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Thanks to free legal assistance, in which Mayor de Blasio has invested $30 million, New York–area immigrants are also more likely than their counterparts elsewhere in the United States to be represented in court. (Eighty percent in Queens versus, say, 39 percent in South Carolina.) Partly as a result, they’re also less likely to get deported, according to data from Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. Among the five U.S. counties with the most immigration cases, Queens had the highest proportion of immigrants who were granted deportation relief and the lowest proportion ordered removed from the country.
Despite all of that, Trump’s immigration crackdown has instilled a new level of fear throughout the city. Before he took office, many undocumented immigrants who were considered low priority for deportation — because they didn’t have criminal records, for example —were allowed to stay as long as they regularly reported to immigration authorities. But Trump has expanded the number of people considered a priority for deportation. Now people whose only offense is staying in the country illegally are being flagged for removal.
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