Mariano Gaik Aldrovandi
03/05/2021 8:32 PM
Clarín.com
Police
Updated 03/05/2021 8:42 PM
The purpose of decree 70/2017, repealed this Friday by Alberto Fernández, was to expedite the expulsions of foreigners.
It reached those accused of having committed a crime as well as violators of the Migration Law 25,871.
During Mauricio Macri's government, some 3,000 foreigners were expelled from the country.
It is worth saying that 820,000 people were also settled, according to official data from the previous administration accessed by
Clarín
.
Of the 3,000 deportees, the vast majority were during the validity of the rule repealed today.
That figure is clear from official data: in 2016, 323 people had been expelled.
The decree was published in the Official Gazette on
January 27, 2017
.
From then on, the number of migrants who were forced to return to their country grew exponentially.
In April 2019, Clarín recorded an expulsion every 13 hours, according to figures from the National Directorate of Migration (DNM), which showed a total of
156 in the first quarter of that year.
The figure represented
a growth rate of 43%
.
With decree 70/17, those expelled went from 239 in 2015 to 703 in 2018. And up to the first quarter of 2019, 1,600 people had been expelled.
That year the bulk of the deportations occurred when the review process of some
1,500 people who were in violation of the immigration law
and 300 who were framed in the figure of estrangement applied to convicted people who served half of the sentence in the country.
Wado De Pedro, current Minister of the Interior, whose area depends on Migrations.
A report from the National Penitentiary Office also shows how the process of expulsion of detainees from the prisons of the Federal Penitentiary System (SPF) was accelerated.
From 217 detainees expelled in 2017, they rose to 300 in 2018, 453 in 2019, and in 2020 they began to decline to 323.
One of the arguments of the Government of Alberto Fernández to repeal the decree was “the violation of the principle of due process, the right to have legal assistance and defense, the restriction to a broad and sufficient control of the judicial power over the acts of the authority administrative ”.
However, a former official from the previous administration denied that argument.
“The purpose of the decree was to
expedite the expulsions
and, in fact, it expedited them.
Always respecting due process.
People had the right to defense, to have a defense lawyer, double administrative and double judicial instance.
No person was expelled without the knowledge or acceptance or pronouncement of a judge.
No case was without judicial review,
"said the source consulted by this newspaper.
The Migration Directorate can order the expulsion of a foreign citizen when he is in violation of the Migration Law 25,871 or charged in a criminal case.
That decision always requires a "retention" order signed by a judge for the person to be transferred to their country of origin.
In practice, Decree 70/17
did not modify anything that already existed, but it tightened controls
to enter the country and simplified the deportation process.
What the macrismo said is that before an expulsion procedure could
last for years
due to the large number of times that a foreign citizen could appeal in court.
In 2019, most of the expulsions were of Chinese nationals.
Most were framed in cases of "human trafficking."
Then, the countries of the region are the ones with the highest number of deportees.
In practice, the measures that increased the number of deportations were, on the one hand, an agreement to integrate the database of the Federal Police Communications System (Sifcop) to that of Migrations.
Thus, the DNM can know in real time if a foreigner is involved in a criminal case in the country.
The Center for Legal and Social Studies (CELS) had filed an injunction to declare
Decree 70/17 unconstitutional
.
The Court of Appeals declared he agreed but the issue had escalated to the Supreme Court.
Amnesty International Argentina, one of the human rights organizations that accompanied that presentation, celebrated the repeal of the norm.
"We can only celebrate the end of this decree, which was accompanied by
xenophobic and discriminatory speeches
by state authorities, who sought to associate migration with crime," Mariela Belski, executive director of Amnesty, said in a statement.
According to the latest statistics from the National System of Penalty Execution Statistics (SNEEP) dating from 2019,
the population of foreigners in Argentine prisons was 6%.
These data vary according to the jurisdiction.
In federal prisons, where there are detainees for crimes such as drug trafficking or human trafficking, the migrant population is 18%, the majority from neighboring countries.
But in the Province of Buenos Aires, foreign citizens deprived of liberty were around
5%
, according to SNEEP.
The figure is in line with Amnesty International data that show that
the migrant population in Argentina is 5% of the total
, while the participation of foreigners in crime is 6%.
Meanwhile, in the City, police sources indicated that about
18% of crimes are carried out by immigrants
.
They also noted that the latest expulsions took place during the previous government.
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