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Monday, June 13, 2011
Thursday, May 31, 2007
Are Our Immigration Enforcement Efforts Keeping Us Safe?
According to a new study conducted by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) of millions of immigration court records, the government’s repeated pronouncements that immigration enforcement efforts are meant to secure the homeland are contradicted by the facts. In fact, the great majority of the efforts spent by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) goes toward fighting commonplace immigration violations such as overstaying a visa or entering the United States without papers.
When DHS was created in 2002, the Immigration and Naturalization Service was folded into it as the newly created Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Since then, ICE’s mission has been “to protect America and uphold public safety by targeting the people, money and materials that support terrorist and criminal activities.” This was a huge paradigm shift in the way the government dealt with immigrants. Instead of having immigration services as part of the Department of Justice, they were now moved to DHS, formalizing in the structure an assumption that immigrants are a threat to homeland security. This has lead to massive enforcement efforts, the militarization of the border and a renewed cooperative relationship between ICE and federal and local law enforcement agencies, including the hundreds of non-ICE agents who were involved in the New Bedford raid this past March. The study shows that since DHS began operating, it has brought terrorism charges against only 12 individuals. This is 12 out of the 814,073 individuals DHS charged. As a matter of fact, 86.5% of all immigration cases had nothing to do with terrorism or national security at all. They were simple immigration violations.
So this begs the question: what is our immigration system supposed to do? Is it meant to keep us safe from terrorism? And why are we spending so much law enforcement resources on fighting run-of-the-mill immigration violations? Is someone who has overstayed a visa really a threat to the homeland? Is an immigrant family working hard to make ends meet really where we should be focusing our anti-terrorism efforts?
When DHS was created in 2002, the Immigration and Naturalization Service was folded into it as the newly created Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Since then, ICE’s mission has been “to protect America and uphold public safety by targeting the people, money and materials that support terrorist and criminal activities.” This was a huge paradigm shift in the way the government dealt with immigrants. Instead of having immigration services as part of the Department of Justice, they were now moved to DHS, formalizing in the structure an assumption that immigrants are a threat to homeland security. This has lead to massive enforcement efforts, the militarization of the border and a renewed cooperative relationship between ICE and federal and local law enforcement agencies, including the hundreds of non-ICE agents who were involved in the New Bedford raid this past March. The study shows that since DHS began operating, it has brought terrorism charges against only 12 individuals. This is 12 out of the 814,073 individuals DHS charged. As a matter of fact, 86.5% of all immigration cases had nothing to do with terrorism or national security at all. They were simple immigration violations.
So this begs the question: what is our immigration system supposed to do? Is it meant to keep us safe from terrorism? And why are we spending so much law enforcement resources on fighting run-of-the-mill immigration violations? Is someone who has overstayed a visa really a threat to the homeland? Is an immigrant family working hard to make ends meet really where we should be focusing our anti-terrorism efforts?
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