Top Obama administration officials have made much of their concern about the country’s outsized prison population. In 2015, President Obama famously visited a federal penitentiary, the first sitting president to ever do so. In 2013, then-Attorney General Eric Holder championed sentencing reforms targeting low-level drug offenders. And Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates recently announced that the Justice Department would substantially reduce its reliance on private prison operators. But at the same time, the Obama administration has arrested and imprisoned a historically unprecedented [...]
Pretrial immigration prisoner trends, part 2
Last week I wrote about the enormous number of migrants who face confinement while they are prosecuted for federal immigration crimes. The absolute numbers are astonishing. Almost 100,000 people suspected of engaging in nothing worse than an immigration crime were held in the custody of the U.S. Marshals Service in fiscal year 2013 alone. Today I remain focused on the federal government’s pretrial immigration prison population, but I take a slight different approach. To provide some context with which to understand the number of pretrial immigration crime defendants who are confined, today [...]
Obama’s new DHS budget reflects security focus
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 [...]