the crime report

A new report by the Urban Institute analyzes how children are affected by the results of their parents’ immigration violations. “Facing Our Future: Children in the Aftermath of Immigration Enforcement” examines a sample of the more than 5 million children whose unauthorized parents have been scooped up by immigration authorities, and looks at housing, food, mental health and behavior, to create a picture of the affect of arrest, detention and deportation on children, most of whom are U.S. citizens.

Use The Crime Report for more information on Immigration and Deportation.

A new study out of Syracuse University looks at the results of a more than 100 percent increase in the budget of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Detention and Removal budget in the years 2005-2009. According the report produced by TRAC, ICE had pledged to focus on detaining people who posed a threat to society, but the number of non-criminal detainees doubled, while the number of criminal detainees remained the same: “Instead of giving priority to the detention and removal of aliens convicted of crimes, the agency seemingly focused on filling detention beds.”

Click here to read the study.

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State and local law enforcement agencies are responsible for six of every 10 immigrants detained in the United States, according to a report released Tuesday by the Obama administration.

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Immigrations and Customs Enforcement has interrogated 4,000 prisoners — including pre-trial, and thus presumably innocent, detainees — at New York’s Rikers Island every year since 2004, according to a new report by East Harlem Against Deportation. The group, led by New York State Senator Jose Serrano, who represents Manhattan’s immigrant-heavy East Harlem neighborhood, was created in May of this year in response to what the neighborhood felt was increasing immigration enforcement by local police and corrections officials.

“Immigration Reform Starts Here: City and State Policy Recommendations to Protect New York Immigrants and Their Families,” recommends limiting ICE’s ability to question pre-trial detainees, and outlines a sample framework for how NYPD might more effectively build trust within the immigrant community.

Use The Crime Report for more information on Immigration, Family Detention and ICE.

The U.S. has deported hundreds of thousands of foreign-born criminals in recent years. The Arizona Republic says a significant number have come back again, illegally, often to commit more crimes. There are no statistics on how many deported criminals re-enter the U.S. illegally, but arrests by Border Patrol agents in the Tucson region alone suggest the number is high. In fiscal year 2008, 16 percent of the 317,696 immigrants arrested by agents in Tucson, one of nine sectors on the U.S.-Mexican border, were charged with felony counts of re-entering illegally.

Crossing the border illegally is typically a misdemeanor.The illegal re-entry of people who have been deported, especially those with criminal histories, represents one of the most vexing and persistent problems in the government’s stepped-up effort to battle illegal immigration. The government doesn’t have the resources to prosecute all of them, and in the past most simply were deported again. To deter re-entry, the government is beefing up efforts to prosecute violent criminals who come back after they’ve been incarcerated and then deported, sentencing the most dangerous and egregious offenders to lengthy prison terms, rather than sending them back home. The goal is to prevent deported criminals who re-enter the U.S. from committing more crimes and to deter others from re-entering, said Joseph Koehler, an assistant U.S. attorney in Phoenix who supervises a unit that prosecutes these cases.

A new book explores how New York City’s affluent suburbs are coping with the rise of youth gangs

Sarah Garland, a New York-based investigative journalist, was researching gangs in East Harlem when a professor suggested she take a look at Garden City, L.I., an affluent suburb 21 miles east of Times Square.  Garland soon discovered that the inner-city doesn’t have a monopoly on violent youth. Her troubling account of the five years she spent following the largely Hispanic gangs in suburban Long Island is now a book:  “Gangs in Garden City: How Immigration, Segregation, and Youth Violence are Changing America’s Suburbs,” released by Nation Books on June 29th.

The Crime Report’s Cara Tabachnick asked Garland about her findings.

The Crime Report: Long Island is usually considered a safe suburban area outside of New York.  Is there a difference between suburban and city gangs?

Sarah Garland:  Both care about the blocks that they control. The …setting is obviously different,  but the concerns are the same. (more…)

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency announced this week that criminal arrests along the Southwest border of the U.S. were up 17 percent so far in 2009. Between October 2008 and June 2009, ICE made 6,834 criminal arrests, just over  1,000 more than the same period in 2008. ICE also announced that the agency deported nearly 50,000 more “aliens” between October and June than the year before, and that Fugitive Operations Teams have captured 26, 900 people so far this year.

Use The Crime Report for more information on Immigration, Deportation and ICE.

Phoenix police officers are largely failing to comply with a year-old policy that lets them question people about their immigration status, undercutting the effectiveness of a plan aimed at helping crack down on illegal immigration, reports the Arizona Republic. The policy, adopted partly in response to criticism that the city provided sanctuary to undocumented immigrants by restricting police officers’ ability to ask about a person’s legal status, gives the officers more discretion to question people and to notify federal officials when they encounter a suspected illegal immigrant.

But the Republic found that officers frequently don’t ask people they arrest about their immigration status as required, and they rarely report suspected illegal to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Officers also are not always following the policy requirement to document their contact with ICE officials and to get a supervisor’s approval before turning suspected illegal immigrants over to federal officials.

A new primer from the Immigrant Justice Network illuminates the “Dangerous Merger” between the criminal justice system and immigration enforcement system. The paper touches on such phenomenon as the “Criminal Alien” program and how ICE contracts with local jails increase racial profiling.

Click here to read the primer.

Use The Crime Report for more resources on Family Detention, Deportation, Immigration and Racial Profiling.