Human Rights Watch reveal large number of immigrants being deported for often minor drug crimes and say policy is breaking up families

Tens of thousands of families in the US are being torn apart by the Obama administration’s policy of deporting immigrants for drug offences, some as minor as possession of a tiny bag of marijuana, according to Human Rights Watch.

At a time of bi-partisan agreement when the criminal justice system is seen as needing to move away from harsh punishment of drug offenders under the so-called “war on drugs”, the human rights group claims the US government is paradoxically pushing in the opposite direction when it comes to immigrants.



Undocumented people, as well as permanent residents holding green cards, who have been convicted of drug offences are increasingly being deported without regard to their strong family ties in the US, the many years they have lived in the country, or the relative triviality of their crimes.

Based on freedom of information requests, the group found that between 2007 and 2012, post-conviction deportations for simple drug possession soared 43%. In those years, some 260,000 non-citizens were evicted from the country having been convicted of drug offences, of whom 34,000 had been caught in possession of marijuana.

In its new report, A Price Too High: US Families Torn Apart by Deportations for Drug Offenses, Human Rights Watch recounts the stories of those like Antonio S, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico now in his early 20s who came to the US when he was 12. He was arrested three years ago in Wyoming for carrying a small bag of marijuana and, unaware of the dangers in terms of his immigration status, pleaded guilty to what was a low-level municipal violation.

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He was sentenced to a short jail-term, but after 11 days was transferred to an immigration detention center where he was held in custody for more than a year. He was deported last year, and has now permanently lost the right to return to the US. “How could this possibly be happening to me?” Antonio S told his lawyer.

President Obama’s handling of immigration has provided one of the starkest contradictions of his time in the White House. On one hand, he has attempted to use his executive powers to extend legal rights to many of the 11 million undocumented immigrants. On the other hand, he has taken a tough line on non-citizens convicted of crimes, removing more than 2 million people from 2009 to 2014 in an escalation of deportations that earned him the unflattering title of “deporter-in-chief”.

Obama has tried to justify this new heavy-handed approach to deportations by insisting that only the most serious criminals would be dispatched from the country.

“Felons not families; criminals not children; gang members not a mom who’s working hard to provide for her kids,” he said last November, referring to the targets of his new tough policy.

But the Human Rights Watch report suggests that far from focusing exclusively on more serious offenders, the Obama administration is dividing thousands of families by removing low-level violators.

People such as Marsha Austin from New York City, who is currently fighting deportation for an incident in 1995 in which she was lured by two undercover police officers in a sting operation into trying to sell them crack cocaine. The vial of drug she attempted to trade was worth $5.