NDLON in the News

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New Study: US Spends More on Immigration Enforcement Than on Top Federal Criminal Law Enforcement Agencies Combined

A report issued today by the Migration Policy Institute finds that the federal government spends more on immigration enforcement than it does on the FBI, DEA, Secret Service, US Marshalls, and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives combined. It also finds that more people are detained each year in immigration detention facilities than are…

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New ICE Detainer Guidance Too Little, Too Late

On the Friday before Christmas, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) released new guidance on immigration “detainers, online ” the lynchpin of agency enforcement programs involving cooperation with local police. In the new guidance, ICE Director John Morton instructed agency employees to only file detainers against immigrants who represent agency “priorities.” Unfortunately, as with prior agency memos on prosecutorial discretion, the detainer guidance is so riddled with loopholes that it could have little—if any—practical effect. The new guidance defines “priorities” so broadly as to make the term virtually meaningless. As is now well known, immigration detainers are requests (not commands) sent by ICE to local jails asking for selected inmates to be held even after they would otherwise be entitled to release. Although the federal government has issued detainers for decades, their use has become especially common following the expansion of Se Communities…

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A safer route to se communities – PressDemocrat

Federal immigration authorities quietly announced a new policy just before Christmas that promises to ease conflicts with local law enforcement agencies while targeting violent criminals for deportation. The new Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency policy mirrors what was promised four years ago when the Se Communities program was launched. ICE will review fingerprints from people arrested by local police, and it will seek custody of people believed to be in the United States illegally if they have committed a serious crime or are repeat offenders. In practice, ICE has detained and deported thousands of people with no criminal record or who have been arrested for petty offenses such as traffic violations. In Sonoma County, 47 percent of the people turned over to immigration agents in the first year of the program hadn’t been convicted of the crimes that landed them in jail.

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An overdue fix to Se Communities – LA Times

The Obama administration has spent nearly four years trying to convince states and local law enforcement that the federal immigration program known as Se Communities is narrowly targeted to deporting dangerous criminals. It’s not. And late last month, the administration finally conceded as much when it announced long-overdue reforms that should restore some credibility and fairness to the controversial program. Se Communities was created to identify “dangerous criminal aliens” for deportation. Local law enforcement agencies were supposed to send the fingerprints of arrestees to federal immigration officials, who would run them through national crime databases. If an arrestee turned out to be an illegal immigrant with a serious criminal background, a “detainer” could be issued requesting that he be held for up to 48 hours so that federal officials could take him into custody.

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