Ricardo showed his passport at a border station, Rosie crossed in an automobile with a family friend, and Adriana walked for eight days through the desert. Ricardo opened a tree-trimming business. Adriana sold home-cooked food out of her little kitchen.
Life was good. Like many immigrant families, Adriana and Ricardo opened their home now and then to friends and family members in need. Adriana was in her own room taking care of the children. Police arrested not only Tom, but Ricardo and Adriana. Adriana served a month in jail, then spent six months in immigration detention. Ricky, who came to the United States from Mexico when he was 2 years old, says he fell into a depression after his girlfriend went off to college. He started smoking marijuana with a new set of friends.
This was a change for Ricky. During his high school years, he avoided alcohol and drugs, focusing on his beloved soccer. In April , one of his new friends gave him a few small bags of cocaine and urged him to try selling them, he said.
They went into his backpack, he said, and when a Canyon Lake Park ranger smelled marijuana smoke on him and searched it, they were there, along with a marijuana cigarette. That moment would lead to his deportation to a country he had never known, and deliver him into the hands of violent criminals.
It almost cost him his life. Ricky caught a bus from downtown Nuevo Laredo to visit a sister in Piedras Negras, fell asleep, and was awakened with a flashlight in his eyes and a gun at his head. Then he dragged Ricky off the bus, beat him with a stick, and forced him to an apartment where six other deportees sat, terrified. To them, Ricky and the other captive deportees were cash cows.
One man began screaming, and Ricky found him covered in a thick layer of angry bees that detached themselves and swarmed Ricky. As the day grew hotter, Ricky ran out of water, he said, and the next thing he knew, he was being wakened by a Border Patrol officer. He had passed out by the side of a road. The officer revived him with an IV drip, he said, and — in an act for which Ricky said he will always be grateful — instead of feeding him back into the criminal justice system to complete his prison sentence, the officer drove him directly to the Laredo-Nuevo Laredo footbridge.
As Ricky told his story nearly two weeks later, his face, neck, and arms were still covered with bee-sting welts. But he managed a sad smile. He found a well-paid job with a landscaping company in Waterbury, Connecticut. Alejandro met Anna in Connecticut. They married, rented an apartment, and had Daniel in Little Daniel loved following his father around at work, with a child-sized rake in his hands. They both loved building snowmen and forts from the mountains of snow Alejandro would pile up in the corners of parking lots.
Anna and Alejandro spoke Spanish at home, but Daniel, once he started school, would answer them in English. In , Alejandro was charged with driving without a license.
That seemingly minor charge would come back to haunt him. In , a shopping mall security guard overheard Alejandro and Anna arguing in Spanish while looking for a parking space.
Anna felt Alejandro was working too many hours, Alejandro remembered. The guard called the police, Alejandro said, and the officers found an open bottle of tequila in the car. But they took him to Waterbury Jail for an hour. This is often all it takes — the briefest, most insignificant-seeming contact with law enforcement at any level can end with being handed over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement ICE and eventual deportation.
At the last one, on March 23 this year, the judge ordered Alejandro to attend a three-week Alcoholics Anonymous program. The day that Alejandro was going to start, an ICE agent took him into custody. In the migrant center, he pantomimed trying to eat with his hands chained to his waist. Anna has left her work at a fast-food restaurant, Alejandro said, because she is afraid of showing her face in public; she is getting house-cleaning jobs when she can.
Alejandro stared at his hands. Alfonso ran a cleaning company in Houston that employed 25 people. The contracts often required night work, and he was a hands-on employer. What set off his deportation troubles in was his own call to police, after Rebecca confronted him outside their apartment about the excessive hours he was working. She was speaking loudly.
But the kids wanted to go out. Using targeted impact litigation, advocacy, and public outreach, the ACLU protects the rights and liberties of immigrants. More about the Immigrants' Rights Project. Our immigration detention system locks up hundreds of thousands of immigrants unnecessarily every year, exposing detainees to brutal and inhumane conditions of confinement at massive costs to American taxpayers.
Recently, mothers and children, who are mainly asylum seekers fleeing violence in Central America, have been detained in family detention centers. In recent years, U. The ACLU believes that all immigration reform must create a welcoming roadmap to citizenship for aspiring Americans living in and contributing to the United States.
Fundamental fairness as guaranteed by the Constitution requires that these individuals be brought within the legal embrace of U. In , immigrants were over three times as likely as the U. However, immigrants were just as likely as the U. Immigrants from Mexico and Central America are less likely to be high school graduates than the U.
On the other hand, immigrants from every region except Mexico, the Caribbean and Central America were as likely as or more likely than U. In , about 29 million immigrants were working or looking for work in the U. Lawful immigrants made up the majority of the immigrant workforce, at An additional 7.
They alone account for 4. During the same period, the overall U. Immigrants are projected to drive future growth in the U. As the Baby Boom generation heads into retirement, immigrants and their children are expected to offset a decline in the working-age population by adding about 18 million people of working age between and The longer immigrants have lived in the U.
Among immigrants ages 5 and older, Spanish is the most commonly spoken language. Around , immigrants were deported from the U. Overall, the Obama administration deported about 3 million immigrants between and , a significantly higher number than the 2 million immigrants deported by the Bush administration between and In , the Trump administration deported , immigrants, the lowest total since Immigrants convicted of a crime made up the less than half of deportations in , the most recent year for which statistics by criminal status are available.
The number of apprehensions at the U. Today, there are more apprehensions of non-Mexicans than Mexicans at the border. In fiscal , apprehensions of Central Americans at the border exceeded those of Mexicans for the fourth consecutive year. The first time Mexicans did not make up the bulk of Border Patrol apprehensions was in While immigration has been at the forefront of a national political debate, the U. Overall, a majority of Americans have positive views about immigrants.
Yet these views vary starkly by political affiliation. Americans were divided on future levels of immigration. A quarter said legal immigration to the U. This new methodology has also allowed the inclusion of the figure from In times of uncertainty, good decisions demand good data. Please support our research with a financial contribution. It organizes the public into nine distinct groups, based on an analysis of their attitudes and values.
Even in a polarized era, the survey reveals deep divisions in both partisan coalitions.
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