The U.S. government’s immigration policy under Donald Trump is already brutal, cruel, and heartless—and now Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is setting actual traps to capture immigrants. The snatching of children from families was already horrendous enough, but now, there’s more.
What once was a legitimate process to obtain a green card is now being used by ICE and the USCIS to trap and detain undocumented immigrants who are married to U.S. citizens.
Lucimar de Souza was detained and separated from her child for doing something that was always considered the right thing to do, without fear of repercussions from our government.
But under Trump, even doing the right thing couldn’t save de Souza from ICE.
On January 30, Lucimar de Souza, an undocumented immigrant from Brazil, went into a US Citizenship and Immigration Services office to prove her marriage to an American citizen was legitimate. It was a standard part of the process for undocumented immigrants married to US legal residents to obtain green cards, one they had long been able to take without fear of detention or deportation. But as she exited her interview, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers detained her, causing her to be separated from her 10-year-old son. She spent the next three months in jail.
De Souza was not the only immigrant to be arrested while verifying her marriage with USCIS, nor was the arrest an accident. Internal government emails and depositions of ICE officials unsealed this week show the two agencies worked together in New England to effectively ambush undocumented immigrants like de Souza who had clear paths to obtaining green cards. The arrests were deliberately spread out over time to prevent the media from finding out about them, the documents show.
The new materials also reveal a startling lack of awareness among some ICE officials of a process that was supposed to allow undocumented immigrants married to legal residents to obtain legal status without being deported.
The documents were released as part of a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts that seeks to block the Trump administration from detaining and deporting people in New England who may be able to obtain green cards through spouses who are US citizens. The ACLU stated in a court filing that the unsealed documents show “the stunning extent” to which a program designed to keep together the families of immigrants with deportation orders was turned into “a trap calculated to cause that separation.” The ACLU will be in a federal court in Boston on Monday to try to convince Judge Mark Wolf that people on the path to legal residency deserve protection—over the objections of the Trump administration.
Think about this: Our government is actually using coordinated traps to detain immigrants who are married to U.S. citizens and legally seeking green cards. The Trump administration, ICE, the USCIS and every single person who goes along with these brutal policies are the personification of evil.