Adding more information to the strange story we reported yesterday about an ICE flight to Africa carrying 92 Somalis destined to go home to Somalia but instead did a U-turn and returned to the US after landing in Senegal.
Minnesota immigration lawyer Kim Hunter talked to the NY Times about her Somali clients. //www.kimhunterlaw.com/staff/
The NY Times after many whinny paragraphs devoted to lawyer Kim Hunter, whose clients were on the plane, tells us a few bits of information we didn’t know.
Besides learning that the new government in Somalia is cooperating with the US and that the flight is being returned to Louisiana, here is some useful data:
Many Somali citizens who are in the United States without documentation have been able to stay for years despite deportation orders because Somalia would not grant them the necessary travel documents. Mogadishu, which opened an embassy in Washington in 2015, appears to be cooperating with American officials to accept more of its citizens back.
Even Obama was deporting Somalis!
The number of Somali people being deported from the United States has risen since 2014. During that fiscal year, 65 Somali citizens were removed from the United States. That number jumped to 120 the next year, and 198 the year after that.
Trump administration picks up the pace!
In the fiscal year 2017, 521 Somali citizens were deported, according to the most recent report from ICE. A spokeswoman for the agency said there were five chartered flights to Somalia that year.
Read it all here.
One advantage of this ICE flight mess-up is that we now know about these deportations and so do a whole lot of other people—including those Somalis who are trying to figure out how to illegally enter the US right now.
And, will we see more “undocumented” Somalis headed to Canada via frozen northern Minnesota and North Dakota?
