A/HRC/7/12/Add.2 page 14 45. In that context, the ICE has recently shifted its approach to enforcement by bringing criminal charges against employers of irregular migrant workers, seizing their assets and charging them with money laundering violations. B. Deportation policy 46. With regard to deportation policy, following changes to United States immigration law in 1996, non-citizens in the United States have been subjected to a policy of mandatory deportation upon conviction of a crime, including very minor ones. These persons are not afforded a hearing in which their ties to the United States, including family relationships, are weighed against the Government’s interest in deportation. According to Government sources, hundreds of thousands of persons have been deported since these laws went into effect in 1996. 47. One case that has been brought to the attention of the Special Rapporteur is that of a male migrant, originally from Haiti, who enlisted in the United States military in 1970. A lawful permanent resident, or green card holder, this individual served his adopted country for four years. Now a 52-year-old veteran with four United States citizen sons, two of whom are in the military themselves, he faces mandatory deportation because he was convicted of the possession and sale of small amounts of crack cocaine in the mid-1990s, for which he spent 16 months in prison. 48. Some 672,593 immigrants in the United States - many of whom, like the Haitian migrant described above, were legal residents - have been deported from the country under the 1996 legislation that requires mandatory deportation of non-citizens convicted of a crime after they have served their sentence. It does not matter whether the non-citizen has lived in the United States legally for decades, built a home and family, run a business, or paid taxes. And these laws do not apply only to serious crimes, but also to minor offences. 49. The 1996 laws added new crimes to the aggravated felony ground of deportation. First, Congress added 17 additional types of crimes to the category when it passed AEDPA in April 1996. IIRIRA added four more types of crimes to the aggravated felony definition and lowered certain threshold requirements. Before IIRIRA, for example, theft offences and crimes of violence were treated as aggravated felonies only if the term of imprisonment was five years or more; IIRIRA reduced the term of imprisonment provision to a one-year threshold. 50. Estimates based on the United States census find that 1.6 million adults and children, including United States citizens, have been separated from their spouses and parents because of the 1996 legislation and the expansion of the aggravated felony definition. Families have been torn apart because of a single, even minor misdemeanour, such as shoplifting or drug possession. 51. Certain immigrants, for example those convicted of selling drugs and given a five-year sentence, are subject to deportation without consideration of the fact that they would be returned to persecution. This is the case under United States law, despite the fact that under the Convention relating to the Status of Refugees (a treaty binding on the United States), only refugees who have been convicted of a “particularly serious crime” and who “constitute a danger to the community” of the United States may be returned to places where they fear persecution.