A crackdown on immigrants shifts direction
Friday, February 06, 2009
BY JEFF DIAMANT
Star-Ledger Staff
The National Fugitive Operations Program was launched six years ago to track down undocumented immigrants who either had a serious criminal record or had been ordered to leave the country.
Critics say the program has not been used as intended. Too many of those caught up in the sweep are not criminals and were never previously told to leave the country, the critics contend.
Such undocumented immigrants made up the majority -- 56 percent -- of those arrested in New Jersey as part of the program from October 2006 through mid-2007, said Bassina Farbenblum, an attorney for the Center for Social Justice at Seton Hall Law School.
Nationwide, 40 percent of those arrested were undocumented immigrants without criminal records, according to the Migration Policy Institute, a Washington think tank that released a report earlier this week criticizing management of the program by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
"Undocumented immigrants should be held to the law. However, this program is designed to arrest individuals who have outstanding deportation orders," Farbenblum said. "So there's a dysfunction here between what Congress is funding and what's being conducted."
Farbenblum cited federal memorandums showing how ICE, in late 2006, allowed arrests of undocumented immigrants without criminal records to count toward higher arrest quotas for the fugitive program. Those memos were unearthed in a Freedom of Information Act request by the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law and were published in the New York Times Wednesday.
In 2004, the program set a goal that criminals should comprise 75 percent of its arrests. In 2007, only 4.5 percent of those arrested in New Jersey were criminal fugitives, according to the Center for Social Justice, which last year filed a lawsuit contending ICE violated constitutional rights of several legal immigrants during raids in New Jersey. Another 40 percent arrested had been ordered deported or failed to attend an immigration hearing.
Farbenblum said undocumented immigrants without criminal records can be arrested through less-expensive programs. Congress devoted $218 million to the fugitive program in the fiscal year that ended in 2008, up from $9 million in 2003.
"The funding was given to them by Congress in order to locate and arrest people with criminal records as a priority, and then people with outstanding deportation orders. And that's not what we've seen happen," she said.
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