The $1.1 trillion budget bill adopted by Congress last week contained funding for several important crImmigration tactics, including a minimum detention bed requirement and reimbursement for local law enforcement agencies that detain certain migrants convicted of crime. Consolidated Appropriations Act, 2014, H.R. 3547. Overall, ICE was allotted $5,229,461,000 (roughly $5.2 billion) to keep the agency operating through September 30, 2014. The bill instructs DHS to “prioritize the identification and removal of aliens convicted of a crime by the severity of that crime.” This sounds like a simple [...]
Regulating Migrants in Franklin County, Ohio–Part 2
Lauren Hines Within Franklin County, Ohio, the most effective method for finding and removing criminal migrants is regulating the movement of migrants across space. Civil and criminal charges that often lead to a migrant’s arrest are subjective. The high removal rates of migrants without criminal records and migrants facing low-level misdemeanor and civil charges in Franklin County make sense within an enforcement framework that willfully obfuscates the line between criminal and civil codes, and criminalizes migrant interactions with law enforcement for the sake of creating removable [...]
Regulating Migrants in Franklin County, Ohio–Part 1
Lauren Hines The Secure Communities program permits federally-trained officers to scrutinize individuals booked into non-federal jails for their immigration status. The program uses shared biometric data from all enrolled Secure Communities jurisdictions as well as FBI and other federal databases to alert Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to removable migrants with criminal records. Secure Communities, however, is not the only program used for targeting migrants classified as criminal aliens for removal. Other federal-local memoranda of agreement (MOA) as well as non-federal practices [...]
Scholars Sidebar: Are immigration detainers illegal?
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 [...]
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 [...]
Report: S-Comm in LA doesn’t live up to its hype
Researchers at the University of California-Irvine recently added another jurisdiction to the list where the “Secure Communities” program is not meeting DHS’s stated priorities: Los Angeles County. Edgar Aguilasocho, David Rodwin, and Sameer Ashar, Misplaced Priorities: The Failure of Secure Communities in Los Angeles County (Jan. 2012). Aguilasocho, Rodwin, and Ashar report that DHS’s signature program is ensnaring many individuals without a criminal conviction, people with convictions for minor crimes, and individuals with old convictions who pose no threat to the community. Misplaced [...]
Report: crImmigration enforcement funding and prison rates rise
A report by the Congressional Research Service tells of increased funding for the federal government’s programs targeting immigrants convicted of crimes, including immigration-related crimes, and an accompanying increase in the number of immigrants arrested and imprisoned. Marc R. Rosenblum & William A. Kandel, Congressional Research Service, Interior Immigration Enforcement: Programs Targeting Criminal Aliens (Oct. 21, 2011). The CRS is a non-partisan unit of the Library of Congress. Between fiscal year 2004 and FY 2001, the report explained, funding for programs targeting so-called [...]