DHS closed the year with a series of important announcements: its 409,000 removals, it plans to shut down its § 287(g) program, and it distributed criteria for ICE field officers to use to determine when to issue an immigration detainer. To Christopher N. Lasch, an assistant professor at the University of Denver who co-directs the law school’s criminal defense clinic, all of these plus last spring’s blockbuster decision in Arizona v. United States support a claim that the federal government lacks the authority to issue immigration detainers as it has been doing with great frequency in recent [...]
U.S. Immigration Policing in the Season of Presidential Elections
The folks over at the Migrants’ Rights Network, a great advocacy group based in London, asked me to share my thoughts on how the presidential election affects immigration policing. Here’s a slightly revised version of the essay originally published on MRN’s Migration Pulse blog: The presidential election in the United States is two weeks away and both major party candidates, as well as third party candidates, know that high Latino turnout in a few key states has the potential to swing the election. Not coincidentally given many Latinos’ strong immigration experience personally or through [...]
Record number of immigration prisoners; 715,000 people removed or returned
The Department of Homeland Security imprisoned a record number of individuals last year and upped the number of people removed or returned from the United States to over 715,000, its newly released annual report indicates. John Simanski & Lesley M. Sapp, Immigration Enforcement Actions: 2011 Annual Report (September 2012). Compiled by staffers at the department’s Office of Immigration Statistics, the Annual Report is a yearly snapshot of immigration law enforcement efforts. The total number of people removed or returned in fiscal year 2011 was 715,495. Of these, 391,953 were removed after [...]
Report details expanding fed immigration prosecutions
A new Justice Department report provides fascinating details about the federal prosecution of immigration activities. Mark Motivans, U.S. Dept. of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Federal Justice Statistics Program: Immigration Offenders in the Federal Justice System, 2010 (July 2012). The report was authored by a Justice Department statistician using data from a host of government agencies. It will come as no surprise to crImmigration.com readers that the report found that federal criminal prosecutions of immigration-related activities have soared in recent years. The roughly 52,000 [...]
Scholars Sidebar: Immigrant Outsider, Alien Invader: Immigration Policing Today
I recently published an introduction to a group of essays about the reappearance of old fears about immigrants in today’s immigration policymaking. César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, Immigrant Outsider, Alien Invader: Immigration Policing Today, 48 California Western Law Review 231 (2012). Despite the unprecedented scope of today’s policing apparatus, I wrote (in the abstract), there is reason for hope: Immigration policing has become a high-tech, multi-pronged affair financed annually by billions of dollars of personnel and the tools of their trade: prisons, weapons, massive computer [...]
New ABA Civil Immigration Detention Standards: Does “Civil” Mean Better Detention or Less Detention?
By Guest Blogger Mark Noferi (Brooklyn Law School) On August 6, 2012, the American Bar Association’s (ABA) full House of Delegates adopted, for the first time, model “Civil Immigration Detention Standards” to guide reform of U.S. immigration detention, America’s fastest growing and least scrutinized incarceration system. ABA, Civil Immigration Detention Standards (Aug. 2012). Donald Kerwin, who led the effort for the ABA Commission on Immigration, called the new ABA standards an “outline” for how “truly civil immigration detention should look and operate.” The ABA standards, if [...]
ICE’s new prisoner transfer policy: Something old, something new
ICE’s new policy regarding prisoner transfers promises to shed more light on decisions to move prisoners from one facility to another, but relies heavily on requirements the agency has long imposed on itself without success and inadvertently identifies major reform obstacles that arise from its heavy reliance on private prison operators. U.S. Immigr. & Customs Enforcement, Policy 11022.1: Detainee Transfers (Jan. 4, 2012). The policy announced in January 2012 makes some significant improvements by recognizing the impact of transfers and the reality of immigrant relationships. For example, [...]
Private prison business is booming; strong growth expected
The economy may still be stuck in the doldrums for most industries, but the largest private prison company is feeling good about where it stands and where it’s headed. The Corrections Corporation of America, the country’s dominant private imprisoning corporation, recently told investors that it is doing a lot of business with DHS and sees plenty of growth potential. CCA, Investor Presentation (March 2012). In a slideshow posted on its web site recently, CCA announced that it has a “$3 billion gross book value portfolio consist[ing] of 92,043 beds comprised of 47 owned facilities with 66,719 [...]