After the publication of my new investigation, which exposed how law enforcement agencies routinely undermine protections for immigrant crime victims, I reached out to a few lawmakers to tell them what I found.

Among the officials I called was Florida state Sen. Annette Taddeo. Now, the Miami-Dade County Democrat is planning to file legislation to force all departments to follow the same standards for handling these kinds of cases.

Taddeo said she will file the bill, which is being drafted, in next year’s legislative session. If it passes, Florida would join 11 other states that have passed similar laws in the last decade.

“I don’t think this is something that many people are aware of. I was not aware,” Taddeo said. “This is something that we can fix legislatively.”

My investigation, which published Nov. 7, found that law enforcement agencies across the U.S. regularly stonewall victims from gaining protections under the U visa. Established by Congress 20 years ago as a way to encourage undocumented immigrants to report crimes, the U visa grants victims temporary status.

In order to apply, victims need the investigating agency to sign a certification that confirms they’re a victim of a violent crime and that they were helpful to investigators.

But I found that victims are dropped into a capricious system in which law enforcement officials decide on their own which cases to support or decline. My analysis of policies from more than 100 agencies serving large immigrant communities found that nearly 1 of every 4 create barriers never envisioned under the U visa program.

The exact language of Taddeo’s bill still is being worked out. Some states, such as California and Nevada, require agencies to certify cases within 90 days and follow the federal criteria. Other laws are broader. In Connecticut and Delaware, for instance, the law instructs agencies only to assign an officer to review requests.

In Florida, I found eight law enforcement agencies with additional barriers. Prosecutors in Miami-Dade and Orange counties are opting to certify cases only after they’ve been closed, while the Fort Lauderdale Police Department considers whether an arrest will be made.

Even departments that say they certify rarely do. At the city of Miami Police Department, the agency certified only 27 cases out of the 235 it received in the last three years.

In an interview last month, Chief Jorge Colina acknowledged his agency’s approval rate was low and said he would look into the department’s review process. 

Taddeo’s bill likely will face strong opposition from the Republican-controlled state Legislature, which passed a law earlier this year, known as SB 168, that requires local law enforcement to cooperate with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The bill was signed into law by Gov. Ron DeSantis, but Democrats succeeded in including an amendment that protects victims and witnesses who come forward to police from being reported to ICE.

Democratic state Rep. Anna Eskamani, who supported the amendment, called the disparity in U visa policies “inhumane and un-American.”

“One of our biggest fears always was that Senate Bill 168 would undermine the U visa system by pushing people further into the shadows,” she told me. “It makes no one more safe, and it’s absolutely motivated by a political agenda that is racially fueled and based on fear mongering.”

During our phone call, Taddeo acknowledged her bill is likely to face challenges in the upcoming session.

“It’s not easy in this environment, in this presidential year,” she said. “But having said that … it’s worth starting the conversation.”

People protesting the Trump Administration's immigration policies in Chicago during July 2019. (CREDIT: Charles Edward Miller, Creative Commons)

TRUMP ADMINISTRATION FILES FLORES APPEAL

The government is appealing a judge’s decision to stop the Trump administration from replacing decades-old court protections for immigrant children in U.S. custody.

At a Sept. 27 court hearing, government lawyers told federal Judge Dolly Gee that the new regulations modernized the protections stipulated in what’s known as the Flores Settlement Agreement. But Gee sided with the group of lawyers who represent children in U.S. custody.  For months, they had raised concerns that the government’s plan does away with key safeguards for the children and could lead to their indefinite detention. 

Last week, the Trump administration requested an expedited appeal in the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. In a 12-page filing, the government said the new regulations would better address the “watershed moment in irregular migration by children and family units.” This year, according to the filing, more than 500,000 parents, children and other family members arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border. Read the filing here.

We recently released a video that explains the complicated history and significance of the Flores settlement. You can watch it here.

THE STATE OF THE U.S. IMMIGRATION COURT SYSTEM

Facing a backlog that now exceeds 1 million cases, immigrants with pending court cases may wait, on average, more than four years for a hearing date, according to a new report released by a Syracuse University research center.

The report, from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, says policy decisions by the Justice Department, which oversees immigration courts, are triggering the growing avalanche of cases. For instance, President Donald Trump’s decision to reopen hundreds of thousands of closed cases led to a significant increase of cases on judges’ calendars.

“This single policy decision has caused a much greater increase in the court's backlog than have all currently pending cases from families and individuals arrested along the southwest border seeking asylum,” the report states.

At the New York City location, for example, hearings currently are being scheduled as far out as December 2024. Four other courts are scheduling court dates as late as December 2023.

The report also notes that the Trump administration hired 92 judges over the past year. But after accounting for retirements and resignation, the net increase is 47. In total, 442 judges are part of the immigration court system.

That means that each judge, TRAC calculates, handles more than 2,300 cases. 

“Even if caseloads were frozen and the Immigration Court stopped accepting any new cases, it would still take the existing pool of immigration judges an estimated 4.4 years to work through this accumulated backlog,” the report states.

Read the report here.

3 THINGS WE’RE READING

1. Trump’s top immigration adviser used an anti-immigrant group’s research to influence U.S. policy. (The New York Times)

Emails obtained by the Southern Poverty Law Center reveal that Stephen Miller often sent information from the Center for Immigration Studies to other government officials, as well as the conservative news site Breitbart News. 

The kicker: In 2017, while searching for ways to illustrate the cost of resettling refugees, Mr. Miller urged State Department officials to embrace data from the think tank that showed it was 12 times more costly to bring a refugee to the United States than to help that same person in their own region. State Department officials declined on the grounds that the think tank report, which did not take into account refugee contributions through taxes, was flawed.

Bonus: Check out this NPR segment on the book Miller references in one message, “Camp of the Saints,” which is foundational to the white nationalist movement. 

2. A family from Mexico was staying at a family detention center in Pennsylvania. But once the son turned 18, the family was separated. (The Philadelphia Inquirer)

The 17-year-old was being held at the Berks County Residential Center. After his 18th birthday last month, he was handcuffed and transferred to an adult detention facility. Because the government no longer considered the teen and his parents a “family unit,” the parents also were transferred out of Berks.  

The kicker: “This is part and parcel of the increasing use of detention as a bludgeon against asylum-seekers and their families,” said lawyer Brennan Gian-Grasso, past chair of the Philadelphia chapter of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. “The transfer of kids when they turn 18, while it existed in the past, happened a lot less because the government was willing to release people on parole.”

3. Meet some of the California immigrants whose lives changed after gaining protections under DACA. (Los Angeles Times) 

As the U.S. Supreme Court decides the future of the program Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, reporters interviewed several “Dreamers” about the ways DACA has shaped their lives. 

The kicker: “It gave me the peace of mind I never had my entire life of walking into a place, being asked for my identification and not having to give them my foreign Mexican identification card and getting weird looks,” he said.
 

Your tips have been vital to our immigration coverage. Keep them coming: [email protected]. 

– Laura C. Morel

Fact-based journalism is worth fighting for.