Double Punishment for Immigrants with Convictions

Michelle Fei in New America Media:

 
The Obama administration’s Aug. 18 announcement of a new policy that purports to suspend deportations against immigrants without criminal convictions has sprouted a range of reactions from immigrant rights advocates, from full-fledged celebration to wary suspicion.

I can appreciate why some advocates are praising the announcement. First, it does seem true that the national outcry over the failure of immigration reform and the expansion of the deportation program known as “Secure Communities” – which requires police to share fingerprint data of all arrestees with federal immigration authorities — has prompted Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to respond with this “new” policy. It’s worth noting, however, that advocates have long sought to get ICE to actually exercise the discretionary powers it has always held. Second, fewer deportations is certainly a good thing. To the extent that this announcement can actually help the small percentage of people who could qualify for a temporary reprieve from deportation, I share the temporary sense of relief of these immigrants. No family should know the devastation of deportation.

But as a lead organizer of the coalition that got New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo to pull the state out of the Secure Communities program, I also have seen how much ICE employs divide-and-conquer tactics, engages in manipulative practices and flip-flops back and forth without ever acknowledging its previous position. A federal judge overseeing a public records lawsuit against ICE recently chided the agency for going “out of [its] way to mislead the public” about whether counties and states could opt out of the program; ICE itself has copped to having “a messaging problem.”

So I remain highly skeptical about the potential of this announcement. ICE’s failure to revise its removal quotas – 404,000 this year alone – can only mean that its deportation dragnet will remain just as active. How else can ICE and its private prison industry bedfellows keep detention centers filled? Read more….

bh