Data that ICE recently released about its immigration enforcement efforts during fiscal year 2013 indicate that the agency continues to remove large numbers of people with no criminal history or fairly minor offenses on their record. During fiscal year 2013, ICE reported, 368,644 individuals were removed. ICE, FY 2013 ICE Immigration Removals: ERO Annual Report at 1. The agency made much of the fact that almost all (98%) of these individuals fell into one or more of its immigration enforcement priorities as set out by a March 2011 memo from former ICE director John Morton. Any noncitizen [...]
Record number of immigration detainees in FY ’12: 477,523
The Department of Homeland Security held 477,523 in detention during the 2012 fiscal year, a figure that the department calls “an all-time high” in a recent announcement of its FY 2012 enforcement actions. DHS, Immigration Enforcement Actions: 2012 Annual Report 5 (Dec. 2013). DHS also removed a record number of people in FY 2012: 419,384. Just under half of those removed had been convicted of a crime. DHS’s enforcement tactics in FY 2012 vastly exceeded anything it had accomplished to date. Its detention population, for example, had hit an all-time high the previous fiscal year when 429,247 [...]
Unflattering picture of ICE’s use of detainers
A report released this week by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University casts serious doubt on ICE's claim that it uses detainers to target noncitizens who pose a danger to the public. TRAC, Few ICE Detainers Target Serious Criminals (September 17, 2013). According to ICE data that TRAC obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, just under half (47.7% or 165,769) of detainers were issued against people with no criminal conviction whatsoever. Between October 1, 2011 and January 31, 2013, ICE issued 347,691 detainers. Of the individuals against whom a detainer [...]
Immigration prosecutions top federal criminal docket in FY ‘12
Immigration prosecutions made up the biggest segment of criminal prosecutions lodged by U.S. Attorneys in fiscal 2012, the agency reported. U.S. Attorneys’ Office, United States Attorneys’ Annual Statistical Report: Fiscal Year 2012. This is consistent with a trend that stretches to the end of the Bush Administration. According to the agency’s report, immigration prosecutions accounted for 40.6% of all federal criminal cases filed in fiscal year 2012. 2012 Statistical Report at 10 chart 2.2. This is a slight drop from the 41.8% of the federal criminal docket that immigration crimes filled in [...]
Scholar’s Sidebar: Crime & immigration in Norway
A study by Norwegian researchers found that the older a person was when he arrived in Norway, the less likely he was to engage in criminal activity. Synøve Nygaard Andersen & Torbjørn Skardhamer, Age at Immigration and Crime: Findings for Male Immigrants in Norway 15 (Dec. 2012). The two researchers, both of whom work for Norway’s statistics agency, examined records of all male immigrants to Norway between the ages of 15 and 50 who resided there with a valid residence permit at any time between 1992 and 2007. Nygaard & Skardhamer at 7. They started with a baseline age of 15 because [...]
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 [...]