By Troy Torres, Kandit News & Views
Undocumented people working in hotels, restaurants, and farms do not have to worry about federal agents stomping into their workplaces to arrest and deport them, so long as they don’t have a criminal record. The Trump administration has changed course in its anti-immigrant blitzkrieg reportedly after the secretary of agriculture prevailed on the President to stop the raids into these industries or risk dire economic consequences.
The new direction from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, known as ICE, was issued over the weekend following the protest of millions of Americans against Mr. Trump’s policies. Those protests were in response to ICE crackdowns in major American cities. Federal agents were raiding workplaces, and even surveilling court houses, and arresting undocumented people who had no criminal history.
The operation caused farms, hotels, and restaurants in cities and towns throughout the country to lose business as a significant portion of its staff are undocumented workers, and those workers were reportedly terrified to go to work for fear of ICE raids, according to several news reports.
According to The New York Times, “The guidance was sent on Thursday in an email by a senior ICE official, Tatum King, to regional leaders of the ICE department that generally carries out criminal investigations, including work site operations, known as Homeland Security Investigations.”
In Guam, HSI has been responsible for the vast majority of drug interdiction and trafficking arrests over the past decade. In the CNMI, HSI officers have been seen in recent video apprehending people on the streets of Saipan.
It is believed that the CNMI is home to thousands of undocumented Filipinos and Chinese former contract workers who overstayed. Many are believed to have been victims of theft, labor abuses and other mistreatment while working in the CNMI during the contract periods.
“Effective today, please hold on all work site enforcement investigations/operations on agriculture (including aquaculture and meat packing plants), restaurants and operating hotels,” Mr. Tatum wrote in the message to HSI, according to The Times report.
The story by Hamed Aleaziz and Zolan Kano-Young’s quoted Mr. Tatum’s email as saying,“human trafficking, money laundering, drug smuggling into these industries are OK.”
“But it said — crucially — that,” The Times story goes on to state, “agents were not to make arrests of ‘noncriminal collaterals,’ a reference to people who are undocumented but who are not known to have committed any crime.”
It is unknown how many undocumented people live in Guam. Senator Shelly Vargas Calvo – a naturalized citizen of Philippine descent – said she was assured by officials from the Philippine Consulate General that U.S. officials are not concerned about enforcement in Guam because the island no longer has an overstay problem.
In the CNMI, however, it is believed that undocumented workers across several industries – including hotels and restaurants – account for a major part of economic activity.
“Our great Farmers and people in the Hotel and Leisure business have been stating that our very aggressive policy on immigration is taking very good, long time workers away from them, with those jobs being almost impossible to replace,” Mr. Trump wrote on social media last Thursday, the first queue of the coming reversal of his recent policy of indiscriminate apprehension and deportation of all without legal status.
