Deportees spend days unable to contact their families, and due to the limited information, support, and follow-up provided by U.S. authorities, reunification is extremely difficult to achieve.
At Dublin, she had been sexually harassed and verbally abused by an officer, physically assaulted by another, witnessed other officers sexually abusing women, and been subjected to retaliation. Before her arrest, Cristal had been a long-time permanent resident of the U.S. Her conviction for drugs invalidated her green card, and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) issued a final removal order based on her felony conviction.
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Permanent-residency applications from more than seventy countries have been frozen, naturalization ceremonies cancelled. When spouses of U.S. citizens have shown up for routine green-card interviews, they've been arrested; others in the middle of applying for their legal status are getting detained and, in some cases, deported outright. The agency is beginning a sweeping campaign to denaturalize large numbers of citizens, aiming to strip them of their legal status; officials have monthly quotas for how many cases they must flag for review.