Today, ICE issued a new policy regarding use of immigration detainers. Sometimes called immigration holds, detainers are requests by ICE that a local law enforcement agency continue holding someone in the LEAs custody. The purpose of continued confinement is to give ICE time to pick up the individual. The policy announced today instructs immigration officers, including local police deputized as immigration officers pursuant to a 287(g) agreement, to issue detainers against anyone who they have probable cause to believe is removable from the United States. Though couched in carefully crafted [...]
Trump asks Congress for $3 billion in supplemental funding for FY 2017
Earlier today, President Trump asked Congress to find $3 billion in funding to pay for the president’s immigration executive orders through the end of September 2017. This request comes as an addition to the billions of dollars Congress has already given the Department of Homeland Security for fiscal year 2017 operations. In particular, the White House requests supplemental funds to pay for the border wall, an expansion to ICE’s immigration detention system, and to prepare to hire more Border Patrol and ICE agents. As the president’s most expensive immigration policing project, the [...]
DHS issues border policing plans
In response to President Trump’s January 25 executive order on border policing, the Department of Homeland Security issued a memo with details about how it plans to carry out the president’s directives. The memo promises to further militarize the Mexican border, expand the nation’s already unprecedented immigration detention capacity, and skirt the immigration court system. Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly signed the memo, titled “Implementing the President’s Border Security and Immigration Enforcement Improvements Policies,” on February 20, 2017. The memo consists of instructions [...]
ICE enforcement actions: Something old, something
ICE is in the streets. President Trump is tweeting away. And rumors are flying. None of this is surprising. On the campaign trail, President Trump turned his consistent demonization of migrants into a cornerstone of his victory. Since taking office, he has not relented. On Sunday, the President tweeted, “The crackdown on illegal criminals is merely the keeping of my campaign promise. Gang members, drug dealers & others are being removed!” Meanwhile, word-of-mouth reports and social media are supplying a stream of reports about immigration enforcement actions. Many turn out to be [...]
Will PEP lead to less detention than Secure Communities? Not likely
By Patricia M. Corrales Secure Communities, Priority Enforcement Program, Potato, Potatoe...What’s the difference? The shortest answer is “none.” The controversial Secure Communities program together with ICE’s 287(g) program, established under the Bush Administration and directly administered by former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, came to an end under Obama’s executive action initiative on immigration announced on November 21, 2014. In its place, Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh C. Johnson announced the Department of Homeland Security’s (“DHS”) new Priority Enforcement Program [...]
Naturalizing Immigration Imprisonment
Every day, roughly 33,000 people spend the night imprisoned while waiting to learn whether they will be allowed to remain in the United States. Thousands more are confined on charges of having committed an immigration crime. Others are behind bars because they were already convicted. The substantive law that applies to people in each of these categories differs: civil law governed by the Immigration and Naturalization Act for those in removal proceedings, and criminal law governed by the federal penal code (and, to a smaller degree, its state counterparts). That is largely where the [...]
Revisiting the exclusionary rule’s role in immigration proceedings
By Lindsay Adkin Thirty years ago in its landmark decision, INS v. Lopez-Mendoza, 468 U.S. 1032 (1984), the Supreme Court held that the exclusionary rule should not apply to removal proceedings. Applying a cost-benefit analysis, the Court concluded that whatever benefit exclusion offered in immigration proceedings was outweighed by the cost of allowing removable immigrants to remain in the United States. Whether or not that was a proper assessment in 1984, the state of immigration law today—especially the rise of crimmigration law—leads to the opposite conclusion: the exclusionary rule [...]
“Looking for immigration problems” and other misunderstandings of crimmigration law
In this month’s The Atlantic, journalist Daniel Bergner chronicles competing views of stop-and-frisk policies. The New York Police Department’s intensive use of stop-and-frisk against black and Latino residents received intense scrutiny, eventually resulting in a federal district court's finding that the department has been hiding under this constitutionally permissible practice to engage in constitutionally impermissible racial profiling. Bergner discusses New York, but spends most of his reporting in Newark, New Jersey tagging along with local officers on patrol. There he encounters an [...]