Undocumented immigrants looking over their shoulders aren't imagining things: Their prospects for a fair chance to have their right to remain in the land of freedom are growing dimmer by the day.
In jail cells where, increasingly, those who wait under lock and key to hear their fate have no criminal convictions, their arrests _ putting them into detention for fast-track deportation hearings _ have quadrupled in New York City over the last three years.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the feared ICE, views merely having a criminal charge pending, in a nation where all are innocent until proven guilty, as reason not only to slap on the cuffs, but to put out press releases crowing about their savage catches, sweeping 118 convicted or charged in a five-day operation last month.
The far greater number who face deportation in freedom must contend with massively backlogged immigration courts made even more chaotic by the federal government shutdown, where the wait in New York for a hearing now stretches nearly two years, for more than 105,000 and growing.
When they get to court, the chances they'll win permission from a judge to stay are sinking like a stone. In 2016, four in five won their cases. Now it's fewer than half.
It is in this dismal climate that recently, the district attorneys of Manhattan, the Bronx and Brooklyn threw their support behind a bill from Assemblymember Michaelle Solages and Sen. Brad Hoylman that would bar ICE and other law enforcers from outside New York from courthouses to enforce immigration law, or arresting anyone in or on their way to or from court, without a warrant _ not least because ICE presence scares away witnesses who must testify to crimes.
A regime of terror only harms public safety in the name of protecting it.
