Gateway Pundit – by Cassandra Fairbanks
Immigration and Customs Enforcement has started filing claims to begin deporting illegal aliens who were protected under Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals or DACA.
The agency has recently began reopening administratively closed deportation cases and told CNN earlier this month that all DACA recipients can expect the same.
“ICE has begun asking immigration courts to reopen administratively closed deportation cases against DACA recipients who continue to have no criminal record, or only a minor record. Immigration attorneys in Arizona confirmed at least 14 such cases being reopened since October, and CNN also found DACA recipients whose cases recently were reopened in Nevada and Missouri,” CNN reports.
“And that is just the beginning,” the CNN report continued. “ICE confirmed to CNN that all DACA recipients whose deportation cases have been administratively closed can expect to see them reopened. In an email, the agency stated that ‘re-calendaring of administratively closed cases is occurring nationwide and not isolated to a particular state or region.’”
The agency reportedly began to re-open cases in October.
“It wasn’t until October that DHS (Department of Homeland Security) started to reopen the DACA cases,” Tucson attorney Jesse Evans-Schroeder wrote in an email to CNN. She told the network that five of her DACA clients saw their cases reopened in October or November.
Prior to May 2018, DACA recipients frequently had their cases administratively closed by immigration judges since the status protected them from deportation. That changed when then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions barred the practice.
ICE spokeswoman Paige Hughes told CNN in a statement that is required under Session’s decision “to reopen approximately 350,000 administratively closed cases so they are litigated to completion,” and the applicant is ordered removed or obtains relief. The agency also asserted that immigration judges “do not have the general authority to suspend indefinitely immigration proceedings by administrative closure,” and that such cases must be resolved one way or another.
It is expected that DACA will soon expire if Congress cannot come to an agreement.
The issue is also being considered by the Supreme Court and a decision is expected no later than June.