ICE arrests outside immigration hearings spark fear in Tucson

Tucson immigration attorney Siovhan Ayala says that many of the people being arrested came into the country legally under a humanitarian parole program during the Biden administration.

“So it's a political maneuver, and people who are rule followers are caught in the middle,” she said. “So people that have been following the rules, and were told they could come to the United States and seek asylum lawfully, are now being targeted.”

She says the arrests are creating a chilling effect. She already had a client who was too afraid to attend her hearing.

“This has been a fear for a long time, and people are very afraid that they will get arrested at their hearings,” she said. “And it's counterproductive for people who are following the rules and are showing up at their hearings to be arrested.”

Border officials said that nearly a million people scheduled appointments for humanitarian parole into the country during 2023 and ’24 “instead of risking their lives in the hands of smugglers.”

Immigration attorney Mo Goldman, who is also running for U.S. Congress, said judges were dismissing people’s cases at the courthouse, and the immigration authorities were waiting there to detain them.

“The problem ultimately is, if their case is terminated and they are not in a parole-authorized parole status anymore, they are subject to arrest, detention without a bond, and probably could be expeditiously removed from the country,” he said. “And so I think that there was some sort of bait and switch going on here where they were having them show up to court and follow the rules under the guise of — we're going to bring them in and then have an operation waiting for them.”

The Arizona Daily Star reported that there was one such case at Tucson’s immigration court. Besides detaining people coming out of their court hearings, immigrants with varying levels of legal status in Southern Arizona have been detained in recent months by immigration officials, including in Tucson.