Trump And Immigrants: Widespread Fear Of Deportations In Bay Area, But How Will It Work?

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Publish Date:
November 20, 2016
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The Mercury News
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Summary

To achieve his goal of deporting two to three million immigrants with criminal records, President-elect Donald Trump would have to go after hundreds of thousands of people in California, including some with green cards who have minor convictions on their records, immigration and legal experts say.

High in hyperbole but short on details, Trump’s plan raises many more questions than it answers, but immigrant advocates are girding for a crisis, urging potential deportees to meet with lawyers now and make “safety plans.”

Even inmates are entitled to due process before the U.S. can throw them out of the country, so Trump simply cannot empty prisons of illegal immigrants and give them the boot, said Stanford Law School Professor Jayashri Srikantiah, who runs the university’s Immigrants Rights Clinic.

Immigration courts are already teeming with people going through the deportation process, Srikantiah said. Although it seems like a criminal matter, it is actually a civil proceeding. That means people flagged as deportees have no right to a court-appointed lawyer to take on the government in their defense. Some never see an attorney before being put on a plane.

“We are all in this world,” said Stanford’s Srikantiah, “where we just don’t know what he is going to do.”

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