Interior Enforcement
After the Raid is Over: Marshalltown, Iowa and the Consequences of Worksite Enforcement Raids
For many years, large-scale worksite raids constituted a major element of federal immigration enforcement. While the large-scale and well-publicized worksite raids have tapered, immigration enforcement has continued to increase, and the number of deportations and detentions is at an all-time high. The ever-expanding arsenal of ICE enforcement policies, together with harsh state and local laws and policies, have harmful side effects that go far beyond the unauthorized population. Policies meant to target unauthorized immigrants also impact their family members, employers, and neighbors. A large number of the people affected are U.S.-citizen children. Latinos, Asians, and others who “sound” or “appear” to be foreign may be the victims of mistakes (such as the U.S. citizens who have been mistakenly deported), or may experience civil rights violations, discrimination, or profiling. In states and localities with anti-immigrant laws and policies, negative attitudes towards immigrants and nasty rhetoric might be enough to cause lawfully present people to leave. Read More
How Expanding E-Verify Hurts the Economy and American Workers
By Tyler Moran, National Immigration law Center. The Government Accountability Office (GAO) recently released a report, Employment Verification: Federal Agencies Have Taken Steps to Improve E-Verify, but Significant Challenges Remain. GAO’s verdict on E-Verify (a program to verify the employment eligibility of new hires) is in: this program is not yet ready for prime time. According to GAO, risks posed by mandatory E-Verify range from encouraging employers to skirt the rules to job losses for native born and immigrant work-authorized people alike. Policymakers who want to roll out this flawed program as quickly as possible should heed the report’s warning that “significant challenges remain” with E-Verify. Read More
A Framework for Effective Immigration Worksite Employer Enforcement
Immigration enforcement is an extremely important national priority. Effective control of our nation’s borders is essential to our national security. The regulation and control of those who enter the country, along with the prosecution of those who violate immigration laws once they are here, is fundamental to our integrity as a nation of laws. Read More
Win, Lose or….Draw? The Supreme Court Tackles Arizona’s Employer Sanctions Law
Those following the Obama Administration’s legal challenge to Arizona’s SB 1070 have likely heard about “preemption”—the legal concept governing when state laws conflict with, and are therefore superseded by, acts of Congress. The heart of the dispute over SB 1070 is whether states have a right to provide assistance that the federal government does not want. No one knows if or how the Supreme Court will ultimately answer that question. But a number of hints may emerge when the Justices issue a ruling in Chamber of Commerce v. Whiting, a case testing the legality of a different law known as the Legal Arizona Workers Act. Passed in 2007, the act imposed new requirements to prevent employers from hiring unauthorized workers, as well as harsh consequences for doing so. While the Justices’ questions during Wednesday’s oral argument offered reason for hope among immigrants’ rights advocates on one part of the law, they left the fate of the other unresolved. Read More
Reading the Morton Memo: Federal Priorities and Prosecutorial Discretion
On June 30, 2010, the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), John Morton, issued a memo to the agency that reflected the Obama administration’s oft repeated intent to focus removal efforts on serious offenders. Morton noted: In light of the large number of administrative violations the agency is charged with addressing and the limited enforcement resources the agency has available, ICE must prioritize the use of its enforcement personnel, detention space, and removal resources to ensure that the removals the agency does conduct promote the agency's highest enforcement priorities, namely national security, public safety, and border security. Coupled with last year’s announcement that ICE would not engage in the kind of major worksite raids that became common during the Bush administration, the “Morton Memo” potentially marks a new phase in the enforcement of immigration law. Moreover, the memo gives us insight into the Obama administration’s approach to prosecutorial discretion in immigration enforcement. Read More
Non-Citizens with Mental Disabilities
In 2009, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detained approximately 380,000 people. Roughly 15 percent of the non-citizen population in detention, or around 57,000 people, have a mental disability. Unfortunately, these mental disabilities often go unrecognized by law enforcement and immigration officials, resulting in less access to justice for the individual and greater confusion and complexity for the attorneys and judges handling the cases. The consequences of immigration enforcement for unauthorized immigrants, long-term permanent residents, asylum-seekers, and other non-citizens with mental disabilities can be severe. Even U.S. citizens have been unlawfully detained and deported because their mental disabilities made it impossible to effectively defend themselves in court. Teasing out the complicated issues of fair treatment for people with mental disabilities caught up in our broken immigration system is not easy, particularly because it must be disentangled from the many challenges facing all immigrants who find themselves in immigration custody or in proceedings before the immigration court. As a report by Human Rights Watch and the American Civil Liberties Union aptly put it: Read More
Sanctuary Cities and the State Criminal Alien Assistance Program: Two Things that Do Not Go Together
The Center for Immigration Studies recently released a report entitled Subsidizing Sanctuaries: The State Criminal Alien Assistance Program, which claims the federal government is giving State Criminal Alien Assistance Program (SCAAP) grant money to “sanctuary” cities. The problem with this argument is that the very fact these cities (San Francisco, Chicago, Arlington, VA) are receiving SCAAP money means that they are not providing sanctuary to immigrants. SCAAP money goes to localities to reimburse them for the costs of jailing immigrants. Read More
ICE’S Enforcement Priorities and the Factors that Undermine Them
As part of its strategy to gain support for comprehensive immigration reform, the administration has continually touted its enforcement accomplishments. In fact, over the last two years, the Obama administration has committed itself to a full-court press to demonstrate how committed the administration is to removing criminals and others who remain in the country without proper documentation. They have continued to use the enforcement programs of the previous administration, including partnering with state and local law enforcement agencies to identify, detain, and deport immigrants. However, in doing so, they have lost the ability to fully control their own enforcement priorities and enforcement outcomes, and the results have demonstrated that the state and local partners are not necessarily committed to the same priorities. At an October 6, 2010, press conference, Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano announced that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had removed more than 392,000 individuals in Fiscal Year (FY) 2010, and presented other “record-breaking immigration enforcement statistics achieved under the Obama administration.” In addition to record-breaking overall numbers, Napolitano also announced the “unprecedented numbers of convicted criminal alien removals” in FY 2010. Of the 392,000 removals in FY 2010, more than 195,000 were classified as “convicted criminal aliens,” which was 81,000 more criminal removals than in FY 2008. Read More
Arizona State Senator Russell Pearce Continues Immigration Crusade Despite Budget Crisis
A cog in the wheel of local enforcement legislation, Arizona state Senator and now Senate President-elect, Russell Pearce, predictably said he will continue his immigration crusade to repeal part of the 14th Amendment despite the looming state budget crisis. A recent article points out that Pearce, in the throes of last minute campaigning, pledged that he would make boosting Arizona’s flailing economy his number one priority instead of pushing yet another immigration bill. Not surprisingly, however, Pearce told reporters today that “he never promised the 14th Amendment bills wouldn’t be heard, only that he wouldn’t sponsor it.” Sound fishy? That’s because it is. Sponsor of Arizona’s controversial enforcement law SB1070, Pearce has a history of not only prioritizing immigration enforcement legislation, but accepting campaign contributions from the prison lobby who helped write it. Read More
Finally, an Immigration Bill that Embraces Racial Profiling!
Florida State Representative William Snyder, a former police officer from Miami, drafted his own version of Arizona’s SB 1070 for the state—a bill has the potential to be even more offensive. The bill mimics SB 1070—allowing officers to stop persons based on a “reasonable suspicion” that they are undocumented in order to check their immigration status. As if that wasn’t bad enough, Rep. Synder’s bill actually goes a step further by providing a caveat that the person stopped will be presumed legal if they have a Canadian passport or a passport from a country which participates in our visa waiver program—the majority of which are Western European countries. Naturally, this caveat has groups enraged over the potential for racial profiling. Read More
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