By Lisa Riordan Seville
Civil liberties activists say the Department of Homeland Security is undermining Congress’ efforts to apply the Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) to immigrant detainees.
Read full entry »Saying he wanted a seamless transition and to preserve positive trends in crime reduction, Memphis Mayor AC Wharton tapped Toney Armstrong, the police department's second-in-command, to succeed Larry Godwin as head of the department, says the Memphis Commercial Appeal. Armstrong, 44, a 22-year veteran of the department, succeeds Godwin April 15 if the City Council ratifies the appointment.
Armstrong said he would continue the department's successful Blue CRUSH initiative, a data-driven police deployment strategy, and would uphold high standards in the detective bureaus, which he said are "near and dear to me." Wharton praised Armstrong's "toughness, fairness, sharpness and concern," and called him the most well-rounded possible candidate for the job. Armstrong who has been in charge of day-to-day operations for the department's 2,400 officers and its $200 million budget.
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By Mark Dow
1996 anti-terrorist and immigration laws are being used to deport some Haitian immigrants in the U.S. to an island they haven’t seen since childhood, and which is struggling through a deadly cholera epidemic, warns a prominent immigration observer.
In response to a terrorist act committed by a U.S. citizen at home 15 years ago, the U.S. government is about to send Haitians who left their country as small children into a post-earthquake cholera epidemic and political turmoil—and in many cases, we can assume, to their deaths.
In 1996, to commemorate the one-year anniversary of the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, Congress hurriedly passed —and President Bill Clinton signed into law—the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act. Shortly thereafter, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act was passed. Both laws drastically expanded the range of crimes for which lawful U.S. residents are subject to mandatory detention and deportation or “removal.”
These immigrants were stripped of the right even to apply for a so-called waiver of deportation from an immigration judge.
Today, as we mark another grim anniversary, hundreds of legal Haitian residents in the U.S. are likely to become victims of that anti-terrorist and immigration reform legislation. Last month, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), an agency of the Department of Homeland Security, confirmed that it plans to begin deportations in January of some 700 Haitians who have criminal records.
The timing couldn’t be worse. This week is the first anniversary of the earthquake which killed over 200,000 Haitians and left an estimated 1.5 million homeless. A subsequent cholera epidemic has killed an estimated 3,000 more. And the country remains dangerously unstable; results of the recent Haitian presidential election remain in dispute. Many of the Haitians being sent back have not seen the country since their childhood and have few family ties there to help them survive.
And most of them are not “illegals” but rather lawful residents here. Presumably they do not qualify for Temporary Protected Status, which, after the earthquake, was quickly enacted by the Obama Administration—to its credit― to stop certain Haitians who were not convicted of any criminal offense from being deported.
Rhetoric from Democrats and Republicans has helped convince the public that when someone with a green card is deported, it’s because he is dangerous. But that has not usually been the case.
How ‘Dangerous’ are Deportees?
Between 1997 and 2007, according to Human Rights Watch, “among legal immigrants who were deported, 77 percent had been convicted for such nonviolent crimes” as drug possession and traffic offenses, Using ICE statistics, the human rights group estimates that in those ten years, 434,495 people were deported as a consequence of non-violent criminal offenses, compared to 140,572 for violent offenses.
The rhetoric goes further. As Nancy Morawetz of New York University Law School explained in a June 2000 article in the Harvard Law Review, the 1996 laws allow ICE to refer to a lawful immigrant’s “conviction” when, according to the criminal justice system, there was no such thing; and to “imprisonment” when the criminal justice system gave the immigrant no jail time. Through perversities such as these, families have been torn apart, and people have been sent “back” to countries with which they have no ties. Billions of dollars in enforcement spending and potential tax revenue have been wasted and lost.
As for the Haitians targeted, when I asked Barbara Gonzales of ICE Public Affairs what their crimes were, she replied: “Here is a list of some of the charges that those facing removal are convicted of. Homicide, kidnapping, sexual assault, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny, embezzlement, money laundering and extortion.” When I asked for a complete list, Gonzales replied, “What I gave you is what I have.”
Those who have actually spoken with the Haitian prisoners have more information. The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and several other civil rights groups have filed an emergency petition with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to stop the round-ups and deportations. These groups have identified, for example, a 43-year-old father of four; two of those children are minors. The U.S. intends to deport this man because of a conviction for drug possession with intent to sell, for which he served six months. He has no family in Haiti.
A 53-year-old man who has been here since 1980 has four children, three of whom are U.S. citizen minors. He owns a house here, and can be deported because of a drug conviction.
These are just two of the hundreds of cases attorneys are trying to identify.
Many of the Haitians who are to be deported have lived here for so long that they don’t speak Haitian Creole.
Dehumanizing Process
The current law does not allow us to see individuals, much less their families and the fuller context of their lives. ICE Public Affairs reinforces this dehumanizing process with its selective and duplicitous information.
It seems possible that President Clinton had no idea of the future consequences of what he was signing in 1996. Author Philip Schrag has described the secretive legislative process behind these laws in his book A Well-Founded Fear: The Congressional Battle to Save Political Asylum in America. Schrag quotes Senator Patrick Leahy’s comment that few of his fellow senators “have the foggiest notion of what it is they are voting on.” Many Democrats and Republicans in Congress acknowledged too late that they had gone too far. Bipartisan reform efforts were underway, but these came to a stop on September 11, 2001.
There are politicians who recognize the unfairness, but their own rhetoric has made them afraid to stand up for “criminal aliens” when immigration reform is discussed. Instead, “private bills” are introduced to help individual victims of these laws. Exceptions are made, and the laws remain.
On Christmas Eve 2010, then New York Governor David Paterson announced pardons for two dozen people subject to deportation as a result of past criminal convictions for which their debts have been paid. Paterson’s office provided sketches of those pardoned, people who “should be protected from inflexible and misguided immigration statutes.” For example:
“[E. C.] was brought to the United States from Haiti as a lawful permanent resident at age 10. He was convicted in 1997 of Attempted Burglary in the Third Degree and sentenced to five years on probation. He has maintained gainful employment and is married to a United States citizen with whom he has two young sons. The pardon will remove the basis for his deportation.”
If not for the governor’s pardon, E. C. could be sitting with other Haitians awaiting “removal” in a jail in Louisiana — in Jena or Waterproof, or in Basile, where ICE detainees went on hunger strike last year to protest insufficient medical care, predatory phone prices, filth, and separation from their families, lawyers, and case files, and were then thrown into solitary confinement in retaliation for their protests.
(Several years ago I had lunch in the cafeteria of the Pine Prairie Correctional Center with the general manager of Louisiana Correctional Services (LCS), which also owns and operates the jail at Basile. Now executive vice president of the ICE-contracted company, he told me without embarrassment that LCS saved money by not providing napkins to the inmates. “Most of these folks wouldn’t use them, anyway,” he said. )
In the weeks before Christmas, in a familiar enforcement pattern, Haitian immigrants were rounded up and bused hundreds of miles from Miami’s Krome Detention Center and elsewhere to these Louisiana jails, while their families and attorneys have scrambled to locate them. There are few pro-bono immigration attorneys in Louisiana. ICE strategy has long been to isolate detainees from legal help, and that’s what the agency is doing again. All of this is taking place, incidentally, as the current Administration trumpets its “reforms” of the immigration detention system.
Here’s a reality check. The laws mandating detention and removal—the laws through which these Haitians will be banished—are called immigration laws; but they constitute a separate justice system for non-citizens, no matter how long those people have been here.
Bill Clinton’s Unique Position
Former President Bill Clinton is in a unique position to take what would be a very unpopular stance on the impending deportation of Haitians who deserve to stay here, or at least to have their cases heard.
First, his foundation, the William J. Clinton Foundation, is very involved in post-earthquake rebuilding efforts. Second, it is because of his administration’s landmark anti-immigrant laws that most of these cases will not be heard.
In Haiti, as the cholera outbreak continues, the Clinton Foundation has listed its programs for cholera education and prevention among its accomplishments. The new deportation program is likely to create more cholera victims. Haiti regularly jails deportees who have criminal convictions, and cholera has reportedly spread through the prisons. In their emergency petition, CCR and other groups report the following:
“Jailed populations are particularly at risk, where the overcrowding, lack of sanitation or toilets, and lack of clean drinking water present classic conditions for cholera transmission…detainees are held in overcrowded cells and locked inside for 24 hours at a time with no outside break and are forced to sleep on insect- and rodent-infested cement floors and to defecate in bags and urinate in communal buckets…Paul Waggoner, a U.S. citizen aid worker [from Massachusetts] recently released from Haiti’s National Penitentiary, told the Montreal Gazette that there was no clean water in prison. Waggoner also reported that while he was in the National Penitentiary, ‘A couple of bodies a day were being removed from there…The last night I just went to the bathroom in plastic bags my friends had given me.’”
In a poem called “Botpipel” (Boat People), the late Haitian poet Felix Morisseau Leroy wrote: Nou tap kouri pou Fò Dimanch / Nou vin echwe nan Kwòm Avni.
“We were running from Ft. Dimanche / We washed ashore on Krome Avenue.”
Morisseau’s readers would have recognized the references to the penitentiary in Port-au-Prince and U.S. Immigration’s Krome Service Processing Center in Miami. Certain things have changed since Morisseau wrote those lines. “Criminal aliens” raised on our streets are not the same as asylum-seekers afraid to be killed on theirs. But they all have something in common with us: their humanity.
Former President Clinton should speak out against the imminent deportation of Haitians, “criminal alien” or otherwise. They aren’t all unsympathetic, and even those who are deserve our protection.
Then Clinton should address the laws making these deportations possible in the first place. They are unjust laws for which he bears responsibility.
Mark Dow is author of American Gulag: Inside US Immigration Prisons (California 2004), which was condemned by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Public Affairs and used as a resource by the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General (OIG) in its audits of detention centers. He teaches English at Hunter College CUNY in New York.
Photo by Matthew Marek/American Red Cross via Flickr.
Read full entry »Several states are taking steps to target "hard-core drunken drivers," defined as drivers with a blood-alcohol content of 0.15% or higher, or offenders who have been arrested before for drunken driving within the past 10 years, reports USA Today. The country has undergone a cultural shift on drunken driving since Mothers Against Drunk Driving was founded in the early 1980s, but some drivers still haven't gotten the message. Last year, more than 70% of all drunken-driving crashes involved hard-core offenders.
The National Transportation Safety Board has made combating hard-core drunken driving a top priority. It is urging states to adopt an 11-point program to reduce it. No state has adopted all 11 components, which include sobriety checkpoints and alternatives to jail. Several states took steps this year to fight the problem. Missouri passed a law requiring jail time for DUI offenders with blood-alcohol contents of 0.15% and higher. Vermont required hard-core drunken drivers to have vehicles equipped with ignitions that won't start if the driver has been drinking. California authorized courts to order 10-year revocations of driver's licenses for those convicted of drunken driving three or more times.
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An immigration program meant to catch the most dangerous criminals has raised questions about the priorities of immigration enforcement.
In mid-November, the New York City Council convened a hearing to discuss immigration policy in its city jails. The meeting ran more than five hours and mixed statistics, testimony and outrage as the audience tried to determine what implementing an immigration program called Secure Communities would mean for the city.
But New York, like many other jurisdictions around the country, found itself with more questions than answers.
Launched in 2008, Secure Communities is a Department of Homeland Security program that identifies deportable immigrants in U.S. jails. Under the program, an arrestee’s fingerprints are checked against federal criminal and immigration databases, giving U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) technological access to local prisons and jails.
ICE and local law enforcement are notified immediately of the arrestee’s immigration status. ICE can then issue a detainer against the arrested individual--meaning the person can be held until ICE decides whether to initiate deportation proceedings against them.
Secure Communities has been activated in 788 jurisdictions in 34 states. The agency plans to implement the program in every state and local jail by 2013.
According to ICE’s Fiscal Year 2010 Fact Sheet, Secure Communities targets and assists “all local communities in the removal of those criminal aliens representing the greatest threat to community safety.” In fiscal year 2010 alone, the Secure Communities program deported more than 1,000 aliens convicted for homicide, nearly 6,000 convicted of sex offenses, more than 45,000 aliens convicted of drug offenses, and nearly 28,000 convicted of driving under the influence of drugs or alcohol.
‘No-cost’ immigration control
For many law enforcement officials and community members, the Secure Communities program is a no-cost, simple way to control immigration and protect residents from potentially violent criminals, without turning local police into immigration officials.
“The program identifies individuals who are here in our country illegally and commit serious crimes, without profiling or enforcement of federal immigration laws by our deputies,” says Fairfax County, Virginia Sheriff Stan Barry in an ICE press release. “There’s no additional workload for our staff and does not cost a dime to Fairfax County or to our residents.”
Much like Arizona’s controversial SB170 law and the 287(g) program, the Secure Communities program is, undoubtedly, changing the face of immigration enforcement in the United States by giving ICE unprecedented access to prisons and jails across the country.
Supporters of the program say that complaints about Secure Communities miss the point: criminal or not, the program targets individuals who broke U.S. law.
"Where it is written that you have to commit a serious felony to have something done to get you out of the country?” says Ira Mehlman, spokesperson for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, an advocacy group that calls for reducing immigration levels. “The penalty is, if you are caught in this country illegally, you are removed."
Police departments already work with federal agencies, notes Mehlman, adding that ICE shouldn’t be exempt.
“Every single day, the New York City police department works with the FBI, the ATF, and the DEA---nobody seems to object to that (and) nobody is asking them to go out and do the job of federal immigration authorities,” he adds. “But if somebody falls into your lap, they ought to have the responsibility to run that person to federal immigration authorities."
But although the Secure Communities program seems an efficient way to catch and deport immigrant law-breakers, some wonder if the costs of the program outweigh the benefits.
Mixed Message
ICE has offered a mixed and perplexing message to the three communities around the country that have tried to opt-out of the Secure Communities program. In September, the County Board of Arlington, Virginia voted unanimously to opt out of the program, because officials feared it would “promote a culture of fear and distrust of law enforcement, ” according to the Board’s published resolution.
By early November, after writing a letter to ICE asking for information about opting out, County Manager Barbara M. Donnellan and Arlington’s police chief and sheriff met with ICE and found that they had two options. They could either not receive the results of federal database searches, meaning local law enforcement would not receive crucial information about the arrestee—such as known aliases or criminal history—or they could decline to share fingerprints with ICE and the FBI. Virginia law, like many states, requires that an arrestee’s fingerprints be checked against both state and federal databases, rendering it impossible for Arlington to opt out.
Like Arlington, San Francisco and Santa Clara, Calif. have each struggled to define their responsibilities and requirements to ICE.
ICE initially told the cities the program was not optional. Then, last September, a memo from Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano implied that communities could in fact chose not to send fingerprints of those they arrest to immigration authorities.
“A local law enforcement agency that does not wish to participate in the Secure Communities deployment plan must formally notify the Assistant Director for the Secure Communities program,” Napolitano wrote. She added that jurisdictions that did not wish to participate would still be responsible for notifying ICE about “suspected criminal aliens” in their custody.
Both Arlington and San Francisco told ICE in writing that they did not want to be “deployed.” But ICE reversed itself again in November, and informed both that opting out was not, in fact, an option.
“Jurisdictions cannot opt out of Secure Communities as it is fundamentally an information sharing program between federal partners,” wrote ICE spokesman Ivan Ortiz Delgado in an email to The Crime Report. According to ICE, once a state signs an Memorandum of Agreement with ICE approving the program, jurisdictions may decide when, but not if, they wish to begin the program.
“Should a jurisdiction not wish to activate on its scheduled date in the Secure Communities deployment plan, ICE will gladly work with them to address any concerns and determine appropriate next steps,” Delgado added.
Washington D.C. did, however, terminate its agreement with ICE last summer, and it may still be possible to opt out at the state level.
New York balks
Two weeks after the meeting downtown, the New York City Council called on New York State Governor David Paterson to do just that, but the move seems unlikely. Although New York City has resisted signing on to the program, 11 local departments in the state have made moves to implement the fingerprint-sharing plan.
“Communities right now don’t have to implement it right away,” says John Caher, spokesman for the state’s Division of Criminal Justice Services. But Caher notes that the state has reason to support the program.
“New York State and in particular New York City is by far the premier target in this country for terrorism,” he says. “There is a legitimate rationale.”
New York City already cooperates with ICE through the Criminal Alien Program, which reviews the immigration records of all inmates at the Rikers Island jail complex. ICE interviews about 4,000 people at Rikers each year, 3,000 of which are pre-trial detainees, according to data obtained by the New Sanctuary Coalition in New York, a coalition of pro-immigration advocacy groups and individuals.
ICE detains about 3,200 Rikers inmates a year, who then get sent to facilities across the country, many in the southwest. Criminal charges are habitually dropped, but immigration detainees do not have the legal right to council, so many immigration detention cases go uncontested.
Make the Road New York is one of several immigrant-rights groups in the city that has opposed ICE’s presence at Rikers Island. They worry Secure Communities will exacerbate an already problematic program.
“Right now they have carte blanche to do what they want,” says Javier Valdez, deputy director of Make the Road. “We need to make sure that ICE is following the national rhetoric and going after the hardened criminals.”
Who gets deported?
ICE has said that Secure Communities places priority on prosecuting and deporting the most dangerous criminals, convicted of “level one” offenses like murder and other violent felonies. Critics are concerned that the program seeks to deport any undocumented or otherwise deportable but non-criminal immigrant found in the databases.
The numbers seem to support this. According to ICE’s, non-criminals seem to be keeping pace with Level 1 and 2 offenders. Last year, ICE booked 33,188 non-criminals and 11,173 Level 3 offenders, or those convicted of a misdemeanor, 36,390 Level 2 offenders, and 30,967 Level 1 offenders.
According to ICE spokesman Ortiz-Delgado, more aliens have been convicted of Level 2 and Level 3 crimes simply because more individuals commit those crimes. However, Ortiz-Delgado says, “ICE prioritizes the removal of criminal aliens convicted of Level 1 offenses, allocating resources to remove those aliens first.”
Those resources have grown exponentially in recent years. ICE appropriated $200 million for the Secure Communities program during fiscal year 2010. But that is only a small sliver of the $5.7 billion budget for the department. About $2.55 billion of that is allocated for detention and removal operations in fiscal year 2010, more than twice the amount budgeted in 2005.
Impact on Community Policing
Many local officials are concerned that the program will discourage immigrant groups from cooperating in police investigations or reporting crime, destroying often hard-earned trust between local law enforcement and communities living off the grid.
Lack of information on the Secure Communities program has also led many immigrants to speculate that local law enforcement and immigration enforcement are one and the same.
“Tight-knit communities have informal methods of communication which aren’t always 100 percent accurate,” says San Francisco Sheriff Michael Hennessey. “When they hear the story of someone who was not convicted of a crime being taken away and disappeared, I think it sends a chilling message to that community: ‘Don’t deal with the police because they are going to turn you over to ICE.’”
“The concern is that if the immigrant community, whether they are here legally or not, will be reluctant to report crimes or come forward as witnesses because they would be fearful of being caught up in the ICE dragnet,” Hennessey adds.
Hennessey says reports are circulating of domestic violence victims being deported after they reported their abuser.
“I know that there are cases where police have responded to a domestic violence call,” he says. “They arrest both parties. One of them is a victim, but they both get reported to ICE.”
Oversight and enforcement
According to federal reports, ICE does not have a strong track record of oversight and management of its enforcement and detention policies.
A 2007 report from the Government Accountability Office found that ICE did not regularly update its training materials and manuals. Some dated from before the Department of Homeland Security was created in 2002. “As a result,” the report said, “ICE officers are at risk of taking actions that do not support operation objectives and making removal decisions that do not reflect the most recent legal developments.”
Another GAO review released in January 2009, found serious issues with the implementation of the 287(g) program, which deputizes local law enforcement to act as immigration officers. ICE told investigators the program strove to enhance the security of communities “by addressing serious criminal activity committed by removable aliens.” Yet investigators found “some participating agencies are using their 287(g) authority to process for removal aliens who have committed minor offenses,” like speeding, open-container violations or public urination.
Like Secure Communities, the 287(g) program does not prohibit local government from pointing ICE toward people arrested for minor offenses. But the GAO report presented an issue that could grow as Secure Communities goes forward. “If all the participating agencies sought assistance to remove aliens for such minor offenses,” the report said, “ICE would not have the detention space to detain all of the aliens referred to them.”
ICE declined to respond to a question about the fiscal impact of the full implementation of Secure Communities, but both supporters and critics of the program believe ICE cannot implement Secure Communities across the country without significantly increasing its detention capacity.
Private companies, with the support of the federal government, have already begun to build new facilities to accommodate the growing number of individuals detained under Secure Communities.
One such facility in Farmville, Virginia, stands to receive about $213,000 in revenue and 300 jobs, according to a recent article in The Washington Post. Over the next year, the $21 million, privately-run center expects to hold over 1,000 detainees, most of them found through the Secure Communities program.
Immigration in the courts
But exactly how many people have been detained and deported through the Secure Communities program remains a mystery. ICE has evaded repeated attempts by groups to obtain specific data on the program.
Data does show, however, that immigration courts are throwing out a significant number of the immigration detention cases that come before them.
During the last three months of fiscal year 2010, courts rejected nearly one out of every three cases, according to a report released by The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), a non-partisan research and data distribution organization at Syracuse University. In some of the busiest courts—New York, Los Angeles, Miami, Oregon and Philadelphia—more than half the cases were judged to be without merit.
The data suggests that ICE is either not screening cases before they enter the legal system, or is failing to present compelling cases in court, according to Syracuse University professor Susan Long, co-director of TRAC. How much of this is tied to Secure Communities is impossible to know, Long said, because ICE refuses to release that data.
“There are hard choices here, whether we think about it from our tax dollars and efficiency, cheating security, or we think about it from the perspective of how people are being treated and the adverse impacts on people’s lives,” says Long.
“If we really want to have a reasoned debate here, which I think the vast majority of people do, we need to have the government release the data so that the facts will be on the table.”
Lisa Riordan Seville and Hannah Rappleye are freelance reporters living in Brooklyn.
Photo courtesy ICE
Read full entry »Mother Jones magazine says the country's 235 immigration judges are overworked and their dockets drastically overloaded. A historic backlog is partly to blame, but so is the Obama administration's goal of deporting 400,000 people this year, or about 1,700 cases per judge. The focus is on numbers, not the quality or fairness of the process, says Bruce Einhorn, a former Los Angeles immigration judge. Successive administrations have viewed the courts as a "widget factory," he says. "The only issue they consider is how many people are needed to produce as many widgets as possible."
Caught in the middle are the judges, for whom mind-numbing bureaucracy collides with thorny moral issues. Most of the time, they work without even basic staff like bailiffs and stenographers. Increased immigration enforcement means that their workload is the highest it has ever been—three to four times larger than caseloads in other federal courts—but a combination of slow hiring and high turnover has left one in six judge positions vacant. In a recent survey, immigration judges reported dramatically more stress than other professionals: They were more burned out than doctors, international aid workers, even prison wardens.
Read full entry »National Public Radio says an investigation revealed a "quiet, behind-the-scenes effort to help draft and pass Arizona Senate Bill 1070 by an industry that stands to benefit from it: the private prison industry." Based on its review of campaign finance reports, lobbying documents and corporate records, NPR says the anti-immigration law amounted to "a new business model to lock up illegal immigrants."
The law is being challenged in the courts. But if it's upheld, it requires police to lock up anyone they stop who cannot show proof they entered the country legally. NPR says the law, which could mean hundreds of millions of dollars in profits to private prison companies, was born at a meeting last December at a Washington, D.C., hotel of a secretive group called the American Legislative Exchange Council. It's a membership organization of state legislators and powerful corporations and associations, such as the tobacco company Reynolds American Inc., ExxonMobil and the NRA. Another member is the Corrections Corporation of America, the largest private prison company in the country. The 50 or so people at the hotel meeting included officials of the CCA, sources said.
Read full entry »A surge in U.S. deportations of criminals was credited partly to the Secure Communities program, which allows local law enforcement officers to check the immigration status of every person, including American citizens, booked into a county or local jail, the New York Times reports. The U.S. deported a record 392,862 immigrants over the last year, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said yesterday.
About half of those deported — 195,772 — were convicted criminals, also a record, and an increase of more than 81,000 deportations of criminals over the final year of George W. Bush’s presidency. As midterm elections approach, Obama administration officials are facing intense pressure to show they are tough on illegal immigration. States have enacted laws to crack down, citing a failure of the federal government to do the job. A broad Arizona law drew a lawsuit from the federal government and an outcry from Latinos, who said it could lead to harassment and racial profiling. A federal judge stayed central provisions of the law. In some races for Congress, a candidate’s position on the Arizona law has become a litmus test for many voters, especially among Republicans.
Read full entry »More illegal immigrants with criminal convictions are being deported in recent years, driving up the number of people being removed from the U.S. say federal data reported by the Sacramento Bee. Deportation numbers for those deemed noncriminals have declined. Of the 350,000 people deported this year, more than half had criminal convictions, a 55 percent increase since 2008, says the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. Noncriminal deportations – which include voluntary returns – have dropped 30 percent.
ICE officials said the trend shows a shift in the agency's priorities to focus on removing the most dangerous criminals from the country. Mike Vaughn of ICE's Sacramento office said the agency pays attention to anyone in the country illegally, as well as legal permanent residents who may have committed a crime that could jeopardize their status. "But if we are looking at a guy who's just here with his family trying to better his life vs. a repeated offender, our priority is the criminal," said Vaughn. ICE attributes the increased deportations of undocumented criminals to expanded partnerships with local and state law enforcement and technological advances such as video teleconferencing, which allows ICE to interview potential deportees in remote county jails.
About 47,000 people have been removed or deported from the U.S. after the Homeland Security Department sifted through 3 million sets of fingerprints taken from bookings at local jails, reports the Associated Press. About one-quarter of those kicked out of the country did not have criminal records, according to government data obtained by immigration advocacy groups that have filed a lawsuit.
At issue is a fingerprint-sharing program known as Secure Communities that the government says is focused on getting rid of the "worst of the worst" criminal immigrants from the U.S. But immigration advocates say the government instead spends too much time on lower-level criminals or non-criminals. Immigration and Customs Enforcement divides crimes into three categories, with Level 1 being the most serious. Most of those deported committed Level 2 or 3 crimes or were non-criminals, a monthly report of Secure Communities statistics shows. Peter Markowitz, director of the Immigration Justice Clinic at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York, called it a "bait and switch."
Read full entry »Undocumented immigrants who decide to leave the United States because of increasing enforcement and decreasing job prospects now face one more obstacle: the threat of arrest and deportation by border officers inspecting outbound traffic, says USA Today. Federal authorities said that when illegal immigrants are detected trying to leave the country, they are not just ushered across the line. Instead, they are processed and formally removed.
The consequences of an arrest can be harsh: Those deported for unauthorized presence in the U.S. may be barred for 10 years from seeking legal immigrant papers. In addition, a later arrest for illegal entry may be prosecuted criminally. Although the scrutiny was designed to catch smugglers delivering currency and firearms to Mexican cartels, immigrants with otherwise clean records sometimes get caught in that net, although inspectors use discretion in deciding whether a person should be allowed to accept voluntary removal.
Read full entry »A federal "Secure Communities" database designed to identify non-citizens has helped authorities remove 31,000 convicted criminals from the U.S. in less than two years and is being aggressively expanded throughout the nation by the Obama administration, the Arizona Republic reports.
Nearly a third of immigrants flagged for deportation from North Carolina jails were arrested on traffic violations, says a study by researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and reported by the Raleigh News & Observer. The review of the 287 (g) program, a local-federal partnership named after a section of federal immigration law, looked at data from 2007 to 2009 in five jails. The study concluded that the program failed to meet its objective of targeting violent criminals, said Mai Thi Nguyen, one of its authors. Of the jail inmates flagged for deportation, just 13.3 percent had been arrested on felony charges. "The program does not meet the stated goal of focusing on violent crimes," Nguyen said. "The majority of people being processed for the program are there for minor crimes."
Of 14,805 inmates screened during the period, there were 9,552 processed for deportation statewide. Traffic violations led to 30 to 57 percent of the deportation cases in various counties. North Carolina was ahead of other states as an early proponent of the program, which trains sheriff's deputies to inquire about a person's immigration status and start deportation proceedings for those in the country illegally. Critics have warned that local enforcement of immigration laws could lead to racial profiling or a reluctance of immigrants to report crimes committed against them.
A new report by the Urban Institute analyzes how children are affected by the results of their parents' immigration violations. "Facing Our Future: Children in the Aftermath of Immigration Enforcement" examines a sample of the more than 5 million children whose unauthorized parents have been scooped up by immigration authorities, and looks at housing, food, mental health and behavior, to create a picture of the affect of arrest, detention and deportation on children, most of whom are U.S. citizens.
Use The Crime Report for more information on Immigration and Deportation.
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A new study out of Syracuse University looks at the results of a more than 100 percent increase in the budget of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement's Detention and Removal budget in the years 2005-2009. According the report produced by TRAC, ICE had pledged to focus on detaining people who posed a threat to society, but the number of non-criminal detainees doubled, while the number of criminal detainees remained the same: "Instead of giving priority to the detention and removal of aliens convicted of crimes, the agency seemingly focused on filling detention beds."
Click here to read the study.
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