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About 47,000 people have been removed or deported from the U.S. after the Homeland Security Department sifted through 3 million sets of fingerprints taken from bookings at local jails, reports the Associated Press. About one-quarter of those kicked out of the country did not have criminal records, according to government data obtained by immigration advocacy groups that have filed a lawsuit. (more…)
A federal “Secure Communities” database designed to identify non-citizens has helped authorities remove 31,000 convicted criminals from the U.S. in less than two years and is being aggressively expanded throughout the nation by the Obama administration, the Arizona Republic reports. (more…)
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.
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.
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.
