President Obama released the final budget request he will make to Congress earlier this month and the pitch for DHS is peppered with costly security measures that fall in line with the department’s existing operations centered on security concerns. At almost $41 billion, the DHS budget request covers everything from FEMA operations to the nation’s principal immigration law enforcement bodies, ICE and CBP. U.S. Dep’t of Homeland Security, Budget-in-Brief: Fiscal Year 2017, at 1 (2016). Combined, the budgets for ICE and CBP comprise almost one-third (30.3 percent) of DHS’ total budget, including [...]
Immigration detention populations appear to have dropped in FY 14 & FY 15
The number of migrants sitting behind barbed wire appears to have dropped in fiscal years 2014 and 2015, but DHS’s reporting has become so opaque that it is hard to be sure. For years, I have tracked ICE’s civil immigration detention population using annual reports issued by DHS. Those reports were posted on the DHS website for anyone with an internet connection to download and read. I regularly did so and often wrote about these trends in my scholarly articles as well as here on crimmigration.com. That has not been the case with immigration detention statistics for fiscal years 2014 or 2015. [...]
Mapping immigration law
Every day the nation’s 250 or so immigration judges enter one of the 58 immigration courts and make life or death decisions. These courts are typically housed in mundane office buildings. From the outside there is little suggesting that inside those walls lives are being altered in significant, often irreversible, ways. The federal government’s most recent statistical report about the immigration courts’ workload indicates just how important these sites are to many people. According to the Justice Department (the parent agency to the immigration courts), in fiscal year 2014, the immigration [...]
Worrying immigration court statistics about detention & representation in FY 2014
Last week, the Justice Department released statistics about the workload of the nation’s immigration court system in fiscal year 2014. U.S. Dep’t of Justice, Executive Office for Immigration Review, FY 2014 Statistical Yearbook (March 2015). There’s a wealth of interesting data to mine in this report, released annually, but I’m going to highlight a few strands of particular relevance to crimmigrationistas: the role of detention and representation in immigration court proceedings. Reflecting its role in immigration law enforcement generally, detention played a significant role in the [...]
DHS Inspector General assesses ICE alternatives to detention
A recent report by the Department of Homeland Security’s Inspector General provides much needed insight into the inner workings of ICE’s alternatives to detention (ATDs). U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Office of Inspector General, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Alternatives to Detention (Revised) (Feb. 4, 2015). At the same time, the report hints at a major risk inherent in ATD expansions: that throwing more people into some form of government supervision will eventually mean more people in detention. Until November 2014, the government ran a single ATD program, called [...]
Lawsuit reveals DACA data treasure trove
Litigation often reveals fascinating information tough to obtain otherwise and the states’ lawsuit against the federal government’s use of its executive powers to provide temporary lawful status to many migrants already in the United States is proving to be no exception (for more on that lawsuit see my article here). A document that the United States filed in federal court last week provides a much-needed glimpse into DACA’s internal operations. In a formal declaration, Donald W. Neufeld, the associate director for service center operations at USCIS, gives a detailed accounting of the [...]
Immigration took center stage among federal criminal cases during FY 2011-12
A new report indicates that federal law enforcement agents, prosecutors, and courts are significantly involved in regulating immigration law through the criminal process. Mark Motivans, Federal Justice Statistics, 2011-2012 (Jan. 2015). By overall historical standards, this is quite anomalous, but it is in line with the trend we’ve seen in recent years (see my analysis of parallel data for fiscal year 2010). Law enforcement investigations and arrests for alleged immigration law violations are at eye-catching rates, with the bulk of those arrested individuals soon finding themselves in federal [...]
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 [...]