Statue of liberty as viewed from Liberty Park | Getty Images
Amid all the poisonous, destructive acts of the second Trump administration, none is more chilling than snatching civilians off the streets of U.S. cities, to be deported without due process or disappeared to a notorious mega prison in El Salvador.
The sheer lawlessness of Trump’s campaign of terror against immigrants is breathtaking.
On University of Wisconsin campuses, hundreds of international students who had their visas canceled are scrambling. Some are giving up their studies and going home, even though they’ve done nothing wrong and could probably get their visas reinstated through an appeals process. They don’t want to take their chances with this capricious, menacing administration.
Who can blame them? Maryland father Kilmar Abrego Garcia was dragged from his car and sent to El Salvador due to an “administrative error” — yet the administration still refuses to return him. Sloppy police work and a cavalier attitude toward the law also appear to have landed a Milwaukee beautician with tattoos that had nothing to do with gangs in the same Salvadoran “terrorist” detention center.
Recently, Wisconsin Public Radio reported that Neenah resident Tom Frantz, a retired college administrator who was born in the U.S., received notifications from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security telling him to leave the country immediately. The letters warned him, “Do not attempt to remain in the United States — the federal government will find you.” Frantz turned to Sen. Tammy Baldwin to help clear up what seems to be a mistake. It’s a bad sign that Franz, with no immigration background at all, felt he had to take the threat seriously.
High-profile black ops against student protesters, a White House visit from the self-described dictator of El Salvador, who thumbed his nose at the U.S. Supreme Court while sitting in the Oval Office, refusing to return the wrongly deported Abrego Garcia, Trump officials mocking due process and flouting the law — all of this is designed to foster fear, hopelessness and despair.
Grant Sovern | Photo courtesy Quarles & Brady
Grant Sovern, an immigration attorney in Madison who helped found the Community Immigration Law Center, is standing up to all of that.
He and his colleagues have been raising money through small donations at house parties to sustain a public defender service for immigrants in Dane County who face the threat of deportation.
“Not everyone is actually deportable who ICE thinks is deportable,” Sovern says. “Maybe ICE has it wrong. … People don’t know. You need an advocate who knows the rules.”
That’s where the Community Immigration Law Center (CILC) comes in. The group’s mission is to ensure that everyone in Dane County who needs an immigration attorney gets one. It’s a significant step toward upholding the rule of law generally.
Sovern points to an evaluation of the New York Immigrant Family Unity Project, the nation’s first public defender service for immigrants facing deportation. The project provided lawyers to all low-income immigrants facing deportation proceedings in New York City. Before the project, only 4% of those challenging deportation were successful. Once they were provided with attorneys, the rate of success rose to 48%.
“So half of the people who were being deported shouldn’t be,” Sovern says. “It’s not like these lawyers were getting around the law. They were applying the rules.”
And even under the current administration, applying the rules makes a difference. “At this moment, when everyone feels so hopeless,” Sovern says, CILC is demonstrating that “we can do something.”
Some of the nonprofit law firm’s clients have been going through immigration court proceedings for years, starting in the first Trump administration. Others are new clients who are challenging deportation orders and winning.
The U.S. Supreme Court has responded cautiously to the Trump administration’s overreach as it deports people without due process. So far it has applied the brakes on Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act only by insisting that deportees’ cases be heard in the courts where they are located.
For people Trump is targeting with its novel use of that wartime law, “the only due process you have is this habeas corpus petition,” explains Sovern — a petition demanding that the government bring people it has detained before a court and justify their detention.
Sovern knows one of the lawyers who wrote the habeas petition for Rumeysa Ozturk, the Tufts University graduate student who was snatched off the street in Boston by masked federal agents and spirited away to a Louisiana detention center. Ozturk’s lawyers filed a petition on her behalf in Massachusetts within five hours, Sovern says, but it was too late. Neither her attorneys nor her friends and family knew where she was and she was unable to speak to her lawyers until after she was flown out of state.
Last week, a federal judge in Vermont, a state Ozturk traveled through as government agents were taking her to Louisiana, ruled that she must be returned to New England no later than May 1 to determine whether she was illegally detained for co-writing an op-ed piece in her student newspaper supporting Palestinian victims of the war in Gaza.
“It is really dramatic how much it takes,” Sovern says of the struggle against Trump’s war on immigrants, due process and civil liberties. But he and his colleagues are rising to the challenge.
CILC’s goal is to be prepared for anything. “As long as we have some process, we are going to make that available,” Sovern says. “It’s going to cost a lot, and we’ll need expert lawyers to do it. But we’re going to find a way. If the Supreme Court and court system give people any type of due process at all, we have to be ready.”
See CILC’s website for more information about the group’s work and what you can do to help.
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