Immigreation Detainers Down, Still No Focus on Persons Convicted of Serious Crimes
In November 2014, the Obama administration dumped the controversial Secure Communities program, which required information exchange on all noncitizens arrested for virtually any crime. It was replaced with the Priority Enforcement Program (PEP), which it was said was to focus on serious offenders actually convicted of crimes.
It appears that things have changed somewhat over the last few months — but not as much as some hoped — with the implementation of PEP.
NPR reports that federal immigration officials are issuing fewer detainer requests, known as immigration holds, to state and local law enforcement agencies seeking immigrants. At the same time, the requests that are issued don’t appear to be targeting serious, or convicted, criminals. This is according to federal data collected by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.
TRAC further reports that, although Secure Communities has been discontinued, the automatic matching of immigration records with the fingerprint data submitted during bookings by state and local law enforcement agencies to the Federal Bureau of Investigation — continues unabated under PEP. Given that millions of fingerprint records from state and local law enforcement agencies will continue to be passed onto ICE by the FBI, it remains an open question as to how detainer usage will be affected. Secretary Johnson’s announcement also called for ICE to adopt a new “notification only” form that merely asks state and local law enforcement agencies to notify ICE prior to the release of the individual, and does not ask that they be detained or held. Usage of detainer holds instead of this new notification-only form, was to be restricted to “special circumstances.” However, getting a large bureaucracy to change is challenging. It remains to be seen whether the shift from Secure Communities to PEP will succeed in changing ICE’s use of detainers.
Actual usage patterns bear monitoring; a look at detainers issued by ICE during April 2015 provides an early glimpse at what is happening in the field after the new PEP policies were announced. According to ICE detainer-by-detainer records released to TRAC, during April 2015 only about one third (32%) of individuals on whom detainers were placed had been convicted of a crime.
KJ