Obama Administration's next target may be Sanctuary Cities

Bloggings on Deportation and Removal
Matthew Kolken

Obama Administration's next target may be Sanctuary Cities

It has been reported that ICE Director John Morton has asked Attorney General Holder to take legal action against Cook County, Illinois for their failure to deliver undocumented immigrants to ICE for deportation. Cook County currently is not utilizing the Secure Communities fingerprint sharing (a.k.a. racial profiling) program.

Director Morton has stated that: “Right now, it’s not a question of Cook County releasing some individuals to us,” “They are releasing no individuals to us, including very violent offenders, and I just don’t think that’s good policy.”

It has been further reported that DHS Secretary Napolitano is also "fed up" with Cook County, and is pushing for legal action that would require the County to comply.

One option also being considered is to withhold federal aid allocated to counties that hold criminal aliens in State jails. Cook county is one of the top ten recipients nationwide receiving $13 million since 2008.Ranking Democrat Rep. Henry Cuellar is on board: “They cannot say, you know, we don’t want you to do Secure Communities, but then at the same time they’re requesting federal dollars for holding those prisoners.”
In related news, Morton prepared written testimony for a House Committee on Homeland Security, Subcommittee on Border and Maritime Security hearing titled “Building a Secure Community: How Can DHS Better Leverage State and Local Partnerships?”

Morton indicated that ICE has caused confusion by failing to properly explain how the Secure Communities program works. Apparently, it wasn't properly conveyed that the Obama administration is using Secure Communities as a tool to deport people of color that have never been charged with any crime and to detain U.S. citizens in maximum security prisons using bogus immigration detainers.

Morton's remarks include statements that ICE takes seriously complaints raised about civil rights violations related to Secure Communities.

Director Morton, if you are reading, you can officially consider this blog as an ongoing complaint. Please check back often.

And incidentally, it was nice seeing you in Buffalo yesterday. I hope you enjoyed your visit.

ILW.COM - immigration news: Obama Administration's next target may be Sanctuary Cities

Obama’s Next Immigration Battle: Local, Federal Authorities on Collision Course over Detention

By Adam Sorensen | @adamsorensen | July 16, 2012

Last Tuesday, Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel held a press conference to announce that he didn’t want his city’s law-enforcement authorities to follow federal requests to hold some undocumented immigrants, picked up on other charges, for deportation. The national media’s ears perked up. Emanuel, a former Chief of Staff to President Obama, was at loggerheads with his old boss — good copy in the making. But on the same day, back in Washington, D.C., much bigger news was developing on the future of federal and local cooperation on immigration policy. John Morton, the director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), told a House subcommittee that his efforts to persuade officials to honor any of ICE’s detention requests in the jurisdiction of Cook County, which includes Chicago, had hit a wall. “I won’t sugarcoat it,” he said. “I don’t think that approach is going to work in full.”

In April, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano told Congress she was “evaluating all options” to compel Cook County, Illinois, to go along with ICE’s requests, known as “detainers,” under a program called Secure Communities, launched in late 2008 to focus immigration enforcement on criminal aliens. Morton reiterated Napolitano’s warning, but his grim assessment of the Cook County situation added further gravity to the statement: “We’ve been exploring, as the Secretary has said, our options under federal law with the Department of Justice, and we will see where that goes.” Translation: the Obama Administration has discussed the possibility of suing a jurisdiction because it’s too lax in enforcing federal immigration priorities, a mirror image of the legal drama the Administration just went through with Arizona’s law, which the Supreme Court partially struck down in June.

(PHOTOS: Behind the Cover: America’s Undocumented Immigrants)

Some advocates have framed nondetainer policies like Cook County’s as a response to the trend of aggressive state immigration crackdowns like the one in Arizona, which requires police to try to discern a suspected undocumented immigrant’s status during a routine stop or detention. That’s convenient politics, but in a much more direct way, they are a response to the rapidly expanding federal immigration-enforcement program, Secure Communities. Under that program, local law-enforcement agents send fingerprints of detainees to the FBI and ICE, which can then ask local jails to hang on to some prisoners eligible for deportation, giving federal authorities the chance to swoop in and remove them within 48 hours.

It’s a wide net, which snags serious criminals, minor offenders and otherwise law-abiding undocumented immigrants — say, someone who has failed to appear in immigration court or who has been previously deported. And it’s putting its critics, who say Secure Communities encourages local law enforcement to arrest more Latinos and undermines cooperation between police and immigrant communities, on a collision course with the Obama Administration.
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It’s not just Cook County, which stopped honoring any of ICE’s detention requests in September of last year, and the city of Chicago, which is considering a narrower ordinance directing jails not to comply with detainers for those convicted or suspected of minor offenses. On the same day that Morton testified before Congress, Washington D.C.’s city council unanimously passed a similar measure. Taos, N.M., already has one. Santa Clara County, California, has declined to honor the majority of the 1,400 ICE requests issued since October. The city of San Francisco has also declined a handful.

These figures are small compared with the vast scope of Secure Communities and the Administration’s wider immigration-enforcement efforts, which have produced more than 1.2 million deportations so far under President Obama. Since launching Secure Communities in late 2008, ICE has received 17 million sets of fingerprints, identified nearly 1 million undocumented immigrants, and deported nearly 200,000 of them. The growth of the program has been explosive. Criminal-alien removals increased 89% between 2008 and ’11, according to ICE, and more than 3,000 local jurisdictions now participate in Secure Communities, up from just 88 in 2009. ICE expects nationwide deployment in 2013.

But the number of jurisdictions resisting detention requests may soon grow too. On July 5, California’s senate passed a nondetainer policy for the entire state, which would restrict local law enforcement from going along with detainers for all but the most serious criminals. It is expected to pass the assembly next month before heading to the desk of Governor Jerry Brown, who has not said whether he will sign it. California has the largest population of undocumented immigrants in the U.S., and about 75,000 of those deported by ICE under Secure Communities have been from that state — far more than any other. It’s not clear what the Obama Administration would do if that crucial state bucked the program.
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“The Administration has to be seen as opposing [these measures] as vigorously as they did the Arizona measure,” says Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University. “First to be consistent on principle, the Administration just argued before the Supreme Court that states should not be able to create detainer policies unilaterally and that the federal government should have overriding authority in the area.”

There’s a certain irony in the Administration’s Secure Communities dilemma, even beyond the Arizona parallel. While ICE has rebuked Cook County for refusing all detention requests — and releasing 222 undocumented immigrants flagged for deportation in the process — the policies that may soon arrive in Chicago and California (which ICE also opposes) seek to prioritize the removal of hardened criminals. That’s been the Administration’s stated goal from the outset, and why Obama recently announced legal relief for some young undocumented immigrants who entered the country as children.

(MORE: Our National Immigration Policy: Still Clear as Mud)

But it’s also why the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) insists that Secure Communities is a good idea. As congressional appropriations for immigration enforcement have ramped up — ICE’s detention and removal budget doubled between 2005 and ’09 — deportations have shot up too. DHS argues that if the money has to be spent, it’s better used going after criminals than someone else. Secure Communities isn’t as narrowly focused as its critics would like, but it’s been amended on the fly — to reduce the number of traffic violators targeted, for instance — and DHS says the portion of deportees who’ve been convicted of the most serious crimes, now 27% in the federal government’s “level 1″ taxonomy, will rise over time.
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That argument hasn’t been sufficient for immigration advocates, who worry police will arrest people on pretext just so they run their prints, not to mention the spike in deportations. Many local lawmakers still insist discretion over who is held should remain with local authorities. And it’s not certain that the Administration, should it decide to pursue legal challenges to nondetainer policies, would be able to make the same case it did against Arizona. While Congress mandated information sharing in 2002, Secure Communities was established by an appropriations bill in 2008. And while Morton now describes ordinances like Cook County’s as “inconsistent with federal law,” DHS documents acquired by advocacy organizations have suggested some ambiguity as to whether federal officials always considered detainers mandatory.

“As long as it’s not directly contradicting immigration law, then it’s not pre-empted,” Steven Gonzales, a constitutional law professor at the Phoenix School of Law, says of nondetainer ordinances. “It’s a fine, fine line, but there is some logic there.” Turley, of George Washington University, says there’s a crucial difference between taking unilateral action, like Arizona did, and declining to carry out federal requests. “I think it would be very difficult for the Justice Department to argue that states are impeding federal policy by not agreeing to be agents of that policy … that would be a serious threat to federalism and states’ rights.”

(PHOTOS: From the Family Photos of an Undocumented Immigrant)

If legal action isn’t a credible threat, cutting off federal funds just might be. The Justice Department reimburses local jails for a part of the cost of holding detainees flagged for deportation, and provides a number of other law-enforcement grants. Morton hinted in his testimony that some of that funding may be subject to re-evaluation. “The power of the purse is definitely the strongest power that the government has,” says Aarti Kohli, a senior fellow at Berkeley’s Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute on Law and Social Policy. But Kohli is skeptical the Administration would even take things that far. “

"Politically, I don’t see what’s to be gained,” she says. It is always risky to snatch away federal funds in an election year.
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If nondetainer policies move ahead and the Obama Administration doesn’t attempt to force jurisdictions to comply, Secure Communities is sure to be another piece of patchwork in the U.S.’s already mottled immigration policy.

The Cook County sheriff, Tom Dart, who says he doesn’t like having to release some of the detainees who’ve been flagged for deportation but has given up trying to persuade his county board and ICE to work things out, found the program to be inconsistent to begin with — its guiding principles impossible to discern. “We have this hodgepodge of rules and laws when it applies to detainers,” he says. “It was so ambiguous, the whole thing.” Ambiguity is a word he used more than once to describe the challenges of immigration enforcement.

That’s the way things are. Neighboring Arizona and California could soon have vastly different protocols for arresting undocumented immigrants and turning them over to federal authorities. “It really is a political issue, a struggle between different points of view,” says Gonzales. “And as long as Congress remains polarized and unable to move forward on comprehensive immigration reform, there are going to be leaks all over the ship … depending on what political environment you’re in around the country.”

Local, Federal Authorities at Odds over Detention Requests | Swampland | TIME.com

Time to Sanction the Sanctuaries

By Jessica Vaughan, July 18, 2012

An article this week on Time.com does a decent job of capturing current developments in one of the most rankling issues in immigration law enforcement — what to do about sanctuary cities — and, atypically, highlights the Obama administration's disinclination to confront them, even as they undermine a key enforcement initiative.


The hottest trend in sanctuary circles is to order local law enforcement agencies to ignore detainer requests from ICE. This ploy has been avidly promoted by illegal-alien advocates with this guide that was funded by the Soros Foundation. The goal is to try to thwart the nearly national Secure Communities program, an automated fingerprint sharing initiative that enables ICE to identify removable aliens who are arrested by local authorities. Anti-ICE policies have been adopted in Cook County, Ill.; Washington, D.C.; San Francisco and Santa Clara Counties in California; Taos, N.M.; and the state of Connecticut. Advocates claim they help police maintain good relationships with immigrants, which is baloney. The real result is that they create more victims and increase criminal justice costs by sending criminal aliens right back to our streets instead of back to their home country.

The Obama administration is in a pickle. People are starting to wonder why they are tolerating this interference, especially when the consequences can be so problematic. Among other good quotes, the article has one from George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley:


The administration has to be seen as opposing [these measures] as vigorously as they did the Arizona measure. First to be consistent on principle, the administration just argued before the Supreme Court that states should not be able to create detainer policies unilaterally and that the federal government should have overriding authority in the area.

Sorry, Professor Turley, don't expect principled consistency from the White House on immigration enforcement matters, unless it's to suppress enforcement. It took just hours for Janet Napolitano to yank the useful 287(g) task force programs from Arizona sheriffs following the Supreme Court decision on SB 1070 last month, and after the dubious DOJ findings on Maricopa County, Ariz., last December. But for nearly a year, Napolitano and her team have just sat on their hands as sanctuary after sanctuary have passed policies thumbing their noses at ICE and its detainers.

It's not like the feds have no leverage. Each year, the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security dole out hundreds of millions of dollars to local governments and law enforcement agencies, including reimbursements for detaining criminal aliens (see my study "Subsidizing Sanctuaries").

Last week at a House Homeland Security hearing, ICE Director John Morton told the sub-committee chair, Candice Miller (R-Mich.), that he is deeply troubled by the Cook County developments, and suggested that this year they might not approve Cook County's annual reimbursement for jailing illegal aliens.

As the Time article suggests, Morton is probably just blowing more smoke. He's been trash-talking about sanctioning Cook County for more than six months now, but has done no more than write a couple of mildly threatening letters, which were publicly scorned by the county board president. Then, last week Chicago mayor and former top Obama staffer Rahm Emanuel announced that he'd like to have much the same policy for his police department.

The next shoe to drop could be a big one. The California legislature is expected to pass a bill in August that would restrict all of the state's law enforcement agencies in working with ICE. No question, such a state law would put a huge dent in the Obama administration's "smarter and more effective" immigration enforcement. These legislators are not likely to be deterred by limp protests from Morton or anyone else at DHS. Actions speak louder than words, as the saying goes, and the administration's disdain for immigration law enforcement becomes more obvious every week.

Time to Sanction the Sanctuaries | Center for Immigration Studies