Article snippet: During his frenetic first week in office, President Trump made good on a core campaign pledge to overhaul the nation’s immigration enforcement. With the stroke of a pen, he redefined the meaning of “criminal alien” by vastly expanding the criteria used to decide who is a priority for deportation. It is not just the “bad hombres” that he talked about on the campaign trail. Any undocumented immigrant convicted of a crime or believed to have committed “acts that constitute a chargeable criminal offense” — essentially, anyone who is suspected of a crime, but has not yet been charged — is now at the top of the list. For undocumented immigrants, the path between detention and deportation is sometimes long and usually twisted. An immigration judge’s deportation order can be appealed — to the Board of Immigration Appeals and, in a very small number of cases, all the way to the Supreme Court. Field office directors for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, can, at their discretion, grant a stay of removal, which is another way of postponing a repatriation. As a federal immigration official put it, “We can put someone in removal proceeding tomorrow and it can take months or years until they reach the finish line.” But what happens once they reach the finish line? The first step is making sure that the country to which undocumented immigrants are being deported will take them back. Immigration officials must secure a travel document from such a country — essentially ... Link to the full article to read more