Dysfunctional US Immigration System deporting vulnerable people

by Catherine A. Traywick, Media Consortium blogger

For the past several months, the Obama administration has relentlessly professed its commitment to targeting only the most dangerous "criminal aliens." But a new report released this week by the Immigration Policy Center suggests that misguided Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) polices render the administration virtually powerless to fulfill its promise.

As Braden Goyette at Campus Progress reports, ICE's practice of outsourcing immigration enforcement to local police through the 287(g) and Secure Communities programs undermines the administration's stated priority of deporting "the worst of the worst." She writes:

By using these partnerships to increase its deportation figures, the federal government gives up control over front-line enforcement to local police, opening up the door to subjective judgment calls -- essentially, all of the problems that plague everyday policing.

Law enforcement charged with enforcing immigration laws -- particularly in areas where heavy enforcement is politically popular -- routinely make discretionary arrests in direct defiance of the Obama administration's stated priorities. As a result, tens of thousands of undocumented immigrants have been deported because of minor crimes, such as traffic offenses.

A bigger issue, though, is that ICE's enforcement programs are fundamentally out of line with the Obama administration's avowed commitment to targeting criminals. The Secure Communities program, which requires local law enforcement agencies to share fingerprints with ICE, is a key example of this disconnect. The program routinely nets even the victims of violent crime. Secure Communities is expanding rapidly, despite its deviance from the agency's stated objective of pursuing criminals.

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