Immigration Nation: Raids, Detentions, and Deportations in Post-911 America by Tanya Maria Golash-Boza

Author:Tanya Maria Golash-Boza [Golash-Boza, Tanya Maria]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781317257820
Google: 3CceCwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 28132711
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2011-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Deportations and Human Rights Violations

These stories of deportees are troubling. In addition, the punitive deportation laws of the United States are in violation of a variety of international treaties and covenants. Article 13 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) specifies that noncitizens should be allowed to “submit the reasons against [their] expulsion,” yet immigrants who are convicted of aggravated felonies have no opportunity to present evidence of their ties to the United States in their deportation hearings. The 1996 laws only permit them to argue that their crime should not be classified as an aggravated felony. Potential deportees are not permitted to present other reasons against their deportation.

For example, Suwan was deported to Cambodia after living in the United States as a refugee with his wife and two young children. His crime was two counts of indecent exposure. In immigration proceedings, this is considered an aggravated felony. Suwan’s crime was that he had urinated outdoors at the construction site where he worked, because there was no toilet available. Suwan’s deportation was mandatory; the judge did not have the opportunity to consider whether his crime was serious enough to warrant deportation to a country from which he had been awarded asylum. Once the judge determined that the crime was indeed an aggravated felony, the severity of the crime itself was not considered. The judge also could not take into consideration the impact of his deportation on his family or the consequence of his being deported to a country from which he had been granted asylum. Suwan was denied his right to a fair hearing and ordered deported, due to the absence of judicial review of these cases (Capps et al. 2007).

In addition, deportations without due process violate people’s rights to form a family, as codified in the UDHR; the International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ICESCR); and the ICCPR. In this latter convention, which the United States has ratified, Article 10 stipulates that “the family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State.” In many deportation cases, however, judges are not allowed to take into consideration the extent to which family members, even those who are U.S. citizens, will be affected by the deportation of a spouse, father, mother, brother, or sister.

In some cases, judges are not allowed to consider family ties. In other cases, undocumented migrants are given no opportunity to have their case heard by a judge. In August 2009, I went to the military airport in Guatemala City, where, on average, one planeload of deportees from the United States arrives each day. On that day, one of the deported passengers was an indigenous Guatemalan woman who had lived for sixteen years in the United States and who had three children who were U.S. citizens. She had crossed the border without inspection in 1993 and had lived in the United States without legal documentation since she arrived. In July 2009, she was arrested in Florida and placed in immigration detention.

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