They’re not “bad hombres” – or “rapists,” as Trump called them in the speech that kicked off his campaign.
Rather, they’re people like Walter Cervantes, who has been sitting in the Stewart Detention Facility in Lumpkin, Georgia, for the past two weeks.
Cervantes, 27, is a husband and a father to a baby girl. His parents brought him to the United States from Mexico when he was just 7. Under the Obama administration, he received assurance that he would be allowed to stay through the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.
But Cervantes has a marijuana charge on his record. On Feb. 13, he went to a monthly meeting with his probation officer. It was part of the conditions, set by a court, that would result in the charge being dismissed later this year.
“As I was finishing, the probation officer told me, two people want to talk to you,” Cervantes told one of my colleagues who visited him in detention.
The men were Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents. Instead of going home to his wife and baby daughter in Marion, North Carolina, Cervantes was detained. Thanks to his probation, he was a convenient target for federal agents freed by Trump’s new immigration orders to detain and deport a far wider class of immigrants than before.
Under Trump’s new mandates, any immigrant in the country without proper documentation who is charged with or convicted of any offense, or even suspected of a crime, is now an enforcement priority. It doesn’t matter how minor the offense. It doesn’t matter if the person has paid their debt to society. It doesn’t matter if the offense is a criminal charge stemming from the person’s immigration status.
Even the Dreamers, the DACA recipients like Cervantes who arrived with their parents as young children, are at risk.
Immigrants who have regular contact with a court, school or government agency should not have to worry that they are particularly vulnerable. Yet, many are. In El Paso, Texas, for example, agents detained a woman inside a courthouse just after she received a protective order against an abusive boyfriend.
The Los Angeles Times reported that up to 8 million people could be targeted for deportation by Trump’s dragnet.
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