Entering the country illegally—without going through an immigration checkpoint—or overstaying a visa isn’t a criminal offense but rather a civil violation of federal law. A growing percentage of the “undocumented” population in the U.S. are people who overstayed their visas rather than people who made unauthorized border crossings. Of the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. today, about 500,000 reside in Illinois, mostly in the Chicagoland area.
After processing, adults arrested in Illinois are then taken from the processing centers to one of seven county jails in the region that hold immigration detainees for ICE: to the Kankakee, McHenry, or Pulaski county jails in Illinois, the Kenosha or Dodge county jails in Wisconsin, the Clay County Jail in Indiana, or Boone County Jail in Kentucky. In all of these facilities, immigration detainees are held in separate parts of the jail from local arrestees charged with crimes. In 2012 the Pulaski county jail (also known as the Tri-County Detention Center) was named one of the ten worst immigration detention facilities in the country by the Detention Watch Network. Currently, the jails ICE uses in Illinois only have space for about 1,400 ICE detainees, but with Trump’s promises to ramp up immigration enforcement, ICE could soon be building or contracting with new facilities in the region.
The odds of winning a deportation case are slim. But they become impossible if one waives one’s right to a hearing in front of a judge. West Suburban Action Project’s Ruiz Velasco says that ICE agents frequently try to get people to sign hearing waivers without explaining what they are, or by promising that a person can fight their deportation from their home country. But once signed, ICE takes the waivers to immigration judges who then issue deportation orders. Often, people aren’t even aware that they’ve signed away their right to fight their case or that they’ve been ordered to leave, Ruiz Velasco says.
Immigration experts say these orders are vague and leave too much to the discretion of ICE officers.
Usually, she says, ICE agents arrive in unmarked cars and wear Kevlar vests with “police” written on the front. Their identification as ICE agents may appear in small letters on the back of their uniforms. They also don’t typically tell people they’re immigration agents, Ruiz Velasco says, so people open the door assuming it’s the cops. There are no equivalent to Miranda rights for immigration arrests, yet agents can use anything people tell them against them in court.
