Quotable of the Year:
“I don’t want my father to die. You have the power to save his life. He is not a flight risk. He has made good faith efforts to comply with all requests asked of him.”
— Dearborn Heights resident Mariam Charara on her father’s pending deportation to Lebanon
In the last days of 2019, the Advance is running a series of our best stories from a few of the many issues we cover, from the environment to the 2020 election. With more than 2,000 stories to choose from, it was hard to pare the list down.
Here’s our roundup of our top immigration stories:
Steve Bannon, former senior adviser to President Donald Trump, led a rally in Detroit this winter to drum up support for the Republican’s border wall.
Jimmy Aldaoud, an Iraqi national who lived most of his life in metro Detroit, died in August from complications of diabetes after being deported to Iraq.
Over the summer, Michigan immigrant rights activists and lawyers said Trump’s tweets announcing immigration raids in cities spurred a new wave of panic in a community that has lived in fear for years.
Median El-Moustrah is living with liver damage, hepatitis B, diabetes and hearing loss. His family says he won’t survive if he’s deported back to Lebanon.
‘I don’t want my father to die’: Dearborn Heights woman pleas for ICE to halt deportation
We reported on a lawsuit that has been filed after Jilmar Ramos-Gomez, an American citizen and Marine veteran, was almost deported from Grand Rapids last year.
ACLU sues ICE over attempted deportation of U.S. citizen in Grand Rapids
The U.S. Supreme Court in November appeared unlikely to salvage a former President Obama-era program that has allowed hundreds of thousands of young, unauthorized immigrants known as “Dreamers” to remain in the country without immediate fear of deportation. Michigan is home to 5,350 DACA recipients.
Democratic state legislators introduced a package of bills that would allow undocumented immigrants, workers and seniors to obtain Michigan state IDs or driver licenses.
Bills allow undocumented immigrants to have state IDs, driver licenses
The Advance broke the story of Gov. Gretchen Whitmer shutting down a land deal for a private immigrant detention center, although the company later bypassed the state and opened the facility.
Whitmer halts land sale for $35M private immigrant detention center
The Advance had a one-on-one with U.S. Rep. Elissa Slotkin (D-Holly), who was part of a bipartisan group touring migrant holding facilities in Texas and the U.S.-Mexico border crossing itself over the summer. She called it a humanitarian “tragedy.”
Slotkin: Border camps ‘a tragedy … for every single link in the chain’
