Congress has taken notice.
The House Committee on Homeland Security held a hearing yesterday on the role of state and local law enforcement in immigration law, specifically focusing on the 287(g) program in which police departments and sheriffs' offices are trained and authorized to carry out some aspects of federal immigration law. At the hearing the Government Accountability Office released a report highlighting the lack of oversight provided by ICE over the state and local agencies whose officers have been deputized under 287(g).
The hearing came in the midst of a slew of investigations and reports scrutinizing the effectiveness of local law enforcement of immigration law.
Justice Strategies recently released the results of its own year-long investigation of the 287(g) program. Justice Strategies describes its findings:
ICE described the 287(g) program as a public safety measure to target "criminal illegal aliens," but its largest impact has been on law-abiding immigrant communities. Rather than focusing on serious crime, police resources are spent targeting day-laborers, corn-vendors and people with broken tail-lights.
The report offers a state-by-state analysis on how the 287(g) program has played out for the communities of participating police departments and sheriffs' offices.
In Arizona, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio has become the focal point of national opposition to local law enforcement of federal immigration laws. But Arpaio is only the most visible of example of how 287(g) and other ICE cooperation agreements have led to alleged racial profiling and the detention of men and women with no criminal history.
An investigation by the Chicago Reporter shows that cooperation with ICE by suburban police departments has led to racial profiling-based traffic stops. The magazine analyzes 2007 traffic-stop records for Chicago suburbs and reports that "44 out of more than 200 communities in the six-county Chicago area recorded a disparity of at least 10 percentage points when the share of Latino drivers stopped is compared to their size in the driving-age population."
For immigrants, racial profiling can have particularly serious consequences.
The Chicago Reporter reports that running a person's name through a federal immigration database has become a routine part of traffic stops for some police departments. As a result, a large number of the men and women who have been turned over to ICE custody are not violent criminals, but people who were caught speeding or driving with broken taillights or some other traffic violation. In the city of Elgin, for example, between March and November 2008, 40 percent of the 233 individuals screened in the ICE database were arrested for driving without licenses, according to the Chicago Reporter.
In recent weeks, federal immigration officers also have been accused of racial profiling in their work. Although not a subject of yesterday's hearing, the National Fugitive Operations Program, a heavily funded program intended to target dangerous fugitive criminal, has come under scrutiny for alleged racial profiling and a tendency to target immigrants who have no criminal history. A study by N. Cardozo School of Law and the Migration Policy Institute revealed that the vast majority of the men and women detained by ICE's fugitive operations teams had no criminal convictions at all. The New York Times reports that "the percentage of criminal fugitives arrested plummeted, to 9 percent in the year that ended Sept. 30, 2007, from 39 percent in the 2004 fiscal year. That same year, 15,646, or 51 percent of those arrested, had an outstanding deportation order, but no criminal record, and 12,084, or 40 percent, were termed 'ordinary status violators' who did not fit any of the program's priority categories."
Allegations against ICE officers gained national attention in February when The Washington Post reported that footage from security cameras at a 7-11 in Baltimore contradicted sworn declarations by ICE officers about how a series of arrests had played out at the convenience store. The Post reports that the local ICE fugitive operations unit was struggling to meet a Washington-mandated annual quota of 1,000 arrests per team. According to the The Post, the Baltimore incident "offers a glimpse into how Washington's directives on arrest targets might have spurred officers in the field to stray from their mission and stage a random sweep for illegal immigrants, possibly in violation of ICE's stated practice."
Immigrant communities and advocates have long suspected the ineffectiveness of fugitive operations and local immigration enforcement initiatives because they have seen neighbors, family members, and clients with no criminal history taken into custody during ICE sweeps reportedly targeting fugitives. Many groups, including the National Immigrant Justice Center, also have spoken out against the dangers of turning local police officers in to immigration agents. Hopefully, recent revelations and Congressional attention will mean an end to unjust policies that leave immigrants living in fear and fail to make our cities safer.