NJ deportation case spotlights Trump's crackdown on green card holders

Three or four times a week, Brandi Edralin steps into her 2002 Volvo and drives 25 miles from her home in Highland Park to the federal immigration detention center in Elizabeth.

She gets in line and waits, sometimes up to an hour and a half, to enter a visitors' room where she'll meet her husband, Cloyd Edralin, for an hour before he is sent back to his cell.

They talk about their children and their softball games, and about things that need to be done around the house now that Cloyd, 47, isn't around to do the handiwork. And inevitably, Cloyd — a green card holder whose detention was triggered by an 11-year-old weapons conviction — frets about his legal battle to avoid deportation to the Philippines.

“When they hear about immigrants in detention, the assumption is they’re illegal,” said Brandi Edralin, 45, a U.S. citizen. “It’s not a black-and-white situation. The general public’s ignorance is so frustrating to me.”

The Edralins' new ritual is a byproduct of federal immigration policy under the Trump administration, which has targeted not only undocumented immigrants but also green card holders and other legal immigrants for deportation, often on the basis of decades-old convictions. Now the administration is considering a policy that would broaden the pool of legal residents at risk of deportation by punishing those who have used food stamps, Medicaid, transit subsidies and other forms of "public welfare" to which they are entitled.

The U.S. government issues more than a million new green cards every year, according to data from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. By some estimates, there are nearly 20 million green card holders in the country, though it is not clear how many of those live in New Jersey. Of the nearly 1.2 million green cards issued in 2016, the most recent year for which data are available, just over 56,000 were issued to New Jersey residents, DHS says.

An Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokesman said the agency does not track how many green card holders are deported, but several stories have surfaced in media reports of green card holders and undocumented immigrants with long-resolved, often low-level convictions — or no convictions at all — being detained by immigration agents.

"This is shockingly weird for the government to be playing the morality police on things that happened a long time ago," said the Rev. Seth Kaper-Dale of the Reformed Church of Highland Park, which has provided sanctuary to undocumented immigrants targeted by ICE. "It's clearly not because of the concern for the safety of the public. They're concerned with racially and ethnically cleansing this country."

Cloyd Edralin entered the United States on a green card in 1988 and was able to renew it repeatedly, even after his 2007 arrest on drug and firearm possession charges in January 2007. His immigration lawyer, Justin English, said he was convicted of two counts of unlawful possession of a gun in 2007, though a court transcript indicated that one of the two guns was "rendered inoperable."

Brandi Edralin said her husband completed his sentence and also paid several fines.

Neither had given the incident much thought until he was arrested on June 4 as he was leaving home to go to his new job as a machinist, joining a growing list of legal residents who are being detained by immigration authorities over old criminal convictions.

In late 2016, Isidro Quintana, a Mexican green card holder from Aurora, Colorado, was flagged by immigration authorities while he was traveling because of a 1996 marijuana-related conviction, according to Denverite, a news website. He was detained by ICE after President Donald Trump took office in 2017.

Quintana had other charges, including a 1996 domestic violence conviction. An immigration judge granted him a reprieve from deportation in May 2017. 

A receptionist for Quintana's attorney, Weldon Caldbeck, confirmed he worked on the case but said he wasn't available for comment.

In January, a 43-year-old Polish doctor and green card holder, who came to the United States with his family when he was 5, was arrested in Michigan after dropping off his daughter at school. The doctor, Lukasz Niec, had two misdemeanor convictions from 1992, though the arrest was triggered by a child abuse investigation against him.

A federal judge dismissed those allegations in April.

In June, a Mexican green card holder who lives in Los Angeles, Jose Luis Garcia, was detained and placed in deportation proceedings over a 2001 domestic-violence-related misdemeanor. Three weeks after his arrest, Garcia's deportation case was closed, and he was released.

Carl Shusterman, an immigration attorney based in Los Angeles, said these cases and others suggest that Trump is as interested in restricting legal immigration as he is in addressing the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in the country.

"The thing he [Trump] is really devoting his attention to is cutting legal immigration," he said. "You could probably ask any attorney in the country and they will tell you the same story."

'A chance before the judge'

Edralin had several people submit affidavits vouching for him in his deportation case, including Kaper-Dale of the Reformed Church of Highland Park, a county law enforcement official, and some of Edralin's relatives.

Family members say the judge did not read the packet because she didn't have time. Instead, she denied Edralin's request to be released on bond because his 11-year-old conviction made him a threat to the public.

"We were stunned that she just said, 'No, no bond; he's a danger to society,' 11 years after the crime and not looking at anything current," Brandi Edralin said.

Edralin's case signals a shift in immigration enforcement under Trump, whose predecessors exercised more restraint by prioritizing for deportation undocumented immigrants who had been convicted of serious crimes or were deemed to pose a national security threat. But penalties for green card holders with criminal records didn't start with Trump. They date as far back as the late 1980s.

Shusterman, who worked for the federal government in the late 1970s and 1980s, said immigration agencies started examining green card holders' records more closely after a 1988 law introduced the idea of "aggravated felonies."

At first, they included serious crimes such as murder, drug trafficking and the illegal trafficking of firearms and destructive devices.

Immigration laws passed in 1990 and 1996, however, expanded the definition to include crimes that immigration attorneys say are neither "aggravated" nor "felonies." 

Immigration officials "are saying if you committed an aggravated felony sometime that you can never show good moral character for immigration benefits for the rest of your life," Shusterman said.

"Things have gotten so much tougher," he added. 

It's unclear whether Edralin's conviction would be considered an "aggravated felony" or a less severe category known as a "crime or moral turpitude," but it wasn't until he was arrested that he realized he was a target for deportation.

Joanne Gottesman, a professor at Rutgers Law School, said the laws on the books aren't any different from under previous administrations, but the enforcement strategy is new.

"I think that the difference with prior administrations is there was a use of discretion in certain circumstances that isn't being applied today," said Gottesman, who runs the Immigrant Justice Clinic at Rutgers.

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Someone who is facing deportation over an old conviction, even for an aggravated felony, "doesn't get a chance to go before the judge and say: Let me tell you the ways that I have been rehabilitated, the deep ties I've had in the United States," Gottesman said. "What the statute does is prevent the judge from hearing anything the person has to say."

Edralin's arrest added a layer of complication for his family's finances. Brandi Edralin, who works full time, said she has covered most of her husband's legal costs, but those fees and the daily household expenses have drained their savings.

"The big thing about him being there — I've come to terms with that. We'll deal with it," she said. "But then the lawn mower broke. He would normally be the one to fix that. ... It's the things you don't think about that you deal with from day to day."

Chariza Edralin, Cloyd Edralin's younger sister, started a crowdfunding campaign to help cover the family's legal fees and daily household expenses. The family is also hosting a fundraiser on at 6 p.m. Tuesday at the Parlor Gallery in Asbury Park.

"The family support keeps me going, the community and friends," Chariza Edralin said. "We are very, very fortunate to have really close-knit friends and family who are very supportive."

In the meantime, family members and friends continue to visit Edralin nearly every day at the Elizabeth Contract Detention Facility.

Edralin tells his wife and his sister about life in the detention center. He gets cold, so he used money that Brandi deposited in his account to buy a sweatshirt and an extra shirt from the commissary to keep warm. 

Some of the inmates he meets don't have anyone to visit them, send them money or represent them in immigration court. At his request, Brandi said, she put money in a few of the other inmates' commissary accounts.

Chariza Edralin, who visits her brother at least once a week, has heard the stories about the other inmates. She says she makes an effort to be upbeat, though at some point they reflect on the birthdays, anniversaries and other milestones he's missing.

"I'm trying to be positive and optimistic about this whole thing," she said, "but just considering the fact that in America, this country is basically all about immigrants, and how we're treating a certain type of immigrants and a collection of immigrants right now, it's embarrassing."

Steph Solis: @stephmsolis; 732-403-0074; ssolis@gannett.com

Note: Edralin was convicted on two counts of unlawful possession of a weapon in 2007. Based on interviews with Edralin's family and a review of state criminal records, an earlier version of this article reported incorrectly that Edralin was found guilty of possessing a pistol that fires plastic pellets.