Mass deportation of Filipino-Americans unlikely — immigration lawyer | ABS-CBN

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Mass deportation of Filipino-Americans unlikely — immigration lawyer

Mass deportation of Filipino-Americans unlikely — immigration lawyer

ABS-CBN News

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Updated Nov 09, 2024 02:48 PM PHT

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Filipino-Americans campaigning for Trump-Pence. Photo courtesy of Herman Martir

Filipino-Americans campaigning for Trump-Pence. Photo courtesy of Herman Martir

MANILA — Fears of mass deportations under a second Trump administration are “a little bit overblown”, a Filipino-American immigration lawyer said, adding most Filipinos in the US are there legally.

Speaking on ANC’s “Dateline Philippines”, lawyer Jath Shao said undocumented migrants are a “very tiny problem that’s been magnified too much in political rhetoric.”

He said that in the past 24 years, the US has deported around 9.6 million people, around 25,000 were Filipino.

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Shao said that Filipinos in the US typically follow the law.

“We’re not really part of this problem,” he said.

He added that the mass deportations that President-elect Donald Trump promised during the campaign would cost the US government billions, could take years, and could disrupt the US economy.

“Realistically, it’s not going to happen in anyone’s lifetime,” he said.

“Even if you are undocumented, you do have the right to fight it, you have the right to file a defense,” he also said.

Shao said the best way to secure one’s stay in the US is still to marry a citizen, have relatives who are citizens, or have a relative in the US military.

“Going through the military route would be a smarter way than to go through any other route right now,” he added.

"It's a very small problem. I think as long as you do everything right, it’s a very small problem," he also said.

Philippine Ambassador Jose Manuel Romualdez has advised undocumented Filipinos who are in the US illegally — there are around 250,000 to 300,000 of them, he said — to go home to avoid being deported and blacklisted.

“Some of them have already filed and so therefore they are here in limbo, meaning to say they are waiting for their papers to pass through,” Romualdez said in a forum of the Foreign Correspondents Association of the Philippines (FOCAP) on Friday.

“My advice to many of our fellowmen who are actually still here but cannot get any kind of status, my advice is for them not to wait to be deported.”

Although he said that mass deportations are unlikely, Shao said he does not necessarily disagree with Romualdez.

“If you have no hope in your case, save up enough money and go home, or fight the case here for decades, pay a lawyer a lot of money… We can do that too,” he said.

According to the Pew Research Center, citing 2022 census data, around 4.1 million Filipino Americans live in the US, with more than half of them — 52% — born there.

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