President Obama has delayed taking executive action on immigration and deportations, and in his absence, ICE seems to be attempting to deport as many people as it can, charges a new report from the National Day Laborer Organizing Network.
“It’s like someone eating all the ice cream in the freezer on Sunday knowing they’re going on a diet on Monday,” one organizer, says in the report. “ICE is more out of control than ever.”
The report, called “Destructive Delay,” uses interviews to highlight the human cost of President Obama’s inaction and calls out ICE’s determination to meet “a draconian deportation quota, regardless of the costs to public safety, institutional integrity, moral or constitutional considerations.”
As Tania Unzueta, an author of the report said:
Destructive Delay shows that there is a real cost to the delay in Washington. While the President postpones action, civil rights are being violated, community leaders are being punished, and trust in local government agencies is being eroded as ICE extends the lengths it will go to achieve its deportation quota.”
One of the interviews in the report comes from Javier Nava, the only person released in a fifty-person raid in Georgia. As he said:
Without introducing themselves the agents came into my house. A few minutes into the conversation one of the agents who spoke Spanish said that they were with immigration.
In a very polite way I told them that what they were doing to me was not legal because I didn’t have any problems with immigration. They took my fingerprints, took pictures, made me sign papers, and I am now in deportation. They have continued to come and take people. I also hear stories from different towns. But people have to keep going to work. They leave the house not knowing whether they will see their children again. It’s impossible to hear that the President says that families are not being separated. Our experience shows that those are lies.
