Updates on Deportations and What to Expect Next
Arrests during ICE raids this February were a fraction of those in the past several years of the same operation, but that doesn’t mean the push is over — it’s probably coming to a jail near you.
ICE says the final round-up tally in early February raids was 680 undocumented immigrants apprehended, 75% of those criminal, according to DHS Secretary John Kelly’s statement released on Monday.
Despite both President Donald Trump and spox Stephen Miller, Duke ’07, boasting about the scope of this latest in a multi-year series of sweeps called Operation Cross Check, the 680 arrests were the fewest of any year since 2011.
2017 hasn’t yet reached half of the previous years’ tallies. In 2015 ICE reported making 2,059 arrests nationwide, 1,660 in 2013, after 3,100 the prior year. In 2011 ICE reported 2900 arrests in June and 2,400 arrests in September, 5,300 across all 50 states.
Trump’s big deportation move will likely make use of local law enforcement as a necessary force multiplier.
The US Constitution vests the power to enforce immigration laws within the federal government, but for twenty years local cops have participated in detention and removal operations through a mechanism commonly called by its section in the statute, 287(g).
The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigration Responsibility Act (IIRAIRA) of September 30, 1996, amended the Immigration and Nationality Act by adding 287(g) to the Act (this was updated with the Homeland Security Act of 2002).
“The Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security is authorized to enter into agreements with state and local law enforcement. These agreements allow designated officers to perform immigration law enforcement functions pursuant to an MOU.”
If Trump wants to deport anything like the numbers he’s promised (once 11 million, more recently 3), these agreements with state and city law enforcement agencies will be absolutely crucial.
It’s also probably logistically impossible for the president to accomplish the full scale of removals in the stated two-year time-frame.
It is also almost certain that the administration wants to maximize “voluntary” deportations. A report by Center-Right American Action Forum modeling the manpower and gear needed for Trump’s mass exodus assumed that “20 percent of undocumented immigrants would leave voluntarily. According to the Pew Research Center’s most recent estimate, in 2014 there were 11.3 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States… remaining 9.04 million immigrants.”
According to ICE, its current deportation capacity is 400,000 undocumented immigrants per year.
“That means that if ICE were to operate at its current maximum capacity, it would take over 20 years to remove 9.04 million undocumented immigrants.”
Even if we scale this down to POTUS’s latest figure, the task is Herculean for other reasons than sheer human numbers.
There are two primary types of apprehensions made by ICE, criminal arrests and administrative arrests — the latter are when local law enforcement officers arrest immigrants for another (often traffic) violation.
Of 241,694 apprehensions in 2013, only about 18% were made by ICE agents and Fugitive Operations Teams, FOTs (11,996/31,222).
For roughly 200,000 of its apprehensions, ICE relied on local departments, almost certainly operating under 287(g) agreements (plus holds) making administrative arrests.
The history of Operation Cross Check also indicates 287(g) enables/necessitates a sort of enforcement hub-and-spoke network.
According to ICE, the geographic breakdown of Cross Check 2017 arrests was 190 arrested in Georgia and North & South Carolina; 235 arrested in “6 Midwestern states,” with the Chicago ICE office conducting raids in Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin, Kentucky, Kansas and Missouri; 161 in Los Angeles-area, or “Socal” and 41 arrested in New York-area, the two regions where the majority of undocumented immigrants are thought to reside; 51 arrested in San Antonio-area, and 44 were confirmed as having been in Austin.
The same pattern has been followed for the past 5 years, and it aligns with some explanatory power with existing 287(g) agreements.
This pattern has been explored by Daniel L. Stageman, PhD, Director of Research Operations at CUNY John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
As I reported in my last post, Stageman is profiling 287(g) jurisdictions with an assumption reinforced by the figures presented above. His most recent in the series looks at Etowah County, Alabama’s program and detention facility.
The county processed 63 287(g) detainees in 2012, according to Stageman’s report, “a number considerably smaller than the thousands processed in many other 287g counties but proportionately significant for Etowah County’s low population (about 104 thousand residents, 3.3% of whom Hispanic or Latino).”
“The Etowah County Detention Center, with a capacity of 357, occupies an $8 million wing of the Etowah County Jail,” wrote Stageman. “The then Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) funded this expansion directly in 2003, in order to outfit the facility to house long-term detainees. Despite this investment, conditions at the facility have long been considered problematic…”
In November 2011 I covered a protest at the jail, which is located in the middle of the county seat, Gadsden, AL.
In his next post Stageman will look at Frederick County, MD — you can read about the department’s program in 2007 below.
