Daniel

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/a-case-that-could-determine-the-...

>On the morning of February 10th, Daniel Ramirez was sleeping on a couch in his father’s apartment in Des Moines, Washington, when three agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ice) walked through the front door. The agents had just arrested his father, who is undocumented, in the parking lot outside, and when they learned that Daniel and his older brother, Josue, were in the apartment they decided to investigate. An agent asked Daniel for his name, date of birth, and birthplace. He is twenty-four and was born in Mexico, but he grew up in California. Since 2014, he has been registered with the federal government under a policy called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (daca), an Obama-era measure that establishes “lawful presence” for undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children. The program allows beneficiaries—some eight hundred thousand people nationwide, often referred to as Dreamers—to work legally, while also freeing them from the immediate threat of deportation. “I have a work permit. You cannot take me,” Daniel told the agent before he was handcuffed. Daniel has been in federal detention since his arrest, and the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ice, has refused to release him.

President Trump has called immigrants “criminals” and touted plans for mass deportations, but he has professed compassion for Dreamers. “We are going to deal with daca with heart,” he said last month. “To me, it’s one of the most difficult subjects I have, because you have these incredible kids.” A few days later, when Homeland Security published a memo overhauling its immigration-enforcement policies, it undid every guideline from the previous Administration except daca, which was kept intact.

Still, according to United We Dream, the largest youth-led immigrant group in the country, six daca recipients have been apprehended since Trump took office, and three of them are currently still in custody. Greisa Martínez, United We Dream’s advocacy director and a daca recipient herself, told me, “I don’t think we’re going to get Donald Trump cancelling daca. I fear we’re going to get this slow, bleed-out death of the program. The question is whether we are in that already.”

The case of Daniel Ramirez shows how daca could be undercut without being officially eliminated. A team of lawyers has sued the government on Ramirez’s behalf, alleging that his due process was violated when he was arrested. The government has responded by aggressively defending Ramirez’s detention, insisting that Homeland Security can revoke the protections afforded by daca without court review. “An individual with deferred action remains removable at any time, and DHS has the discretion to revoke deferred action unilaterally,” Justice Department lawyers argued in a recent motion to dismiss the case.

Homeland Security had this power under President Obama, too, and exercised it against daca recipients who were convicted of a crime or who were deemed a threat to public safety. “A daca recipient had to do something to warrant their daca getting stripped,” Felicia Escobar, a former special assistant to Obama on immigration policy, told me. Ramirez did not commit a crime, but the ice agents who arrested him are claiming that he still constituted a threat to public safety. Ramirez and his lawyers insist that the agents have no actual evidence against him. Nevertheless, as soon as the accusation was made, Homeland Security “terminated” Ramirez’s daca status and began the process of deporting him. “This is an important test case to push the premise of whether the new Administration can go after daca kids or not,” Escobar said.

After his arrest, the ice agents took Ramirez to a holding facility in Tukwila, south of Seattle, where he was processed. By then, according to a declaration that Ramirez signed under oath, he had already informed the agents of his daca status. But any doubts the agents had should have been cleared up once they fingerprinted Ramirez and ran his name through state and federal databases. The search demonstrated not only that Ramirez had no criminal history but also that he first received daca in 2014, after an extensive background check, and that he successfully applied to renew his status in February, 2016. As Ramirez’s lawyers have pointed out, he has been vetted by the federal government three times: when he applied for daca, when he reapplied, and again in 2015, when the government conducted a review of all daca recipients by running “biographic and biometric background checks . . . against a variety of databases maintained by the DHS and other federal government agencies.”..