In the federal government’s first fiscal year entirely under President Trump, ICE detained more people than a year earlier, but still lags behind Obama-era highs. Fiscal year 2018, which ran from October 1, 2017 to September 31, 2018, saw 396,448 people detained by ICE and 256,085 removed from the United States, ICE reported. ICE’s detention capacity has grown in recent years. Under President Obama, Congress regularly increased the agency’s budget for confinement operations. The agency uses over 600 facilities spread throughout the United States, many of which are nothing more than county [...]
Oregon lawsuit challenges state, local participation in immigration enforcement
By Christopher N. Lasch and Mark Fleming On Thursday, a state trial court judge in Wasco County, Oregon (of Wild, Wild Country renown) will hear summary judgment arguments in Stovall, et. al. v. Northern Oregon Corrections dba NORCOR, No. 17-CV-31082 (Or. Cir. Ct.). At the heart of the lawsuit is a contract known as an “Intergovernmental Services Agreement” (IGSA) between NORCOR, a four-county public prison system, and the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency. Under the IGSA, NORCOR jails people for ICE who are in civil immigration proceedings. The question for the trial court [...]
Bulk of immigration prisoners commit basic offenses
Immigration crime is neither unusual nor new. Federal law threatens imprisonment for a host of migration activity. Impersonating a United States citizen can lead to three years behind bars. Smuggling people into the country is too, and if anyone dies in the process it can even result in execution. Far less newsworthy, entering the country without the correct permission is also criminalized. Since 1929, federal law has prohibited entering the United States without the government’s authorization. Doing that once can result in six months imprisonment. Entering the United States without [...]
Immigration crime prison population 2000-2016
Over the summer, the Trump administration made headlines worldwide when it decided to separate families arriving at the border while criminally prosecuting the parents. This was an especially cruel instance of using the bludgeon of criminal law to target migration. But it wasn’t the first time this happened. Across the Southwest, criminal prosecution of migration has been a common feature in federal courthouses for many years. Many of these individuals are sentenced to time-served, meaning they do little jail time beyond what they spend behind bars awaiting prosecution. Government data that [...]
Family detention to family separation and back
When Attorney General Sessions announced the Trump administration’s family separation policy, all eyes turned to the border. In countless reports, we saw parents brought to federal courts without a clue about their children’s whereabouts and kids winding up in federal custody suddenly alone. Soon enough, the family separation policy reverberated throughout the country. By the time President Trump signed an executive order supposedly backtracking, the administration’s next step was in view: families would be detained together. The trauma of family separation and family detention will be the [...]
Under Trump, ICE No Longer Recommends Release for Immigrants in Detention
Kate Evans & Robert Koulish In summer 2018, the Trump administration ratcheted up its immigration enforcement and detention practices with new family separation and forced detention, as part of its “zero tolerance” strategy aimed at deterring asylum applicants from exercising their asylum rights under the 1980 Refugee Act. Part of its effort was to manipulate the immigration risk detention tool, known as the risk classification assessment, or RCA. The risk tool was designed during the Obama administration to reduce the arbitrary detention of immigrants by tailoring it to risk. A new [...]
ICE ignores detention oversight, Inspector General finds
ICE audits its detention centers, but too infrequently too keep anyone in check and doesn’t follow up to make sure changes are made, a government report issued last month disclosed. The agency has very little capacity to make sure that its sprawling network of over 200 immigration prisons meets the government’s own standards. Worse, glaring deficiencies go uncorrected, sometimes deliberately, because ICE’s oversight system is hobbled by lack of funding and under-attention. The DHS Inspector General’s document, issued June 26, reads like an ICE abolitionist’s talking points. Inspections are [...]
Resisting family separation and family detention in South Texas
President Donald Trump’s policy of separating migrant families is quickly morphing into the expansion of an existing policy of detaining families. At the end of June, the federal government announced that an immigration prison—the Port Isabel Service Processing Center—would be its “primary family reunification and removal center,” though it has since walked that policy back. We work out of this facility and have visited it many times. Call it what they like, this is a prison. That Port Isabel is at the center of the administration’s new policy to expand family detention only underscores [...]
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