Advocacy Update
April 2007

Families Need Comprehensive Reform
By Matt Wilch, Senior Counsel for Policy and Advocacy, and Melanie Gibbons, Acting Director for Church and Community Outreach

A 12-year-old girl and her family are sleeping soundly in their home one cool, spring night. Suddenly, she is awakened by loud banging and shouting, and armed men burst through her bedroom door demanding to know if she is hiding someone.

Another child has spent a busy day in second grade, and is waiting with his teacher for his mother to come pick him up. Finally, the teacher calls the home of his older sister to see if she can come get him. After some confusion, the siblings learn that their mother has been arrested, but they don’t know where she is, what will happen to her or when they might see her again.

These children do not live in an unstable, developing country halfway around the world. They live in communities across the United States that have been subject to raids by agents from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Since April 20, 2006 DHS has been carrying out its new “Interior Enforcement Strategy” targeting unauthorized workers, individuals who did not comply with removal orders, or people who are otherwise deportable from the United States. In the last year, ICE raided homes and workplaces to arrest thousands of people in at least 36 states and U.S. territories. ICE uses over 40 percent of its detention space for undocumented people without criminal records, such as those apprehended through these raids.

Coalitions of faith leaders, service providers and other LIRS partners have been mobilizing across the country all year long to respond to community needs during the raids—advising immigrant communities of their rights, providing legal services, providing social services for children separated from their parents, sharing due process concerns with the press, and advocating with the government to help assure fundamental due process rights. Many raise concerns that DHS is not complying with due process requirements regarding searches and arrests, racial profiling, stipulated deportations, access to legal counsel, overreliance on detention, and transferring individuals to detention centers far away from legal counsel and family.  Even when compliant with due process, the raids take an unfair, disproportional toll on families, especially children whose caregivers or providers are detained and deported.

These raids underscore the urgent need for comprehensive immigration reform and the high price of an enforcement-only approach to our broken system. Since 85 percent of undocumented people in the United States live in mixed households that include both undocumented and documented members (U.S. citizens or legal permanent residents), an enforcement-only approach inevitably tears families apart. It also removes needed workers from vital jobs. Moreover, raids drive undocumented people further into the shadows and raise fear and distrust in immigrant communities just as many in Congress hope soon to invite those same communities to “trust us” and come forward for processing as part of a reform effort.

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