As US escalates detentions of migrants for claimed visa breaches, families struggle for information

After almost five weeks of being held in a detention centre in California, 64-year-old Masuma Khan, a Bangladeshi immigrant, was reunited with her family on November 6.

Khan, who came to the US in 1997, had been arrested at her annual immigration check-in by the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement on October 11. She has been in the legal process of obtaining a so-called green card that would allow her permanent residence.

Her husband is a US citizen.

After several petitions and pleas, a court finally intervened in early November to release Khan

Since Donald Trump assumed office as US president for the second time in January, the number of immigrants without criminal records held federal detention centres increased by over 2,000% to 65,135, ICE has said.

On October 27, the department said it had deported more than 527,000 people.

Last week, The New York Times reported that lawyers across the US “have seen a surge in arrests of foreign spouses of Americans during interviews at US Citizenship and Immigration Services offices”.

News outlets have also reported many other cases of people being detained as they report to ICE offices for routine check-ins, though exact numbers are not available.

Information is hard to come by, said Shakeel Syed, Executive Director of South Asian Network, a community-driven organisation based in California, who met Khan after she was released.

“We have learned through Masuma's cases, even elected officials are not getting straight answers from ICE,” he said. “Many of these detentions happen without any notification, and despite multiple efforts, it is extremely difficult to get a response from them.”

In September, less than a month before Khan, 73-year-old Bibi Harjit Kaur was detained by ICE at a similar routine immigration check-in in California.

After being moved from a detention centre in California to a holding facility almost 4,000 km away in Georgia, without any notification to her lawyer or family, the grandmother was deported to India two weeks later.

“It is despicable that any human should be treated this way,” said the Sikh Coalition, an organisation working for and with Sikh Americans, in a press release after Kaur's deportation. “And downright sickening that a 73-year-old woman was forced to endure it”.

Kaur is now back in Punjab.

In May, US President Trump set a target for federal agents: 3,000 arrests a day. Less than a month later, he took to his Truth Social account to make an announcement. Calling it the era of the “largest mass deportation operation of illegal aliens in history,” Trump asked ICE officers “to do all in their power” to achieve it.

“I want our Brave ICE Officers to know that REAL Americans are cheering you on every day,” he declared.

By that time, over 2,000 Asian immigrants had already been arrested by ICE in just the first four months of this year, according to a study by the University of California, Los Angeles' Asian American Studies Center and the Center for Neighborhood Knowledge. Indian immigrants, according to this report, accounted for the second-highest number of detentions among Asian groups.

As ICE actions have clearly escalated, it is unclear how many more have been arrested since then.

From courts, hospitals, schools, places of work and places of worship, the crackdown against immigrants has been widespread. Masked agents armed with bulletproof vests and guns have picked people off the streets, often without any legal documents to establish their credentials. Some of these arrests, videos show, have been abrupt and unprecedentedly violent.

In many, if not most, of these cases, neither were families nor lawyers notified before the arrests.

But cities across the US have also seen pushback by citizens. From people trying to guard and restrict ICE officers from making arrests, there have also been large protests. At one such protest in California, participants carried a poster with photos of four South Asians detained by ICE.

One of them was Khan.

Married to a US citizen, she first arrived in the country on a visa after her daughter fell sick in 1997. After overstaying that visa, she began the process of applying for a green card. However, it did not go as she hoped.

The agent she entrusted with her case turned out to be fraudulent, she said. They took her papers and money and she heard nothing further about the application.

In 2015, Khan began the process again. This time, the family worked with lawyers. Since then, she has attended immigration check-ins every year. It was at one such check-in this year that she was arrested.

Despite efforts by Congress members such as California's Judy Chu to get answers about Khan's sudden detention, there was little response, Chu told the media. It was especially challenging, she said, in light of the longest government shutdown in US history, which began on October 1 and lasted 43 days.

A month after Khan's detention, however, a US District Court ordered her “immediate release” from the California Correctional Facility. It prevented any deportation actions “without due process” while her lawful immigration case continues.

In his presidential inauguration speech in January, Trump pledged to deport “millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came”. Top White House officials have followed that agenda.

However, in June, the arrests of immigrants with no criminal record increased by 807%, The Guardian reported. By September, immigrants with no history of criminal activity made up the largest proportion of ICE arrests – over 56% of total arrests.

The others included immigrants with criminal records or those with pending charges.

In April, for instance, a Bhutanese-Nepali man based in Ohio was also taken into ICE custody.

Mohan Karki, 30, fled to the US from a Nepali refugee camp when he was 15. Just over a year later, in 2014, he was arrested for robbery and criminal trespassing. He served more than 15 months behind bars.

Over a decade later, the soon-to-be father of a daughter was taken into custody for deportation in Columbus, the capital of Ohio. He had been issued a deportation order in August 2014 but it wasn't until this year that any action was taken on it, his lawyers told local media.

Two months after his arrest, in June, a court issued an emergency stay order against Karki's deportation. However, he remains behind bars, awaiting an appeal against his deportation orders. Moved to a jail over 585 km from his home, wife and newborn baby, Karki is being held in Michigan.

His case is especially complicated. The US plans to deport Kakri to Bhutan, even though he is not recognised as a citizen of the kingdom. “This community is stateless,” said Aisa Villarosa, attorney and member of the Asian Law Caucus, to The Columbus Dispatch about the Bhutanese-Nepali refugee community in the US.

There are approximately 30,000 of them in central Ohio alone – most of whom fled to the US fearing ethnic cleansing and civil unrest.

“They are being deported to a land that does not recognise them,” Villarosa said.

Source: Scroll
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