America seeks to deport Iraqis after an agreement to exclude their country from travel bans



Posted on 2017-06-12 By sotaliraq


Immigration officials are carrying out specific operations to arrest Iraqi migrants who have been sentenced to deportation after committing serious crimes as a result of an agreement with Iraq to drop him from a list of countries targeted by President Donald Trump to ban travel, a US government official said on Monday.

"As a result of recent negotiations between the United States and Iraq, Baghdad has recently agreed to accept a number of Iraqis who have been ordered to deport," Gillian Christensen, a spokeswoman for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Administration, told Reuters.

There have been reports of arrests of Iraqis in the past few days, but they have not been reported as a result of negotiations between the two governments.

There was no comment from the Iraqi embassy in Washington.

Christensen said the administration has recently arrested a number of people convicted of serious crimes.

"Each of them has undergone full and fair immigration procedures, after which a federal judge specializing in immigration cases found that they were not eligible for any exemption under US law and ordered their deportation," she said.

She refused to give further details of the operations because they were still under way.

Lawyers, activists and family members interviewed by Reuters said immigration and customs officials detained members of the Chaldean Catholic community in Detroit, Michigan and Iraqi Kurds in Nashville, Tennessee last week and earlier this week.

They say they have been informed of dozens of arrests so far, but Reuters has not been able to independently verify these facts.

The move comes after the US government ruled Iraq out of a list of countries covered by a revised travel ban executive order issued in March.

The first version of the ban, which took place days after Trump took office in January, mainly includes Iraq along with Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen.

The amended order said Iraq was excluded from the list because "the Iraqi government has taken steps to improve the documentation of travel and exchange of information and to restore Iraqis who have been issued final deportation orders."

Some 1,400 Iraqis have been given final deportation orders in the United States.

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