In a small immigration cell somewhere in San Francisco — with nothing but a window, door, toilet and three other women also bound for the border — Josefina Velasquez sank deep into despair.
Her cellmates offered no solace. They echoed what immigration officials told Velasquez just before putting her in the cell.
"We're all headed to Arizona," they said. After that, there would be a final trip across the Mexican border. "There's nothing you can do about it."
Velasquez, 36, whose belief in God was rooted in tradition rather than spiritual faith, thought of her son, her daughter and her husband back in Sonoma County and fell to her knees.
"God, if you really exist, please let me stay, let me stay here with my family," she pleaded. "He got me out of that room."
Velasquez was released on bail. Two years later, she is facing deportation. And like hundreds of thousands of other undocumented immigrants facing removal from the United States, she'll likely need another miracle.
That's because President Barack Obama's promise to rein in the deportation of people without serious criminal records largely has been a failure, according to immigration attorneys and advocates.
In June 2011, the Obama administration announced new ground rules for applying "prosecutorial discretion," or PD for short. The policy would focus immigration enforcement on serious criminals and high-priority immigration violations while allowing vast numbers of families facing deportation to stay in the country.
That November, immigration officials went about the arduous task of reviewing some 300,000 pending deportation cases, applying the new guidelines. Obama critics called the move a pre-election ploy to woo back Latino voters who had become disillusioned with record numbers of deportations under Obama.
In its first year, only 2 percent of the deportation cases reviewed under the policy were halted and closed, according to the New York Times. Since then, the PD approval rate has risen across the country, but not by much.
Between September 2012 and July 2013, only 7 percent of the 325,044 deportation cases reviewed by the federal government for leniency have been stopped through PD, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, or TRAC, a nonprofit research group based at Syracuse University.
The rate of approval varies widely from one immigration court to the next.
On the high end, for example, PD approvals in immigration courts and processing centers in the U.S. Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico range from 37 percent to 42 percent. In Seattle and San Diego, the removal cases closed through PD both are 24 percent.
But at immigration detention centers in Houston, the approval rate is less than 1 percent. Compared to immigration courts, immigration detention centers in general have much lower rates of exercising prosecutorial discretion, a policy that can be applied by a wide variety of immigration officials at any stage of the enforcement process.
In San Francisco's immigration court — the second-busiest in California after Los Angeles — 6.7 percent of the 19,047 removal cases reviewed have been closed through prosecutorial discretion, or 1,277 cases. Los Angeles has a rate of 12.3 percent.
Federal officials counter that the TRAC data, obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, understates the actual use of prosecutorial discretion.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials said the data does not account for all the instances where agents decline to initiate deportation proceedings in the early stages of an encounter with an undocumented immigrant.
Virginia Kice, an ICE spokeswoman, said the agency's officers, agents and attorneys "exercise prosecutorial discretion, as early in the process as possible, on a daily basis throughout the system."
But immigration attorneys say that in many cases they've encountered, the standard for PD approval has been set too high. They say that people with minor offenses, such as driving without a license, using a false ID or misdemeanor assault, continue to be deported.
"I have been disappointed, frankly, with how high the bar is," said Richard Coshnear, a Santa Rosa immigration attorney and member of the Committee for Immigrant Rights of Sonoma County.
"Every once in a great while, some deserving soul gets a reprieve, but many have their requests dismissed without even a reason given," he said.
Coshnear cited a case where one of his clients, a man from Calistoga with 2-year-old triplets born in the U.S., one of whom has developmental issues — was denied without a reason given. Coshnear said he returned to the immigration judge and pleaded the case.
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