Because the same week U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement launched the Scheduled Departure Program inviting immigrants to turn themselves in for deportation (only three have), U.S. Customs and Border Patrol officers reportedly were detaining U.S. children at the airport to lure and arrest undocumented family members who came to pick them up.

The Associated Press reports:

The Mexican Consulate in Chicago issued a warning Friday evening to Mexican nationals to carry proper identification and be cautious when arriving or going to meet relatives or friends at the world's second busiest airport.

 

The consulate has reviewed at least a dozen instances this year in which people traveling from Mexico to Chicago's O'Hare International Airport were detained while U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents arrested family members or acquaintances waiting to pick them up, officials said.

 

In those instances most arriving from Mexico were either U.S. citizens or had valid documentation such as a visitor's visa, the consulate said.

 

"We have to let the people know that they are at risk of being detained," consulate official Ioana Navarrete said. "It's something that has escalated."

 

In one case, a U.S. citizen minor was allegedly detained while agents asked him about the whereabouts of his parents, who were illegal immigrants and had come to the airport to pick him up. CBP agents then asked for the parents through an airport speaker system, consulate officials claimed.

 As one Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agency announces a new era of "compassionately conceived enforcement," another makes the simple act of picking a loved one up from the airport dangerous for undocumented families, even those who have committed no crimes.

In another startling story of DHS's "compassionate" enforcement at work, The Times News in North Carolina reported that a Dominican man who came to the United States on a valid visitor's visa to be with two sons who were facing criminal charges has been detained for more than three months because he lied to an immigration officer who approached him on the street in front of a courthouse and asked why he was there.

The Times News reports:

Mateo-Mendez's case highlights the ability of immigration agents to question people on the street without the probable cause that limits other police agencies. Immigration lawyers and advocates worry this will help lead to greater levels of racial profiling and have a chilling effect on the willingness of immigrant crime victims and witnesses to talk to police and testify in court.

 

"To allow immigration agents to come into the federal and state courthouse and questioning people is really going to pose problems,'' said Sara Dill, a Miami-based immigration and criminal lawyer.

Mateo-Mendez told a U.S. district court judge that his business in the Dominican Republic has been destroyed due to his absence and that he wants to return home. Why is our government spending taxpayers money to jail someone who is asking to be sent home? Isn't that what the self-deportation Scheduled Departure Program is all about?

DHS's deportation-focused enforcement efforts are becoming more nonsensical by the week. But what can we expect when the job of reforming of a massively dysfunctional national immigration system has been placed fully in the charge of an executive branch agency whose primary mission is to arrest and deport non-citizens, the judicial branch is overwhelmed trying to adjudicate the "tsunami" of immigration appeals that have come its way as a result, and the legislative branch fails to do anything.

Members of Congress are the ones who could clean up this mess by passing sane and humane immigration reform legislation. It is time for them to step up and take responsibility.