The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency continues to ramp up hardline immigration policing practices, government-issued statistics about the number of detainees indicate. In the transition year that began under President Obama and ended under President Trump, ICE surpassed previous highs in its immigration detention network. In fiscal year 2017—running from October 1, 2016 to September 30, 2017—ICE detained, on average, 38,106 people every day. Called the “average daily population” in official reports, the FY 2017 figure is an increase of approximately 4,000 from the previous year [...]
Supreme Court to hear another immigration imprisonment case
On the heels of its decision allowing prolonged confinement in an ICE detention center to continue, the U.S. Supreme Court decided to hear arguments in another case about the federal government’s practice or locking up migrants. Every day, the Department of Homeland Security detains roughly 34,000 individuals. At a cost of at least $126 per day per person, ICE spends more than $4 million daily to incarcerate. In Nielsen v. Preap, No. 14-16326, the Court will decide whether ICE is required to detain migrants who have served their jail or prison time for a laundry list of crimes and have [...]
If private prisons close…
When the Justice Department announced two weeks ago that it would soon limit its reliance on private prison corporations, the news didn’t take long to reverberate. Advocates rightfully cheered a major step toward ending an egregious moral failure of a policy: Private prisons represent a base commodification of human bondage. For their part, the private prison corporations tried to put on a calm look, but had a tough time succeeding. The Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), one of the two largest private prison operators in the United States, issued a statement the same day as the Justice [...]
Obama’s new DHS budget reflects security focus
President Obama released the final budget request he will make to Congress earlier this month and the pitch for DHS is peppered with costly security measures that fall in line with the department’s existing operations centered on security concerns. At almost $41 billion, the DHS budget request covers everything from FEMA operations to the nation’s principal immigration law enforcement bodies, ICE and CBP. U.S. Dep’t of Homeland Security, Budget-in-Brief: Fiscal Year 2017, at 1 (2016). Combined, the budgets for ICE and CBP comprise almost one-third (30.3 percent) of DHS’ total budget, including [...]
DHS asks for more detention beds, alternatives to detention, prosecutors, & drones
[While all of the information below is accurate regarding the Obama Administration's FY 2016 budget request, it turns out we're already in 2016. I should have written about the FY 2017 budget request (and meant to), but in a late-night blogging oversight I instead wrote about year-old material. My apologies. I'll try to get to the FY 17 budget request next week. I'll leave the FY 16 analysis up as a comparison.] In the last budget request he will make to Congress, President Obama hopes to boost the Department of Homeland Security’s detention network, increase the number of people supervised [...]
BIA: Rehab is no different than jail, at least sometimes
When trying to figure out if a migrant has been sentenced to imprisonment, a court-ordered drug rehabilitation facility should be treated just like jail time, the Board of Immigration Appeals recently held. Matter of Calvillo Garcia, 26 I&N Dec. 697 (BIA 2015). In doing so, the BIA further disincentivized alternative dispositions that have become a mainstay of criminal proceedings as a way of diverting people from prisons and into supportive treatment environments. This case involved an LPR convicted of aggravated assault in Texas and sentenced to five years of community supervision, [...]
9 Cir limits prolonged immigration imprisonment
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit recently reinforced a semblance of rationality that is long tried to inject into the federal government’s civil immigration detention practice. In Rodriguez v. Robbins (Rodriguez III), Nos. 13-56706 & 13-56755, slip op. (9th Cir. October 28, 2015), the court largely affirmed its commitment to critically examining ICE’s conduct inside the vast immigration detention center archipelago. This decision builds off a sustained challenge to detention that advocates have brought before the Ninth Circuit repeatedly since 2009 and in the Central [...]
New Efforts to Push Private Prisons Out of Immigration Detention
By Mariela Olivares As regular readers of this blog and of César’s work know, the history of mass incarceration is one mired in political and societal efforts to criminalize drug-related offenses, to lengthen prison sentences and to increase the severity of punishment for relatively minor offenses. These general criminal justice system reform efforts, which gained greatest steam in the 1980’s, resulted in an incredible increase in the number of people incarcerated in the United States. As we also know, the concomitant effect on immigration detention was also unprecedented. Although [...]