Trump administration officials insist there will be “no amnesty” while carrying out mass deportations, but some Republicans told NOTUS that behind the scenes, they’re advocating for some immigrants to stay.
It’s another sign President Donald Trump’s allies in Congress are grappling with the administration’s ambitious arrest quotas, and they’re realizing its targets for deportation aren’t limited to violent criminals and gang members.
Republican lawmakers pointed to stories of longtime residents and workers getting arrested as reasons for members of Congress to intervene. Others said they often help people with visas, or that they’re advocating for immigrants who hope to obtain permanent legal status. But most said they support the Trump administration’s immigration agenda, even if they’re stepping in on behalf of some people who face removal.
Rep. Chip Roy, a member of the House Freedom Caucus, told NOTUS he’s “going to bat for” one immigrant he knows because he deemed him “a good guy.”
“He’s here legally at the moment, actually. He’s got a green card,” Roy said. “I think he’s deserving of potentially being on track for citizenship, but he’s got some things. These are human beings. You can kind of address these.”
“As members of Congress, we have room to do that,” he told NOTUS.
The Department of Homeland Security’s assistant secretary, Tricia McLaughlin, wrote in a statement to NOTUS that the department “will continue to fight for the arrest, detention and removal of aliens who have no right to be in this country.”
But Roy said the administration has been responsive to concerns like his from lawmakers. The lawmaker also rejected that those cases are signs Trump’s immigration agenda is going awry.
“There’s always concern about people that have been here and that are caught up in raids and stuff that work in different people’s businesses, and there’s always concerns in Texas about that, but the vast majority of people, even though directly impacted, are pretty happy to see people getting removed,” Roy said.
Lawmakers from both parties often help constituents — residents of their districts, their family members and sometimes tourists or students navigating visa rules — deal with immigration issues. But since Trump took office, that work looks different for some members of Congress, as his deportation agenda continues to haul away thousands of immigrants, most with no criminal records.
Some lawmakers have been successful in their advocacy: House Majority Leader Steve Scalise asked immigration authorities to review the detention of Mandonna Kashanian, an Iranian woman who has lived in the U.S. for 47 years and is married to an American citizen.
Scalise told news outlet WDSU that Kashanian should be judged on “her life’s work” and role in her Louisiana community.
“When she was picked up, we looked at it and said, ‘Are they really looking at it the right way, objectively?’” Scalise said. “And so they took a second look at it.”
Scalise’s office didn’t respond to a request for comment. Kashanian’s lawyer told the Associated Press that Scalise’s advocacy was “absolutely crucial” in securing her release after she was arrested while gardening in her New Orleans yard last month. Now, she’ll wait for her asylum hearing with her family at home, instead of in a detention center — but DHS said it’s intent on arguing for her removal, despite Scalise’s input.
“The facts of this case have not changed,” McLaughlin wrote in a statement to NOTUS. “She overstayed her visa by more than three decades. … She exhausted all her legal options.”
For detainees, this kind of attention from lawmakers might be the most promising way out of detention centers with reportedly harsh conditions, where inmates have said they have limited contact with their lawyers or families.
Rep. Carlos Gimenez represents southern Florida and said his office has “absolutely” seen an uptick in immigration casework since Trump took office. But unlike Roy, he said he believes some cases are a sign that Congress should step in.
“We look at each one on an individual basis and see what we can do,” Gimenez said. “I’m in favor of deporting criminals and gang members and people with active deportation orders, but I think that the policy should be a little bit more nuanced. And since we have control of the border, maybe we need to start looking as a country at how we can moderate what’s going on.”
Immigration and Customs Enforcement announced a dramatic expansion of its mandatory detention policy last week, stating any immigrant who entered the U.S. illegally isn’t eligible for bond hearings before a judge. The change means ICE plans to hold arrested immigrants “for the duration of their removal proceedings,” which can sometimes take years in backlogged immigration courts.
ICE credited Republicans’ reconciliation bill for the policy change, saying its detention centers will have “plenty of bed space” to accommodate the increase in arrests. Nearly every House Republican, including the ones who shared misgivings about Trump’s immigration policies in interviews for this story, voted to hand ICE $75 billion in additional funding to bolster enforcement and expand its detention system.
Rep. Nick Langworthy of upstate New York downplayed the deportations, saying that while his district also has longtime residents who have been swept up, some of them were cases of immigrants “delaying the inevitable.”
“We ask ICE to help sort through the facts and why the person has been detained, and usually, I think every casework matter that’s come to us, they have had a removal order that has been delayed, or they perhaps had arrest records,” Langworthy said, going on to describe one detention that sparked community outrage.
“He knew he was at the end of the line, and did not have a green card, did not have that permanent status, and the family was pretty clear that they weren’t looking for any additional assistance because they knew the facts, versus community members that were up in arms and wanted to make this a political debate,” Langworthy continued. “The due process had run its course. He was on his way for deportation.”
Rep. Derrick Van Orden said if he heard about ICE arresting someone in his district, whether the matter deserved his advocacy would come down to one question: Did they enter the U.S. legally? If not, he said, he didn’t foresee any exceptions he’d support.
“Everybody that entered this country illegally broke the law. And you’re like, ‘Well, was it that bad?’ You broke the law,” Van Orden said. He rejected the premise that there’s any discretion to be offered to someone arrested over administrative, instead of criminal, violations of immigration law:
“Do you speak Spanish?” he asked. “La ley es la ley.”
Meanwhile, Republican lawmakers who regularly answer to immigrant communities are receiving more requests for help. Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, whose district sits just north of Gimenez’s and includes many foreign-born constituents, pointed to the Venezuelans, Cubans and Nicaraguans in his district, who “come from places where there’s strong repression.”
“I continue to believe that those folks might be more apt to have a legitimate case of asylum, and so I would like to see if I can get those cases reviewed a little bit more of a case-by-case,” he said. “I haven’t achieved that yet, but we’re still working.”
The Trump administration is trying to dismantle the humanitarian parole programs that the federal government has offered those groups, but he said he’s working to get them other protections.
“We’ve had good communication with the secretary’s office,” Diaz-Balart told NOTUS. But, he added, “it doesn’t mean that they always do what we want them to do.”
Some Republicans, like Rep. Don Bacon, said they wished deportations would “focus on the dangerous people.”
“You’ve got farmers out there right now, and there’s a lot of industries that are dependent here,” he said. He pointed to Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar’s new immigration legislation, which would offer more paths to legal status “for otherwise law-abiding people.”
Rep. Doug LaMalfa told NOTUS there’s not much he could do within the legal immigration framework to help his district’s many farmworkers if they were arrested.
“Technically, if someone’s here illegally, then that’s a problem, right? We’ve had a longtime look-the-other-way situation on certain types of workers, and the types of workers we’re talking about generally are good people who their employers know, and they enjoy having them,” LaMalfa said.
Holding a printed memo about Salazar’s legislation he said someone had just handed him, he mulled it over, commenting that balancing stronger border enforcement while still “having people be able to work” is “a heavy discussion right now” among his colleagues.
While lawmakers debate immigration policy, some people sit in detention centers hoping for their assistance. Whether they receive any, though, might come down to geographic luck. Not every Republican said they’d approach a situation like the one involving Scalise with much sympathy.
When asked if he would intervene if a longtime resident of his district were arrested, Rep. Troy Nehls of Texas dismissed the idea.
“If there was a detention that took place and it was an American citizen, so to speak, and that person was able to bring all the documentation forward that says that they’re an American citizen and this and that, there would be no reason that I wouldn’t support them in clearing that,” he told NOTUS. “Why not?”
What if someone was picked up for having overstayed a visa 20 years ago?
“What, you just forgot?” Nehls said of visa deadlines. “You knew what you were doing was against the law.”
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This story was produced as part of a partnership between NOTUS and NewsWell, home of Times of San Diego, Santa Barbara News-Press and Stocktonia.