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by Karen Aguilar
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NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WZTV) — An immigration attorney said ICE is detaining people at the US Citizenship and Immigration Services in Nashville while they were trying to fix their legal status. ICE said that because they had orders of deportation, they were within their right under the law to detain the migrants.
The immigration attorney said those detained by ICE are spouses and were trying to do the right thing. ICE said the right thing would have been to obey their judge's order to deport, which they didn't do.
Under the Trump Administration, ICE officers are fully enforcing federal immigration law: deporting undocumented immigrants.
Immigration Attorney Katja Hedding said that last Thursday at the USCIS office on Plus Park Boulevard, the migrant spouses of US citizens were detained.
She said they were coming for an interview to see if they could get a waiver to not be deported.
Hedding said ICE should have allowed them to finish the process.
"There's no discretion," she said. "That's their marching order."
She said two of the people ICE swept up were Jeaneth Rodriguez-Aguirre and Jose Enmanuel Giron-Giron, both from El Salvador.
ICE said both were court-ordered to be removed a long time ago. Jose had been ordered to be removed twice, long before his interview, in hopes of filing a waiver last week.
ICE said Jose entered the country illegally in 2016. That was during the Obama administration.
ICE PIO Lindsay Williams said Jose claimed fear, but it was determined that the claim was not legitimate.
He said an immigration judge ordered him to be deported in 2020. Giron appealed to the Board of Immigration Appeals a year later, and that affirmed the immigration judge's order of deportation.
He added, Giron had an opportunity to return to his country and fulfill the process there, but did not.
Hedding told me Giron got married the same year the second time and the order of removal was enforced.
She said he entered a petition only a year ago, leading up to the interview last week.
He said they had their due process.
"They would not have refused to leave after they had been ordered deported," said Gill.
We asked Hedding why she believed ICE shouldn't fulfill orders of removal.
We also asked her, in her expertise as an immigration attorney, if someone who enters the country illegally is breaking the law.
Despite that, Hedding said, since the spouses do not have a criminal record, it's wrong.
He added that coming into the country illegally is a crime in itself.
Hedding also asked why USCIS has a process for a waiver if ICE is going to detain people.
ICE responded by saying, “The waiver process is for people to be admitted into the United States after removal from the United States. These fugitives can apply for the waiver from their country of citizenship following the correct process.”
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