Miriam Jordan

But her case is not so common. Romero has been receiving treatment for Stage 4 oral cancer that needs continual attention. And she has a son, a doctoral student at Yale University who is himself in the country without legal permission, who was not about to stand idly by.

“I grew up in this country. My mother is the single biggest reason I am at a school like Yale,” her son, Cristian Padilla Romero, said of the public campaign he started to win his mother’s freedom.

“She guided me, worked three jobs to support me,” said Padilla Romero, 24, who was 7 years old when he came to the United States.

His campaign has been directed at fellow students, professors, members of Congress and the public at large. An online petition he began on Tuesday has gathered about 20,000 signatures. A GoFundMe campaign has raised more than $21,000. His mother’s plight appeared in an article in The Yale Daily News and on national immigrant advocacy social media feeds.

Padilla Romero is protected from deportation under the program known as DACA, or Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, which gives a temporary reprieve to young people who were brought into the country without authorization as children.

Many of them, also known as Dreamers, have used their temporary legal status and skills in political organizing and social media to shine a light on the actions of the immigration authorities, things that earlier might never have been made public.

This fall, students and faculty mobilized at the University of California, when at least a dozen Iranian students were denied permission to enter the United States.

“Cristian’s story is not the only story like this,” said Miriam Feldblum, who was vice president for student affairs at Pomona College when Padilla Romero was an undergraduate at the California school. “Students on campuses across the country are struggling with immigration issues. Their parents are in deportation. They are in limbo.”

Padilla Romero has reached out to Feldblum, who is a founder of the Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration, which advocates on behalf of immigrant students. “This is someone who exemplifies the engaged student scholar on campus,” said Feldblum, whose organization is made up of university presidents and chancellors.

At Yale, Padilla Romero’s classmates have been strategizing with him, calling members of Congress in Connecticut and Georgia and sending queries to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency that is moving to deport his mother, to demand her release.

“When stuff like this comes up you drop everything,” said Joshua Aiken, a doctoral student in history and African American studies, who prepared a script for Yale students to use when telephoning ICE. “People’s families are being torn apart every day by cruel and unethical deportation policies, and so the minute Cristian told me what was happening, it was time to mobilize.”

Alicia Schmidt Camacho, chair and professor of ethnicity, race and migration at Yale, said Padilla Romero, who is her student, had made a decision to be a scholar in Central American studies to address the root cause of the crisis that unauthorized immigrant families are enduring.

“Now he’s using his own struggle to shed light on the devastating impact of deportation on our communities,” she said.

Tania Romero, 48, crossed the border illegally two decades ago and raised four children in Atlanta, juggling jobs as a housekeeper, dishwasher and laundromat attendant, sometimes all at once. Eventually, she got a full-time job in construction.

She apparently was issued an order of removal from ICE in 2008, based on her failure to show up for scheduled hearings in immigration court. But her son obtained documents through a Freedom of Information Act request that appear to show that she had not received any of the three notices advising her to appear in court. The letters had been returned to ICE by the U.S. Postal Service.

Though Romero knew she was in the country illegally, she did not learn she had an outstanding deportation order until she was detained in mid-August of this year, after being pulled over while driving in Gwinnett County, Georgia, Padilla Romero said.

In 2016, Romero received a diagnosis of Stage 4 oral cancer. She went through surgery as well as chemotherapy, which damaged her jaw and caused her to lose several teeth.

“It’s very hard for her to eat in general, and we are really concerned about her health in detention, where she is not receiving any special accommodation,” Padilla Romero said.

While she is not in urgent need of special medication, he said, she requires regular medical attention and is not receiving it.

The health staff at the ICE detention facility in Georgia determined that Romero had a severe vitamin B12 deficiency and recommended hospitalization, Padilla Romero said, but she was only offered remedial injections, and only after her lawyer intervened.

A request to ICE by her lawyer for a stay of deportation on humanitarian grounds because of her fragile health was denied in September.

ICE officials said they could not discuss the case. “Due to privacy restrictions, ICE is unable to comment on Tania Romero’s case,” said Lindsay Williams, a spokeswoman for the agency.

The agency’s general position has been that unauthorized immigrants are not automatically entitled to stay in the country, even in cases of people who are receiving lifesaving medical treatment. President Donald Trump has made it a priority to crack down on illegal immigration and take action against those living unlawfully inside the country.

Padilla Romero’s campaign has started to find a response. Julián Castro, the Democratic presidential candidate, shared the petition on Twitter. And Rep. Lucy McBath, D-Ga., who represents Padilla Romero’s congressional district, is working closely with the family on the case, her office said.

But Padilla Romero learned on Wednesday that ICE had contacted Honduran authorities for travel documents that would enable his mother to be deported by the end of this week.

She has already missed an oncologist appointment, he said. In Honduras, she would not get the care she requires.

“Sending my mother back to Honduras would be a death sentence,” Padilla Romero said. “We’re not going to stop our work until she is released.”

This article originally appeared in

She's Fighting Cancer. Her Son Is Fighting Her Deportation.

It is a common occurrence: an unauthorized immigrant gets pulled over for a traffic violation, ends up in detention and swiftly is removed from the United States. In the case of Tania Romero, a Honduran mother of four who was arrested recently in Georgia, a deportation could happen within days.

Family breakups have been imposed with even greater frequency in recent months under the Trump administration’s most widely debated immigration policy, ostensibly to protect the welfare of the children, but in many cases because of relatively minor criminal offenses in a parent’s past, such as shoplifting or public intoxication, according to tallies the Justice Department provided to the American Civil Liberties Union, which is challenging the separations.

This month, the acting Homeland Security secretary, Kevin McAleenan, said in testimony before the House Oversight and Reform Committee that separations were “rare” and made only “in the interest of the child.”

“This is carefully governed, it’s overseen by a supervisor when those decisions are made,” McAleenan said, noting that fewer than 1,000 separations of children from their parents had occurred out of about 450,000 members of families encountered at the border since October 2018.

In most cases, government officials have said, border officers who make a decision to remove a child from an accompanying adult do so because there are questions about the child’s welfare, or doubts that the adult is genuinely the child’s parent. In some cases, they said, children are separated even though they are traveling with someone who clearly appears to be an aunt, uncle or sibling. Some children have appeared at the border accompanied by adults who later were determined to be using the child to try to gain entrance to the United States, officials have said.

The new numbers were filed with Judge Dana M. Sabraw of the U.S. District Court in San Diego as part of the court’s continuing supervision of the family separation issue. In its motion Tuesday, the ACLU asked the judge to clarify a set of standards for such separations that would ensure that children are taken from their parents only when there is evidence that the parent is a genuine danger to the child, or is unfit to provide care.

“The administration is still doing family separation under the guise that they are protecting children from their own parents, even though the criminal history they are citing is either wrong or shockingly minor,” said Lee Gelernt, of the ACLU’s Immigrants’ Rights Project. “This is just circumventing the court’s order.”

Children who were separated from their families over the last year spent an average 68 days in shelters, according to the motion filed with the court, though four children have been away from their families for more than 300 days.

More than half of those separated — a total of 481 — were under age 10 at the time of separation, and 185 children were 5 or younger.

Family separations began in large numbers in the spring of 2018 under the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” border enforcement policy, which called for nearly all adults who entered the country illegally to face criminal prosecution. Any children accompanying them were placed in shelters or foster care. Migrant families often ended up hundreds or thousands of miles apart for weeks or longer.

A limited number of family separations also occurred under the Obama administration, though only in instances when it was clear that the parent endangered the child, former Obama administration officials have said.

The separations were central to the Trump administration’s early efforts to discourage migrant families from trying to enter the United States after traveling over land through Mexico. Arrivals of families decreased while the policy was in effect.

But images of weeping mothers and children at the border provoked an international outcry and outrage across party lines, with all four living former first ladies and Melania Trump expressing horror at the policy. Trump issued an executive order on June 20 effectively rescinding the policy by calling for any parents who are prosecuted for illegally crossing the border to be detained with their children.

Sabraw the same month issued an order to reunify all separated families, and cases of separations dropped precipitously. But they have recently been climbing rapidly, Gelernt said. By March, about 200 migrant children had been taken from parents and other relatives and placed in institutional care since the policy was officially rescinded the previous June. The total number reported to the court Tuesday — 911 separations between June 2018 and June 2019 — suggests that the practice has expanded recently, perhaps in response to a large number of migrant families entering the country in the spring.

In the first nine months of the current fiscal year, 427,881 members of families were encountered at the border, compared with 161,113 during the entire 2018 fiscal year, according to figures compiled by Customs and Border Protection.

The latest separations reported to the court, based on monthly tallies the Justice Department is required to submit to the parties in the litigation before Sabraw, are mainly based on crimes committed by the parent, according to the new documents. But ACLU lawyers argued in their motion that many of the violations are as minor as traffic tickets. In one case, a 6-year-old child was flown to a New York shelter when her mother was hospitalized in California after injuring her leg.

In testimony before Congress this month, the Border Patrol’s chief of law enforcement operations, Brian S. Hastings, said the agency has established that its agents may elect to separate a child from a parent if there is a determination that the parent or legal guardian poses a danger to the child, is otherwise unfit to care for the child, has a criminal history or a communicable disease, or is transferred to a detention setting for prosecution for a crime other than improper entry.

They may also separate a child when border officials cannot confirm that the adult is actually the child’s parent or legal guardian, or if the child’s safety is at risk, Hastings said.

But this leaves broad discretion for Border Patrol agents, something that lawyers challenging the practice in court hope to end with court-imposed standards.

“Right now, the government can separate based on any criminal history, regardless of the severity, and based on subjective criteria,” Gelernt said. “We want them only separating in specific circumstances.”

In the field, Border Patrol agents say they are mindful of the best interests of children, and of their obligation to keep them safe.

“We are not really separating anybody unless there is criminal activity already on the record,” said Jorge Rivera-Navarro, a spokesman for the Border Patrol in El Centro, California, a sector that covers 70 miles in the southeastern corner of the state near Arizona. In one recent case, he said, a member of the MS-13 gang was posing as the father of a little girl. The man was arrested and the girl was sent to a government shelter.

The new motion before the court did not lay out the full details of all 911 cases of separations, in part because the government provided only minimal details of criminal history for each case, the filing said. For many parents, the spreadsheet provided by the Justice Department did not state the nature of the criminal history at all. For many others, it did not specify whether the criminal history was a conviction or merely a charge.

“In most cases, the spreadsheet fails to indicate the age of the charge or conviction,” the court filing says. In over 75% of the cases, the spreadsheet does not even specify whether the crime was a felony or misdemeanor.”

In the 218-page filing, organizations that work with immigrants at the border and lawyers that represent them, working with the ACLU, documented a number of separations they considered questionable. The organizations included Catholic Charities, the National Immigration Justice Center, the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center and Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center.

In one case, a father who is identified in the court filing only by the initials ERR had sought medical attention for his daughter when she began to cough and became feverish in detention.

One day, while she was sleeping in her father’s arms, the baby wet her diaper and he did not change it because he had wanted her to keep sleeping. “A female guard took his daughter out of E.R.R.’s arms, criticized him for not changing the diaper, and called him a bad father,” the filing says. “The guard then separated E.R.R. and his infant. The government’s own documents show that E.R.R. has no other criminal history.”

The government’s report to the ACLU lists dozens of parents separated from a child as a result of traffic violations, drunken driving offenses, drug possession, and fraud or forgery offenses, according to Gelernt.

A 2-year-old child was separated from his father based on “public intoxication arrests and a D.U.I.” An 8-month-old boy was removed from his father for a “fictitious or fraudulent statement or representation arrest.” One parent was separated from a child because of an assault that took place 20 years ago, a misdemeanor offense for which he had served three days in jail.

One parent was separated from his daughter because of “malicious destruction of property, value $5,” for which he had received a six-day jail sentence with six months of probation. The child was handed over to her mother after nearly four months in custody.

An 11-year-old girl was separated from her father because of a conviction for disorderly conduct and an illegal re-entry charge. One parent was separated because of a record of shoplifting and driving without a license, according to the government spreadsheet. Another parent was separated as a result of a 2009 conviction for “resisting or obstructing an officer,” for which he received “17 days time served,” according to the filing.

There were also allegations of gang membership that were unsubstantiated, the filing said. A father accused of being a gang member was separated for six months from his children, ages 9 and 11, the filing said, until his attorney submitted a background check that showed another person in El Salvador with a similar name and date of birth who had a criminal record.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/30/us/migrant-family-separations.html" id="c87b755d-6f9c-31f8-a98b-5b2a7d50af8f">The New York Times</a>.

More Than 900 Migrant Children Have Been Separated From Their Families Over Past Year

LOS ANGELES — In the year since President Donald Trump officially ended family separations at the southern border, immigration authorities have removed more than 900 migrant children from their families, sometimes for reasons as minor as a parent not changing a baby’s diaper or having a traffic citation for driving without a license, according to new documents filed Tuesday in federal court.

A limited number of family separations also occurred under the Obama administration, though only in instances when it was clear that the parent endangered the child, officials from the Obama administration have said.

They may also separate a child from a person purporting to be a parent or legal guardian in certain circumstances, such as when border officials cannot confirm that the adult is actually the parent or legal guardian, or if the child’s safety is at risk, he said.

The new motion before the court did not lay out the full details of all 911 cases of separations, in part because the government provided only minimal details of criminal history for each case, the filing said. For numerous parents, the spreadsheet provided by the Justice Department did not state the nature of the criminal history at all. For many others, it did not specify whether the criminal history was a conviction or merely a charge.

“In most cases, the spreadsheet fails to indicate the age of the charge or conviction,” the court filing says. In over 75% of the cases, the spreadsheet does not even specify whether the crime was a felony or misdemeanor,” according to the court filing.

In the 218-page document, organizations that work with immigrants at the border and lawyers that represent them, working with the ACLU, documented a number of separations they considered questionable. The organizations included Catholic Charities, the National Immigration Justice Center, the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center and Las Americas Immigrant Advocacy Center.

In one case, a father who is identified in the court filing only by the initials ERR had sought medical attention for his daughter when she began to cough and became feverish in detention. He was separated from her because of a wet diaper, according to the filing.

One day, while sleeping in her father’s arms, the baby wet her diaper and he did not change it because he had wanted to allow her to keep sleeping. “A female guard took his daughter out of E.R.R.’s arms, criticized him for not changing the diaper, and called him a bad father,” the filing says. “The guard then separated E.R.R. and his infant. The government’s own documents show that E.R.R. has no other criminal history.”

A 2-year-old child was separated from his father based on “public intoxication arrests and a D.U.I.” An 8-month-old boy was removed from his father for “fictitious or fraudulent statement or representation arrest.” One parent was separated from a child because of an assault that took place 20 years ago, a misdemeanor offense for which he had served three days in jail.

One parent was separated from his daughter due to “malicious destruction of property, value $5,” for which the father had received a six-day jail sentence with six months of probation. The child was handed over to her mother after nearly four months in custody.

LOS ANGELES — In the year since President Donald Trump officially ended migrant family separations at the southern border, immigration authorities have removed more than 900 migrant children from their families, sometimes for reasons as minor as a parent not changing a baby’s diaper or having a traffic citation for driving without a license, according to new documents filed Tuesday in federal court.

In most cases, government officials have said, border officers who make a decision to remove a child from an accompanying adult do so because there are questions about the child’s welfare, or doubts that the adult is genuinely the child’s parent. In some cases, they said, children are separated even though they are traveling with someone who clearly appears to be an aunt, uncle or sibling.

President Donald Trump had touted the raids — called Operation Border Resolve — as a show of force amid an influx of Central American parents and children across the southern border. After postponing the raids in June, Trump said ahead of time that they would take place last week.

Two current Department of Homeland Security officials and one former department official also confirmed to The Times that an enforcement operation would take place around mid-July.

But the publicity may have prompted many of those who had been targeted — 2,105 people in more than a dozen cities who had received final deportation orders but had not reported to Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers — to temporarily leave their homes, or to move altogether to evade arrest.

Advance notice of the large-scale operation also gave immigrant advocates time to counsel families about their rights, which include not opening the door or answering questions. On social media, community groups shared detailed information about sightings of ICE agents.

In an interview Monday, Matthew Albence, acting director of ICE, which is responsible for arresting, detaining and deporting unauthorized immigrants who are in the United States, acknowledged that the number of apprehensions was low.

“I don’t know of any other population where people are telling them how to avoid arrest as a result of illegal activity,” he said. “It certainly makes it harder for us to effectuate these orders issued.”

“You didn’t hear ICE talking about it before the operation was taking place,” he added.

The arrests of the nearly three dozen migrants — 17 of whom were members of families that crossed the border together and 18 of whom were collateral apprehensions of unauthorized immigrants — were among more than 900 the immigration authorities have made since mid-May, Albence said.

From May 13 through July 11, ICE arrested 899 adults who had final deportation orders, in an undertaking called Operation Cross Check. The majority had criminal convictions, Albence said.

A backlog of nearly 1 million immigration cases means that it can take years for a case to wind its way through the courts. Those who were targeted in last week’s raids had been placed on an accelerated docket, with a goal of resolving their cases within a year. The majority had been ordered removed from the country by an immigration judge.

“What we found is that the vast majority did not even show up for their first hearing,” Albence said. “Above and beyond, we sent them letters giving them the opportunity to turn themselves in and arrange for an orderly removal process,” including time to organize their affairs and schedule flights on commercial carriers.

As part of a multipronged approach to rein in illegal immigration, Albence said that the government had also been cracking down on companies suspected of hiring unauthorized immigrants. He said 3,282 businesses across the country were told last week to submit payroll documents for review.

“Part of our goal is to reduce economic opportunities,” Albence said. “We cannot have individuals who come into the country illegally and then go find work illegally.”

The audits of companies and payroll forms, often called “silent raids,” hit restaurants, food processing, high-tech manufacturing, agriculture and other industries that employ thousands of workers, according to lawyers representing some of the companies. Employers typically lose a substantial number of workers as a result of the audits, which can also lead to fines and criminal charges against the businesses.

The Trump administration has significantly increased company inspections, often called I-9 audits for the form that workers are required to fill out affirming that they are authorized to work in the United States. There were 5,981 such audits in fiscal 2018 compared with 1,360 the previous year.

“The Trump administration has been more aggressive than any administration with I-9 investigations,” said Kimberley Robidoux, a business immigration lawyer in San Diego who specializes in compliance and who has several clients who are affected.

Still, as it grapples with a record number of migrant families at the southern border, the Trump administration has deported fewer people, on average each year, than the Obama administration.

In fiscal 2018, the Trump administration deported 256,086 immigrants, an increase of 13% over the previous year. In contrast, President Barack Obama removed 409,849 people in 2012, an all-time high, and 235,413 in fiscal 2015.

In the first two quarters of the 2019 fiscal year, the Trump administration deported 130,432 people, up from 123,253 during the same period the previous year.

Obama directed immigration authorities to target for arrest and removal convicted criminals, migrants who had crossed the border recently and those who had illegally entered the country multiple times. Trump has said that anyone agents encounter who is living in the country illegally is fair game for detention and removal.

Indeed, on Monday the Trump administration said it would accelerate the deportation of unauthorized immigrants who cannot prove they have been in the United States for more than two years, enabling federal agents to arrest and deport people without a hearing before a judge.

The expansion of an expedited removals program, which is expected to be challenged in court, could result in people being deported without a court hearing and could affect their ability to seek asylum in the United States.

Just last week, the administration announced it would deny protections to immigrants who failed to apply for asylum in at least one country they passed through on their way north, in its latest attempt to deter Central Americans from heading to the United States. That policy was challenged in court by a coalition of immigrant advocates one day after it was announced.

The Border Patrol has arrested 363,300 migrant family members from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala at the southern border in fiscal 2019. Many of them are seeking asylum, having fled violence in their home countries.

Because children cannot be detained for more than 20 days under established standards, the Border Patrol has been releasing families, who usually turn themselves in to authorities after crossing the border, to await their immigration court dates.

“This highlights the challenges when we are unable to detain individuals at the border and are forced to release them into the country,” Albence said.

Last week, Trump deemed the operation targeting families that began around July 14 as “very successful.”

The government’s plans changed at the last minute because of news reports that had tipped off immigrants about what to expect, according to several current and former Department of Homeland Security officials. Instead of a large sweep, the authorities opted for a limited and more diffuse scale of apprehensions.

The families who were rounded up have been placed in family detention centers, where it is difficult for them to gain access to legal help. But immigration lawyers said that they could still take steps to halt their immediate deportation, for example by filing an appeal or a motion to reopen their cases. Some of the families, they said, might not have been aware they missed a court hearing if they did not receive a notice of if they had moved.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/23/us/ice-raids-apprehensions.html" id="25ac42ba-319e-30a6-a0e6-337acd9b122d">The New York Times</a>.

More than 2,000 migrants who were in the United States illegally were targeted in widely publicized raids that unfolded across the country last week. But figures the government provided to The New York Times on Monday show that just 35 people were detained in the operation.

More Than 2,000 Migrants Were Targeted in Raids. 35 Were Arrested.

The businesses coached their clients to deceive U.S. immigration officials and pay indigent rates at hospitals to deliver their babies, even though many of the clients were wealthy, investigators said. Some Chinese couples were charged as much as $100,000 for a birth-tourism package that included housing, nannies and shopping excursions to Gucci.

A tip sheet for customers, titled “Strategies to Maximize the Chance of Entry,” recommended stating on a visa application that pregnant mothers intended to stay at the “5-star” hotel, “Trump International Waikiki Beach,” to convince immigration officials that they were well-to-do vacationers, not mothers traveling with the intention of giving birth on American soil, investigators said.

Grand jury indictments unsealed Thursday in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles brought the total number of people charged in the schemes to 19, including both business operators and clients. But some of those targeted in the indictments are not presently in the United States, investigators said.

The appeal of bearing an American child, long associated with immigrants who enter the country illegally, has spurred a birth-tourism industry that now caters to people from all over the world.

The industry is growing at a galloping pace, especially among Chinese nationals experiencing uncertainty over their country’s long-term economic prospects, investigators said. The number of businesses in operation is undoubtedly much larger than the three agencies targeted in the latest indictments in the Los Angeles area, said Mark Zito, assistant special agent in charge of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Homeland Security Investigations in Los Angeles.

“We are talking about three takedowns in LA, when there are probably 300,” Zito said. “We have seen more businesses pop up. It is probably going stronger now than it was in 2015.”

While the agencies charged in the investigation cater mainly to Chinese parents, Zito said investigators have also found evidence of Russians heading to the Northeast and Nigerians traveling to Texas for the sole purpose of having American children. The Middle East is also a growing generator of birth tourism, investigators said.

“We are trying to quell this, but it is increasing. Other nations will start taking advantage of this,” Zito said.

The phenomenon of anchor babies has fueled criticism from advocates of tougher immigration laws who are concerned that foreign adults are using their children to secure permanent residency in the United States and from there, access to public benefits.

The indictments include an array of charges, including visa fraud, wire fraud and identity theft, against owners of the birth-tourism agencies that are accused of enabling thousands of Chinese women to come explicitly to give birth to American children.

“Statements by the operators of these birthing houses show contempt for the United States, while they were luring clients with the power and prestige of U.S. citizenship for their children,” Nick Hanna, U.S. attorney in Los Angeles, said in a statement. “Some of the wealthy clients of these businesses also showed blatant contempt for the U.S. by ignoring court orders directing them to stay in the country to assist with the investigation, and by skipping out on their unpaid hospital bills.”

There are no official figures for how many babies are delivered to tourists on American soil. The Center for Immigration Studies, a group that supports restricting immigration, puts the number at about 36,000 annually in a 2015 report.

“The fact that we have no idea of the scale of birth tourism is a problem in and of itself,” said Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the center in Washington. “We should not tolerate an entire industry that encourages people to come here for the sole purpose of having a child who leaves with a U.S. passport.”

In recent years, the practice has prompted some lawmakers, who oppose children of unauthorized immigrants automatically becoming citizens, to propose repealing birthright citizenship, which is enshrined in the 14th Amendment of the Constitution.

President Donald Trump last year claimed erroneously that the United States is the “only country in the world” that automatically confers citizenship to anyone born in the country. In fact, it is one of at least 30 countries that do so.

Still, the United States has struggled to rein in birth tourism because it is not unlawful for foreigners who are pregnant to travel to the United States or to have babies in the country.

“Birth tourism is a gray area of the law,” said Vaughan, who called “at the very least” for a revision of citizenship rights to prevent those who are in the country for only the first few weeks of their lives from retaining citizenship for life.

China, home to a burgeoning moneyed class that includes many who are eager for a foothold in the United States, is the biggest market for the birth-tourism industry. The United States offers educational opportunities for their children and a haven down the road in the event of political and economic instability in their home country.

The indictments allege that government officials, doctors and lawyers are among those traveling from China to the United States to have children.

The businesses were dismantled after raids in 2015 by the special agents on several sites where the businesses housed pregnant women, in Los Angeles, San Bernardino and Orange counties. But it is not clear how long the three birth-tourism agencies had been operating.

Dongyuan Li, a resident of Irvine, California, who ran a business called “You Win USA,” is accused in the indictment of renting about 20 units in a luxury apartment complex in Irvine under the names of people who did not occupy them as part of an “illegal international birth tourism scheme.” Clients spent a couple months there before giving birth and were then replaced with newly arrived pregnant women, the charging document said.

On its website, Li’s company touted the benefits of having an American child, including a “most attractive nationality;” “priority for jobs in U.S. government, public companies and large corporations;” and the opportunity to immigrate to the United States once that child became an adult and could sponsor a parent for a green card.

The business, which advertised on its website that it had handled 500 births, charged each client $40,000 to $80,000 for a range of services that included coaching on how to respond to questions at a visa interview, fill out forms and disguise the true motive for travel from Customs officers at the airport on arrival, according to the indictment.

One customer is alleged to have falsely stated on a visa application that she would be spending 12 days at the “Trump International Hotel” in Hawaii.

You Win USA recommended that clients flew from China to Hawaii and then connected on a domestic flight to Los Angeles, their destination, to clear passport control in Honolulu and avoid tougher scrutiny expected from officers in California.

It promised a refund to any customer who was not admitted into the country on arrival, according to the indictment.

The business arranged accommodation, prenatal care and shopping trips for the women. In some cases, the indictment said, it instructed clients to fabricate financial documents to enable them to obtain visa extensions, and it deposited money temporarily in their bank accounts.

Zito, the special agent, said clients were advised to claim they lacked insurance, which entitled them to pay the indigent rate at whichever hospital they used to deliver their babies.

In some cases, he said, the women returned to China and canceled their credit card to avoid paying even that rate, about $4,000, which is a fraction of what it costs most women in the United States to deliver a baby.

At the same time, he noted, “they would have nannies and buy things at Gucci and Hermes at South Coast Plaza,” a high-end mall in Costa Mesa, California, where many shops have Mandarin-speaking attendants to help the numerous Chinese customers.

Li was arrested Thursday, along with the operators of USA Happy Baby, another agency associated with birth tourism, according to the indictment: Michael Wei Yueh Liu, of Rancho Cucamonga, California, and Jing Dong, of Fontana, California.

Another indictment charges Wen Rui Deng, operator of a business based in Los Angeles called Star Baby Care, believed to be the largest birth-tourism operation in the country. There was no arrest in that case because Deng is believed to be in China, investigators said.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/31/us/anchor-baby-birth-tourism.html" id="849dee35-f51b-3e69-a131-d3f56cacb595">The New York Times</a>.

Three people who operated multimillion-dollar birth-tourism businesses in Southern California were arrested Thursday in the biggest federal criminal probe ever to target the thriving industry, in which pregnant women come to the United States to give birth so their children will become American citizens.

3 Indicted in Crackdown on Multimillion-Dollar 'Birth Tourism' Businesses

“We are actively engaged in uniforming this process across our properties and will institute E-verify at any property not currently utilizing this system,” Eric Trump, an executive vice president of the company, said in a statement. “As a company we take this obligation very seriously and when faced with a situation in which an employee has presented false and fraudulent documentation, we will take appropriate action.”

Thousands of employers have enrolled voluntarily in the government’s E-Verify electronic system, which checks documents provided by new hires against Social Security Administration and Department of Homeland Security records. A mismatch suggests that the person is unauthorized to work.

All federal contractors must use E-Verify, and 22 states require at least some private and public employers to do so. The federal E-Verify database suggestedthat the Trump Organization did not use heightened employment document verification procedures at several of its properties, meaning that the chances of employing undocumented workers was high.

The New York Times reported in December that undocumented immigrants had been employed for years at the Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey, as housekeepers, landscapers and kitchen staff.

They were kept on the payroll despite the fact that management was aware that they had used phony documents to secure employment, as is common among unauthorized immigrants.

Victorina Morales, an immigrant from Guatemala, said that a manager at Bedminster had helped her secure a new fake Social Security number and legal permanent-residency card after telling her that those on file had expired.

Since the articles were published, about a dozen workers deemed ineligible to work in the United States because they lacked legal immigration status have been terminated at the Bedminster club, according to people familiar with the matter.

Another dozen were fired at the Trump National Golf Club in Westchester this month, a development first reported by the Washington Post.

“I must say, for me personally, this whole thing is truly heartbreaking,” Eric Trump said in the statement Tuesday. “Our employees are like family but when presented with fake documents, an employer has little choice.”

He said that hiring immigrants without legal documents was not a problem unique to the Trump Organization and that it “demonstrates that our immigration system is severely broken and needs to be fixed immediately.”

The Trump Organization said last month that it would immediately terminate those who were not authorized to work in the United States. But for several weeks it failed to respond to questions about what measures it was taking to rectify the situation.

President Donald Trump has made border security and protecting jobs for Americans cornerstones of his presidency, from the border wall he has pledged to build — it recently resulted in the partial government shutdown — to the workplace raids and payroll audits that his administration has carried out.

Trump launched his bid for the GOP presidential nomination in June 2015, declaring that the United States had become a “dumping ground for everybody else’s problems.” Mexico was “sending people” to commit crimes and bring drugs. “They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people,” he said.

In a speech in Arizona shortly after, he deemed illegal immigration “a major, major problem in this country,” vowing to erect a wall along the southwest border.

In August 2015, Trump told The Times that his companies employed only people with legal work papers.

When the Trump International Hotel opened for business in Washington, the president boasted that he had used E-Verify to ensure that only those legally entitled to work were hired.

“We didn’t have one illegal immigrant on the job,” Trump said then.

About 11 million unauthorized immigrants live in the United States and about 8 million of them are in the labor force, according to the Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan think tank. It is an open secret that many businesses, especially in the service sector, employ them.

To deter illegal hiring, Immigration and Customs Enforcement conducts audits of businesses, having slapped tens of millions of dollars in administrative and criminal penalties on those found to employ workers without documents since the early 2000s. These inspections have intensified under the Trump administration.

From Oct. 1, 2017, through July 20, 2018, ICE opened 6,093 work-site investigations and made 675 criminal and 984 administrative work-site-related arrests, several times more than in the entire 2017 fiscal year, Oct. 1, 2016 to Sept. 30, 2017.

Employers who use E-Verify contend that they struggle to attract enough workers to perform menial, physically onerous jobs. The vast majority of businesses simply require applicants to fill out a federal form, the I-9, and present identification and Social Security card, which they assume are genuine.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/29/us/trump-organization-everify.html" id="bd9a33cf-eefe-3c10-a5f9-0888ed81e997">The New York Times</a>.

Trump Organization Will Use System to Verify Workers' Documentation

The Trump Organization said late Tuesday that it was implementing a system to weed out unauthorized immigrants who try to get jobs at its properties. The move followed reports in The New York Times last month that the president’s company was employing people at its flagship golf club in New Jersey who were in the country illegally.

After the president’s latest announcement Saturday — that he was proposing to end the standoff over the partial government shutdown by, among other things, temporarily extending that shield — Hernandez just shrugged.

“I don’t trust Trump — I don’t believe him,” she said as she hoisted her 3-year-old son onto a swivel chair at the D &amp; H Beauty Salon in San Antonio. The blue-collar shop, with rows of wooden chairs in the waiting area, is a favorite among immigrants in the city. But in the hours after Trump’s White House address, his latest offer of an immigration deal was finding little support.

In exchange for $5.7 billion to erect a barrier along the border with Mexico, Trump said he would agree to extend protection for three years for the roughly 800,000 immigrants who benefit from the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which covers people brought into the country illegally as children. The president held out the hope of similar relief for 300,000 immigrants living in the United States with temporary protected status, known as TPS, after fleeing earthquakes and other disasters in their own countries.

“I am here today to break the logjam and provide Congress with a path forward to end the government shutdown and solve the crisis along the southern border,” Trump said, calling his offer “a common-sense compromise both parties can embrace.”

But many of the clients waiting their turn for a $6 haircut or shave at the D &amp; H salon, in a strip mall in the northern part of the city, greeted Trump’s announcement with skepticism, if not downright indifference. Most expressed deep reservations about a border wall, deeming it a waste of money.

Eliseo Castillo, 60, an unauthorized immigrant from Mexico, said an extension of DACA’s protections from deportation, and its offer of work permits, could benefit his 26-year-old son. He said his son had relied on the program for years to get a driver’s license and a job and to live without the fear that even a minor misstep, like driving with a broken taillight, could land him in deportation proceedings.

But Castillo, a construction contractor who relies on a steady flow of workers from Latin America, said he wondered what would happen to his business if a reinforced border wall halted the flow of workers. He said he is already having trouble hiring enough laborers.

“The fact is, there is not an American who wants to mix cement, do carpentry and heavy work,” said Castillo, who employs 18 people to lay down foundations for houses in San Antonio’s expansive subdivisions.

Castillo, who wears cowboy boots and bluejeans and keeps his silver hair in a braid, has called Texas home since the 1980s. But he harbors no illusions about legalizing his status, at least as long as Trump holds the highest office in the land.

Waiting his turn for a haircut in paint-splattered trousers that gave away how he earns his living, Jose Ramos, 63, a naturalized American born in Mexico, said he had no faith that Trump, whose “favorite sport is blaming immigrants for everything, which is not right,” would ever keep his word.

“This isn’t a deal,” Ramos said. “Trump is just offering to give back what he already took away.”

Democrats in Washington have criticized the president for offering to extend DACA and TPS protections, when it was he who had ordered those protections revoked. Some have called the offer a nonstarter because it did not include any long-term solutions, like a path to permanent legal status or citizenship for DACA recipients, who are known as Dreamers.

But many people in San Antonio never had much faith that such solutions were even possible with Trump as president.

Indeed, some in the city wonder how much the president knows about the border.

Speaking with reporters Saturday, Trump cited the city as a place that had benefited from building a border barrier. “You look at San Antonio, you look at so many different places, they go from one of the most unsafe cities in the country to one of the safest cities, immediately, immediately,” he said.

But San Antonio is 150 miles from the border, and has no wall.

Alicia Alaniz, 47, the stylist working at station 7 in the salon, rolled her eyes and said that the only thing she could agree with in Trump’s statement was the notion that the immigration system was “broken.”

“We need immigration reform — it would benefit the country and everyone who lives here,” said Alaniz, a legal permanent resident who emigrated from Mexico. People just want to work the right way, and support this country that has brought them many blessings.”

President Barack Obama introduced DACA in June 2012 as a temporary reprieve for young unauthorized immigrants, at a time when Congress was in a stalemate over immigration policy. To qualify for DACA protection, immigrants must have lived in the United States for much of their lives and meet other requirements, like passing a background check and completing high school.

On the campaign trail, Trump vowed to eliminate any program that Obama had created by executive action, including DACA, a stance that generated deep anxiety among the Dreamers.

But in December 2016, shortly after winning election, Trump softened his position.

“We’re going to work something out that’s going to make people happy and proud,” he told Time magazine. “They got brought here at a very young age, they’ve worked here, they’ve gone to school here. Some were good students. Some have wonderful jobs. And they’re in never-never land because they don’t know what’s going to happen.”

Once in office, however, Trump appointed one of the fiercest opponents of the DACA program, Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, as his attorney general. Sessions rescinded DACA in September 2017, but the action was challenged in court and has yet to take full effect, while the courts decide the program’s fate.

Without work permits provided under the program, young immigrants would face cascading, and possibly dire, consequences: They would lose their jobs, driver’s licenses and the chance to attend college at in-state tuition rates.

Friday was the last day the Supreme Court could accept an appeal and schedule any arguments on the DACA litigation in its current session, and the court let the day pass without addressing the Trump administration’s bid to kill the program. That ensures that DACA will survive at least until the court’s next session, which begins in October.

When the administration made its bid to end the program, “I worried about what I would do; I was so sad,” said Hernandez, who works these days for a casual dining chain known as Zoe’s Kitchen. But with the issue tied up in the courts, she said she has simply had to get on with her life. “Now, I don’t even think about it,” she said.

Her DACA permit expires in a year.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/20/us/border-wall-daca-tps-trump-reaction.html" id="b74cadf2-3705-3339-aa9c-2c346ea7eb53">The New York Times</a>.

Trump's Deal Meets With Skepticism Among Immigrants in Texas

SAN ANTONIO — Donald Trump got Brenda Hernandez’s hopes up in 2016 when he indicated that he had a heart for young unauthorized immigrants like her, who were brought into the country by their parents. But her hopes were dashed when Trump became president and ordered an end to the federal program known as DACA that shields her from deportation.

The federal government has reported that nearly 3,000 children were forcibly separated from their parents under last year’s “zero-tolerance” immigration policy under which nearly all adults entering the country illegally were prosecuted, and any children accompanying them were put into shelters or foster care.

Even before the administration officially unveiled the zero-tolerance policy in the spring of 2018, staff of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the agency that oversees the care of children in federal custody, had noted a “sharp increase” in the number of children separated from a parent or guardian, according to the report from the agency’s Office of Inspector General.

As of December, the department had identified 2,737 children who were separated from their parents under the policy and required to be reunified by a federal court order issued in June 2018.

But that number does not represent the full scope of family separations. Thousands of children may have been separated during an influx that began in 2017, before the accounting required by the court, the report said.

HOUSTON — The Trump administration likely separated thousands more children from their parents at the southern border than was previously believed, according to a report by government inspectors released Thursday.

Miriam Jordan

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