A New York immigration judge on Tuesday ruled that Jean Montrevil, a Haitian immigrant and longtime activist, will no longer face deportation, after a decade of being targeted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement for his activism. Montrevil was deported to Haiti in 2018 under the Trump administration but got a second chance in 2021, when Virginia Governor Ralph Northam granted him a pardon for two drug convictions from three decades earlier, which ICE had used as a pretext to deport him. Montrevil sought to regain his legal immigration status and was allowed to return to the United States on a 90-day special parole, but the threat of deportation continued to hang over his head — until Tuesday, when the decades-long saga came to a close. “It was huge for me,” says Montrevil in his first interview following the ruling. We also speak with Alina Das, part of Montrevil’s legal team and co-director of the Immigrant Rights Clinic at NYU School of Law, who says Black people face much harsher treatment under immigration law than others.
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.