Detention
The Challenge of Measuring Immigration Enforcement in the United States
The effectiveness of immigration enforcement policies in the United States cannot simply be reduced to removal numbers. In other words, the system’s functionality and fairness cannot be determined by counting how many individuals a president deports each year. An honest analysis should include an understanding of what belies the… Read More
Circuit Court Ruling Affirms Detainers Not Mandatory
As communities continue to debate the harmful impact of large scale immigration enforcement programs such as Secure Communities, the 287(g) Program and the Criminal Alien Program, much of the discussion has centered on the use of “detainers… Read More
New Year, New Leadership and New Opportunities at DHS
The Department of Homeland Security enters 2014 with new leadership, following the confirmation this month of Jeh Johnson and Alejandro Mayorkas for Secretary and Deputy Secretary, respectively. Johnson and Mayorkas bring years of government service to their new jobs. Mayorkas’ tenure as Director of USCIS led to a far more open agency that treated the public as a partner, with innovations such as public comment on policy memos, expanded public engagement opportunities, the entrepreneur-in-residence program, and the delivery of a working program to process DACA applications within two months of the president’s announcement of the program. These successes, coupled with Johnson’s experience as the top Pentagon lawyer, promise a new direction for DHS. Read More
New ICE Deportation Statistics Are No Cause for Celebration
There is little to cheer in the new deportation statistics released by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). While the numbers document a 10 percent decline in the total number of deportations compared to last year, they also reveal the extent to which immigration enforcement resources are still devoted to apprehending, detaining, and deporting individuals who represent no conceivable threat to public safety or national security. In fact, the overwhelming majority of people deported by ICE either have no prior criminal record or were convicted of misdemeanors. While ICE does indeed capture and remove potentially dangerous individuals, most of its resources remain devoted to the enforcement of a broken and unworkable immigration system. The latest decline in removals notwithstanding, the U.S. deportation machine remains severely out of balance and lacking in either flexibility or meaningful opportunities for due process. Read More
New Legal Analysis Shows State Compliance with ICE Detainers May Violate the Constitution
Chicago, New York, and San Francisco now prevent local jails from honoring immigration detainers—requests from federal immigration officials for state and local jails to hold a person so that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents can investigate the person’s immigration status—unless an arrestee has been charged with or convicted of certain criminal offenses. And California’s Trust Act, which does virtually the same thing, will go into effect early next year. Yet, while these states have limited who can be subject to an immigration detainer, there are legal questions surrounding this selective enforcement that call into question whether detainers are legal at all. Read More
Nuevos Informes Revelan Cultura de Crueldad dentro de la Patrulla Fronteriza
Esta semana el American Immigration Council publicó dos nuevos informes que muestran a las claras ciertos patrones sistemáticos en el uso de la fuerza por parte de la Patrulla Fronteriza de los Estados Unidos. En particular, los informes ponen en evidencia una serie de abusos, tanto físicos como verbales, ejercidos contra inmigrantes indocumentados durante el proceso de aprehensión o mientras los mismos están detenidos. Asimismo, documentan prácticas corrientes de retención de pertenencias de los migrantes ocurridas durante el proceso de deportación. Read More
New Reports Expose Subculture of Cruelty Within the U.S. Border Patrol
There is a subculture of cruelty within the Border Patrol—and, more broadly, within the entire machinery of the U.S. deportation regime. From the ranks of frontline Border Patrol agents to the guards in private, for-profit detention facilities, the abuse of detainees is widely tolerated and even accepted. This is the central finding to emerge from the second wave of the Migrant Border Crossing Study (MBCS). Wave II of the MBCS is currently housed in the Center for Latin American Studies at the University of Arizona and the Department of Sociology at George Washington University. The survey is a study of 1,110 randomly selected, recently repatriated migrants who were surveyed in six Mexican cities between 2009 and 2012. The results of this study are being released in a series of three reports titled Bordering on Criminal: The Routine Abuse of Migrants in the Removal System. Read More
The Punishment Should Fit the Crime for Immigrants, Too
The punishment should fit the crime. That maxim is as old as law itself, dating at least as far back as the Old Testament and Hammurabi’s Code. It’s firmly rooted in our Constitution’s Due Process Clause and the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against excessive fines and cruel and unusual punishment. That principle—referred to as proportionality—appears in both our criminal and civil law. It forbids, for example, the imposition of a life sentence for passing a bad check. It means that the state cannot sentence juveniles for non-homicide crimes to life without parole. And it disallows extreme punitive damages awards. So what does proportionality have to say when the government tries to deport a lawful permanent resident who, a decade ago, shoplifted $200 worth of merchandise from a department store? Right now, astonishingly, nothing: immigration judges do not even consider whether a person’s banishment from the United States is a disproportionate punishment for a crime before ordering the person’s removal. But advocates are working to change this. Read More
New York’s Highest Court Says that Noncitizens Must Be Warned of Deportation Risk Before Pleading Guilty
The highest court in New York ruled on Tuesday that due process compels state court judges to warn defendants in criminal proceedings who are not U.S. citizens that pleading guilty to a felony may result in their deportation. The court noted that “deportation is a plea consequence of such tremendous importance, grave impact and frequent occurrence that a defendant is entitled to notice that it may ensue…Due process compels a trial court to apprise a defendant that, if the defendant is not an American citizen, he or she may be deported as a consequence of a guilty plea to a felony.” Read More
Detention Bed Mandate is Just One Example of How Immigration is Being Criminalized
For more than a century, study after study has confirmed two simple yet powerful truths about the relationship between immigration and crime: immigrants are less likely to commit serious crimes or be behind bars than the native-born, and high rates of immigration are not associated with higher rates of either violent or property crime. Unfortunately, immigration policy is frequently shaped more by fear and stereotype than by empirical evidence, which is why immigrants are so often treated like dangerous criminals by the U.S. immigration system. Whole new classes of “felonies” are created which apply only to immigrants, deportation is viewed as a just punishment for even minor crimes, and policies to end unauthorized immigration become more and more punitive rather than more rational and practical. In short, immigration itself is being criminalized. Read More
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