statistics

Immigration crime defendant prison population grows, then falls, under Trump

President Trump made much of his antipathy toward migrants. From his perch at the U.S. Justice Department, Trump’s first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, worked hard to operationalize the president’s racist rhetoric. In April 2017, less than three months into the Trump administration, Sessions instructed federal prosecutors to treat five primary immigration crimes as “higher priorities.” Government records about the federal prison population suggest that prosecutors heeded the attorney general’s directive, but only for a time. From fiscal year 2018, which began in October 2017, to fiscal [...]

Dip in families detained by ICE

The Trump administration’s anti-migrant policies are well known and multifaceted. Interestingly, the government’s heavy-handed approach is showing up in fewer detained families at ICE’s “family residential centers.” Data I obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests show that there were substantially fewer children held alongside their parents in September 2019 than at that point one or two years earlier. From October 2016 to September 2019 (ending on September 14, 2019), the number of people held in ICE’s family immigration prisons peaked in May 2018 when, on an average day, the [...]

Administration misleads on DACA recipient criminal activity

As the Supreme Court turned to the legality of President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, President Trump and one of his top immigration officials made grossly misleading claims about the danger that DACA recipients pose. On Tuesday, President Trump claimed there are 53,792 DACA recipients with arrest records. “That is a very large proportion of the total,” he tweeted. DACA recipients with arrest records: 53,792! That is a very large proportion of the total. @LouDobbs Not good, but we will be able to make a deal with the Dems!— Donald J. Trump [...]

ICE enforcement picks up in FY 18, but remains below record highs

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 [...]

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 [...]

Separating families is a choice

When President Obama announced Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, his administration’s policy of pushing young unauthorized migrants to the bottom of the immigration law-enforcement priority list, Republicans complained that focusing on some legal violations over others was equivalent to not enforcing the law. When Obama used his discretion to extend similar protections to parents of United States citizens, Republican legislators successfully took to the courts to block him. Within days of entering the White House, President Trump issued an executive order proclaiming, “We cannot [...]

Criminal prosecution data reveal longstanding practices & disparities

Federal prosecutors filed criminal charges against more migrants in May 2018 than at any other time since Donald Trump became president, newly-released government statistics obtained by the Transactional Access Records Clearinghouse reveal. But despite the administration’s “zero tolerance” approach, most people apprehended by Customs and Border Protection officers never found themselves in a criminal courtroom. Only about one-third of people apprehended in May outside of ports-of-entry were prosecuted criminally. As the report’s authors point out, this shows that the zero tolerance policy [...]