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Friday Immigration Bulletin: DHS Deems DePape Deportable

Added 2022-11-04 19:01:19 +0000 UTC

Happy Friday! DHS says Pelosi attacker is deportable; Grijalva + 27 House Dems send letter to Mayorkas about attorney access to migrants in ICE detention; insights into immigration messaging during the election from Data for Progress; and some Beltway context to the Define American report on North Carolina immigration news coverage...

DHS Deems DePape Deportable

The assassination attempt on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has an immigration angle after Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials revealed that the suspect, David DePape, is a Canadian national who overstayed his temporary status after entering the United States legally in 2008.

Last Friday, David DePape broke into Pelosi’s San Francisco home looking for the House Speaker (who was in Washington, DC at the time) and attacked her husband Paul with a hammer.

CNBC reports that Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) sent the San Francisco County Jail a detainer request for DePape so that the federal agency can take him into custody if he’s eventually released by local authorities.

ICE typically sends detainer requests for migrants the agency is looking to deport, leading to speculation that DePape, 42, will eventually be deported back to Canada.

House Dems: ICE Must Allow Attorneys Access

On Thursday, Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-AZ) sent a letter signed by 28 House Democrats to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and ICE Director Tae Johnson decrying the ways migrants in detention are denied access to legal representation. The letter offered six recommendations for the agency to consider.

“At least 58 ICE detention facilities do not allow attorneys to schedule phone calls with detained clients in advance,” said Grijalva in the letter. “[P]hone calls are often cost prohibitive, and telephones for detained people are almost always located in public areas, and are often in disrepair. At least 58 ICE detention facilities do not allow attorneys to schedule phone calls with detained clients in advance.”

Denying migrants access to their lawyer is unconstitutional. Detained migrants do not have the right to government-sponsored attorneys, but the constitution gives everyone the right, regardless of their citizenship status, to due process which includes access to legal representation.

The six recommendations lawmakers made to the agency heads included providing migrants with free ways to transfer confidential documents and spaces to have private conversations with their attorneys in ICE facilities. I’ll follow up with Grijalva and the other lawmakers in the lame duck to see if DHS or ICE replies to their letter, which you can read here.

Interesting Statistic in Roll Call

Suzanne Monyak wrote a solid overview of how the GOP’s immigration narrative is playing out in the midterm. The story includes an interesting statistic from the team at Data for Progress:

“When asked about the top issues for congressional candidates to focus on, just 7 percent of Democratic voters put immigration in the top three, compared to 39 percent of Republicans, according to polling by progressive firm Data for Progress. Data for Progress’ polling also shows that voters overall are more likely to say the Republican party would do a better job addressing immigration than the Democratic party would.”

Report: Immigration Coverage Lacking in North Carolina

Define American’s report on immigration news coverage in North Carolina is a telling microcosm of some of the issues facing the beat nationally and in Washington, DC. The report lists four key findings that are worth diving into a bit here:

First, the advocacy non-profit concluded immigration to be an expendable beat assigned to inexperienced reporters in North Carolina, if at all.

This is true in Washington, as well, where the immigration beat has long-been a stepping stone for early career reporters in the Beltway political press, a sort of hardship tour rife with misinformation and wildly emotional stakeholders.

Moreover, most major U.S. news outlets have no immigration reporter in Washington, though some mainstream Beltway outlets lump their immigration coverage in with other beats, like Politico’s “Immigration and Labor” beat that focuses almost entirely on labor.

Most Beltway outlets have no assigned reporter or articulated immigration beat, choosing instead to assign general assignment or other beat reporters to cover immigration stories when they feel immigration events rise to the level of news (usually when something sensational happens in the U.S. - Mexico border; rarely when something wonky happens in Congress).

Second, Define American found that immigration reporting tends to focus almost entirely on Latinos who make up just half of the immigrant population in the United States. “Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI) make up a full 28.5% of the immigrant community, yet fewer than 5% of immigration stories refer to this group,” notes the report’s authors.

Beltway outlets tend to maintain a wider demographic focus because immigration coverage here is usually a derivative of the news of the day. The U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan is a good example of how a defense or foreign policy beat story becomes an immigration story in time.

The problem for news consumers with the “news of the day” model of covering immigration is that non-immigration beat reporters get assigned to cover immigration news stories when it touches their beat. Outlets with no immigration reporter to help guide coverage or answer questions internally are more likely to rely on partisan framing in their stories.

Third, Define American found that immigration reporting in North Carolina often reinforces stereotypes that associate migrants with crime. This is absolutely true of Beltway immigration reporting which tends to over-rely on enforcement data from the Department of Homeland Security and right-wing narratives offered by lawmakers and other public figures to frame their coverage.

It’s worth noting here that exhaustive reports over the years by Cato Institute and others have established that immigrants are far less likely to commit crimes or use public benefits than the native born population. That hasn’t stopped Beltway outlets from incorporating the border narratives about danger and criminality into their editorial decisions on the immigration beat.

Fourth, the report argues that news outlets are missing out on a significant business opportunity by neglecting the immigration beat. (I actually made this case to Axios founder Mike Allen at a super fun DC happy hour on October 20th.)

Immigrants and their communities have long been under-served by the Beltway press. The question news executives have never really sought to answer (at least not in the English-language press) is whether or not these audiences are willing to pay for dedicated news coverage of the beat.

Pablo Reports is the first Beltway outlet betting that the immigration beat is a real business opportunity. My Hill reporting proves that there is a huge, underserved audience for news updates on the latest immigration policy developments in Washington. On the question of whether or not audiences will pay for these updates through subscriptions, I've been surprised and grateful by the response here on Patreon.

Download the full Define American report here.