When someone comes to my office we talk about the situation, who their family members are, whether they left their country because of persecution, or other categories that they might qualify for. Sharon There are many different categories for immigrants and why they come here. If they have been here since 1995 then it may be more difficult to get any kind of a status. Some people who have applied for political asylum and are still waiting on that response are basically left somewhat undocumented in the sense of not having any legal papers. Sometimes we are really hard on an immigrant because of our laws and our rules here.
Some people feel that the immigrant is lazy.
It used to be that you could be deported if you committed something really heinous, but now people are being picked up, detained, and deported because they've had two drunk driving offenses or they've had a shoplifting offense or something like that. The other is that refugees coming into the country are detained until they establish what's known as a credible fear, a credible fear of being sent back to where they came from. That whole process is new and is very problematic because the decision on that credible fear is not normally made by an immigration judge but simply by an immigration officer. So far a pretty high proportion of the people who claim to be refugees have been found to have a credible fear. The problem is that they're held in jail, in detention, until that credible fear decision is made.