Department of Homeland Security

Who is a ‘low priority’ under DHS deportation guidelines?

Photo by davipt/Flickr (Creative Commons)

After yesterday’s announcement from the Department of Homeland Security that it will review some 300,000 cases of immigrants in the deportation pipeline, potentially sparing many from removal, a Obama administration official posting on the White House Blog linked to “common sense guidelines” that will be applied in deciding who goes and who stays.

An excerpt from what was posted by Cecilia Muñoz, White House intergovernmental affairs director:

So DHS, along with the Department of Justice, will be reviewing the current deportation caseload to clear out low-priority cases on a case-by-case basis and make more room to deport people who have been convicted of crimes or pose a security risk. And they will take steps to keep low-priority cases out of the deportation pipeline in the first place. They will be applying common sense guidelines to make these decisions, like a person’s ties and contributions to the community, their family relationships and military service record.

The link leads back to a June 17 memo from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement director John Morton that urged agency staff to use prosecutorial discretion in the cases of certain immigrants, particularly those without a criminal record, those who arrived here as minors and those who have served or are connected to the military. From the memo, some of the factors to be considered (bold type added):

When weighing whether an exercise of prosecutorial discretion may be warranted for a given alien, ICE officers, agents, and attorneys should consider all relevant factors, including, but not limited to –

• the agency’s civil immigration enforcement priorities

• the person’s length of presence in the United States, with particular consideration given to presence while in lawful status

• the circumstances of the person’s arrival in the United States and the manner of his or her entry, particularly if the alien came to the United States as a young child

• the person’s pursuit of education in the United States, with particular consideration given to those who have graduated from a U.S. high school or have successfully pursued or are pursuing a college or advanced degrees at a legitimate institution of higher education in the United States

• whether the person, or the person’s immediate relative, has served in the U.S. military reserves, or national guard, with particular consideration given to those who served in combat

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FILED UNDER: Politics/Justice, Cecilia Muñoz, Department of Homeland Security, Deportation, DHS, Secure Communities

August 19, 2011 | 11:08 AM | By Leslie Berestein Rojas

DHS shift ‘doesn’t provide permanent status for anyone:’ A Twitter Q&A with the White House

Photo by Tom Lohdan/Flickr (Creative Commons)

The Obama administration’s announcement yesterday that it would back off on deporting “low priority” immigrants who don’t present a public safety threat is being cheered by immigrant advocates, but questions remain as to who will benefit and to what extent.

According to the announcement, the deportation cases of immigrants with no criminal records and strong ties to the United States – particularly young people who arrived as children, military veterans and their families – will be reviewed on a case by case basis, and many could be spared deportation. Some people allowed to stay might even qualify for work permits.

But what kind of long-term solution does this represent, if any? Several pertinent questions were brought up yesterday during a live Twitter Q&A chat with White House intergovernmental affairs director Cecilia Muñoz. Among those who joined the discussion was Jose Antonio Vargas, an award-winning journalist who recently revealed his undocumented status. Here’s a Storify(ed) timeline of the chat via the White House Blog.

(And kudos to the White House for posting this while I was tweaking code on a nearly identical Storify timeline, as it saved me some tech headaches.)

FILED UNDER: Politics/Justice, Cecilia Muñoz, Department of Homeland Security, Deportation, DHS

August 18, 2011 | 12:33 PM | By Leslie Berestein Rojas

What does the DHS policy shift on deportation mean?

The Obama administration announced this afternoon that it will make further changes to the way deportation cases are handled, potentially sparing many “low priority” immigrants such as youths who arrived here as children and military families from deportation, and allowing some the opportunity to work legally.

From a new post on the White House blog from Cecilia Muñoz, the White House’s director of intergovernmental affairs:

Today, they announced that they are strengthening their ability to target criminals even further by making sure they are not focusing our resources on deporting people who are low priorities for deportation. This includes individuals such as young people who were brought to this country as small children, and who know no other home. It also includes individuals such as military veterans and the spouses of active-duty military personnel. It makes no sense to spend our enforcement resources on these low-priority cases when they could be used with more impact on others, including individuals who have been convicted of serious crimes.

So DHS, along with the Department of Justice, will be reviewing the current deportation caseload to clear out low-priority cases on a case-by-case basis and make more room to deport people who have been convicted of crimes or pose a security risk. And they will take steps to keep low-priority cases out of the deportation pipeline in the first place. They will be applying common sense guidelines to make these decisions, like a person’s ties and contributions to the community, their family relationships and military service record.

What does this translate to? The office of Sen. Dick Durbin, an Illinois Democrat who is sponsoring the latest version of the Dream Act, which would grant conditional legal status to qualifying undocumented students and military hopefuls, has put out this interpretation:

Today, in a letter to Assistant Majority Leader Dick Durbin (D-IL) and 21 other Senators, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano announced that the Administration has established a new process for handling the deportation cases of DREAM Act students and other sympathetic individuals.

If fully implemented, the new process should stop virtually all DREAM Act deportations.

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FILED UNDER: Politics/Justice, Department of Homeland Security, DHS

May 31, 2011 | 5:37 PM | By Leslie Berestein Rojas

Opting out of Secure Communities? Not so fast, ICE official says

Photo by Chad Miller/Flickr (Creative Commons)

The California Assembly voted last week to approve a bill that seeks to extricate the state from Secure Communities, a federal immigration enforcement program in which the fingerprints of people who land in local jails are checked against a database of immigration records.

The bill, which now moves to the state Senate, would allow California to renegotiate its contract with the Department of Homeland Security, letting local jurisdictions opt out of what is now a mandatory program or the state to opt out altogether.

But can this really happen? Not so fast, says a top Homeland Security official interviewed by KPCC’s Kitty Felde. From a story today:

John Morton, director of federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement, says local jurisdictions don’t have the power to pick and choose.

“An individual state can’t come to the federal government and say, ‘We don’t want the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security to share information or seek to prevent that information sharing.’ That is between federal departments.”

The bill still needs approval from the state Senate, and from Gov. Jerry Brown, who supported Secure Communities when he was California’s attorney general.

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FILED UNDER: Politics/Justice, Department of Homeland Security, Secure Communities, Trust Act, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement

May 17, 2011 | 4:50 PM | By Leslie Berestein Rojas

The end of NSEERS, one of the most contentious post-9/11 national security programs

Photo by Timothy Valentine/Flickr (Creative Commons)

The Migration Policy Institute has published a brief history and analysis of the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System, known as NSEERS, which was terminated in recent weeks by Homeland Security.

Implemented after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, it was one of the most controversial national security programs established during that time. The idea was to collect information, fingerprints, and photographs of certain individuals entering and living in the United States, and to monitor their whereabouts. Its primary focus was on men from Muslim-majority countries.

Most contested by its critics was a “special registration” provision that required non-citizens already present in the United States to report to immigration officials for questioning. While this portion of NSEERS was suspended at the end of 2003, the rest of the program remained in effect until its termination was announced at end of April. From the MPI paper:

In its recent announcement terminating the program, DHS cited the redundancy of the current manifestation of NSEERS, stating that, as a result of improved intelligence programs and better methods of tracking immigrant visa overstays, NSEERS was no longer needed to protect national security. And in reference to the program’s turbulent past and controversy over profiling based on nationality and religion, DHS stated that it will now “seek to identify individuals and actions that pose specific threats, rather than focusing on more general designations of groups of individuals, such as country of origin.”

In a striking coincidence, the announcement to terminate the NSEERS program came less than a week before the death of Osama bin Laden, the al Qaeda leader responsible for the 9/11 attacks. It’s unclear as to whether the program would have been terminated in the aftermath of his death, which has increased anxiety about terrorist retaliation against the United States.

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FILED UNDER: Politics/Justice, 9/11 attacks, Department of Homeland Security, NSEERS, Osama bin Laden

May 4, 2011 | 11:27 AM | By Leslie Berestein Rojas

Immigration and the bin Laden effect: More on the changes since 9/11

A new stretch of border fence, February 2009. Photo by The Pope/Flickr (Creative Commons)

A post on Monday outlined a few of the direct and indirect ways in which the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks orchestrated by Osama bin Laden changed the nation’s immigration landscape. Legislative reaction to the attacks propelled legal and policy changes that led to tightened borders and beefed up immigration enforcement as national security took center stage. Among these changes was the creation of the Department of Homeland Security in early 2003.

In the days since, there have been other takes on immigration and the bin Laden effect. Today in a post in ColorLines, Seth Freed Wessler wrote about DHS’s National Security Entry-Exit Registration System, or NSEERS, a program whose recent end has been applauded by Muslim groups:

Muslims in the U.S. became the most ominous threat, by policy. The Department of Homeland Security created the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS), commonly called “Special Registration,” which functioned as a deportation net specifically for Muslims. As Colorlines’ Channing Kennedy wrote in April:

Initiated in September 2002, NSEERS functioned like Arizona’s SB 1070, with working-class Muslims as the target. Its first phase required all non-citizen male residents, ages 16 to 65, from a list of “suspect” nations, to register at INS offices. Thousands of families went out of their way to comply with the law, thinking it would be part of the government-sponsored pathways to citizenship that they were already participating in. Instead, in July 2003, the Washington Post reported it as the deportation of “the largest number of visitors from Middle Eastern and other Muslim countries in U.S. history—more than 13,000 of the nearly 83,000 men older than 16 who complied with the registration program by various deadlines between last September and April.”

Last week, the federal government officially ended the NSEERS program.

Bill Ong Hing, a law professor at the University of San Francisco and one of the editors of the ImmigrationProf Blog, wrote in an opinion piece yesterday in the Huffington Post:

The events of 9/11 and the ensuing call to action from the anti-immigrant lobby resulted in far-reaching legislative and enforcement actions. These enforcement actions had implications not only for suspected terrorists but also for immigrants already in the United States and noncitizens trying to enter as immigrants or with nonimmigrant visas. The Patriot Act passed Congress with near unanimous support, and the president signed it into law a mere six weeks after 9/11. The vast powers embodied in the law provide expanded authority to search, monitor, and detain citizens and noncitizens alike, but its implementation preyed most heavily on noncitizen Arabs, Muslims, and Sikhs.

Post-9/11 immigration and national security policy changes have been written about extensively since not long after the attacks, including in this 2003 report from the Migration Policy Institute that examined the challenge of preserving civil liberties alongside new security measures.

FILED UNDER: Politics/Justice, 9/11 attacks, Department of Homeland Security, NSEERS, Osama bin Laden, Patriot Act

May 2, 2011 | 11:03 AM | By Leslie Berestein Rojas

Five ways in which Osama bin Laden changed the immigration landscape

Post-9/11 security legislation known as the REAL ID Act allowed the government to waive environmental laws and litigation blocking border fence construction near San Diego, which called for filling in a canyon with 1.5 million cubic yards of dirt. Photo by Romel Jacinto/Flickr (Creative Commons)

The direct and indirect repercussions that the late Osama bin Laden’s actions in masterminding the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 have had on the agencies, policies and attitudes affecting immigrants in the United States are far too many to mention in a short list. The attacks led to the dissolution of the federal immigration infrastructure at the time, to several legislative and policy changes, and to an increasingly enforcement-heavy and divisive immigration climate.

Here are a few of the major changes:

1) The end of INS, the beginning of DHS: Criticism of the decades-old Immigration and Naturalization Service, after it it was discovered that some of the 9/11 hijackers were here on visas that shouldn’t have been granted, led to the end of the INS in early 2003. The agency, which at the time governed all immigration functions from visas to border security, was replaced by the much broader Department of Homeland Security. Three sub-agencies within DHS were given authority over immigration matters: U.S. Customs and Border Protection (overseeing customs and border security, including the U.S. Border Patrol); U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, overseeing functions such as naturalization and the granting of legal residency; and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, which is responsible for immigration enforcement in the United States, oversees immigrant detention and deportation, and is responsible for enforcement policies such as Secure Communities and 287(g).

2) The Patriot Act: Less than two months after the 9/11 attacks, Congress passed the “Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001,” what’s referred to as the Patriot Act. This controversial piece of legislation expanded the federal government’s ability to conduct surveillance on Americans. Among other things, it allowed law enforcement agents greater ability to conduct wiretaps and to search telephone, e-mail, financial, medical and other records, as well as to conduct property searches without advising the owner. The law made it easier for law enforcement and immigration authorities to detain and deport immigrants suspected of being connected to terrorism and placed greater scrutiny on foreign students. It has long been criticized by civil rights groups, who have alleged misuse and constitutional violations and complain that Middle Eastern immigrants are singled out. Some Patriot Act provisions, including a “roving wiretap” provision, are set to expire later this month unless extended.

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