Bustamante also heard stories about how recent immigration raids have separated families, which the U.N. expert described as an area of particular interest. One woman wept as she described how her Chile-born husband was recently picked up in a routine traffic check and is being detained, leaving her alone, pregnant and penniless.
And community activists described how legal immigrants were being swept up in growing furor against illegal migrants. Non-citizen legal workers, for instance, were twice as likely as citizens to be inaccurately rejected as ineligible to work by computerized verification systems, according to Marielena Hincapie of the National Immigration Law Center. Yet Congress is currently discussing making such verification systems mandatory, a move she said could force many legal workers to lose jobs.
