Immigration arrests in the interior of the U.S. fell to the lowest level in more than a decade during fiscal year 2021, The Washington Post reported this week.
According to the outlet, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement data shows that there were roughly half the annual number of arrests compared to totals when Donald Trump was president.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was established in 2003 in response to the Sept, 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. On an average day, ICE makes 87 criminal arrests and 284 administrative arrests in addition to other actions, said the agency website.
When President Joe Biden took office, ICE arrests plummeted, said The Washington Post. This was in part due to a 100-day pause on most deportations that was been blocked by a federal judge before the end of January. With the judge’s action, arrests began to increase in recent months.
Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas also issued new directives to ICE in late September. He said if someone is living in the U.S.
illegally, it “should not alone be the basis” of a decision to detain and deport them.
When Trump was president, ICE officers could boradly enforce immigration laws and make arrests, said The Washington Post. Under that system, many people categorized as “criminal” suspects were nonviolent offenders or those with convictions for immigration violations.
Mayorkas’s new ICE guidelines prioritize immigrants who pose a threat to national security and public safety, as well as recent border-crossers.
“Are we going to spend the time apprehending and removing the farmworker who is breaking his or her back to pick fruit that we all put on our tables?” Mayorkas told The Washington Post in a September interview.
“Because if we pursue that individual, we will not be spending those same resources on somebody who does, in fact, threaten our safety. And that is what this is about.”
So far, the new administration has kept enforcement levels lower than usual. ICE Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) officers made about 72,000 administrative arrests during the fiscal year that ended in September, down from 104,000 during fiscal 2020 and an average of 148,000 annually from 2017 through 2019.
On average, the 6,000 ERO officers each made around one arrest per month over the 12-month period ending in September. During peak ICE enforcement in 2011, officers were making more than four times as many arrests.
Criminal charges for those detained by ICE also dropped in the past year. In fiscal year 2020, around 90 percent of people ICE took into custody faced criminal charges. In 2021, that figure dropped to 65 percent.
Even so, ICE said the number of serious criminals arrested increased from 3,575 between Feb. 18 and Aug. 31, 2020 to 6,046 during the same period this year. The agency also said 363 sex offenders were found during a targeted operation this summer, compared with 194 during that period the previous year. Nearly 80 percent of the offenses involved child victims.
ICE spokeswoman Paige Hughes said the agency “is in the process of finalizing our year-end fiscal numbers, and these numbers will be shared publicly when the review is complete. Data integrity is of the utmost importance to the agency, and ICE’s vetted statistics powerfully demonstrate the effectiveness of our current approach of prioritizing national security, border security, and public safety,” when asked for a comment on the data.
The Department of Homeland Security also said this month that the agency would discontinue mass roundups at worksites and instead focus on employers who exploit unauthorized immigrants.
Congressional Democrats hope to achieve president’s goal of granting millions of longtime undocumented immigrants a path to citizenship soon. The slowdown of ICE arrests helps the Biden administration shield those immigrants from deportation, The Washington Post explained.
Maru Mora Villalpando, a 50-year-old Mexican national living in Washington state, said the new policies marked “a major victory” for grass-roots immigration organizations that have been fighting to limit arrests.
However, the new policies have also drawn criticism.
At the U.S.-Mexico border, 1.7 million migrants have been apprehended by the Border Patrol during the 2021 fiscal year, an all-time high.
Critics of the Biden administration point to reduced interior enforcement as the reason behind this increase.
Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, said there has been a “collapse in interior enforcement.”
“This is a public safety problem that we don’t need to have,” she said, adding that one officer told her “the hardest part of my job now is pretending to look busy.”
Since interior enforcement activity was reduced in 2020 to prevent the spread of COVID-19 in detainment facilities, the detainee population in immigration jails dropped from around 56,000 to 22,000.
Texas and Louisiana are also battling in federal court to compel the government to arrest more undocumented immigrants.
“There is simply no way for ICE to so significantly reduce its initial book-ins without allowing many dangerous criminal aliens at large in American communities,” the states said in a court filing late last week.
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