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April 11, 2012 | 12:52 PM | By

L.A. County inmates released to ICE, by the numbers

Photo by 888bailbonds/Flickr (Creative Commons)

A Los Angeles County prisoner bus, June 2009. The county participates in the federal 287(g) program.

Crowding, violence and allegations of civil rights abuses are among the reasons the embattled Los Angeles County jail system is under federal investigation. But the county has also faced criticism in recent years in some circles for its federal-local partnerships with immigration authorities.

Sheriff Lee Baca a supporter of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s controversial Secure Communities enforcement program, which allows for the fingerprints of people booked into local jails to be shared with immigration officials. The county has also long participated in a smaller voluntary federal-local partnership called 287(g), in which deportable inmates are identified and released post-conviction to immigration officials.

How many L.A. County inmates are released to ICE? The 2011 numbers are found buried in new report on the county jail system from an independent justice expert, which among other things recommended closing the Men’s Central Jail downtown because of violence problems.

According to the report, there were more people released to immigration authorities from county jails than there were inmates transferred to California state prisons. A chart from the report:

The 19,725 releases to immigration authorities made up 14 percent of last years’ releases from the county jail system; by comparison, there were 17,816 people released to California prisons, 13 percent of total releases.

According to the report, the focus of the study was the eight-facility “core jail system” and excluded the Mira Loma Detention Center in Lancaster, a facility that ICE contracts from the county and is reserved for immigrant detainees.

The complete report can be downloaded here.

FILED UNDER: 287(g), ICE, Los Angeles County, Los Angeles County jails, Secure Communities, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement
January 9, 2012 | 3:59 PM | By

A legal basis for mandatory S-Comm? Read the federal memo

Photo by olongapowoodcraft/Flickr (Creative Commons)

An October 2, 2010 federal internal memo made public today shows that immigration officials were long ago bracing itself for legal challenges to their position, recently affirmed, that states’ participation in the Secure Communities immigration enforcement program is mandatory. And that they were doing so even as confusion continued among states and local jurisdictions, several of which believed that participation was voluntary and could be discontinued.

The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement memo was released today on an immigration advocacy website, obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request. The memo lists and analyzes legal statutes as to whether the agency’s plans to roll the program out nationwide by 2013, with mandatory participation, violates the Tenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

The conclusion in the memo is no, though that could be up for interpretation in court. An excerpt:

Our analysis of case law concentrates on Printz v. United States, 521 U.S. 898, 925 (1997), the seminal case on unconstitutional state participation in mandatory government programs. Significantly, Printz holds that “federal laws which require only a provision of information to the Federal Government” do not raise the Tenth Amendment prohibition of “the forced participation of the States’ executive in the actual administration of a federal program.”

…We examine several potential legal challenges and arguments that law enforcement agencies may make to avoid the reach of Secure Communities in 2013, and conclude that each seems rather weak in the face of Printz and its progeny.

The case cited is a landmark decision involving state-federal collaboration and gun purchasing background checks. The ICE memo goes on to paint various challenge scenarios to Secure Communities. It notes that there are statutes relating to immigration information collected by states that “do not provide a legal basis for characterizing participation in Secure Communities as mandatory,” but that these are “essentially irrelevant given other statutory support.”

The memo was released last fall just as Homeland Security officials were finally asserting, after months of back-and-forth, that jurisdictions could not opt out of Secure Communities. The program, which allows the fingerprints of people taken at local jails to be shared with immigration officials, began rolling out in late 2008. Many local and state officials had believed that as with an older federal-local partnership program called 287(g), Secure Communities was optional.

It initially appeared so by the Memorandums of Agreement, or MOAs, signed between federal and state/local officials around the country allowing Secure Communities to be implemented. Here is part of the contract with the California Department of Justice, dated January 23, 2009:

This MOA may be modified at any time by mutual written consent of both parties.

This MOA may remain in effect from the date of signing until it is terminated by either party. Either party, upon written or oral notice to the other party, may terminate the MOA at any time. A termination notice shall be delivered personally or by certified or registered mail and termination shall take effect 30 days after receipt of such notice.

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FILED UNDER: 287(g), Secure Communities
December 29, 2011 | 12:53 PM | By

Top five immigration stories of 2011, #2: More record deportations

Photo by John Moore/Getty Images

A man is prepared for a deportation flight bound for San Salvador in Mesa, Arizona, December 2010

In fiscal year 2011, the Obama administration broke its own deportation record for the second straight year, deporting close to 400,000 people in the year that ended last Sept. 30.

It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that news of another record-breaking year for removals was pretty much expected, with the continued expansion of federal immigration enforcement programs like Secure Communities and 287(g), both of which have fed the deportation pipeline in recent years with a steady flow of cases stemming from local law enforcement.

The number of deportations has crept upward steadily for years now. According to a federal chart, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has removed these many people in recent years:

FY 2010 = 392,862

FY 2009 = 389,834

FY 2008 = 369,221

FY 2007 = 291,060

Still, it’s a story that has legs, as newspaper editors used to say, and which continues to raise questions.

Among these questions is just who being deported, and whether the programs being used are working as intended. The Obama administration has long made a point that its focus is on deporting immigrants (including legal residents) with criminal records. An October press release from ICE read that “nearly 55 percent or 216,698 of the people removed were convicted of felonies or misdemeanors — an 89 percent increase in the removal of criminals since FY 2008.”

But analyses of federal deportation stats have pointed out gray areas. Last summer, an Associated Press analysis revealed that among those counted as criminal deportees are a growing number of people who have been deported following traffic and DUI arrests; the number of those deported following less-serious, non-DUI traffic offenses had close to tripled over a two-year period. From a story in July:

The U.S. deported nearly 393,000 people in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, half of whom were considered criminals.

Of those, 27,635 had been arrested for drunken driving, more than double the 10,851 deported after drunken driving arrests in 2008, the last full year of the Bush administration, according to Immigration and Customs Enforcement data provided to The Associated Press.

An additional 13,028 were deported last year after being arrested on less serious traffic law violations, nearly three times the 4,527 traffic offenders deported two years earlier, according to the data.

DUI offenders made up a large number (35,927) of those deported in fiscal year 2011, as did people convicted of drug-related offenses (44,653). Violent offenders (homicide, 1,119; sexual offenses, 5,848) were fewer in number, according to ICE.

As for the non-criminals being deported, some are being ensnared through the methods used to target serious criminals, another criticism of the administration’s enforcement tactics. Reports have indicated that nearly half the immigrants who have been caught up in the embattled Secure Communities program, which allows for biometric data of people fingerprinted in local jails to be shared with immigration officials, have been non-criminals or low-level misdemeanor offenders.

A more recent report from Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) tallied up the criminal charges used in the nation’s immigration courts, coming up with a much lower percentage of criminal charges found in deportation cases. ICE called the analysis “wildly misleading,” attributing the difference to the fact that the agency doesn’t always note prior criminal records in deportation cases. However, these individuals still make the annual criminal tally in the federal deportation stats.

The growing number of deportations has had broader domestic repercussions as more immigrants are sent back to their native countries, among them a growing number of mixed-status or legal-resident families in the U.S. left without a parent (or sometimes both parents), and a growing number of U.S. citizen children of deported parents landing in foster care.

In August, the Obama administration announced that it would review some 300,000 deportation cases to ferret out those deemed a “low priority” for removal under a set of prosecutorial discretion guidelines released by ICE earlier this year, again stating that its focus is on criminals. Among those who could be spared are undocumented immigrants who arrived here as children, college students and graduates, and immigrants with U.S. military ties. The review process is being pilot-tested now.

If the reviews are expanded and some deportation cases are indeed thrown out (though these individuals would still not have legal status – but that’s another story), will it make a dent in the deportation caseload next year? Or will the continued expansion of programs like Secure Communities, which the federal government has declared mandatory and is expected to be operating nationwide by 2013, make for another record year of removals in 2012?

Come back tomorrow for top story #1.

FILED UNDER: 287(g), ICE, Record deportations, Secure Communities, Top five immigration stories of 2011, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement
August 17, 2011 | 3:03 PM | By

Does Secure Communities undermine L.A.’s Special Order 40?

Photo courtesy of Will Coley

A camera operator rests on the mock coffin as Angelica Salas, executive director of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles, addresses a Homeland Security panel Monday, August 15, 2011

On Monday night, as protestors and speakers sounded off on the federal government’s Secure Communities immigration enforcement program during a town hall meeting in Los Angeles, one recurring theme involved a local police policy enacted more than three decades ago.

“The trust factor is undermining Special Order 40,” said Marielena Hincapié of the National Immigration Law Center, a legal advocacy organization, to a panel assembled by the Department of Homeland Security to gather input on the controversial fingerprint-sharing program. In the crowd, protesters held a large black mock coffin reading “RIP Special Order 40.”

What is Special Order 40, and how does Secure Communities conflict with it, if it does? And how does Secure Communities compare with 287(g), an older federal-local law enforcement partnership used in jails to identify deportable immigrants? It’s complicated, but the workings of all three are worth a look.

Special Order 40 is a policy enacted by former LAPD Chief Daryl Gates in late 1979 that essentially bars local law officers from enforcing federal immigration laws. Secure Communities, which began rolling out in 2008, allows the fingerprints of people booked into local police jails to be shared with immigration agents. The federal program’s critics have long held that the mandatory partnership undermines trust between immigrant communities and local authorities, potentially impeding police work.

At Special Order 40′s core was an acknowledgement that the cooperation of undocumented immigrants was critical to the department’s “ability to protect and serve the entire community.” From a department memo dated November 27, 1979:

The Department is sensitive to the principle that effective law enforcement depends on a high degree of cooperation between the Department and the public it serves. The Department also recognizes that the Constitution of the United States guarantees equal protection to all persons within its jurisdiction.

In view of those principles, it is the policy of the Los Angeles Police Department that undocumented alien status in itself is not a matter for police action. It is, therefore, incumbent on all employees of this Department to make a personal commitment to equal enforcement of the law and service to the public, regardless of alien status.

Officers were directed that they “shall not initiate police action with the objective of discovering the alien status of a person.” The order further directed that officers “shall not arrest nor book persons for violation of Title 8, Section 1325 of the United States Immigration Code (Illegal Entry).”

While idea of the order was to foster police cooperation from a fearful and vulnerable population, it has had its vocal critics. Special Order 40 came under fire especially after the 2008 murder of Jamiel Shaw, a black high school football player shot by a Latino gang member who was undocumented.

Enter Secure Communities, which ICE has stated is intended to ferret out deportable criminals. But the program has landed many others in deportation proceedings, among them minor traffic violators and people without a criminal record.

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FILED UNDER: Politics/Justice, 287(g), Secure Communities
January 31, 2011 | 12:06 PM | By

Report: 287(g) immigration enforcement program isn’t focused on serious offenders

Photo by 888bailbonds/Flickr (Creative Commons)

A Los Angeles County prisoner bus, June 2009. The county extended its participation in the federal 287(g) program in October.

The federal government’s controversial 287(g) program, which partners local agencies with immigration authorities, is the subject of a new report out today from the Migration Policy Institute.

Among other things, the report echoes some of the already existing complaints about federal-local immigration enforcement in that there is not as much of an emphasis on finding and deporting immigrants with serious criminal records as promised by the Obama administration.

According to the analysis from the institute, a nonpartisan Washington, D.C. think tank whose senior staff includes former U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service chief Doris Meissner, the 287(g) program as it’s being implemented “is not targeted primarily at serious offenders,” with only about half of 287(g) activity involving non-citizens (mostly undocumented immigrants, but also legal residents) arrested for misdemeanor or traffic offenses.

A few of the findings highlighted in the report:

  • At the national level, the program is not targeted primarily or even mostly toward serious offenders. Nationally, about half of program activity (defined by the number of immigration detainers issued) involves people who have committed felonies and other crimes that ICE deems to be serious (Priority Level 1 and 2 in ICE’s terminology). The other half of detainers issued are on people who have committed misdemeanors (usually considered Level 3) and traffic offenses.
  • Some jurisdictions operate “targeted” models, aimed primarily at identifying serious criminal offenders, while others pursue “universal” models, designed to identify as many unauthorized immigrants as possible. In FY 2010, Las Vegas operated the most targeted program among our sites: officers placed 70 percent of detainers on Level 1 or 2 offenders. By contrast, Cobb County (GA) and Frederick County (MD) placed about 80 percent of their detainers on Level 3 or traffic offenders, and officers there placed detainers universally (i.e., on every unauthorized immigrant booked into jail or encountered during policing operations).
  • The 287(g) jail model does not impose federal oversight on officers who make the initial arrests. Under the jail model, 287(g) officers screen for immigration status and place detainers after people have been booked into jail. Initial arrests are generally made by police officers working for agencies without 287(g) agreements and who lack federal oversight and training in immigration laws. The lack of federal control over arresting officers opens the door to racial profiling and pretextual arrests, especially in jurisdictions that place immigration detainers universally.

Another interesting finding was that most of the “universal” models of implementing 287(g), those designed to net the most deportable individuals, are concentrated in the Southeast. The report was based on interviews with federal, state and local law enforcement, elected officials, advocacy groups and others in seven jurisdictions where the program is used, including Los Angeles County.

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FILED UNDER: Politics/Justice, 287(g), Immigration and Naturalization Service, Migration Policy Institute, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement
December 31, 2010 | 2:40 PM | By

Top five immigration stories of 2010, #1: Arizona’s SB 1070

Photo by Leslie Berestein Rojas/KPCC

Protesters rally across the street from the downtown office of Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio in Phoenix on July 29, the day that SB 1070 was partially implemented in Arizona.

It’s been a year in which immigration has played a part in everything from the economy and the 2010 census to the California governor’s race, making it tough to limit the year’s biggest immigration stories to a list of only five. The stories we have reviewed this week have included the tragic massacre of migrants near the Texas border in Tamaulipas, which highlighted just how dangerous clandestine passage to the United States has become; the record number of deportations under the Obama administration, part of an enforcement trade-off for broader reforms that never came; the controversial enforcement programs Secure Communities and 287(g); and the Dream Act, which prompted an unexpected student movement in support of its proposed conditional status for undocumented college students and military hopefuls.

But one that’s likely to have a lingering effect on immigration politics, at least in the next few years, is that of Arizona’s controversial anti-illegal immigration law, known as SB 1070.

Signed last April by Arizona Governor Jan Brewer, the law drew the most controversy over a state immigration measure since California’s Proposition 187 in 1994, and brought the highly polarized immigration debate back squarely into the foreground of national and state politics.

Its provisions, while based on federal immigration law, seemed especially stringent at the state level: Among other things, the law empowered local police to check the immigration status of people they encountered if they had “reasonable suspicion” to think they were in the country illegally, made it a state crime to be in Arizona without proper documentation, made it illegal for state or local officials to adopt policies restricting enforcement of federal immigration laws (so-called “sanctuary” policies), and made it illegal to shelter, transport or give work to undocumented immigrants.

The “reasonable suspicion” clause drew the most ire from immigrant advocates and immigrant communities in general, who saw it as state-sanctioned racial profiling, with little way for police to distinguish between foreign nationals and nonwhite U.S. citizens and legal residents. A flurry of lawsuits followed, among them a federal lawsuit challenging the measure on the grounds that its provisions were pre-empted by federal law. On July 29, when the law went into effect amid widespread protests, it did so only partially, with a federal judge having blocked the most controversial provisions, including the clause allowing police to check for immigration status.

What continues to make SB 1070 such an important story are its ramifications beyond Arizona, which will be playing out in the years to come. Even with some of its provisions still hung up in appeals court by the pending federal challenge, SB 1070 has emboldened conservative state legislators around the country to draft their own versions of the law, some just as strict or more so than the original. From a recent Bloomberg story:

About 300 immigration-related bills were introduced in statehouses in 2005, said Ann Morse, who directs the Immigrant Policy Project for the National Conference of State Legislatures. In each of the last two years, the figure reached about 1,500, she said.

In 2011, state legislators could push the number higher. “Every indication I get is, they’re not done,” Morse said.

Those drafting SB 1070-style laws are receiving help from veterans of the Arizona law. From the story:

Many of the efforts are getting help from a central source, the Immigration Reform Law Institute. At the legal arm of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, a group that wants to crack down on illegal immigration, the institute’s attorneys are drafting measures.

“I’ve been personally approached by lawmakers from all over the country,” said Kris Kobach, a counsel for the group who helped to draft Arizona’s “probable cause” law.

Even in California, where the state legislature would be unlikely to approve such a measure, a voter initiative for a similar law has been submitted for the 2012 state ballot.

Part of the logic to SB 1070 that made it attractive to its supporters, and which continues to drive its imitators, is the idea of attrition through enforcement: Make life tough enough for people who are in the country illegally, the thinking goes, and many will opt to leave.

Before the law was partially enacted in July, there were anecdotal reports of Latino immigrants leaving the state out of fear. Intitial 2010 census results showed slowed-down population growth in Arizona, though demographers disagree on how much of an effect SB 1070 might have had, since the law was signed April 23, more than two weeks after the April 1 census count.

Another lasting effect: The measure has helped set the tone for the enforcement-heavy nature of the federal measures that Republican leaders, who will take leadership of the House and have a greater Senate presence come January, are expected to promote in the next two years.

FILED UNDER: Politics/Justice, 287(g), Dream Act, Gov. Jan Brewer, SB 1070, Secure Communities, Sen. Russell Pearce, Tamaulipas migrant massacre, Top stories of 2010
December 29, 2010 | 6:16 PM | By

Top five immigration stories of 2010, #3: Secure Communities and 287(g)

Photo by 888bailbonds/Flickr (Creative Commons)

A Los Angeles County prisoner bus, June 2009. The county extended its participation in the federal 287(g) program in October.

The record number of deportations carried out in the past two years by immigration officials under the Obama administration has been fueled, in large part, by the use of two controversial federal programs that work in cooperation with local agencies, Secure Communities and 287(g).

Both predate the current administration, but their use has been expanded as the Obama administration has shifted its focus to catching and deporting immigrants with criminal records, which the programs are meant to target. Administration officials have lauded both as instrumental to enforcement, culminating with the deportation of almost 800,000 immigrants in two years.

But neither program has worked exactly as planned, drawing heavy scrutiny this year from both immigrant advocates and government officials, including some in jurisdictions that have tried to opt out of one  - the Secure Communities fingerprint-sharing program – and learned they can’t.

Here’s how they work:

287(g) derives its name from a 1996 amendment to the immigration law that authorized it. The voluntary program authorizes U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to enter into agreements with state and local law enforcement. Agencies that choose to participate receive training from ICE, which in turn authorizes them to identify and detain deportable immigrants encountered in “the course of daily duties,” per an ICE fact sheet. Each agency enters into a contract, known as a memorandum of agreement, that defines the scope of the partnership.

Participants in 287(g), presently 71 agencies in 25 states, according to ICE, can request training specific to any area of enforcement, such as checking immigration status during traffic stops. But as in Los Angeles County, the program is used mostly to identify undocumented immigrants and deportable legal residents who land in local jails and state prisons.

Secure Communities got its start in early 2008 under the Bush administration, but was expanded last year. As with 287(g), the program is also used to identify deportable immigrants in the jail system. When individuals are booked, their fingerprints are submitted not only to criminal record databases, but also to the Homeland Security department’s database of immigration records. If their fingerprints match those on immigration records, immigration officials are alerted.

As of December 21, Secure Communities was operating in 868 jurisdictions in 35 states, according to an agency website. ICE plans to have the program operating nationwide by 2013.

In general, the greatest criticism of both programs is that they cast a wide net, leading people who have no criminal record to wind up in deportation proceedings. The Homeland Security department’s Office of Inspector General released a report earlier this year that found a number of problems with the implementation of 287(g), among them a failure to focus on people who posed a threat to public safety. Similarly, government records have shown that one-fourth of those deported under Secure Communities did not have criminal convictions, even if they illegally entered or overstayed a visa.

The involuntary nature of Secure Communities has irked local officials in several jurisdictions, among them San Francisco, Santa Clara County and Arlington, Va., which have tried to opt out of the program, worried that undocumented immigrants might become less willing to cooperate with police. After much back-and-forth with the federal government, which at first gave the impression that participation was optional, they learned this year that they could not opt out.

In response to a legal challenge filed earlier this year, a U.S. District Court judge in New York recently ordered U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to release documents pertaining to Secure Communities by mid-January, which could shed more light on the policy.

Yesterday Multi-American reviewed another one of this year’s top immigration stories, the record deportations under the Obama administration.

FILED UNDER: Politics/Justice, 287(g), Record deportations, Secure Communities, Top stories of 2010, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement
December 28, 2010 | 5:30 PM | By

Top five immigration stories of 2010, #4: Record deportations

A man waits to be processed at a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility in Arizona.

It was the Obama administration’s strategic trade-off on immigration: A stepped-up approach to enforcement which, the President hoped, would help win over Republican lawmakers for bipartisan support of a sweeping overhaul of the nation’s immigration system.

In the end, with insufficient support for anything broader, the only thing to stick this year has been the enforcement. The Obama administration has deported nearly 800,000 immigrants in the past two years, more than during any other two-year period in the nation’s history.

The exact numbers for this year have been disputed: The record figure released last fall of more than more than 392,000 deportations in fiscal year 2010, which topped the 2009 record, turned out to include more than 19,000 immigrants removed the previous fiscal year, as well as a small number of repatriations that would normally have been counted by the U.S. Border Patrol.

Still, the administration came close to its expected goal of deporting around 400,000 people in fiscal year 2010. Immigration officials had stated that they would focus on immigrants with criminal convictions, utilizing a pair of controversial programs that rely on cooperation from local law enforcement. A Washington Post story on the deportations cited Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano:

Napolitano credited programs known as 287G and Secure Communities, both of which leverage the reach of local law enforcement officials, for the stepped-up deportations. She said that crime along the border was either stable or falling, and that “some of America’s safest cities are right along the southwest border.”

But some ICE critics say the effort to target criminals for deportation, which often involves assistance from state and local law enforcement officials, has swept up unauthorized immigrants who had committed minor offenses – or no offenses at all.

When it announced its fiscal year 2010 deportations last fall, the Obama administration also announced that about half of the deportees were people with criminal records. But the programs used to target criminals for deportation cast a wider net: One quarter of those deported through the fingerprint-sharing program known as Secure Communities had no criminal convictions, according to one recent news report.

More on Secure Communities and 287(g) this week as we continue reviewing the top immigration stories of the year. The story reviewed yesterday: Last summer’s tragic migrant massacre in Tamaulipas.


FILED UNDER: Politics/Justice, 287(g), Deportation, Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, Secure Communities, Top stories of 2010, U.S. Border Patrol, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement