Ankle monitors and curfews: inside Biden’s new migrant family tracking system
On a recent evening in California, a woman named Sandra was at a birthday party with her 15-year-old son when she looked at the clock.
She panicked: it was after 10 p.m
She had less than an hour to get home in time for the 11 p.m. curfew imposed by U.S. immigration authorities, part of a nearly year-old tracking system for migrant families hoping to gain asylum in the United States.
She motioned for her son to leave and pushed him out the door and into the car.
They arrived home at 10:58 p.m., the bulky GPS monitor on her right ankle reporting her location to authorities who were watching her. Her heart, which had been beating against her chest the entire ride home, finally slowed.
Sandra, 45, and her son Justin, who crossed the border in December after fleeing Colombia, are part of a nearly year-old Biden administration program that aims to quickly relocate many of the migrant families who have arrived in the region processed – and possibly deported. United States in record numbers.
The goal of the program is to prevent families from skipping their asylum hearings and melting into American society, joining the millions of undocumented immigrants who remain in the country indefinitely under the radar of U.S. authorities.
If the families do not pass the asylum screening, they can be deported within weeks. The asylum process usually takes years and most applications are ultimately rejected.
So far, the Family Expedited Removal Management program has tracked more than 19,000 people since May, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement data obtained by The New York Times. More than 1,500 of them have been deported and about 1,000 have absconded by prying off their ankle monitors, ICE data show. The rest have passed the initial screening or have ongoing cases.
Although the program has only been used in a fraction of claims, some U.S. officials see it as a test case for a faster way to deal with families seeking refuge in America, where laws require the government to consider asylum claims from anyone who succeeds. American soil.
They hope the program can provide an alternative to the usual options for dealing with migrant families: detaining them in expensive ICE facilities, which President Biden has criticized, or releasing them with court dates years in the future and no consistent way to detain them. tracks.
Thomas Giles, an ICE official leading the program, said it was promising.
“It has certainly led to an increase in family unit moves over the last nine months compared to before, so we’ve been successful with that,” he said. But he cautioned that the program requires a huge amount of resources and is still in its infancy.
“This is essentially what we’ve had to do for the last decade, but on a massive scale,” said John Sandweg, ICE’s acting director during the Obama administration.
The Biden administration should expand the program, he said, because it is difficult to deport people — especially families — if they have been in the United States for years, building lives in America as their cases work their way through the system.
What to do with families?
Chronically underfunded and understaffed, America’s immigration system cannot keep pace with the number of people seeking asylum in America. Mr. Biden, in an election year when immigration is a dominant issue, may even consider limiting asylum altogether.
There were more than 2.5 million encounters with migrants at the southwestern land border in fiscal year 2023, a record number that has strained resources in American cities.
The questions of how, where and for how long to detain migrants have confused successive governments. But in particular, the issue of what to do with families has been one of the most fraught, with increasingly ethical and political implications.
Years of scientific consensus show that holding minors, even with their parents, can cause developmental damage. Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald J. Trump all detained families in ICE facilities, hoping the prospect of detention would deter migrant families from making the journey.
Mr. Trump tried to expand the practice and hold families indefinitely, but a federal judge said that violated a court settlement that required families be held for only 20 days.
The Biden administration made a point of ending the detention of families and instead releasing families with ankle bracelets and trackable cellphones. That model was a precursor to the new program, which uses strict curfews and accelerated asylum screenings in addition to electronic surveillance.
The program is used in more than 40 locations and has the tools to monitor thousands of migrants and make rapid rulings in a decisive step in the asylum process: the credible-fear interview.
In a functioning system, most asylum seekers would be interviewed at the border to determine whether they have a credible fear of persecution in their home country. But only about 500 such interviews are conducted every day – for a tiny fraction of the thousands of people crossing the border.
The rest are often released into the country with a trial far in the future.
The new program aims to screen families and quickly deport those who don’t meet the bar due to credible fears. Mr. Giles, the ICE official who runs the program, said ICE gives migrants a list of free legal services providers when they are processed into the program.
If families fail the initial screening, case managers who track their movements ensure their travel documents are in order and coordinate travel home, usually on chartered government planes. When they abscond, ICE begins searching for them for immediate arrest.
If they are successful, they can at least remain in the United States until their case is resolved.
‘I didn’t want to come’
Sandra said she came to the United States as a last resort.
In Colombia, she led a Christian organization for many years that focused on helping children of people addicted to drugs. It was, she said, her “dream job.”
But last year, she said, gang members threatened to kill her because she refused to help them sell drugs. She knew she had to leave.
“I didn’t want to come,” she said through a Spanish interpreter, asking that only her first name be used out of fear for her safety. “Many people come here because they are looking for the famous American dream – but that was not my case.”
In Colombia, she said, she was “up here,” gesturing above her head. In America she is ‘down here’, pointing to her anklet.
She began organizing the trip to the United States in the winter, with a vague plan for what to do once she arrived with Justin: Her eldest son, who had come to the United States a few years ago, would buy plane tickets to Buy them Oakland. , California.
But first she had to cross the border. In Mexico they were robbed and threatened with kidnapping and torture. Cartel members threatened to detain them until their families paid money. There was only one option, she said. Cross the border.
In early December, they walked into Arizona and told Border Patrol they were afraid to return to Colombia, triggering the asylum process.
The administration saw them as candidates for the new expedited process because they were headed to the Bay Area, where the program has an office. Sandra was fitted with an ankle monitor and told to report to a government office in San Francisco.
The case manager there told Sandra that she was not a criminal, but that this was part of Mr. Biden’s program to get things “under control,” she recalled.
“This is humiliating in a way,” she said. “We know we didn’t get here legally, but we had no way to do it legally.”
‘Completely unsustainable’
Many immigrant advocates say the expedited removal program actually works too quickly, making it difficult for people to find legal representation. They also criticize the use of GPS trackers, which are more commonly used in criminal courts.
The National Immigrant Justice Center said building an asylum case requires “complex legal research, fact-gathering and numerous in-person meetings with the client for trauma-informed interviews and case preparation.”
“The speed of the program is completely unsustainable,” said Cindy Woods, national policy advisor at Americans for Immigrant Justice, an organization that represents families whose cases are processed through the expedited removal program, including Sandra’s.
Ms. Woods said a mother of two from Ecuador contacted her over the summer two days before her family’s credible anxiety screening. But the woman became distraught as she spoke of “past harm and threats”, Ms Woods said.
There was no time to prepare her for the asylum screening, which she ultimately failed, Ms Woods said. The woman is now in hiding with her family in Ecuador.
Ms Woods said the accelerated removal program was preferable to family detention. But she said, “It’s happening way too fast.”
For the Biden administration, speed is the whole point.
The immigration court backlog exceeded three million cases last year, and there are not nearly enough judges and interpreters to handle it effectively. The new accelerated program is an attempt to prevent families from becoming even more disadvantaged.
The future
On a Friday in late December, Sandra arrived in San Francisco for her first asylum screening.
She explained to the officers why she came to the United States and what she risked at home. A week later the decision was made: she had passed the credible fear screening, the first administrative step on the road to asylum.
She was in America for four weeks.
Now she waits with the rest of the asylum seekers for her case to go to immigration court. There are often multiple hearings, including one where both the migrant and the government present evidence. That could take years.
Now that she has passed the initial screening, government officials have removed her ankle monitor — a relief, she said. She is going to apply for a work permit so she can earn money.
But the country still feels deeply unknown to her.
“We trust God and I think everything will turn out well,” she said. “But of course we are afraid of what will happen.”