Donald Trump “ordered a vast overhaul of immigration law enforcement during his first week in office, he stripped away most restrictions on who should be deported, opening the door for roundups and detentions on a scale not seen in nearly a decade,” the Los Angeles Times reports.

“Up to 8 million people in the country illegally could be considered priorities for deportation.”

“Far from targeting only ‘bad hombres,’ as Trump has said repeatedly, his new order allows immigration agents to detain nearly anyone they come in contact with who has crossed the border illegally. People could be booked into custody for using food stamps or if their child receives free school lunches.”

There have been ICE raids across the country over the last few days, spawning protests in Washington D.C., New York City and other cities.

NEW YORK — When ICE officials knock on your door, you don’t have to let them into your home. And in case a law enforcement officer stops you on the road and asks about your immigration status, do not provide any information without your immigration lawyer.

Those were the rights that undocumented Filipinos and all other immigrants in the United States can exercise to protect themselves, according to immigration and community advocates on Wednesday, in the wake of executive orders on immigration issued by Pres. Donald Trump that have sparked massive raids in recent days across the country.

“Don’t open the door to anyone you don’t know,” Sally Kinoshita, deputy director of Immigrant Legal Resource Center (ILRC), told the ethnic press. “Don’t sign any document that you don’t understand [because] that may give up some of your rights to a hearing [with an immigration judge] and other benefits.”

Every immigrant can deny ICE officials entry, especially if they don’t have a warrant issued by an immigration judge, advocates say. In most cases, because judges issue order of removals and not warrants, ICE officials do not have warrants with them.

Know your rights

“Immigrant communities,” Konishita added, “should know that these rights have not been changed.”

Giselle Ruiz, a staff attorney at ILRC, noted that these rights are rooted in the U.S. Constitution and that every individual in the country, regardless of immigration status, is protected.

“These are parts of the Fourth Amendment—the right of the people to be secure in their homes against unreasonable searches—and the Fifth Amendment, which is basically your right to remain silent,” Ruiz said. “Trump cannot take away these rights [from you].”

Trump’s executive orders have broadened the definition of “criminal alien,” in which it potentially makes almost every undocumented immigrant a priority for deportation.
Under the Obama administration, though he deported 2.7 million immigrants from 2009 to 2016, the priority for deportation was focused on immigrants who were deemed a threat to public or national security, or had committed serious felony offenses.

Not threats to public security

Most immigrants did not fall under any of these categories — and this is the reason why many undocumented immigrants, even the ones with a deportation order, were allowed to stay in the United States.

But among the first executive orders that Trump has issued since he took office on Jan. 20, undocumented immigrants with any criminal offense—including those who have been convicted and those who have not been charged but are believed to have committed “acts that constitute a chargeable criminal offense”— have become a priority for deportation.

This means that any undocumented person in the country (including those who overstayed their visas) is a priority, advocates say, and that it encourages “local law enforcement,” such as a police officer, to “cooperate with federal immigration authorities to enforce some of these priorities.”

Advocates believe that this move by the present administration is part of the campaign-promise that Trump gave to his supporters.

Sweeping raids

According to reports, sweeping raids by U.S. immigration officials in recent days apprehended hundreds of undocumented immigrants.

As of Friday, Feb. 10, nearly 200 individuals from California, Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina were arrested in a weeklong immigration operation.

In Los Angeles alone, more than 150 arrests were reportedly made last week.

Former Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa issued a statement: “The recent reports of ICE raids in our region have created great anxiety and are justifiably disturbing. Particularly given Pres. Trump’s rhetoric targeting immigrants, it is critically important that we stand together to protect each other.”

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security officials described to the media the operations as “routine.”

Leaked memos

While no one could verify its authenticity, advocates noted that there have been some leaked documents showing that Trump may issue more executive orders on immigration.

These leaked memos include ending the Deferred Action for Childhood Removals, or DACA, a program that Obama issued in 2012. To date, more than 740,000 undocumented immigrants— including Filipinos— who came to the United States when they were younger than 16 years old, have been recipients of the DACA program.

According to a report by the Migration Policy Institute, Filipinos were among the five highest DACA-eligible populations in the country. Last year alone, about 22,000 Filipinos were eligible for DACA and 28 percent of them filed their applications.

“If this [leaked memo] happens, they [DACA recipients] will lose their protection from deportation and their ability to work legally in the country,” said Kinoshita.

In addition, part of the leaked memos say that the Trump administration will conduct a report on how much money the government spends for refugee assistance program, how many foreign workers affect job opportunities for U.S.-born citizens, and how many undocumented immigrants committed crimes.

Pitting others against immigrants

“They [Trump administration] is really trying to pit people of the United States against immigrants — that immigrants [pose] danger to communities or drain the resources,” said Kinoshita.

In the Filipino American community, many are alarmed by unverified reports that the Philippines, because of the Muslim presence in the south, will be soon added to the seven countries facing Trump’s travel ban.

“Anecdotally, we’ve heard about people who are not part of the seven countries were detained at the airport or were not being able allowed to board their flight,” said Esther Sung, a staff attorney of National Immigration Law Center. “But it is difficult to know because we don’t have the specifics of the case.”

But a federal appeals panel on Thursday, Feb. 9, unanimously rejected Trump’s effort to reinstate his travel ban in the United States from seven largely Muslim nations — Somalia, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Sudan, Syria and Yemen.

Necessary check

Sung added: “The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals acted, as the courts are supposed to, as a necessary check to the blatant constitutional overreach emblazoned by Pres. Trump’s unlawful and un-American executive order. This decision means that, for now, people seeking refuge from horrific conditions will not be turned away, that families separated by this discriminatory policy can reunite. This is a reminder to everyone: our constitution protects us all, and no one—not even the President—is above it.”

Still, for Ruiz, knowing and defending your rights would be critical in these times of harsh immigration policies.

“Immigrants themselves should be at the forefront of protecting their own rights,” she said.

Legal experts provide advice on how to handle ICE raids

Local immigration lawyers and activists are bracing for possible raids across the city after President Trump signed executive order aiming to block federal funding to sanctuary cities.

Sanctuary city is a term used for cities that do not permit police or municipal employees to inquire about one’s immigration status, follow certain procedures that shelter undocumented immigrants and don’t allow municipal resources to further enforcement of federal immigration laws.

As fears loom over possible  US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids the city is gearing up by training its residents on how to respond during an ICE raid: “We saw that people power works, we saw what happened at San Francisco airport. So what we need to think about is how do we build a public campaign around deportation?,”  said Lorena Melgarejo of the Catholic Archdiocese of San Francisco. Melgarejo was addressing around a hundred people who had gathered for a  rapid response network training at St.Agnes Church.

Rage Donate $10 to CARECEN to resist ICE deportations

Melgarejo emphasised the importance of having a network of supporters: “When your mother is about to be deported you are in shock you need someone who can sit down with you and work on a strategy. May be not everyone can be a first responder but everyone can provide company and help. Think of practical things like cooking meals, help the family get legal representation and so on,” she said.

People of all ages were in the audience, most of them diligently taking notes as Melgarejo narrated stories of undocumented immigrants who have faced deportations or have been approached by ICE  and explained ways in which the community could help.

“I think it is important to know that even though you want to help it is not about you. At that moment it’s about the person and what they’re going through, So I have to be there for that person,” said Nicole Taylor, a San Francisco resident and public school teacher.

‘What to do during an ICE raid?’

Attorneys Luis Angel Reyes Savalza and Nilou Khonsari of Pangea Legal Services conducted a legal training to help people understand their legal rights as observers.

“For far too long ICE has become accustomed to picking up people at 5 or 6 in the morning. For far too long they’ve become accustomed to ripping families apart from their own homes without a warrant, taking them to courts and have them deported. For far too long it has all happened in the dark,” Savalza said.

Savalza spoke about his personal story of coming to the United States as an undocumented child: “When Trump got elected my mother was terrified until she saw the outpouring of protestors at San Francisco airport. It was then she turned to me and said ‘they like us, they want us to stay here we will be fine’,” he said.

So what should one look out for?:

Here’s what the advisors told people:

Warrant: 

• ICE officers can not enter a property without a warrant.
• The warrant needs to clearly state the individual’s name.
• It should have the individuals address.
• It should be signed by a Judge.

Observe:

• Write down the badge number of the officer (if you can).
• Film the interaction and make sure to keep the focus on the ICE officers.
• Take notes of any sign of officers being forceful, for example if they push open a door, pull out identification cards from the individual being questioned, make possible false statements to get individual to share information about their status, take an individuals personal belongings without a warrant or make homophobic or racial slurs.

Caution:

• Do not engage with an ICE officer.
• Do not interfere during the raid.
• Do not start speaking to the individual being questioned because you might risk them sharing more information that they shouldn’t be without a warrant.
• Document in detail rather than summarising.
• Minimal compliance in case officer addresses you.

Attorneys Nilou Khonsari and Luis Angel Reyes Savalza of Pangea Legal Services conducted a legal training to help people understand their legal rights as observers. Photo by Sana Saleem.

Khonsari emphasized the importance of documentation to help with legal proceedings: “We’ve had cases where judges have dismissed the case because there was enough documentation to prove that ICE acted outside of the law.  I do want to emphasize that people should not publish notes, video or photos online. Please always provide the information to legal teams and let them decide if information can be partially used for advocacy,” she said.

Erika (last name withheld) attended the training and took notes: “After the elections a lot of people have come out on the streets, people are asking others to join the protests to help protect marginalized communities. I too feel that I can put my body on the line for people who are being discriminated,” she said.

Throughout the trainings speaker emphasized the history of deportations: “These families are no longer nameless as they’ve been for the past eight years,” Melgarejo said.

Maria (last name withheld) said that she attended the training to better understand how to respond to ICE raids: “I am here because I am daughter of immigrants who were once undocumented,” she said Trump’s executive order brought focus to an issue that the immigrant community has faced for a long time: “People don’t realize that this is a situation that has been ongoing way before Trump, so it is time to organize and act,” she said.

Immigrant communities across the country are on edge after federal immigration agents arrested over 600 people in the past week in the largest raids since Donald Trump became president. Raids were reported in at least 11 states, including California, New York, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Missouri and Wisconsin.

On Monday, February 13 at approximately 4:45 AM in the Beach Flats neighborhood, armored vehicles and soldiers with machine guns were escorted by Santa Cruz police. They broke down doors, detained women and children, and checked people’s immigration papers. Members of the Salvadoran community were targeted for prosecution and deportation under the guise of searching for “gang members.”

The Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids involved helicopters, flash grenades, and fully armed officers in several neighborhoods in Santa Cruz who detained at least eleven individuals. The same thing happened elsewhere on California’s central coast, including in Live Oak, Soquel, Watsonville, Hollister, Salinas, and Daly City.

SCPD’s new Deputy Chief Dan Flippo said the city of Santa Cruz and the Santa Cruz Police Department would not participate in an immigration raid and the timing of Monday’s raids were “unfortunate” but in no way connected to an immigration sweep. “This investigation was ramped up very recently based on the belief that there was a significant threat to public safety,” Flippo said in a release.

But, in light of Trump’s recent threats to deport citizens without documents, the people of Beach Flats are terrified. “This morning’s raids threw the immigrant community into a panic. Trump’s new mandate to prioritize deportation of a far broader swathe of the immigrant community means many, many more people — parents, families, ordinary working people — must be fearful. Many are now in hiding,” said Paul Johnston of the new community organization Sanctuary Santa Cruz.

Police enthusiasts, including corporate media, diligently repeat police statements indicating that the raids occurred as part of a five year investigation and had nothing to do with illegal immigration. So far most of the media covering this incident has focused on an alleged MS-13 gang affiliation of the people detained.

However, there have been accounts of people being seized who have no affiliation to this gang, as well as tearful testimonies of law enforcement breaking down doors without warrants, smashing windows, and in some cases, taking money and computers and vandalizing homes.

The police chief’s statement that “this was not an immigration enforcement operation” dangerously invisibilizes how the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) may have targeted undocumented individuals under the auspices of solely targeting “criminals”. This brings to question the cooperation between local police and ICE as well as the guises and tactics ICE might use to enact their agenda.

Highly Militarized ICE Raids in Watsonville, California

The Watsonville Police Department assisted Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to conduct terrifying raids in Watsonville on February 13. ICE used flash grenades, armored vehicles, and military tactics to enter homes. ICE was also roaming the streets and scaring people. Communities are being terrorized. People, and especially children, are scared.

Watsonville just adopted the sanctuary resolution, so what does this mean? How are we a sanctuary city if they are employing tactics that terrorize the immigrant population?

Central Coast Communities Respond to the Terror of ICE Raids

Ernestina Saldana, an activist with Sanctuary Santa Cruz, addressed over 700 people at a standing room only community meeting in the Santa Cruz Civic Auditorium on Monday, February 13. She cried as she spoke about the ICE raids that happened at 4 AM that morning. It was a coordinated raid by highly militarized ICE officers in Santa Cruz, Watsonville, Live Oak, Soquel, Hollister, and Salinas.

Supposed “gang members” were being deported, but many other people were picked up in the raid, including mothers who had been deported and come back across the border to be with their American born children, considered federal criminals. As she cried, Ernestina told the audience that she’d received 350 emails and 38 calls by 5 in the morning. Doors were broken open. “We have proof of that” she stated. “We are afraid. I am afraid. These kinds of actions make fear grow like a weed everywhere.”

Later in the day on February 13, there was a training in Watsonville for parents about what to do if they get separated from their children, but only a few people attended, since many people were too afraid to attend. Children didn’t go to school. People are terrified and locking themselves in their homes.

While the city passed a resolution to be a Sanctuary City, this has not yet become a legal ordinance, which is a much stronger commitment. The City Council previously postponed this agenda item to February 28, rather than addressing it on February 14. Given the events of February 13, this is clearly not soon enough.

On Tuesday, February 14, Santa Cruz City Hall was packed with people demanding that local governing officials pass legislation confirming Santa Cruz’s status as a Sanctuary City and preventing the Santa Cruz police from cooperating with Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, as well as all of DHS.

ICE Arrests 600 in Nationwide Raids After Trump Order Expands Criminalization of Immigrants

Immigrant communities across the country are on edge after federal immigration agents arrested over 600 people in the past week in the largest raids since Donald Trump became president. Raids were reported in at least 11 states, including California, New York, Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Missouri and Wisconsin.

On Sunday, February 12, Trump tweeted, “The crackdown on illegal criminals is merely the keeping of my campaign promise. Gang members, drug dealers & others are being removed!”

Immigrant rights activists say the actions signal a clear shift by the Trump administration to deport people who were considered a “low priority” for removal under the Obama administration.

Tuesday Federal Agents forced entry into twenty Southern California locations believed to be orchestrating “maternity tourism” scams for pregnant alien women aiming to gain U.S. citizenship for their soon to be born child.

According to U.S. immigration officials, the “maternity hotels,” which housed predominantly women from China, cost anywhere from $15,000 to 50,000 depending on negotiated services.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency, or ICE, reported that locations for the “maternity hotels” included Los Angeles, Orange and San Bernardino counties.

No one was arrested in connection with the scheme, reported Reuters. It is not illegal for women coming from foreign countries to give birth to children in the United States. Moreover, the U.S. Constitution grants citizenship to children born in the United States regardless of where the parents are from.

However, other felonies such as visa and tax fraud, money laundering, and conspiracy are often attached to these types of operation. Wednesday ICE investigators will interview the women and any other material witnesses found at the locations.

When does a “routine action” become a raid?

After the executive orders come the enforcement actions. And now, the tallies are starting to come in. In the last week, Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested more than 600 undocumented immigrants across 11 states, The New York Times reported Monday. The multi-state operation is the first major sweep cracking down on undocumented immigrants since President Donald Trump signed an executive order on his sixth day in office expanding the categories of undocumented immigrants who’d be prioritized for deportation.

One hundred and sixty immigrants were arrested in the Los Angeles area; some 200 undocumented immigrants were arrested in Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina this past week. Roughly 40 were arrested in New York—those numbers were released Sunday morning in a leaked ICE document published by the New York Immigration Coalition. ICE confirmed Sunday afternoon that the factsheet was legitimate. Another 200 people were arrested throughout the Midwest: in Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Missouri, and Wisconsin.

“The focus of these operations is no different than the routine, targeted arrests carried out by ICE’s Fugitive Operations Teams on a daily basis,” ICE spokesperson Rachael Yong Yow told The Nation on Sunday.

In other words, ICE considers this week of high enforcement activity business as usual. But sorting out what’s business as usual in the dawning days of the Trump administration is the vexing question before immigration watchers now.

The Trump administration did not invent the concept of immigration raids, after all. Some of the most high-profile were undertaken during George W. Bush’s administration; his ICE agents arrested more than 1,600 immigrants in the final years of his tenure by staging terrifying raids on meat-processing plants in rural Midwestern states. One 2008 raid in Postville, Iowa, ended with the arrest of 400 undocumented immigrants.

And the Obama administration, too, in an attempt to deter desperate Central Americans who were arriving at the US-Mexico border to seek asylum, announced in late 2015 that it too would initiate raids. ICE arrested 121 people in an operation conducted in the first days of 2016, aimed at newly arrived Central Americans. The Obama administration even gave immigrant communities a heads-up with leaked announcements ahead of time. And even then, multi-day enforcement operations were not uncommon for the Obama administration. This past summer, for example, 112 people were arrested in a four-day operation throughout Los Angeles.

And of course, President Obama presided over record-breaking deportations as president—often without the use of the headline-grabbing scare tactics that the Bush administration favored. Determining whether this past week’s efforts are more akin to the raids of the Bush era or the enforcement sweeps of Obama’s—or if they mark the beginning of something brand new altogether—is what’s harder to parse.

What’s different now, in 2017, is that, aided in part by the massive detention and deportation machinery set up by the Obama administration, President Trump has not had to do much to further codify his animus toward immigrants into actionable policy. His January 25 executive order follows a decades-long trend of expanding the classes of offenses that can render a noncitizen deportable.

Now, under Trump, ICE agents have been directed to focus not just on undocumented immigrants who have been convicted of serious crimes, as the Obama administration sought to do in its final years. Trump has ordered ICE to also pursue those who “have committed acts that constitute a chargeable criminal offense,” including immigration crimes like entering and re-entering the country illegally—which as of 2016 now accounts for more than half of all federally prosecuted crimes.

The order also includes offenses like driving without a license or using a fake Social Security number to work or file taxes. In other words, the very actions that are inextricably linked to being unauthorized. Trump’s executive order also empowers immigration agents to pursue any unauthorized immigrant who “otherwise pose[s] a risk to public safety or national security” based on nothing more than that individual immigration officer’s personal “judgment.”

These changes massively expand the powers of immigration agents and widen the net of undocumented immigrants who now could be prioritized for deportation.

Because of this, immigrants have already been on high alert. Immigrant-rights groups began holding know-your-rights trainings almost immediately after Election Day. On Thursday afternoon, rumors and reports spread that ICE agents in Los Angeles were staging checkpoints at traffic stops and that immigration agents were descending on neighborhoods and conducting sweeps. The information spread over Facebook and Instagram and Twitter in easily shareable meme and “please copy and paste” posts, often by activists and allies.

The flurry of posts came just hours after activists in Phoenix staged a 15-hour protest to attempt to stop the deportation of an undocumented immigrant. Guadalupe Garcia de Rayos, a mother and 21-year US resident, had been checking in yearly with immigration officials after she was swept up in a raid in then–Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s notorious raids. She had never been a priority for deportation until last week, when she was ultimately deported. To her supporters, Garcia de Rayos’s deportation was proof of the beginning of the harsh changes under

But not all law-enforcement activity is proof of an ICE raid. On Saturday, Desis Rising Up and Moving, a Queens-based organizing group in New York City, urged supporters over Facebook not to share unsubstantiated reports. “Spreading such reports online is causing more damage than helping people,” DRUM wrote on its Facebook page. The group sent organizers out to confirm the social-media rumors, only to find that the activity “so far turned out to be the usual abuse meted out by police. Not ICE.”

The danger of spreading false reports, DRUM said, is that “people stop going to work, sending their children to school, leaving their homes.”

Indeed, many of those purported checkpoints turned out to be mere rumor.

On Friday evening, ICE, responding to conflicting reports of the scale of its operations, admonished those who shared “false, dangerous and irresponsible” reports of “ICE checkpoints and sweeps.” Agency officials said “those reports create mass panic and put communities and law enforcement personnel in unnecessary danger,” adding that people who “falsely report such activities are doing a disservice to those they claim to support.”

It’s an odd statement to come from the agency responsible for carrying out the president’s deportation agenda. This past week’s operations may not have included checkpoints or even “sweeps,” but they were coordinated, and also highly publicized. They are part of the president’s immigration agenda.

The memes by themselves are not responsible for creating the “mass panic” that ICE now condemns. It is President Trump’s own rhetoric, words, and policies that do.

The deportation force is here. According to new Department of Homeland Security (DHS) memos, the Trump administration plans to vastly expand the pool of undocumented immigrants in the United States who will be targeted for removal.