Two United States immigration services officials who say “Jamaicans are being impacted heavily” as the deportation enforcement operations threatened by President Donald Trump take full effect, are urging the island’s Government to brace itself for a flood of returnees who have no family or homes here.
According to Audrey Morrison Lawson, proprietor of Midas Immigration Services, a full-service immigration firm based in Miami, Florida, concerns about the raids being conducted by officers of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) are “elevated” among members of the Jamaican community there.
According to the media house, ICE’s 25 field offices were told in a meeting with senior leadership over the weekend to enhance their “routine operations” by meeting a quota of between 1,200 and 1,500 arrests per day.
According to Morrison Lawson, who said only one of her clients has been detained, some Jamaicans have already lost employment as fears heighten.
“We have been seeing ICE raids coming closer and closer to home and by home we are really referring to the people that we serve, for example some of my clientèle. They are nervous, they are scared, they are confused because of the position that some of them are in. We have people who have lost jobs because the employers don’t want to hire because they don’t want to invite the presence of ICE or any other authority to their premises. Employers who were more receptive to undocumented immigrants, who were extending an arm, they are a little bit wary right now,” she told the Jamaica Observer.
Resident attorney for Midas Dionnie Wynter Pfunde, told the Observer that ICE operatives have used varying tactics to make arrests.
“One individual, about two weeks ago, they were called in by ICE, they were told that they had forgotten to sign a document and they went in and were detained. ICE can do that in the name of national security. I am aware of a lot of people who have been detained. A lot of Jamaicans have been detained. I think the prime minister should be bracing himself on how he is going to rehabilitate these individuals that have not been in the country for the last four to seven years, that have not been back to Jamaica,” she said.
“Some of them don’t have a home there; their whole family is living in the United States, they have been here for the last five to seven years and they will need some kind of rehabilitation, so that’s food for thought,” she pointed out.
