ACLU: Federal agencies setting 'trap' to deport immigrants

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (WJAR) — Lilian Calderon was detained by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, or ICE, in January because she had never become an American citizen. Her family brought her to this country as a three-year-old.

Calderon graduated from high school in Providence, married her high school sweetheart, who is an American citizen, and bore two children. She went with her husband to the United States Citizenship and Immigration office, known as USCIS, in Johnston to verify their marriage to start becoming legal. The officer interviewed her, and then two ICE officers arrived to detain her.

A lawsuit in Boston notes that the tactic of inviting people to pursue a legal remedy for their immigration status, only to detain them, is essentially a bait and switch tactic, or a trap.

“What USCIS and ICE were doing is they were in cahoots, to say, ‘Well, you know Johnny and Marie are coming in for an interview today, so you can pick them up because Johnny has a removal order,’” Roger Williams University law professor Deborah Gonzalez told NBC 10 News Tuesday.

That's alleged in a memo submitted by the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts in federal court in Boston Monday. It shows how USCIS coordinated with ICE to arrest spouses coming in for interviews, even asking for interviews to be spread out, quoting the following email from ICE officer Andrew Graham:

"As far as scheduling goes, I would prefer not to do them all at one time as it is only a strain on our ability to transport and process several arrests at once, but it also has the potential to be a trigger for negative media interests, as we have seen in the past. If you have the ability to schedule one or two at a time and spread them apart, that would work best for us."

ICE doesn't comment about ongoing legal matters.

The lawsuit charges that the government is trapping undocumented foreigners who are pursuing the legal process to become permanent residents. Gonzalez, who is also an immigration attorney, said it’s become routine.

“I guess now it’s usual because this administration has now been in over a year, is that ICE now comes to most interviews,” Gonzalez said. “I know from the colleagues that I work with and other immigration attorneys in the state -- they're leery to bring their clients to the CIS office in Johnston because they're worried ICE is going to get called especially if there's a removal order.”

Gonzalez went on to criticize the policy.

“This is what we call low hanging fruit,” she said. “These are the folks that are easy to pick up. If the goal is national security, then we really should be picking up the people that don't deserve to be here -- the rapists, the drug dealers, the sex offenders.”

Gonzalez said the policy contradicts a federal intent articulated two years ago to keep families together.

“It absolutely is contradictory,” she said. “Anything that DHS did in 2016 they're completely undoing in 2018 without any notice or comment.”

ACLU of RI Executive Director Steven Brown shared similar sentiments in a statement.

“The government’s actions in this case are truly despicable,” Brown noted. Essentially, they waved the carrot of permanent legal status before unsuspecting immigrants with the intent of arresting, detaining and deporting them. The devastating effect of these machinations was to unnecessarily and cruelly tear families apart.”

The statement also noted that a multi-day hearing on the case is expected to begin in federal court in Boston starting Monday.