Top five immigration stories of 2011

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December 30, 2011 | 12:34 PM | By

The top five immigration stories of 2011

Photo by Victoria Bernal/Flickr (Creative Commons)

During the past week, Multi-American has been counting down the biggest and most influential immigration stories of 2011. That’s not to say there were only five: It’s been a major year for stories related to the immigration debate, especially as the battleground has shifted to the states, record deportations have continued, and the Obama administration’s expansion of federal-local partnerships such as the Secure Communities fingerprint sharing program continues to draw controversy.

Stories that didn’t make the list are also worth mentioning, among them the passage of state tuition-aid bills for undocumented students like the California Dream Act and the continued steep drop in illegal border crossings – even as illegal immigration remains a popular talking point for candidates seeking the presidency in 2012. Here are M-A’s choices for top stories of the year.

1) The states as immigration battleground: When counting down last year’s top stories, choosing Arizona’s game-changing SB 1070 to top the list was a no-brainer. Not necessarily because news of the stringent 2010 anti-illegal immigration law dominated immigration coverage last year, but because of the lasting impact the law was bound to have on other states.

A year later, SB 1070-inspired immigration enforcement bills have made their way through statehouses around the country. Similarly strict laws have taken effect in states like Alabama, Georgia, Utah, Indiana and South Carolina.

Like the Arizona measure that inspired them, headed to the U.S. Supreme Court on a state appeal, all of these face their own court challenges. Federal judges have blocked several of these laws’ most stringent provisions, including a controversial provision in Alabama that would require public schools to check the immigration status of students, which when the law first took effect prompted a rash of school absences. Agricultural states like Georgia and Alabama, meanwhile, have experienced severe labor shortages as immigrant farm workers have fled their fields for more welcoming climes.

The new laws enacted are but one small aspect of what’s been happening in the states. The National Conference of State Legislatures reported recently that in 2011, there were 1,607 bills and resolutions relating to immigrants and refugees introduced in all 50 states and Puerto Rico, significantly up from a little more than 1,400 in 2010. Bolstered by the relative success of SB 1070, even as parts of the law remain hung up in court, immigration restriction-minded legislators in many states banded together, working with the same legal teams to draft crackdown bills.

Where does it go from here? The Supreme Court decision on SB 1070 could well hold the answer, either encouraging or putting the brakes on state bills. The high court will weigh the merits of a lower court judge’s decision to block some of the more controversial provisions of the law, including one empowering local police to check for immigration status. The case is expected to be heard in the spring.

The high court set a state-law precedent earlier this year when it ruled in favor of a previous Arizona anti-illegal immigration law, a 2007 measure mandating employers to use a federal program called E-Verify to check workers’s immigration status and punishing those who don’t comply. Many of the state laws that have followed SB 1070 have had similar employer provisions, an enforcement tactic that is becoming more popular as states find ways to crack down.

Photo by John Moore/Getty Images

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

2) Another year of record deportations: In fiscal year 2011, the Obama administration broke its 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 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 people deported annually has crept upward steadily for years now, from 291,060 in fiscal year 2007 to 396,906 in fiscal year 2011, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement records.

These deportations have raised several questions, among them questions about just who is being deported as the Obama administration stresses an emphasis on criminal deportees, and whether the programs being used are working as intended. 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 deportation stats have pointed out gray areas.

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FILED UNDER: Birthright citizenship, Coming out undocumented, Prosecutorial discretion, Record deportations, SB 1070, Secure Communities, Top five immigration stories of 2011
December 30, 2011 | 9:56 AM | By

Top five immigration stories of 2011, #1: The battle in the states

Photo by naslrogues/Flickr (Creative Commons)

A year ago, when Multi-American was counting down the top five immigration stories of 2010, topping the list with Arizona’s game-changing SB 1070 was a no-brainer. Not necessarily because news of the 2010 anti-illegal immigration law dominated immigration coverage last year, but because of the lasting impact the law was bound to have on other states. I wrote then:

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.

A year later, SB 1070-inspired immigration enforcement bills have made their way through statehouses around the country. Similarly strict laws have taken effect in states like Alabama, Georgia, Utah, Indiana and South Carolina.

Like the Arizona measure that inspired them, headed to the U.S. Supreme Court on a state appeal, all of these face their own court challenges. Federal judges have blocked several of these laws’ most stringent provisions, including a controversial provision in Alabama that would require public schools to check the immigration status of students, which when the law first took effect prompted a rash of school absences.

Agricultural states like Georgia and Alabama, meanwhile, have experienced severe labor shortages as immigrant farm workers have fled their fields for more welcoming climes.

The new laws enacted are but one small aspect of what’s been happening in the states. The National Conference of State Legislatures reported recently that in 2011, there were 1,607 bills and resolutions relating to immigrants and refugees introduced in all 50 states and Puerto Rico, significantly up from a little more than 1,400 in 2010. Bolstered by the relative success of SB 1070, even as parts of the law remain hung up in court, immigration restriction-minded legislators in many states banded together, working with the same legal teams to help them draft immigration crackdown bills.

Interestingly, in spite of the bill-filing fury, 11 percent fewer of these state immigration bills became law this year than in 2010. Among those that didn’t get anywhere were a series of bills intended to end birthright citizenship for the U.S.-born babies of undocumented immigrants, written with the aid of the same legal counsel behind SB 1070 and introduced in states like Arizona, Indiana and Iowa. Also voted down was an Arizona “omnibus” bill that would have denied public services to undocumented immigrants, similarly to California’s ill-fated Proposition 187 in 1994, and an Arizona bill requiring that hospitals check for patients’ immigration status.

Where does it go from here? The Supreme Court decision on SB 1070 could well hold the answer.

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FILED UNDER: Alabama immigration law, Georgia immigration law, SB 1070, South Carolina immigration law, State immigration laws, Top five immigration stories of 2011
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
December 28, 2011 | 1:56 PM | By

Top five immigration stories of 2011, #3: Secure Communities

Photo by Corey Moore/KPCC

Anti-Secure Communities protesters in Los Angeles, August 15, 2011

The controversy over the federal immigration enforcement program known as Secure Communitieshas been brewing since not long after it was first implemented 2008, during the waning days of the Bush administration. But after a heated back-and-forth between state, local and federal officials over the program as some jurisdictions attempted to withdraw – only to be told they couldn’t – the controversy came to a head this year.

First, in a nutshell, how Secure Communities works: When state or local authorities book someone into a local jail, the person’s fingerprints are electronically submitted to the FBI. These fingerprints are then sent to the Department of Homeland Security, and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents check them against an immigration records database to determine if the person is deportable (legal residents are also subject to deportation if they have committed certain offenses). The person is then held for deportation by ICE.

Unlike with a similar federal-local partnership known as 287(g), the screening is done pre-conviction, meaning that some people who turn out to be otherwise innocent have landed in the deportation net; some cases have involved domestic violence victims. This has been a sticking point for critics of the program, who say it goes against the Obama administration’s stated goal of focusing on criminals for deportation. Criticism has also come from some law enforcement agencies, state and city officials who complain that because of its nature, the program alienates immigrant communities by undermining trust in police, making policing them more difficult.

Which brings us to this year’s explosive controversy: Several jurisdictions around the country, including the city of San Francisco, began attempting to opt out of the program last year. Many local and state officials had believed that as with 287(g), Secure Communities was optional, as evidenced by a series of internal emails released last spring. After all, federal officials had signed contracts known as Memorandums of Agreement, or MOAs, with state and local officials around the country allowing Secure Communities to be implemented.

Here’s how part of the contract with the California Department of Justice, dated January 23, 2009, reads:

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.

Sounds optional, right? But it isn’t, according to federal officials.

By last summer, the governors of Massachusetts, Illinois and New York had announced plans to withdraw from the program, and California’s state Assembly had passed legislation that would allow the state to renegotiate its Secure Communities contract with Homeland Security, allowing local jurisdictions to opt out.

Then the hammer came down. In August, ICE director John Morton sent out a letter to governors terminating all existing MOAs with the agency regarding Secure Communities. The letter clarified “an issue that has been the subject of substantial confusion,” i.e. that states must participate and have no choice in the matter, according to ICE.

The program has continued to draw harsh criticism, most recently from civil rights advocates angry over U.S. citizens being detained accidentally after being fingerprinted. A recent UC Berkeley Law School report cited as many as 3,600 cases of U.S. citizens having been arrested by ICE as a result of Secure Communities.

The Obama administration continues to support use of Secure Communities, crediting it along with 287(g) in part for continued record deportations, a growing number of which federal officials are counting as removals of people with criminal records. But that’s another story for this week.

Come back tomorrow for top story #2.

FILED UNDER: ICE, Record deportations, Secure Communities, Top five immigration stories of 2011, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement
December 27, 2011 | 12:32 PM | By

Top five immigration stories of 2011, #4: Birthright citizenship

Photo by Victoria Bernal/Flickr (Creative Commons)

The political battle over birthright citizenship exploded almost a year ago, when a series of states began introducing bills seeking to cut off the children born to undocumented immigrants from automatic U.S. citizenship.

The United States, like most countries in the Americas but unlike many European nations, has had a longstanding practice of jus soli citizenship, meaning citizenship is granted to those born on U.S. soil (jus soli is Latin for “right of the soil). Other nations, such as Germany, abide by versions of jus sanguinis (Latin for “right of blood”) citizenship, which there is granted only to children of citizens and/or legal residents.

The notion of barring the children of undocumented immigrants from receiving U.S. citizenship had long lingered on the more extreme fringes of the immigration restriction lobby. But in the anything-is-possible climate that followed the approval of Arizona’s stringent SB 1070 last year, a group of like-minded state legislators banded together and, with the aid of attorneys who worked on SB 1070, created one-size-fits-all model state legislation that would distinguish between babies born to undocumented immigrants and other children when issuing state birth certificates.

Bills based on this model were introduced in several states, including four related bills in Arizona. The idea was to force a Supreme Court reinterpretation of the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which since a landmark 1898 ruling has been interpreted as defining how citizenship is bestowed on those born in this country. Here’s Section 1 of the 14th Amendment:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

While it seems self-explanatory, opponents of the 1898 definition (which came out of a legal challenge from a young San Francisco-born Chinese American named Wong Kim Ark) argued otherwise. Here’s what John Eastman, a Chapman University law professor who along with Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach helped draft the model bill, wrote in a 2006 legal paper:

Textually, such an interpretation is manifestly erroneous, for it renders the entire “subject to the jurisdiction” clause redundant. Anyone who is “born” in the United States is, under this interpre-tation, necessarily “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States. Yet it is a well-established doctrine of legal interpretation that legal texts, including the Constitution, are not to be interpreted to create redundancy unless any other interpretation would lead to absurd results.

The “subject to the jurisdiction” provision must therefore require something in addition to mere birth on U.S. soil.

Anti-birthright citizenship bills were introduced in states that included Arizona (where four related bills were introduced), Iowa and Indiana; a related U.S. Senate resolution seeking a constitutional amendment was introduced by GOP legislators from Kentucky and Louisiana.

In the end, the bills didn’t get much traction. In Arizona, where two of the anti-birthright citizenship bills were voted on in the Senate, these and three other strict anti-illegal immigration bills (including one requiring hospitals to check immigration status, and another “omnibus” bill that would bar undocumented immigrants from public services) were voted down in March.

Much speculation followed: Had the anti-birthright citizenship frenzy contributed to a jump-the-shark moment for immigration restriction in the nation’s statehouses?

As the last several months have shown, not entirely. While the action has cooled in Arizona, as evidenced most recently by the recall of SB 1070 sponsor and former state Sen. Russell Pearce (also a champion of the anti-birthright citizenship movement), other states such as Georgia, Alabama and South Carolina have since enacted their own strict anti-illegal immigration laws.

And while none of these have included an anti-birthright citizenship component, their relative success – in spite of court challenges – has shown that state-level immigration initiatives have yet to lose their popularity.

As for the state-to-Supreme Court trajectory that the architects of the anti-birthright citizenship bills envisioned, based on what they hoped would happen with SB 1070? The high court is set to take on the SB 1070 case early next year, a ruling that could make or break the state law trend. But that’s for another story this week.

Check back in tomorrow for top story #3.

FILED UNDER: 14th Amendment, Anti-birthright citizenship, Birthright citizenship, John Eastman, Jus sanguinis, Jus soli, Kris Kobach, SB 1070, Sen. Russell Pearce, Top five immigration stories of 2011, Wong Kim Ark
December 26, 2011 | 12:57 PM | By

Top five immigration stories of 2011, #5: ‘Coming out’ undocumented

Photo by Leslie Berestein Rojas/KPCC

A student activist's t-shirt, December 2010

This week, Multi-American is counting down its top five immigration stories of 2011. It’s been a tough list to narrow down with so many major stories this year, ranging from the political battle over birthright citizenship early in the year to the ongoing record deportations to the growing number of state immigration laws, a story that’s still developing as a case involving Arizona’s precedent-setting SB 1070 heads to the U.S. Supreme Court.

We’ll start out today with one story that didn’t come out of government, though, but rather bubbled up slowly from college campuses and gained steam via social media: the trend of “coming out” as undocumented among young people, done as a political act.

What began a few years ago among a small number of undocumented student activists has developed into a movement its own right. By December of last year, growing numbers of young, undocumented college students and their supporters were publicly revealing their status as a previous version of the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act, a bill that would grant conditional legal status to young people who arrived before age 16 if they went to college or joined the military, moved through the House and on to the Senate.

The bill failed to clear a Senate vote, but the trend continued. In California, some of these young people threw their efforts behind two state bills called the California Dream Act (both eventually signed into law this year) which would make it easier for undocumented students to pay tuition.

Last March, a national campaign mounted by student immigrant advocacy groups urged more students to reveal their status, with groups around the country holding coming-out events.

During one coming-out event in Orange County last spring, some of those taking part talked about the trend becoming, for many, a cathartic rite of passage for many young people who were brought to the U.S. by their parents at an early age, growing up culturally American while keeping their legal status a secret from their peers.

“People have reached this point,” said Jorge Gutierrez, a 26-year-old activist and graduate of Cal State Fullerton who was brought here by his family from Mexico at age 10, but had been unable to adjust his status. “It has become a cultural phenomenon.”

The movement hit a milestone last June, when ex-Washington Post reporter and Pulitzer winner Jose Antonio Vargas revealed that he’d kept his status a secret for years, sharing it only with a close network of confidantes while navigating college and career. Vargas, who was born in the Philippines, wrote in the New York Times:

Over the past 14 years, I’ve graduated from high school and college and built a career as a journalist, interviewing some of the most famous people in the country. On the surface, I’ve created a good life. I’ve lived the American dream.

But I am still an undocumented immigrant. And that means living a different kind of reality. It means going about my day in fear of being found out. It means rarely trusting people, even those closest to me, with who I really am.

The term “coming out,” if course, is borrowed. While promoting last year’s “National Coming Out of the Shadows” week, the advocacy site DreamActivist.org posted a quote from gay rights hero Harvey Milk, the slain San Francisco city supervisor who in a 1978 speech urged his peers, “you must come out.”

Milk was calling for a political act during an era when coming out the closet was not a cultural expectation or norm, but a dangerous thing to do, as it still is in many places. But the danger didn’t involve deportation, as it does for people who aren’t in the country legally.

Young people who have come out as undocumented say they are aware of the risks; they also say that the more of them choose to come out, there more safety they believe there is in numbers. Student activist networks have come to the aid of those who land in deportation proceedings, launching petition drives and social media campaigns.

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FILED UNDER: Politics/Justice, California Dream Act, Coming out, Coming out undocumented, Dream Act, Harvey Milk, National Coming out of the Shadows Week, Top five immigration stories of 2011