NPR
By Richard Gonzales
September 8, 2015
Federal
immigration officials are issuing far fewer detainer requests, also
known as immigration holds, to state and local law enforcement agencies
seeking immigrants
who are in this country illegally. At the same time, the requests that
are issued don't appear to be targeting serious, or convicted,
criminals.
That's
according to federal data collected by the Transactional Records Access
Clearinghouse, obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests.
It's an independent
research organization based at Syracuse University.
Detainer
requests dropped 30 percent between October 2014 and April 2015, from
11,355 to 7,993. In November of last year, the secretary of the
Department of Homeland Security,
Jeh Johnson, announced a new Obama administration policy changing the
way detainers are issued.
Under
an old program called Secure Communities, officials at Immigration and
Customs Enforcement would ask local police to hold immigrants for up to
48 hours after they
were due to be released. Immigration activists argued that these holds"
were unconstitutional. Last year, a federal court in Oregon agreed,
ruling that ICE detainer requests violate the Fourth Amendment.
Johnson
unveiled a new approach called the Priority Enforcement Program.
Fingerprint data collected by state and local authorities at the time of
a booking are still sent
to federal officials for matching with immigration records. What's
different is that ICE only issues a request that it be notified 48 hours
before local law enforcement releases an immigrant from custody.
There's
plenty of evidence that the 30 percent drop in detainer requests is
consistent with a longtime trend reaching back to 2011, when almost
28,000 detainer requests
were issued. That number has been dropping ever since.
Virginia
Kice, a spokeswoman for ICE, said in a statement that her agency
determines when it will issue detainers "on a case-by-case basis with a
priority for detention
of serious criminal offenders and other individuals who pose a
significant threat to public safety."
But
TRAC says that in April 2015, only 32 percent of the detainers were
issued for immigrants with criminal convictions and only 19 percent had
felony convictions. "Fully
two-thirds had no criminal conviction of any type," says the TRAC
report.
For more information, go to: www.beverlyhillsiimmigrationlaw.com
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