After 10 people died in a tractor-trailer smuggling people from Mexico and Guatemala, an immigration attorney in Texas told the survivors about a visa designed for victims of crimes. But as the case against the truck driver moved forward, it was argued as a smuggling case instead of a human trafficking case, which made visas for the victims harder to get. Some were soon deported.
From the Intercept:
Read Full Article »The dismissals came on a Tuesday, two days before the material witnesses were scheduled to begin their depositions. “We had been visiting our clients and preparing them,” Barrera said. “Then, from one day to another, we're at the immigration office having an entirely different conversation.” By Wednesday, two men had been removed to Mexico. Both were clients of Jonathan Ryan and the Raices legal team, though the attorneys didn't learn about their deportations until the following afternoon. “We've been the last to know anything,” Ryan said, an hour after his office received confirmation of the removals from ICE. While two of Ryan's clients were deported, ICE placed a third under an order of supervision and released him in Florida. The man had a prior order for removal but for reasons that remained unclear to his attorneys, he was spared from deportation. That disjointedness is a core component of the U.S. immigration system, Ryan explained, and part of what makes representation so challenging. Comprised of “many different offices with many different sets of leaders and their own prerogatives and their own goals,” the cogs in that machine sometimes produce favorable or empathetic outcomes, Ryan said, but “the collective whole tends toward the negative, and we're seeing that play out in real time right here, right now.”
