Phoenix – The Trump administration plan to strictly demand from anyone illegally in the United States that registered with the Government and the documentation to carry is causing fears of racial profiles even among legal residents, they say the defenders of immigrants’ rights.
For some, it is a return to a climate of the recent past in which police departments and the insistence of other law enforcement agencies promoted immigrants underground and increased public security concerns.
“It happens to some extent … I think this would worse still because you knew that someone is undocumented?” José Patiño said, Vice President of Education and External Affairs of Breath, a Defense Organization based in Arizona that supports immigrants without documents. “Creates ambiguity of how you are going to enforce and identify people who are not in the country (legally).”
A federal judge Post on the side of President Donald Trump Earlier this month, in a lawsuit filed by the immigrant rights groups on politics and the mandate entered into force on April 11. Trump officials say they are simply enforcing a requirement that has been the law for decades.
“The Trump administration will apply all our immigration laws: we will not choose which laws we will enforce,” said the secretary of the American homeland Kristi Noem in the statement after the ruling. “We must know who is in our country for the security of our homeland and all Americans.”
According to the Federal Law, all those over 14 without legal status must self -register and give digital footprints and an address. Parents and guardians of any youngest person must ensure that they are registered. Not doing so is considered a crime and the lack of documents risks prison time and fines.
The mandate has rarely applied under previous administrations. To complicate things, there have been recent cases of authorities arresting Even people born in the United States As confusion also extends through other federal and state immigration policies.
A Online appointment application Used by temporary residents has sent cancellations of work permits since the end of March, even to US citizens. A growing number of states led by Republicans are also Refuse to recognize state driving licenses especially issued for immigrants without documents.
Guerline Joef, executive director of the non -profit organization Haitian Bridge Alliance, says that the racial profile already occurs at a disproportionate pace for black migrants. The sudden pivot has aggravated things and people with a temporary protected status or who had regular immigration and customs records have been arrested during the trip, he said.
She denounced the entire test as a form of “psychological war.” Migrants who were allowed temporary legal residence are not sure if they need to carry protection documents at all times.
“It is very difficult to even communicate with the community members about what to do, telling them that they need to know their rights, but anyway they stomp their rights,” said Joef. “We are back in the ‘show me your papers’.
The new mandate evokes previous instances of certain groups that have to carry documentation. During the time of slavery in the United States, the released blacks had to have “freedom documents” or risk being recruited. During World War II, American Japanese had to register and maintain identification cards, but they put themselves in imprisonment.
“The statutes that are in the books on the registry have been inactive” for 85 years, said Lynn Marcus, director of Immigration Law Clinics of the Law Faculty of the University of Arizona James E. Rogers. “There were no forms to meet this requirement. It was created in times of war.”
The renewed strict registration requirement forces US citizens to bring birth certificates or other citizenship evidence at all times, “especially if they have a ‘foreign appearance’,” Marcus said.
People who are valid residents or visas holders could be profiled according to factors other than physical characteristics.
“Let’s say that the application of the law finds someone in another circumstance, maybe they are informing a crime,” Marcus said. “They may not be satisfied with the answers if they cannot communicate because not all US citizens speak English fluently.”
Eileen Díaz McConnell, professor at the Transfer School of Studies at Arizona State University, said the effects of a 2010 Arizona Law that requires all immigrants to obtain or carry immigration registration documents.
In 2012, the Department of Justice sued the State for the Law and the United States Supreme Court revoked the requirement of the documents, but those two years in which the requirement was in its place was a traumatic moment for Latin families in the state, McConnell said.
“The parents would not ride a car together. They were always separated because they were worried that they stopped it,” said Díaz McConnell. “People don’t leave their home.”
He has conducted extensive research on how immigration policies can affect the mental health of mixed households of family members who are born in the United States and have no documents.
“In previous years, children report, even if they have real damage and born in the United States, impact on their own dream, concern, not eating, depression,” said Díaz McConnell. “There will be people who will say things like, ‘Well, if you’re not undocumented, what do you have to worry about?'”
Patiño, whose undocumented parents took him to the United States when he was 6 years old, is accustomed to keeping documents as a Deferred action for children’s arrivals beneficiary. He knows that others without special status are now panic. The single mother of one of her former interns born in the United States has stopped going to the grocery store, the church and other places, since she lacks documents.
“It’s as if I was afraid of his shadow or, how, even going out and throwing the trash,” he said.
People who crossed the border without documents are especially insecure if they will register as a result of international students and other detainees or deportees even though they had pending visas or judicial hearings.
“You are asking people to come out of the shadows and register us in a system that most of them have probably not heard,” said Patiño. “It seems that the administration is trying to go to Catch-22 with the people. You are in trouble if you do, you are in trouble if you do not.”
