Accidental Deportation Of Salvadoran Man Should Come As Surprise To No One

The accidental deportation of Salvadoran immigrant José C. Rodríguez-Portillo some two months ago has opened up a can of worms for those who did not formerly realize that ICE is made up of a gang of marauding thugs with the reasoning abilities of a drug-addled lab monkey. 

In a rare move, U.S. immigration has agreed to revisit Rodriguez-Portillo’s case, reuniting him with his family in Miami in the meantime. His attorney, Eduardo Soto, is also representing two Venezuelan brothers, Guillermo and Jesús Reyes, who are students at Miami-Dade College and also facing possible deportation. Soto maintains that immigration officials overlooked the fact that his client is among thousands of Salvadorans granted legal, temporary residence in the United States following the 2001 earthquakes that devastated much of their country. 

Such mistakes are symptomatic of an overall attitude long-exhibited by ICE officials, who have received countless complaints regarding their tactics which, according to immigrants’ rights groups and their victims, often smack of racial profiling and xenophobia. So far, the Obama administration has reacted to this by going ahead and expanding ICE’s power, authorizing local police to carry out federal immigration laws. And while ICE proudly points to a growth in the number of people they have deported, the question is whether they are deporting and targeting actual undocumented criminals in the first place.

After accidental deportation, critics say immigration officials making mistakes [The Miami Herald]