One year after the Obama administration said it would stop deporting some immigrants who are not safety threats, it has dismissed only a small fraction of the deportation cases reviewed under the new policy, disappointing advocates who were hoping for dramatic change.
So far, the administration has reviewed more than 232,000 pending deportation cases since it began using new guidelines granting more discretion in pursuing immigration violators. Less than 2 percent have been closed or dismissed.
The portion of those who receive reprieves is likely to be 9 percent once the reviews are complete, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said in a news release last week.
“It”s not something that happens overnight,” ICE spokeswoman Gillian Christensen said.
Some immigrant advocacy groups predict the number of cases closed will not exceed 4 percent, not much higher than the number immigration judges typically close each year.
The review accelerated June 4 in the Bay Area when San Francisco”s busy immigration court partially closed for a two-week scouring of cases. The goal is to weed out the least important of more than 18,000 pending deportations from across Northern California.
Ulises Toledo is among those hoping to be deemed a low priority.
“I”m excited,” Toledo said. “Hopefully I”m one of those they give a reprieve.”
The deportation net swept up the 21-year-old Chabot College student in 2010 after police stopped him for driving without a front license plate.
Immigrant advocates hoped when the reviews were announced a year ago that many more illegal immigrants such as Toledo would be helped.
“Be it 1 percent or 10 percent of cases closed, the results are still tremendously disappointing,” said Gabriela Villareal of the Oakland-based California Immigrant Policy Center. “We still see hundreds of thousands of people who are part of our communities caught up in the dragnet.”
Republicans and other immigration control proponents believe the opposite: Too many illegal immigrants are getting a pass, they say.
Having a case set aside is not a path to citizenship. Administratively closing low-priority cases puts illegal immigrants in legal limbo — they can stay here but not get green cards.
Closing low-priority cases helps immigration agents more quickly remove the greatest threats to public safety, Christensen said.
The new approach, she said, is “dramatically changing the composition of the immigration courts and helping to prevent future backlogs.”
Most of the people getting reprieves are longtime U.S. residents with family and community ties and clean records, or students brought to the country when they were young. Toledo, a San Leandro High School graduate, came to the U.S. when he was 8 and is related to several U.S. citizens, from his grandfather on down. He believes he fits the bill.
ICE has been seeking to deport him to Mexico since Hayward police pulled him and his girlfriend over one afternoon in 2010 near the college campus.
He was behind bars for several days and then taken to an Alameda County jail, which handed him over to ICE. Such pickups have become more common since 2010, when all Bay Area counties joined the federal Secure Communities database, which reports every arrest to immigration agents.
The dragnet contributed to a record 396,906 deportations last year. Until recently, ICE agents and attorneys rarely made distinctions among deportation candidates.
With the focus on discretion, ICE has closed or dismissed 4,363 cases, just less than 2 percent of the total reviewed as of May 29.
Almost as many — 3,998 people — declined offers of relief, which can mean they are seeking to win their immigration case with its chance at a green card and citizenship. The alternative is the limbo of a case that always can be reopened.
More than 12,000 people offered a dismissed or closed case either are undergoing a background check or haven”t decided whether to accept. That group brings the total percentage offered a reprieve to 9 percent, according to the new statistics.
