Welcome to Politically Speaking.

I'm Elizabeth Bennion, chancellor's professor of political science and director of Community Engagement at Indiana University South Bend.

Today, we turn our attention to immigration.

We'll discuss the US immigration system, the impact of immigration enforcement on local communities, and the potential implications of Donald Trump's plan to launch the largest deportation program in US history.

To help us explore these crucial issues, we're joined by Rudy Monterrosa, an experienced immigration and criminal defense attorney and founder of the MONTERROSA group.

Thanks so much for being here.

Well, thanks for having me, Elizabeth.

Now, I want to ask you, as somebody who is deeply involved in immigration cases, what are some of the challenges that the immigrant community is facing in Indiana and elsewhere?

Well, first of all, thank you very much for inviting me to participate in this program.

We always appreciate being able to show both sides of the story when we when we talk to our audience.

I believe the challenges that immigrants have had in Indiana and throughout the country is the fact that I think sometimes people aren't very well educated about the system of immigration in our country.

I think that if people were educated about it and knew about it and didn't just rely on what's posted on social media or what's said on the campaign trail, I think that if people were educated for exactly what was happening or how our system works, then I think people might have a different reaction.

And I think this is especially true when you start meeting somebody or when you realize that you know somebody that's going through this process, either of legalization or becoming a US citizen or perhaps somebody that's going through the deportation proceeding, then then I think when people see that it's a human being, then I think at that point people see it differently where there's a reason why, for example, you know, President elect Trump had had said these illegals are illegal aliens, is because you dehumanize a person when you refer to them as a as a net as another.

But it's not as easy to deport Joey, who plays soccer with your son or it's not is easier to deport Mary, whose real name was Maria.

But who's the person that you've known for years but didn't realize that they had these immigration issues?

So I believe it's a matter of education, and I believe it's a matter of realizing the humanity in people.

And then when we're talking about immigration, we're talking about families, we're talking about communities, and we're talking about human beings that have, for whatever reason, decided to make the United States their home.

And, you know, this country is based we're founded on immigrants.

And we're and we thrive because immigrants have come to this country and have been able to work hard and contribute and do something positive with our country.

And I think that I mean, I think that's the bottom line.

I think it matters.

It goes down to education.

People need to know how the system works.

So many people, even those who recognize we're a country of immigrants, say, but that's fine, just do it legally.

So what are the paths for people who are trying to immigrate here and would like to do so through one of those legal paths that they have?

And what are some of the challenges that people have pursuing that legal immigration that they might desire?

So when people say, well, why don't you do the things the right way or do it legally, let us recall that before the 8000s.

You'll see the theme from The Godfather.

Right.

Where Don Corleone comes to Ellis Island.

And they thought that he had a disease or they thought that he was sick.

They quarantine them and then they allowed him into the United States.

So it used to be that if you wanted to come here and work hard, you would be able to come in.

They didn't.

There wasn't this concept of you have to show documentation in order to be able to come to the United States.

We were there came a point where we start we stopped being that way, including where we made people that were in the United States already that were a part of this country.

And now we made them into the, you know, the saying that the border didn't cross me.

I think across the board of the border crossed me.

Right.

That there were people here already in the United States who were already a part of it, but yet then became another because of the way we drew our our our borderlines.

If you want to do things legally nowadays, the system that we have relies on someone being a sponsor, either with the work that we do.

So generally speaking, it's either an employer or a family member.

So a US citizen can submit what's called a 930 a petition for an alien relative.

And that petition says, I'm a U.S. citizen and this person is either my spouse, my parent, my spouse, my child under the age of 21, over the age of 21, married, unmarried, and my brother and sister.

Those are individuals that that person can apply for.

If you have a green card, you can only apply for your your wife, your spouse, I should say, or your child, so long as they're not married.

If you're fortunate enough to be a U.S. citizen and you qualify as an immediate relative, which is the parent spouse child under the age of 21 who's unmarried, then you have a visa that's immediately available.

So the first step is to establish that you have a foundation.

In other words, there's a visa available for you to be able to come into the United States.

So that's the first step to recognize that you have a right to come into the United States.

But the second step is actually applying to legalize your status, and that's where things get complicated.

So a lot of times people may have entered the United States lawfully.

If they entered lawfully and they're an immediate relative, then they, despite the fact that they may have worked unlawfully or they may have been in the United States unlawfully, they have an opportunity to be able to legalize their status here in the United States.

But if you entered unlawfully or if you entered lawfully, overstayed your visa, and then because you're not an immediate relative, then that means that you don't have to leave the United States in order to legalize your status.

But back in 1996, we passed there was that's the last time we had significant immigration reform in this country.

And that what we did then is that we said that if you'd been in the United States longer than six months, but less than a year and you leave the country, you can't come back for three years.

And if you've been in the United States longer than a year and you leave, you can't come back for ten years.

And if you've been in the United States longer than a year, you leave and you come back without permission from the attorney general, then you can never come back.

It's called the permanent bar.

The idea of having passed that law was that people would stop coming to the United States, that they knew that if they left, they would be able to come back for three, ten years.

It had the opposite effect.

Instead of people going back and forth because they used to be the people, some people would come here work and they would go back to their country, come here, work, and they would go back to their country when this law had passed, then that encouraged folks, well, I'm not going to go back.

And they stayed.

And so then and now they started having families or would get married.

And that example that I gave you before where you, a family member, can petition for this individual.

Now, the lawyer is telling them that if you want to legalize your status, you have to leave the country.

But that means you have to leave the country for three years, ten years or for life, that you have to stay outside of the United States for a certain period of time before you're able to come back.

So that's two that's one issue.

The other is that if you're not an immediate relative and a visa is not immediately available, then that means you have to wait in line.

And if you're waiting in line, that that can be anywhere is could be as short as two years.

If you're lucky enough to be the spouse of a legal permanent resident from anywhere else in the world other than Mexico, the Philippines, India and China that have the most serious backlogs.

But if you're the brother of a US citizen and you're from the Philippines, you're waiting in line for about 20 years.

So when we talk about individuals, you know, the last number I heard was about 14 million that were people that were in the United States undocumented, that didn't have lawful status.

What they don't really explain is that of those 14 million people, that some of them may very well have a petition that's already been submitted.

They are waiting in line.

It's just taking 15, 20 years for them to be able to get to the point where they can even apply.

And once when they get to the point where they can even apply, it's a matter of whether or not they qualify under an exception, to be able to legalize their status here in the United States or if they're going to have to go through this other process that I talked about, which is leaving the country.

There's waivers that exist.

There's a waiver that exists to waive that three and the ten year bar and also the permanent bar under certain conditions.

Typically, though, that's for individuals that are married to a US citizen or a legal permanent resident, that they're legal, that their spouse is a legal permanent resident, or the children of parents that are legal permanent residence are U.S. citizens.

But recall that we have heads of households, parents that are undocumented, whose children now a petition for them and the children now turn 21.

They can petition for them and there's a visa immediately available.

But with the parent, they would have to leave in order to legalize their status.

And now we're telling parents there's no waiver, unfortunately for parents.

And so if they leave the US, they would have to stay outside the United States for a period of ten years.

And so that makes it very difficult for families, especially when, ironically enough, it's the head of household who's undocumented.

But somehow or another they're making ends meet.

And to tell that family that the head of household would have to leave for ten years before they would be able to come back, it makes it difficult.

And so that's those are part of the issues with regard to legalization.

So when we talked about waiting in line, that line could be a couple of decades, either because you're from China, Philippines and Mexico, and that is the soonest you're going to get in through this more extended period.

If you don't have an immediate family member or you might have to leave for an extended period of time.

So it's not as easy as filling out the correct paperwork.

Right.

We wish that it was right now.

Sometimes people will ask me, well, I've been in the United States for so long, doesn't that count for something?

It does if you're in deportation proceedings.

But the one point I wanted to make is we do have a law.

It's that's called registry.

And that one says that if you've been in the United States since January 1st of 1972, you can fill out the paperwork and legalize your status.

But a lot of those folks have already legalize their status.

There's not many.

Well, I was born in 1973, so there's still you know, there's still some of us that are alive.

But but when that when they afforded that opportunity for individuals to be able to fill out that paperwork, that that time has already passed for many of those folks or they've already legalized or they've already become U.S. citizens.

So there has been talk and actually this is what I would encourage the new administration to do, that it's not about deporting everybody from the United States.

Like like what we've heard throughout this campaign.

It's not about deporting people for the United States.

It's about coming up with a realistic immigration system so that people can do things the right way.

So that we're so that we minimize illegal immigration because people do want to do things the right way.

And I'll give you an example.

There were under the Biden administration, there were people that were coming from the United States.

They had an opportunity.

They had their family reunification.

They had an opportunity to be able to be with their loved ones.

And I believe it was Venezuela or Honduras.

And I forget the other country.

But there were some countries that the United States had designated that said, look, if you submit the paperwork and you submitted an affidavit to support somebody that can be responsible for you, you can come here for a temporary period of time, be able to work, and at least you're here with your family.

These were folks that were waiting for a petition that their family had filed, something along those lines.

The government specifically sent out letters to these individuals.

And that's how you knew if you qualify for it wasn't something that you could.

Affirmative apply for what they saw that people from those countries, the numbers went down at the border.

So they thought the legal means to do it.

And so what's the advantage of doing things about providing immigration reform, the advantages that you would be able to have people come out of the woodworks turning the paperwork, you know, exactly where they are, you know exactly who they are and they can contribute to our base, not underground.

Right.

Because we know that the United States has a lot of individual and certainly here in our community, people that are working unlawfully, that the industry relies on them, whether we like to believe that or not, the industries rely on it.

You know, here next door we have Elkhart County, the RV industry in our area, we have the hotel, the service entry with labor intensive the farms.

Right.

Agriculture.

So there's people out there.

I'm not saying that everybody that's working out there is undocumented, but what I am saying is we know that there are folks that are and that these industries rely on them.

And if you're able to provide a legal means for people to work, people are going to take advantage of that, are going to want to do that the right way.

And so I think that doesn't disrupt families, that doesn't disrupt communities, and it still allows us to be able to take advantage or be able to still enjoy the fruits of these labors from people that are there, our members of our community that come from mixed status families, that we don't.

Well, my feeling is that these are not individuals that we want to leave the United States because they made the United States what it is.

And this will be one of the interesting things to see how business response leads to any attempt to deport everybody with undocumented status and what kind of work visas are put in place, if any, before that would happen.

Because as you suggested, often what happens in various states is that the leaders of the state and of the cities will urgently tell their members of Congress, we can't afford to lose all of these workers.

What can you do for us?

Yeah, the good example of that was what happened in Georgia, right?

Georgia had passed some very anti-immigrant laws, and so people left the undocumented along with the documented.

They felt that it was a hostile environment.

And so they had crops that were dying.

They had work that was not being completed.

And they thought, well, wait a minute, okay, maybe we went a little bit too far and and reversed on that so that people would go back in and that labor could still happen.

So I think what we really need to take into account is when we have this rhetoric, this dangerous rhetoric about illegal immigration or when we start demonizing illegal immigrants, we can't just like you can't tell who is a US citizen because we're so diverse.

You can also you can't tell who's undocumented.

We're so diverse.

So it could be that because of the color of our skin that we would be targeted.

Though we may be a U.S. citizen or a legal immigrant or somebody that has lawful state some form of lawful status.

When you demonize one person in my view, you demonize all.

And I think that that's the danger in this rhetoric and this demonization of immigrants or even undocumented or otherwise, of creating this other.

And I think that's the danger.

I think that's what we have to be careful with.

Are you noticing some anxiety on that level of people who are here legally, maybe have been here for years, perhaps even generations who are concerned about what may happen if we do experience a wide scale deportation effort or an additional sort of intensifying of anti-immigrant rhetoric.

So now, as we as we wait on what's going to happen under this new administration, we have the benefit of hindsight, and that is that we already went through the Trump administration once.

And so we saw what he was able to enforce.

We saw what became a priority.

We saw how the community reacted and how also those that supported immigrants were able to stand up.

So I believe that the fact that we have had response from folks who were here lawfully.

Right.

That are concerned so that what we're starting to see is that then people are more are perhaps interested in applying for citizenship because they know that if they apply for citizenship, then, okay, then I'm safe.

They're not going to remove me, although under the last administration, you know, President Trump did create this de naturalization task force where they were looking for people that were already U.S. citizens and making an effort to to to find a reason why they shouldn't have been given citizenship in the first place, which I thought was an extreme.

But it did happen.

Well, the task force was created, not the that they were actually successful with doing so, that when we talk about, you know, you mentioned earlier about mass deportation.

The last time this happened was under President Eisenhower's administration, it was in the fifties.

And, you know, when we talk to our community or to my students and we talked to them about mass deportation, I would presented as the shocker.

Right.

Can you believe that in the United States we actually had a mass deportation that this actually happened such that when we would teach that class, we would say, well, but this could never happen again because we're in such a better place, and now here we are.

But what we what we've learned from that time when that happened was that when mass deportation occurred, that the sweeping the immigration raids, they removed U.S. citizens, legal permanent residents and the undocumented.

So if mass deportation were really to go in and affect the way President Trump or President elect Trump has been talking about, then I'm at risk, right?

Because because of the color of my skin, because I am a Latino man.

And again, you you can't tell by looking at me whether I'm a US citizen or undocumented, if unless I can show you the paperwork so that we know that that happened before.

And so if we implement this mass deportation, we know that it can happen again.

But I think that's also the other side, right?

I'm not going to let myself be deported.

I'm also not going to let my my community member and my fellow brother and sister for them to be report deported.

The bottom line is that in the United States of America, if you're here and you have you have planted yourself within the US, you're protected by the Constitution of the United States.

Everybody is entitled to due process.

So if you even if they try to remove somebody from the United States, you have a right to be heard before a judge, to have a hearing before a judge.

And the judge is going to make the call on whether or not you can be removed.

And then that begs the question, then how are you going to deal with this influx?

Because we already have an immigration court system now that is backlogged.

And so and a lot of that backlog, you can also attribute it to during the last administration, because two things happened during that.

One was the Trump administration and the other was covered with COVID.

We saw the whole world shut down.

So that had an impact with immigration cases.

And the immigration court system.

But with the Trump administration, the last time he said his priorities, typically under the Biden administration, under the Obama administration, the priorities have been if somebody is a threat to national security or is a terrorist or if they've been convicted of a felony, those are the individuals that we're going to be targeting because we did see a high number of deportations under both of those administrations.

But it was more efficient.

And we saw that because it was efficient.

They were targeting those individuals and those were the priorities.

You're absolutely correct.

But under the Trump administration, his priorities were, if you've ever been convicted of any crime, you're a priority.

If you've been charged with the crime, but you weren't found guilty, you're a priority.

If you could have been charged with the crime, but you weren't charged with a crime, you're a priority.

And if the officer sees you and thinks that you're a threat to national security, you're a priority.

So in doing that, everybody was a priority.

And when everybody was a priority, that did not exist, it didn't make sense.

Nobody was a priority.

So this idea of being able to remove everybody and prioritizing everybody is just doesn't function because it takes too much money, it takes too much time, it takes too much too many resources to actually implement that.

So I'm not sort of the answer to that puzzle that some people ask, which is why is it that Donald Trump talked a lot about deportation?

But Barack Obama actually appeared to deport more people?

What was going on there?

And what you're saying is it was just a different, more targeted effort of people who were the courts would approve for removal.

And so those targeted cases were successful or this is much more general approach.

Right, Exactly.

Okay.

Now, if we think about Donald Trump's promise, which it needs as he will keep the promises that he made in the campaign, one of which is to leave the largest deportation effort in US history and to use the military to carry it out.

What would be the effect of that on not just under documented people, but communities in general?

Well, I believe that's the concern, that if in fact sweeping immigration raids do take place, then I believe that there will be people that are placed or removal proceedings or that there's going to be an effort to deport of individuals that have every right to be here and that should not be targeted, but because maybe they don't have the paperwork with them or what have, you could be a target.

Right.

So I think there's going to be false arrest if this were to happen.

I don't believe that this can actually take place.

I think the courts will step in.

Or why do you not believe that?

Well, first of all, the president may say one thing, but what the other bodies and other agencies say within our country are saying another.

Right.

So the president saying that he's going to use the military and the military is going to enforce this role of mass deportation.

But what we've heard military officials say is that we're not going to we can't take an active role because that's not our role.

That's not our duty.

That's not what we're called upon to do.

To the extent that they might provide back up services, like, for example, with I think what he indicated was the National Guard or something like that, then perhaps in that level.

But the idea that the military would be the ones that are actively engaged in removing individuals, I don't believe that he'll be able to do that.

And I think the military has come out to indicate that they wouldn't do that either.

What you could see is an increase with ICE personnel, with Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel, such that they would try to identify those individuals, I think will.

So that's on the one hand, as much as I want to be optimistic, I think the other part is we also have to be realistic.

So I do believe that one thing that we can be concerned about or that we may expect is that they would target those individuals that have been removed before from the United States and that are in the United States.

And in fact, we during the Trump administration, we saw that.

And I expect that it would happen again, which is the increase of federal immigration crimes.

So it's eight U.S., 1325 and eight, U.S. 1326, which was entering the United States unlawfully or entering the United States unlawfully after you had already been removed.

We've seen an increase of those types of of of those crimes even in our community.

Typically, you would see those crimes being charged around the border communities.

But we see them here in Indiana that if they've identified somebody who's been deported before, the US government can charge them federally for having entered illegally after they had already been deported.

So we do expect that we'd see an increase in that and we do expect that they would target those individuals or at least place those people in removal proceedings.

That's the that I think that's the easiest one for the government to do, which is to reinstate deportation orders that already existed before or to identify those individuals that are here after they had already been removed.

That's that's a concern.

And the other it's kind of hard to argue this one.

Those people that have been convicted of the most serious crimes, I mean, it's kind of Well, it's not it's hard to argue when it's your family member, when it's your family member.

But at the same time, we recognize that if it's somebody that committed a heinous crime, you know, we're talking murder, rape, sexual abuse of a minor or illicit trafficking or a drug trafficking crime, those are individuals.

They're going to be they're going to be there.

There's going to be a focus on people that were convicted of those types of crimes.

And certainly those are the people that would be removed because they've been convicted of an aggravated felony.

If you've been convicted of an aggravated felony, then that certainly is going to put you at risk of being deported.

And I would expect that that's what would do.

We would see an increase of.

So if somebody has been in the US, although they may have been here unlawfully but has no prior criminal history whatsoever, I don't think that those are the individuals that are going to be arrested.

I think that Julie, the administration is going to be targeting because it's because that's going to be easily identifiable.

Are those individuals that have prior deportation orders or those individuals that have been convicted of serious crimes.

So at least in the first stage, that's what we would expect.

And the rest remains to be seen as well as whether there will be any hope for more coverage of immigration reform.

Thank you so much for explaining this system to us and sharing your insights with us.

That's all the time we have for this week's Politically Speaking.

I want to thank our guest, attorney Rudy Monterrosa, for joining us.

I'm Elizabeth Penny and reminding you that it takes all of us to make democracy work.

We'll see you next time.

This WNIT Local production has been made possible in part by viewers like you.

Thank you.