San Diego ICE arrests expand to green card appointments
Though other cities have reported arrests of immigrants in the final stages of obtaining their green cards, this week marks the first time that San Diego attorneys have seen clients detained at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services appointments.
Written by Kate Morrissey, Edited by Lauren J. Mapp
Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers began detaining people at their green card interviews in downtown San Diego this week.
On Wednesday, word spread quickly among immigration attorneys about clients arrested at routine appointments with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services that should’ve been the last part of the process to get their green cards for permanent residence in the United States.
“It's pretty shocking honestly,” said Tessa Cabrera, whose client was among those detained. “It's not something we've seen at all.”
ICE and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services did not respond to a request for comment in time for publication.
Cabrera's client, a man from Mexico who has been here since 2002, has a U.S. citizen daughter who sponsored his green card, Cabrera said. He had last entered the United States pushing his mother, who was also a U.S. citizen, in a wheelchair. A customs officer waived him through without checking his visa at the time, Cabrera said, which meant that when he later tried to adjust his status to a permanent resident, there was no record of his entry in his immigration file.
He went to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to attest to his manner of entry. During his interview, he signed a sworn statement about what happened.
Cabrera said her firm has gotten green cards approved in similar cases without issue.
“It was business as usual up until the very last moment,” Cabrera said. “There was no inkling whatsoever that anything was awry.”
But as the interview with a U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officer wrapped up, ICE officers came in and handcuffed her client, Cabrera said.
“Basically, I was just arguing with them at that point like, ‘Why are you detaining him?’” Cabrera recalled. “They wouldn't say.”
The officers just handed her the warrant for her client's arrest.
She said her client is the sole caregiver to his 17-year-old son who has autism. The ICE officers told her that he would still be detained, she said.
Her client told her that the officers took him in a van with about seven people to the Edward J. Schwartz Federal Building, where they held him in the basement for processing. Cabrera went there, too, to try to speak with her client. Officers allowed him to call her, and they later transported him to Otay Mesa Detention Center.
Isaac Rodriguez, an immigration attorney with Union Law Group, said officers also detained his client at an appointment. He said the client, who came on a fiancé visa and got married within the required timeframe, opted to go to the appointment without him to save money on attorney fees.
During the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services interview with the client and his wife, ICE officers came into the room and told him they were arresting him for overstaying his visa.
Going through the adjustment of status process to get a green card after entering the U.S. basically requires overstaying a visa, Rodriguez said, because of how long it takes the government to process the application.
If the visa is through a U.S. citizen spouse, Rodriguez said, then the overstay is normally forgiven in the process of getting the green card.
“While they're waiting for their interview, they are technically in a limbo,” Rodriguez said. “They get you on that little glitch, on that loophole. You're an overstay, but if you leave (the U.S.) you abandon your petition, and you're out of luck.”
He said his client had no prior immigration or criminal history and that he and his wife had sought to do everything by the book in bringing him to the U.S. for their wedding and subsequent life together.
Now, he said, his client will have to pay attorney fees to file a bond petition to get out of custody.
“It's a huge extra step in their process,” Rodriguez said.
He said his client's wife feels distraught and betrayed.
“If you could hear her, the desperation in her voice, the emotions going through her, the disappointment in her country — ‘I did everything the right way,’” Rodriguez said.
He's worried about what could happen at upcoming appointments for other clients.
Daylight San Diego
Michelle Celleri, the legal rights director for Alliance San Diego, called the arrests inhumane.
“ICE appears to be detaining people in the course of their application process in order to meet arbitrary quotas, traumatizing families in San Diego,” Celleri said. “We call on all community members to speak out and let their congressional representatives know this is unacceptable.”
She said even if ICE detains someone, that person can still pursue a green card. She encouraged people to not give up if that happens to them.
Maria Chavez, immigration legal director at Partnership for the Advancement of New Americans, said people should make sure their attorneys go with them to appointments with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and that they should prepare themselves for the possibility of detention.
