Thread: Immigration tactics aimed at boosting deportations

Immigration tactics aimed at boosting deportations

Brad Heath, USA TODAY7:25p.m. EST February 14, 2013

Story Highlights

• Immigration officials approved new tactics for deporting convicted criminals
• Some approaches were aimed at increasing deportations of people charged with minor crimes
• Changes were part of push to make sure government didn't fall short of deportation targets

WASHINGTON — U.S. immigration officials laid out plans last year that would ratchet up expulsions of immigrants convicted of minor crimes as part of an urgent push to make sure the government would not fall short of its criminal deportation targets, new records obtained by USA TODAY show.

Among those new tactics — detailed in interviews and internal e-mails — were trolling state driver's license records for information about foreign-born applicants, dispatching U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to traffic safety checkpoints conducted by police departments, and processing more illegal immigrants who had been booked into jails for low-level offenses. Records show ICE officials in Washington approved some of those steps.

President Obama's administration has made deporting convicted criminals a central feature of its immigration policy, while saying it would halt some efforts to remove low-priority immigrants who pose little risk to public safety. Immigration advocates who have largely supported that approach said ICE's urgent effort to boost deportations last year suggested the immigration agency had veered from that approach.

"If this is what ICE is currently doing, it's very problematic," said Gregory Chen, the director of advocacy for the American Immigration Lawyers Association. Chen says such tactics contradict immigration officials' public pledges to streamline enforcement by focusing on dangerous criminals and show that the agency instead sought to "increase its criminal alien numbers by pursuing people with minor offenses like traffic violations."

The push came after senior ICE officials in Washington warned its regional enforcement chiefs that criminal deportations had fallen from the year before and instructed them to get the numbers back up. "The only performance measure that will count this fiscal year is the criminal alien removal target," David Venturella, who then supervised ICE's field offices, said in April in an e-mail to agents in Atlanta.

ICE spokeswoman Gillian Christensen said in a statement that "ICE does not have quotas." She said the agency sets "annual performance goals" that "reflect the agency's commitment to using the limited resources provided by Congress." She declined to say whether the agency adopted any of the new tactics.

Bob Dane, a spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which favors tougher enforcement, said ICE "wouldn't have to do a hail Mary to juice the numbers" if it hadn't ordered its agents to halt efforts to deport some illegal immigrants.

Venturella said the deportation targets did not amount to quotas. He said in an interview that aides to ICE Director John Morton were worried that a drop in criminal deportations might be publicly attributed to the administration's policy of dropping some low-priority removal cases. Focusing on convicted criminals was a "cornerstone" of the Obama administration's immigration policy, Venturella said, "and it would have raised a lot of eyebrows if those numbers had continued to go down."

Some Morton aides "seemed to think their careers depended on that number going up," Venturella said, and they convened daily meetings on how to make it happen. In April, officials told field office heads to map plans to increase removals, then instructed at least one field office which supervises enforcement throughout Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina to go ahead with efforts to mine DMV records and step up their efforts to deport people who had been booked into county jails, among other measures.

By the time the government's fiscal year ended in September, ICE had deported 225,390 criminal immigrants — a record, and well above the agency's target of 210,000. ICE has not specified how many of those deportations were based on minor offenses; the year before, it reported that more than a quarter of the people it classified as criminals had been convicted only of traffic offenses.

How many people were deported because of the new tactics ICE proposed, and how widely they were implemented, remains unclear. In one instance outside Asheville, N.C., agents arrested 15 immigrants – many of whom had only minor convictions, frequently for driving without a license – at a police traffic checkpoint but were promptly ordered by officials at the field office to release them.

The e-mails were first obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union of North Carolina under the federal Freedom of Information Act. The group had been conducting its own inquiry into the traffic checkpoint.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2013/02/14/immigration-criminal-deportation-targets/1919737/

By Andrew O'Reilly
Published February 15, 2013
Fox News Latino

U.S. immigration officials beefed up efforts to deport undocumented immigrants convicted of minor crimes as a way to meet their criminal deportation quotas, according to documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents were sent to traffic safety checkpoints set-up by local police departments to monitor peoples' immigration status, according to the ACLU.

Agency officials in Washington also advised agents to process more undocumented immigrants convicted on low-level offenses, the ACLU said.

“HQ has directed us to implement this plan and to REALLOCATE ALL AVAILABLE RESOURCE (sorry. Not “shouting”, just emphasizing to attaining this year’s criminal-alien removal target),” said an ICE official, whose name was redacted, in an email to other agents.

The allegations were first reported by USA Today, which obtained the documents from the ACLU.

Gillian Christensen, spokeswoman for ICE, said that the USA Today article story lacks context and does not present an accurate picture of the agency's efforts.

“Over the last four years, this Administration has fundamentally changed immigration enforcement policy,” Christensen said in a statement to Fox News Latino. “ICE is focused on smart, effective enforcement that prioritizes the removal of criminal aliens, recent border crossers and egregious immigration law violators, such as those who have been previously removed from the United States and ICE’s 2012 year-end removal numbers highlight this focus.”

But that statement differs from an earlier one Christensen gave to USA Today.

Christensen told then newspaper that "ICE does not have quotas," but instead relies on "annual performance goals" that "reflect the agency's commitment to using the limited resources provided by Congress."

The ACLU of North Carolina had filed a federal Freedom of Information Act while conducting its own investigation into racial profiling at traffic stops in North Carolina. Lawyers at the ACLU looked into a case where ICE agents were purportedly operating alongside local police at a seatbelt checkpoint in Jackson County – about an hour southwest of Asheville. At the checkpoint, federal agents arrested 15 undocumented immigrants and held a number of legal citizens for questioning for over an hour, according to the obtained documents.

The ACLU, through testimonies from people who passed through the checkpoint, said ICE agents and local police engaged in racial profiling by only screening the immigration status of Latinos, while waving other people through the checkpoint.

“Racial profiling doesn’t work and it subjects people to unwarranted stops to prove their citizenship,” Raul Pinto, staff attorney for the ACLU of North Carolina, told Fox News Latino. “ICE needs to take significant steps to ameliorate this problem.”

Pinto called the checkpoints and the alleged quotas enacted by ICE “troubling” and referred to the practice a “wide dragnet” that targets people – such as Latinos – who might be forced to prove their citizenship.

“These checkpoints show a real problem with these quotas that ICE has to abide by,” Pinto added.

Immigrant rights groups across the country were outraged with the news, claiming that ICE is only concerned about numbers and not the personal safety of citizens in the U.S.

“It’s more about meeting the numbers and less about our public safety,” said B. Loewe, an activist with the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, based in Los Angeles. “This doesn’t help immigration enforcement or safety and just creates problems with the immigrant community.”

Other argued that the ICE method is actually smarter, more effective immigration law enforcement and does focus on public safety.

“If ICE had been doing this all along, instead of catch and release and exercising absurd prosecutorial discretion, then they would not have needed to jump start their numbers in this way,” said Jessica Vaughn, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, an immigration-restriction think thank in Washington, D.C.

The agency has recently been under pressure to increase its arrest numbers, going so far as to take arrests away from Customs and Border Protection for their own stats, Vaughn said.

“There is a lot of pressure coming from headquarters to the field because they feel the need to show Congress and the public that they’re enforcing immigration laws,” she added.

The quota controversy, however, is at odds with the Obama administration’s current proposal for comprehensive immigration reform.

The current administration – as well as a number of both Democratic and Republican senators – is desperately trying to pass some form of immigration reform in the coming months. Obama in his State of the Union speech and Florida Sen. Marco Rubio in the Republican rebuttal advocated for both strengthening the border while providing a path to citizenship to the 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the U.S.

“This seems at odds with what the administration is doing about immigration,” Vaughn said of the detentions.

At the end of ICE’s fiscal year in September of last year, the agency had deported 225,390 undocumented immigrants – a record that is well above its target of 210,000. Despite not announcing how many of the deportations were the result of minor offenses, in fiscal year 2011 it said that over a quarter of “criminal immigrants” were convicted of traffic offenses.

Immigration Agency Under Fire for Alleged Deportation Quotas | Fox News Latino