Matt Kessler, Dreamer in process of Daca renewal to be deported without court hearing The Guardian 03/03/2017
Sarah Fowler, Immigrant detained after press conference Clarion-Ledger 03/01/2017
Julianne Hing, Daniela Vargas’s Detention Shows How Vulnerable DREAMers Are Under Trump The Nation 03/02/2017
Hing writes, "Despite dangling the possibility of immigration reform before the nation this week, the Trump administration continues to show exactly what its immigration intentions are where it matters most: in the streets."
The Young Turks reported on Daniela's story on Thursday, Did Trump Target This Immigration Activist? 03/02/2017:
Daniela and her family are from Argentina, though Daniela herself grew up and finished college in the US. The Buenos Aires Herald reports:
Argentine art curator Juan García Mosqueda, a legal United States resident, was deported from the country after he was detained in an airport for 14 hours, becoming the first known case of an Argentine expelled from the country since President Donald Trump promised to implement stricter border controls. “The process was dehumanising and degrading at the same time,” Mosqueda had posted in an Instagram photo. He complained that he had been interrogated for 14 hours and was threatened from returning to the country for five years. Another Argentine immigrant, Daniela Vargas, was also arrested in Jackson, Mississippi later in the week over immigration issues yet unlike Mosqueda she had been illegally residing in the US.That's not the best report, though. Daniela hadn't just applied for the Dreamers (DACA) status. She had been covered by it and was eligible to renew it, which she had applied to do.
She was arrested after she decided to publicly denounce on TV that her father, a painter, and brother, a construction worker, were arrested on February 15 by US immigration authorities. Vargas had applied for the Dreamers immigration programme for youths who want to regularise their situation. [my emphasis]
Fowler reports:
Vargas was 7 when her family came to America from Argentina, placing her under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, immigration policy. Under the policy, DACA recipients have to reapply every two years.Hing explains:
Vargas' DACA expired on November 11, 2016. Due to the $495 filing fee, Vargas waited several months to refile. Vargas previously told The Clarion-Ledger she recently had to drop out of school at The Univeristy [sic] of Southern Mississippi for financial reasons.
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services received Vargas' renewal paperwork Feb. 10, 2017.
In those years [of Obama's Presidency], undocumented immigrants repeatedly told me that “coming out,” as declaring one’s status publicly came to be known, was actually a safer move, because at least their neighbors and coworkers and friends and fellow churchgoers could know and then help wage a public campaign to support a person should they get caught up in the immigration system. It was hiding in the shadows that put a person at greater risk of being deported.
But Obama is not the president anymore. And while we’ve already seen just how important political protest is in the Trump era, Trump’s executive orders on immigration have explicitly liberated ICE agents to pursue any and every undocumented immigrant. This is the reality—despite Trump’s wishy-washy public statements about DREAMers, whom he’s said he’d deal with “with heart.” The Trump administration has yet to dismantle the DACA program, which exists at the discretion of the president. It is one of Trump’s immigration campaign promises that he’s actually held off on fulfilling, and it’s one of the easiest programs to dismantle.
Yet Trump’s executive orders, the recently released implementation memos from the Department of Homeland Security, and Vargas’s arrest show that DREAMers should consider themselves vulnerable.
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