{"id":73258,"date":"2025-06-02T11:11:37","date_gmt":"2025-06-02T18:11:37","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/?p=73258"},"modified":"2025-06-02T11:11:37","modified_gmt":"2025-06-02T18:11:37","slug":"what-happens-if-you-help-an-undocumented-immigrant","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/?p=73258","title":{"rendered":"What Happens if You Help an Undocumented Immigrant?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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By<\/span>Selen Ozturk<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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With massive immigration crackdowns and deportations since January, what rights do Americans have to help undocumented immigrants?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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With ramped-up immigration crackdowns and deportations since January, what rights do Americans have to help undocumented immigrants?<\/p>\n

The major federal law codifying U.S. provisions concerning this \u2014 the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 (INA) \u2014 prohibits harboring unauthorized immigrants, but there is no nationwide, Supreme Court consensus as to what harboring means.<\/p>\n

While the INA defines harboring as actions that \u201c to substantially facilitate the alien remaining in the United States illegally,\u201d for instance, would this include giving an immigrant money for a bus to their target city as much as it would include housing them?<\/p>\n

\u201cMost of our immigration laws, as we have found brutally up until now, are pretty laissez faire. The fact that we have\u00a011.7 million<\/a>\u00a0unauthorized people in the country must mean that we don\u2019t enforce laws so universally. That\u2019s reality. You can\u2019t hide from that,\u201d explained Muzaffar Chishti, senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute and director of the MPI office at the New York University School of Law, in an interview with American Community Media.<\/p>\n

\u201cDifferent administrations obviously have different attitudes as to what gets you removed, apprehended, detained and deported from the United States,\u201d he continued. \u201cUnder the first Trump administration, Attorney General Sessions made no secret of zero tolerance toward smuggling and harboring people at the border \u2026 so there\u2019s an expectation this\u2019ll go up hugely now under Holman.\u201d<\/p>\n

Under Sessions, harboring-related\u00a0charges<\/a>\u00a0filed by the first Trump administration spiked from less than 3,500 in 2015 to approximately 4,500 in 2018 and an all-time high of just under 5,700 in 2019 \u2014 a nearly 65% increase over the four years.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey are going to prosecute more people for harboring, and one reason why is that their goal of mass deportation of 1 million people a year is unlikely to materialize. They\u2019re not even outperforming Biden \u2026 and now they\u2019re facing lawsuits and uncooperative judges,\u201d said Chishti.<\/p>\n

An Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) report published in mid-March shows that Trump\u2019s daily removals from January 26 through March 8, 2025 averaged\u00a0661<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 10.9% lower than Biden\u2019s daily average of 742 for 2024.<\/p>\n

As of May, Trump\u2019s use of executive power in areas including immigrant extraditions, legal status revocations, DEI bans and press restrictions has spawned at least\u00a0328<\/a>\u00a0lawsuits nationwide.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo if the numbers are not going to come from deportation, they want people to self deport \u2026 through fear: \u2018My God, if I\u2019m harboring my partner or my employee or my neighbor, would I become the target?\u2019\u201d Chishti said. \u201cBut as to what harboring actually means, the case law is all over the place.\u201d<\/p>\n

While\u00a0some<\/a>\u00a0courts, like the Third Circuit, define harboring as an illegal offense broadly as \u201cproviding shelter, transportation, direction about how to obtain false documentation, or warnings about impending investigations that facilitates a person\u2019s continuing illegal presence in the United States,\u201d others like the Sixth and Ninth Circuits define it more restrictedly as literally shielding or affording shelter to an immigrant.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf it\u2019s a situation like your partner just staying with you or you transporting them somewhere already in the country, it\u2019s unlikely to lead to a charge. But if you take them over the border, or to a facility to get a fake green card, or if ICE shows up and you prevent them from being detected, that would rise to harboring,\u201d explained Chishti.<\/p>\n

As for work, \u201cif you are employing someone without knowing that they\u2019re unauthorized, that would not be harboring,\u201d he continued. \u201cBut if you\u2019re found knowingly hiding it \u2026 or if you help them fill an I-9 form when they show you false documents, that\u2019s harboring, because you\u2019re directly facilitating the unlawful stay of the person in the country.\u201d<\/p>\n

He noted that \u201cAt the end of the day, it\u2019s really going to be determined by how much resources each jurisdiction has in prosecuting these people. It\u2019s an opportunity cost: If they prosecute someone who gives a lift to someone, what are they not prosecuting?\u201d<\/p>\n

In late May, for instance, a Harris County, Texas sheriff\u00a0said<\/a>\u00a0a bill requiring state sheriffs to help ICE enforcement would cost \u201cwell over $1 million.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you see a sick person by the road, do you have an obligation to ask them first whether they\u2019re authorized?\u201d asked Chishti. \u201cOne way to put this is whether being a good Samaritan is being criminalized.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 2018, under the first Trump administration, a college teacher and humanitarian volunteer was arrested and charged with two counts of felony harboring and one count of conspiracy for giving food, water and shelter to two unauthorized migrants along the border.<\/p>\n

He was\u00a0acquitted<\/a>\u00a0after challenging what he called the government\u2019s \u201cattempt to criminalize basic human kindness\u201d and invoking the Religious Freedom Restoration Act 1993, on the grounds that his religious beliefs motivated him to help the migrants.<\/p>\n

In 2019, a Texas city attorney was\u00a0arrested<\/a>\u00a0and detained for stopping to phone for medical attention for three dehydrated young migrants limping along a roadside.<\/p>\n

\u201cReasons for a \u2018don\u2019t ask, don\u2019t tell\u2019 policy in institutional behavior are becoming more prevalent,\u201d said Chishti. \u201cIn schools, this looks like teachers wanting parents not to tell them anything about their kids. It\u2019s about whether telling the hospital essential information about you creates an obligation to call ICE, because if they don\u2019t, they could be accused of harboring. It looks like not showing up to your own court hearing.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIf there is a need to know less and less, you can imagine what less engagement in the lives of those most vulnerable does to the social fabric,\u201d he added. \u201cThe chilling effect of this, at some level, is much longer-lasting than actual enforcement.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

BySelen Ozturk Jun 2, 2025 With...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-73258","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinion","category-u-s-a"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73258","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=73258"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73258\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":73259,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/73258\/revisions\/73259"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=73258"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=73258"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lapost.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=73258"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}