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 [...]
PEP vs. Secure Communities
Last November, Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson announced the end of the Secure Communities program. Beloved by the Obama Administration, Secure Communities (often described simply as S-Comm) came under heavy criticism by advocates, state and local lawmakers, and police officials. Whatever victory advocates could celebrate was short lived. In the same memo in which Johnson announced S-Comm’s demise, he added that DHS would replace it with a new initiative called the Priority Enforcement Program (PEP). Since then advocates and scholars have been trying to figure out how PEP differs [...]
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 [...]
“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 [...]
No Evidence that Secure Communities Improves Public Safety or Affects Policing: Preliminary Findings
By Elina Treyger The launch of the Secure Communities program in 2008, and its subsequent gradual expansion to the entire country, constituted an important development in building up the crimmigration regime. The program, which requires that fingerprints gathered by any local law enforcement agency (LEA) at arrest be automatically checked against the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) IDENT database, has ignited considerable controversy. DHS officials and other proponents of the program have claimed that Secure Communities not only facilitates the detection of removable non-citizens, [...]
More humane immigration law
Last week, President Obama ordered his administration to review whether immigration law can be enforced in a more “humane” manner. To borrow a refrain from his first campaign for president, “Yes, we can.” First, he can reduce the number of people detained and second he can reduce the number of people removed from the United States. Here are just a few ideas how the Obama Administration can do that without waiting for congressional action. First, the President should acknowledge that immigration detention is out of control. At last count (fiscal year 2012), 477,523 people saw the inside of an [...]
Scholar’s Sidebar: The perils of automated immigration policing
The restrictive immigration legislation proposed and sometimes enacted in states and localities throughout the United States in recent years has pushed immigration status into new territory. For years a person’s compliance or non-compliance with immigration laws was difficult if not impossible to discern in the course of ordinary life. People went to church, school, work, the grocery store, government offices, and even prison without others knowing or even asking whether they had received the federal government’s authorization to be present in the United States. Arizona’s Senate Bill 1070, [...]