This is the 140th edition of BORDER/LINES, a weekly newsletter by Felipe De La Hoz and Gaby Del Valle designed to get you up to speed on the big developments in immigration policy. Reach out with feedback, suggestions, tips, and ideas at BorderLines.News@protonmail.ch.
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This week’s edition:
In The Big Picture, we examine President Biden’s recent pardon of people convicted of marijuana possession, which notably excluded non-citizens.
In Under the Radar, we look at new data on ICE’s Alternatives to Detention program.
In Next Destination, we discuss the recent rise in asylum applications among Afghan evacuees already in the U.S.
The Big Picture
The news: President Biden recently issued a proclamation pardoning people for simple possession of marijuana—a pardon that only applied to “current United States citizens and lawful permanent residents.” In addition to excluding undocumented immigrants and people on non-immigrant visas, the pardon does not apply to anyone who had their permanent residency stripped because of a marijuana conviction.
The issue at hand is the concept of “deportability.” Non-citizens convicted of certain offenses are immediately classified as deportable, meaning Immigration and Customs Enforcement can arrest them for violating immigration law even if they entered the country lawfully. There’s also the notion of “inadmissibility,” which applies both to people arriving at or between ports of entry and, perhaps counterintuitively, to those who are already in the country. A drug possession conviction could render someone inadmissible, deportable, or both.
Under the Radar
ICE use of “alternatives to detention” reaches all-time high
Immigration and Customs Enforcement is monitoring at least 316,700 people through its Alternatives to Detention program, according to federal data analyzed by TRAC at Syracuse University. For the first time ever, the number of people monitored via ATD has surpassed 300,000.
Of those, 255,602 people are monitored via a smartphone app called SmartLINK. Operated by BI Incorporated, a subsidiary of the GEO Group, the app requires noncitizens to “check in” by uploading a photo of themselves and enabling their location. Nearly 41,000 others are tracked via GPS ankle monitors, which track people’s location at all times, according to TRAC. The rate of people tracked via ankle monitors has increased in recent months; in July 2022, just 16,444 people were monitored this way.
A separate report by TRAC shows that the nationalities represented in the ATD program are shifting. A growing number of those monitored via SmartLINK or through GPS ankle monitors are Venezuelan, Honduran, Nicaraguan, Cuban, Brazilian, or Haitian—a shift that reflects the fact that Customs and Border Protection’s expulsion policy is primarily levied against Mexican, Guatemalan, and Salvadoran nationals who are not allowed into the U.S. to pursue asylum claims.
Next Destination
Afghan evacuees increasingly applying for asylum
More than 17,400 Afghans who initially entered the United States via humanitarian parole have applied for asylum or special visa status, CBS News’s Camilo Montoya-Galvez reports. Almost 90 percent of the more than 88,000 Afghans who have arrived in the U.S. were granted parole for a two-year period, according to DHS data reviewed by CBS News, but this doesn’t confer them any kind of permanent status or path to citizenship.
The Afghan Adjustment Act, introduced earlier this year, would have done just that, but it has stalled in Congress. Some Republican lawmakers claim that Afghans evacuated after the fall of Kabul haven’t been sufficiently vetted, even though many of the Afghans who were admitted into the U.S. fled Afghanistan precisely because they directly or indirectly helped the United States during the war.
Thus far, more than 8,200 Afghans have applied for asylum, according to CBS News. Most of the cases are still unsolved even though Congress had previously ordered U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to process Afghans’ asylum requests within five months. While most cases are still pending, early numbers suggest that evacuees have strong odds of winning their cases. Of the 462 applications that have been decided so far, just two were denied. An additional 9,200 Afghan evacuees have applied for Special Immigrant Visas, a visa designation for people who assisted the U.S. during the war effort.