The Detroit Metro area is fast becoming the epicenter for deportations. In the year ending on September 30th, The Office of Detention and Removal Operations in Detroit increased deportations about 45 percent — from 5,057 to more than 7,500. This is a new record and already for the new year are ahead of that pace deporting about one-fourth of that record number in October and November alone.

The Detroit Metro area has more than 400 ICE investigators and their presence and actions are making familias scared, even young children.

After nine years in southwestern Detroit, Alicia Hernandez faces a tough decision: Does she banish her American dream to return to Mexico with her deported husband or does she stay, risking arrest, in the hope of providing her young daughters the best possible future?

Deported immigrants can’t return to the United States without federal approval.

Hernandez and her husband were in the country illegally. He worked a series of construction jobs before August, when he was caught-up in the crackdown. He said goodbye to his daughters, who are American-born citizens, through a pane of security glass at a Monroe County jail.

“From just one day to the next, you can be a good person and then find yourself under arrest,” Hernandez said. “I tell my daughters they will see their father, but I think they think I am lying. When the littlest is by herself on the floor, playing, she says things out loud like, ‘Don’t do that or you’ll go off to jail, like my poppy.’ ”

Not surprisingly, the targets of home raids and traffic stops that turn into ICE raids are the communities of color, Arabs and Latinos. Sometimes agents will have a warrant for one person but enter a home and demand to know the immigration status of all inside. Officials call this a “safety precaution”.

I guess only certain people deserve safety.

Via / The Detroit News