This summary was featured in Documented’s Early Arrival newsletter. You can subscribe to receive it in your inbox three times per week here.
The Trump administration sent its last deportation to Haiti the night before the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden. The ICE deportation flight took off from Alexandria, Louisiana at 10 a.m. and was scheduled to arrive at 1 p.m. in Port-au-Prince. One person, Paul Pierrilus, was removed from the flight list last minute because he never lived in Haiti, according to immigration advocate Guerline Jozef. Pierrilus Has been fighting deportation attempts for 15 years. Biden promised to halt the deportations of undocumented immigrants from Haiti who have been living and working in the U.S. while he review’s President Donald Trump’s immigration policies. Miami Herald
In other national immigration news…
9-Year-Old Boy Might Be Separated from Older Brother
A 9-year-old Haitian boy, Vladimir Fardin, may be separated from his older brother by immigration officers even though they entered the U.S. with visas, according to their attorney. U.S. Customs and Border Protection offices detained the brothers when they arrived Sunday at San Francisco International Airport. Fardin was visiting California with his brother, Christian Laporte, 19, a student at Diablo Valley College. Fardin travelled with a tourist visa while Laporte had a student visa, but CBP allegedly took away their visas and claimed Laporte was missing an I-20 form. Laporte is scheduled to be deported Wednesday while Fardin was given to ICE and is waiting to be transferred to a shelter. BuzzFeed News and San Francisco Chronicle
Undocumented Immigrants Afraid COVID-19 Vaccination Will Lead to Deportation
Activists are worried undocumented immigrants will not widely accept coronavirus vaccines even though they were hit hard during the pandemic. Experts cautioned that there needs to be a way to communicate with hard-to-reach communities to assure them receiving the vaccine won’t expose them to the federal government. Adonia Simpson, director of the Family Defense Program, said the Trump administration and some lawmakers’ attacks on immigrants has led them to avoid any government programs. About 11 million undocumented immigrants live in the U.S. and hundreds of thousands of them work in food, retail, and construction. HuffPost
