatched up at check-in.' Sign up for Essential California for news, features and recommendations from the L.A. Times and beyond in your inbox six days a week. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Los Angeles Times
22-04-2025
- Politics
- Los Angeles Times
Southeast Asians in L.A. region are being detained, deported at routine ICE check-ins
A growing number of Southeast Asian immigrants in Los Angeles and Orange counties whose deportation orders have been on indefinite hold for years are being detained, and in some cases, deported after showing up for routine check-ins at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement offices, according to immigrant attorneys and advocacy groups. In recent months, a number of Cambodian, Laotian and Vietnamese immigrants have been told that deportation orders that had been stayed — in some cases for decades — are now being enforced as the Trump administration seeks to increase the number of deportations. The immigrants being targeted are generally people who were convicted of a crime after arriving in the U.S., making them eligible for deportation after their release from jail or prison. In most cases, ICE never followed through with the deportations because the immigrants had lived in the U.S. long enough that their home countries no longer recognized them as citizens, or as is the case with Laos, the home country does not readily issue repatriation documents. Instead, under longstanding policies, these immigrants have been allowed to remain in the U.S. with the condition that they checked in with ICE agents regularly to show they were working and staying out of trouble. The check-ins generally start out monthly, but over time become an annual visit. According to the Asian Law Caucus, as of 2024 there were roughly 15,100 Cambodians, Laotians and Vietnamese nationals living in this situation across the U.S. 'People are very worried about their check-ins. They are dedicated to complying with their reporting requirements and want to continue to comply as they have been doing for years, but they are also afraid to report based on what they have seen on the news,' said Lee Ann Felder-Heim, a staff attorney at the Asian Law Caucus. Connie Chung Joe, the chief executive of Asian Americans Advancing Justice Southern California, said that in the last month her organization has been made aware of at least 17 community members in Los Angeles and Orange counties who have gone in for scheduled check-ins, only to be detained or deported. 'These are folks who've been here for decades,' Chung Joe said. 'It just breaks the community and their families apart.' Orange County is home to the largest diaspora of Vietnamese outside of their home country, many of them refugees who fled the fall of Saigon. The county's Little Saigon is home to more than 100,000 Vietnamese Americans. In addition, tens of thousands of Cambodians and Laotians have settled in the Los Angeles area, according to the Pew Research Center. Many Southeast Asian refugees were brought over as children, and not all got adequate support as they coped with the upheaval, said Laura Urias, program director at Immigrant Defenders Law Center. Some fell in with gangs as they struggled to assimilate, and that's when they got caught up in the criminal system. Although they may have gotten in trouble as youths, Urias said, many served their time and went on to get jobs and put down roots. In one instance, a Cambodian immigrant went in for his ICE check-in and came out with an order to produce a plane ticket to Cambodia within 60 days, she said. Urias said none of the center's clients have been deported at this point, but that she has heard about people without legal representation who were deported after a check-in. 'It's definitely something that we haven't really seen before,' Urias said. 'It aligns with the overall message that this administration came in with — threatening to deport as many people as possible.' The Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, did not respond to a list of questions from The Times about the reasons behind the policy shift and whether the immigrants' home countries will accept them. Urias said she suspects that the Trump administration's looming tariff threats have made some countries more willing to cooperate and accept deportees. Richard Wilner said his firm, Wilner & O'Reilly, in Orange, has seen an uptick in requests for consultations from the families of immigrants who have been detained. His firm does not take on clients who have been convicted of serious crimes such as sexual offenses and murder. 'In the past two weeks, I've gotten more phone calls than I have in the past 15 years or longer, because people are getting arrested,' he said. He added that he hasn't been able to figure out why some immigrants with delayed deportation orders are being targeted for removal and not others. 'These are people with outstanding orders of deportation, some of whom have gone on to lead remarkable lives, started families, businesses, good folks. Others have gone on to re-offend,' he said. 'I don't know what the parameters are, because not everyone is getting snatched up at check-in.'
