Federal immigration officials to be barred from Chicago Public Schools unless they have a criminal warrant, says CPS... History will evaluate how far Trump administration will go against Chicago's schools, teachers, families, and children...
Both ICE and DHS "police" will be raiding schools and other places now that the newest guidelines from the Trump administration have been issued. Substance supporters and reporters are urged to begin reporting all incidents, along with photographs if they can get them. The above photo is from generic stocks.On the days that the Trump administration announced its latest draconian attacks on "illegal immigrants", top officials of the City of Chicago and Chicago Public Schools announced important guidelines to protect children and families of CPS students. The following memo was distributed to CPS principals on February 21, 2017...
CHICAGO PUBLIC SCHOOLS MEMO TO PRINCIPALS...
From: Communications, Internal Date: Tue, Feb 21, 2017 at 11:00 AM
Subject: Guidance: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)
To: CPS principals
Dear Principals,
In the days since the Presidential election, many members of our school community have expressed concern and anxiety about immigration matters. Many of you have worked to ease the concerns felt by students and families, and we appreciate your commitment to ensuring that every student who walks through your doors is embraced and supported.
We have also received questions from many of you on how to handle interactions with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, so we have attached initial internal guidance to best protect students’ safety and privacy. To be very clear, CPS does not provide assistance to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in the enforcement of federal civil immigration law. Therefore, ICE should not be permitted access to CPS facilities or personnel except in the rare instance in which we are provided with a criminal warrant. If presented with any paperwork from ICE, please call the Law Department at 773-553-1700 before taking any action.
In the coming days, we will also provide a detailed FAQ document to address additional questions you may have, and please continue to reach out to Law, Communications and your Network Chief in the meantime. In addition, to better support our families and provide additional clarity on some of the questions you may be receiving from families, we have attached a set of resources that can be provided at your discretion to members of your school community. Attached you will find:
A letter to parents highlighting our commitment to supporting all students and noting the many supports available to immigrants in Chicago.
Multi-language guidance from the City of Chicago’s Office of New Americans on legal assistance, immigrant rights, mental health care, and public safety.
Palmcards from the National Immigrant Justice Center on immigrant rights.
While many of our families have serious concerns and anxiety about recent federal actions and statements, we want to make sure that parents know school is a safe place for all students regardless of their race, ethnicity or country of origin.
Attendance at a number of CPS schools dipped below typical rates during the “Day Without Immigrants,” but as we noted earlier in the week, we firmly believe that the safest and most beneficial place for students is a classroom alongside their fellow students. We hope that the attached resources will be useful in addressing some of the new issues you and your school community face, and we are eager to hear your feedback on opportunities to better support our students and families.
Sincerely,
Dr. Janice K. Jackson
Chief Education Officer Chicago Public Schools
WASHINGTON POST STORY OUTLINING NEW TRUMP GUIDELINES...
Trump administration issues new immigration enforcement policies, says goal is not ‘mass deportations’
Trump administration strengthens immigration enforcement guidelines Play Video2:40
The Trump administration on Feb. 21 issued guidelines strengthening enforcement against illegal immigration but insisted that it isn’t seeking “mass deportations.” (Bastien Inzaurralde/The Washington Post)
By David Nakamura February 21 at 6:37 PM The Trump administration on Tuesday sought to allay growing fears among immigrant communities over wide-ranging new directives to ramp up enforcement against illegal immigrants, insisting the measures are not intended to produce “mass deportations.”
Federal officials cautioned that many of the changes detailed in a pair of memos from Homeland Security Secretary John F. Kelly will take time to implement because of costs and logistical challenges and that border patrol agents and immigration officers will use their expanded powers with care and discretion.
Yet the official public rollout of Kelly’s directives, first disclosed in media reports over the weekend, was met with outrage from immigrant rights advocates over concerns the new policies will result in widespread abuses as authorities attempt to fulfill President Trump’s goals of tightening border control.
Trump took a hard line against illegal immigration during his campaign, at times suggesting he would seek to create a nationwide “deportation force” to expel as many of the nation’s estimated 11 million unauthorized immigrants as possible.
In a conference call with reporters, a senior Department of Homeland Security official moved to avert what he called a “sense of panic” among immigrant communities.
One undocumented woman's solution to deportation? Seeking sanctuary in a church. Play Video3:07
Jeanette Vizguerra, an undocumented immigrant who has lived in the U.S. for 20 years, is under a deportation order and was supposed to check in with authorities on February 15. Instead, the mother of four and immigration activist is seeking sanctuary 15 miles away in the basement of First Unitarian Society of Denver. She plans to remain there indefinitely. (Alice Li/The Washington Post)
“We do not have the personnel, time or resources to go into communities and round up people and do all kinds of mass throwing folks on buses. That’s entirely a figment of folks’ imagination,” said the official, who was joined on the call by two others, all of whom spoke on condition of anonymity to answer questions. “This is not intended to produce mass roundups, mass deportations.”
The new guidelines, intended as a road map toward implementing a pair of executive actions Trump signed last month, call for the hiring of thousands of additional enforcement agents, expanding the pool of immigrants who are prioritized for removal, speeding up deportation hearings and enlisting local law enforcement to help make arrests.
The policies represent a sharp break from the final years of the Obama administration and could reverse a sizable reduction in the number of deportations that occurred toward the end of President Barack Obama’s time in office.
After deportations reached a record high of 434,000 in 2013, intense pressure from immigration advocates prompted the Obama administration to implement new guidelines that focused enforcement on hardened criminals. Obama announced in Nov. 2014 that his administration would deport “felons, not families.” Many undocumented immigrants have lived in the country for more than a decade and have family members and children who are U.S. citizens.
The number of people deported in 2015 was just over 333,000, the lowest number since 2007, according to federal data. Statistics for 2016 are not publicly available.
Kelly’s new DHS policies considerably broaden the pool of undocumented immigrants prioritized for removal, including those who have been charged with crimes but not convicted, those who commit acts that constitute a “chargeable criminal offense,” and those who an immigration officer concludes pose “a risk to public safety or national security.”
The Trump administration “is using the specter of crime to create fear … in the American community about immigrants in order to create an opening to advance the indiscriminate persecution of immigrants,” said Clarissa Martínez-de-Castro, deputy vice president at the National Council of La Raza. “This administration is saying, ‘Now, everybody is going to be a priority,’ and the devil may care.”
Goal of new immigration memos not 'mass deportation,' Spicer says Play Video4:13
White House press secretary Sean Spicer fielded questions about the new Department of Homeland Security memos on immigration enforcement priorities during a press briefing on Feb. 21. (Reuters)
DHS officials emphasized that the guidelines in Kelly’s memos hew closely to the language of Trump’s executive orders and that the secretary has written the memos to conform to federal immigration laws established by Congress.
“We are not creating anything out of whole cloth,” the DHS official said.
Democrats and human rights groups blasted the administration. Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) called the policies “xenophobic” and suggested they could lead to racial profiling of minorities.
“It is irresponsible to treat a hardened criminal the same as an immigrant mother with children for purposes of deportation,” Menendez said in a statement.
[Trump’s hard-line immigration rhetoric runs into obstacles — including Trump]
White House press secretary Sean Spicer also denied that the goal of Trump’s executive orders is mass deportations. Rather, he said, the Obama administration had allowed “so many carve outs” on which immigrants were to be the focus of enforcement actions that federal agents “had their hands cuffed behind them.”
“The president wanted to take the shackles off individuals in these agencies and say, ‘You have a mission, there are laws that need to be followed, you should do your mission and follow the law,’” Spicer said.
Yet Spicer on several occasions during his daily press briefing misrepresented the number of undocumented immigrants living in the country, citing “13, 14, 15” million, or “potentially more.” In fact, the number has held steady in recent years at just over 11 million, after peaking in 2007 at about 12.2 million, according to a report last fall from Pew Research Center.
That is in part because of stricter border control measures have flattened the net flow of illegal immigrants to roughly zero, according to the report.
During his campaign, Trump said he thought there could be as many as “30” million illegal immigrants. “Nobody knows what the number is,” he said.
Trump’s early attempts to crackdown on immigration, including his executive order banning travel of citizens from seven Muslim-majority nations, have drawn criticism both in the United States and abroad. Kelly and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson plan to visit Mexico later this week where tensions over the president’s plan to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border are sure to be on display. Around the same time, House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) will be leading a delegation of lawmakers to the border as Congress wrestles with how to actually implement Trump’s signature campaign promise.
Kelly’s implementation memos do not overturn one important directive from the Obama administration: a program called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals that has provided work permits to more than 750,000 immigrants who came to the country illegally as children.
Trump had promised during his campaign to “immediately terminate” the program, calling it an unconstitutional “executive amnesty,” but he has wavered since then. Last week, he said he would “show great heart” in determining the fate of that program.
But the new directives released on Tuesday seek to expand partnerships with local law enforcement agencies to apprehend undocumented immigrants, hire 10,000 new Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers and 5,000 new Border Patrol agents, and broaden expedited deportations, currently limited to those in the country two weeks or less, to those who have been in the country for up to two years.
The provisions mandate that the government detain immigrants until they are granted a hearing before an immigration judge, ending the Obama administration’s policy of releasing some to live with relatives until their hearings. Backlogs at immigration courts have delayed hearings for more than a year.
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The provisions also allow federal authorities to prosecute the parents of unaccompanied minors who enter the country illegally if they are found to have paid smugglers.
DHS officials said the Trump administration is seeking to maximize federal immigration policies that have been on the books for years but were not used by the Obama administration.
Some of the changes, they said, will take time to implement because of the costs and because some of the policies must be announced through the federal register. Officials declined to estimate the costs for the additional personnel, including more immigration judges to speed up hearings, as well as significant new detention housing for unauthorized immigrants awaiting their court proceedings.
“This will not happen tomorrow,” the DHS official said.
“The big picture here is that we’re executing what the president directed, which is consistent with what Congress put into law,” the official added. “We will do so professionally. We will treat everyone humanely and with dignity, but we’re going to execute the laws of the United States.”
Comments:
By: bob Busch
Stay out
He came running into the gym class.A couple of seconds later two plainclothes dick's ran into the gym and made a beeline towards him.
By then he was peacefully standing on his number.while unprepared for gym,the teacher just took roll, as he walked past the kid he noticed the 45 auto sticking out of the jacket
between his feet.just that fast the cops had him , and his 45.the teacher got called to the office and was almost suspended for LETTING THE COPS IN THE GYM.
By: Jill Wagnoski
Immigration and Trump
Although I agree with GS about how awful Trump's immigration orders are, the media, including this site, has focused too much attention on this. To date, Trump has signed over twenty-four executive orders and most have not been reported. If Democrats want to return to power, they will need to gain the narrative in the media and expose all of Trump's attacks on Americans and not isolate exclusively on deportation issues. Swing voters will not be compelled to change sides on merely immigration but will be moved when made to comprehend the declining standard of living in America that will continue to erode as gains made by workers in previous decades are removed by Trump's executive actions