Changes Coming The Rest Of This Year & Next Year 2021

Now that the election is behind us. There’s been a lot of talk about 2021 and what the future holds about what we expect to see in 2020 ’cause it’s not over yet. But what are some things that we can expect to see?

During this time of transition we have called the lame duck period where Trump is still president. He’s got a few more months or two-ish months in office. And of course nobody really knows exactly what’s gonna happen.

But the thing is that, he on his way out will probably take aim at vulnerable people including the immigrant population, which we know has been a target of his administration for the last four years.

So the most recent development in immigration is the expansion of expedited removal which means that historically people who are caught entering the country can be deported without seeing a judge.

What the Trump administration did within the last month is they expanded the option of expedited removal to the interior of the United States, where everyone can be deported without seeing a judge under expedited removal, if they can’t prove to the satisfaction of the deportation officer that they’ve been in the U S for longer than two years.

So what that means is that no one who is undocumented should be out of their house without proof of your presence in the US for two years. Right now is a very vulnerable window of time for undocumented immigrants.

And you need to know how to protect yourselves: Always have your proof of presence in the US for longer than two years.

If you have any kind of official type evidence of your time in the US it can be any kind of receipt, anything with your name and a location on it. And a date that shows that you’ve been in the US for this period of time is going to serve for this purpose.

And I think it makes sense to spend a few hours gathering this.

I know it’s not a fun project, but it’s definitely one of those better safe than sorry situations.

And save it in your phone in a folder of pictures, so you always have it on your phone or save a folder that you stick in your car or have in your purse or all of the above because it’s really hard for us as lawyers to stop an expedited removal, because they can just do it without a judge’s order.

And so we want to make sure that you guys are equipped to have the evidence that you need to get yourselves into regular deportation proceedings which is what used to happen when someone got apprehended, they were put into deportation proceedings.

Is Any Police Officer Going To Be Asking For That?

No, cops shouldn’t be asking for that. But usually what happens is, if someone gets arrested in Bastrop, for example, for driving without a license, the Bastrop police department is gonna call ICE to the scene and then ICE will do the processing.

Or if someone just gets arrested and taken to be booked through a County jail, ICE is gonna be notified. And at that point they’ll come and they’ll do a review on what to do next.

Previous expedited removal they would detain that person, put them in proceedings we’d start the bond process and we talk about what are the ways, the things that you guys need to know when you’re put in proceedings.

But that requires that you’re not placed on expedited removal.

So that’s why this is such an important alert to keep the stuff on you, because we want to just be able to get you guys into regular removal proceedings.

So we can start bond applications, defense to deportation applications, like all this stuff that comes with a removal case.

You don’t even get to that. If you get expediently removed you just get sent home.

And for people from Mexico, it’s like within a matter of hours.

So it’s really critical that you guys know that you need to have this stuff on you always at least until this policy changes, which hopefully will really early in the next administration.

But these next few months are critical for the immigrant community particularly the undocumented community.