After President Trump took office, he promised his immigration crackdown would focus on deporting people here illegally who have committed crimes—or as he put it, the "Bad Hombres." Now it looks like that epithet extends to people who are in the country legally or going through the proper immigration channels, including prominent surgeons and green card applicants.
On Wednesday, five people on their way to meet with officials from US Citizenship and Immigration Services in Lawrence, Massachusetts, were arrested and detained by ICE officials, WBUR reports. Two of the five had no criminal record and the rest had a few parking violations, according to an ICE spokesman. At least three of the people arrested were in the process of applying for a green card.
Brian Doyle, an attorney for one the green card applicants, told WBUR the recent arrests send an intimidating message to those trying to apply for legal residency.
"If they don't show up [to their meetings], it's what's called abandoned... USCIS just sort of assumes that they don't want to go forward with it," Doyle said. "But now, if they do show up, trying to take that first step and they're detained, it can lead to them being removed."
Then on Thursday in Houston, Texas, immigration authorities told two neurologists they had 24 hours to leave the country after a technical error was made on their immigration paperwork. Dr. Pankaj Satija and Dr. Monika Ummat, a married couple from India, had been living in the US legally for more than a decade and specialize in epilepsy as Texas Children's Hospital. They managed to get a 90-day temporary stay to sort it all out, but the confusion could leave their patients without care.
"I have 50 patients today and 40 patients tomorrow," Satija told Chron. "I'm just concerned they'll be left in a lurch. They could land up in the emergency room."
Both incidents suggest the Trump administration isn't going to be kind to people looking to immigrate to the country legally, and isn't doing a whole lot to instruct ICE to weigh deportation priorities on a case-by-case basis. Attorney General Jeff Sessions added to that sentiment on Monday, vowing to "claw back" federal money from cities that generally offer illegal immigrants a safe haven from deportation—so-called "sanctuary cities" like New York, LA, Seattle, and Austin.
According to a recent Quinnipiac poll, 53 percent of Americans believe undocumented immigrants should only be deported if they've committed "serious crimes." Only 22 percent believe immigrants should be deported for "any crime"—like, for instance, getting a few parking tickets.
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