Gallego visits Iranian man in immigration detention in Florence

U.S. Sen. Ruben Gallego visited a Iranian man at the immigration detention facility in Florence — following Sen. Mark Kelly and other members of Congress in meeting with constituents held by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.  As part of his visit, Gallego criticized the Trump administration’s increasingly hard-line immigration policies.

Gallego said he traveled to the Central Arizona Florence Correctional Center, about 60 miles northwest of Tucson, and met with Amin, an Iranian man who fled with his wife in 2001 and sought protection from Ayatollah Khamenei’s regime. Amin and his wife have lived in the United States for more than two decades and have two U.S.-born sons – now 18 and 16, Gallego said.

“Despite their deep ties to the U.S. and lack of criminal history” both parents have been in ICE detention for four months, Gallego said. The couple were detained by ICE following a traffic stop while on their way to pick up a birthday present for their son, Gallego said.

“This is the type of enforcement that is not needed, does not make us any safer. We should be allowing these people to be continuing their life,” Gallego said. “They’re contributors to society, and this administration are targeting these types of people just so they can hit these arbitrary quotas.”

The Central Arizona Florence Correctional Center is operated by CoreCivic — a private prison corporation — under contract for ICE, and is one of four facilities in Arizona which holds detained immigrants.

Gallego also met with the family of Kelly Yu, a Peoria business owner who has been in detention at the Eloy Detention Center, about 54 miles northwest of Tucson.

Yu fled China in 2004 as a teenager, and sought asylum in the U.S. Yu runs a popular Arizona restaurant, and is married to a U.S. citizen, and has a U.S. citizen child now in college. Gallego met with family members at Yu’s restaurant, one of three events he attended on Monday.

U.S. Rep. Greg Stanton met with Yu—along with 20 other detainees— at the Eloy Detention Center earlier this month. And, Kelly visited her and another woman—Maria Pelaez, the mother of an active duty Marine—last week. 

“Donald Trump is going after people like Kelly Yu and Maria Pelaez who are mothers, grandmothers, members of our communities, instead of using ICE resources
to go after criminals,” Kelly said in a prepared statement from his office.

Gallego has repeatedly hammered the Trump administration for its immigration efforts. During at town hall in Apache Junction following his visit in Florence, Gallego criticized the White House for “diverting resources away from violent criminals and instead using them to detain law-abiding individuals and tear families apart.”

He told the crowd he spoke to detainees and “more than half have U.S. citizen kids.” He said ICE agents are not given “discretion anymore” rather agents are told to go pick up” people “and they have to hit a quota every day.” 

“What we really need to do is overall fix the broken immigration system,” he said.

ICE officials have repeatedly insisted they do not have quotas. DHS officials told a three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit of Appeals that while White House officials have said they want 3,000 immigration arrests per day, this figure is a “goal” the Trump administration was “looking to set,” noted Austin Kocher, an assistant research professor at Syracuse University focused on immigration data.

“That quotation may have been accurate, but no such goal has been set as a matter of policy, and no such directive has been issued to or by DHS or ICE,” officials said.

Meanwhile, the number of people detained by ICE has only increased, rising to at least 59,380 people by August 10. Of those, 41,822 people, or around 70 percent have no criminal convictions, according to data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. Many of those convicted committed only minor offenses, including traffic violations, according to TRAC.

In June, the Eloy facility had around 1,380 people in custody, according to TRAC.

ICE’s own data shows of the 59,380 people are in custody across the U.S., including around 17,558 were convicted of some offense and around 14,875 people who have pending criminal charges—but have not been convicted. ICE said 26,947 are held because of immigration violations.

ICE data does not include all immigrants in federal custody, including those held at the so-called “Alligator Alcatraz,” a $450 million facility set up at an airport carved out of Florida’s Big Cypress National Preserve.

Earlier this year, Gallego presented five-pillar immigration plan aimed to balance hardening the border while also “bringing immigrants out of the shadows.”

“We don’t have to choose between border security and immigration reform,” Gallego said in a statement in May as part of the bill’s introduction.

While Gallego and Kelly have criticized the Trump administration, both senators voted for the Laken Riley Act in January, a Republican-led bill that mandates detention for immigrants in the country illegal accused—but not convicted—of theft and violent crimes.

Before the Laken Riley Act was signed into law, immigration judges had much wider discretion to consider and grant bonds for immigrants in detention. However, since January, this discretion has narrowed and people who were accused of many nonviolent offenses, including minor thefts, face mandatory detention. Further, the Department of Homeland Security said it would require mandatory detention for anyone who came into the U.S. without inspection, said the Vera Institute, an advocacy group focused on criminal justice.

“This means that millions of people who might have been granted a bond hearing are now being denied one and kept in ICE detention,” the Vera Institute said. “Meanwhile, as releases from immigration prisons have slowed to a trickle, daily detention numbers have reached record highs. By stripping even more people of the possibility of supervised release, Trump’s new actions will make things exponentially worse.”