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Notes -
It seems to me as an external outlier that quite a few of the 'heartbreaking story of peaceful productive illegal immigrant removed stories' are these people, though. Cases where they entered the USA in 2005 or whatever, have explicitly run through all of their options for appeals over the course of a decade and have then wandered off the reservation till occasionally picked up on the current day. Even the OP mentioned with the Grandma who had explicitly received a final order of removal.
Also hasn't a soft-amnesty and opportunity to self deport also been provided with an additional payment to those who take it up?
I feel like those are the least sympathetic such cases. People that were ordered removed by the Obama administration and just refused, well, even Obama was in favor of deporting them (and his clip of 3M over his 8 years is comparable enough to Trump's run rate of 500K a year).
The most sympathetic cases are something like "immigrant goes to ICE appointment, has existing status yanked and is arrested right on the spot".
Granted some large proportion of those existing legal statuses were Biden-era bullshit, I'm not defending that they were justified, but a lot of those folks did have a valid-on-paper withholding of removal. And while the left doesn't acknowledge it as legitimate, the same law that makes it possible for the Biden AG to grant WoR also justified the Trump AG revoking WoR on the spot. Still, it's bad look as compared to giving them notice that WoR is being revoked, a chance to try the process and appeal through the BIA and ultimate removal if they ignore their legal duty to leave.
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