Given United States president-elect Donald Trump’s vow to commence mass deportation of illegal immigrants upon taking office next month, Guyanese-American immigration attorney Kinda Velloza said immigrant case filings around the country have been rapidly increasing.
She is urging Guyanese living in the US illegally to decide if they want to return home or if they want to stay and for the latter to begin legal petitions so as to avoid immediate deportation.
“I am advising them to have an application pending, so if they are ever accosted by ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] they have a protection that something is pending in immigration court or the USCIS [United States Citizenship and Immigration Services]. If they don’t, chances are they will be on the next flight out,” Velloza, who heads the law firm Velloza and Associates, told the Stabroek News in an interview.