Immigration Impact: New ICE Deportation Statistics Are No Cause for Celebration Walter Ewing - Immigration Impact
go to original December 21, 2013

How to Turn the US-Mexican Border Into a War Zone: Al Jazeera's Rob Reynolds reports from the city of Mexicali. (AlJazeeraEnglish)

There is little to cheer in the new deportation statistics released by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). While the numbers document a 10 percent decline in the total number of deportations compared to last year, they also reveal the extent to which immigration enforcement resources are still devoted to apprehending, detaining, and deporting individuals who represent no conceivable threat to public safety or national security.

In fact, the overwhelming majority of people deported by ICE either have no prior criminal record or were convicted of misdemeanors - and most of those misdemeanors were simply immigration violations that have been made criminal offenses.

While ICE does indeed capture and remove potentially dangerous individuals, most of its resources remain devoted to the enforcement of a broken and unworkable immigration system. The latest decline in removals notwithstanding, the U.S. deportation machine remains severely out of balance and lacking in either flexibility or meaningful opportunities for due process.

The latest statistics from ICE indicate that there were 368,644 “removals” in Fiscal Year (FY) 2013. This includes 133,551 people who were apprehended in the interior of the country, and 235,093 who were apprehended at or near the border. While the total is down considerably from prior years, such as the 409,849 removals which took place in FY 2012, it remains high considering that most of the people removed were not a threat to anyone.

To begin with, ICE notes that 59 percent of all removals, “a total of 216,810, had been previously convicted of a crime.” That statistic leaves one to wonder about the other 41 percent - the 151,834 individuals without a prior criminal record who were also removed.

Read the rest at Immigration Impact

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