Aswini Anburajan has some statistics to keep in mind as Democrats in the Senate urge the administration to set up a system where potential DREAM Act beneficiaries can apply for "deferred action" to avoid deportation. Anburajan reminds us that the administration, while ostensibly prioritizing the deportation of undocumented immigrants who are dangerous, have been deporting everyone:
Instead, officials have spent most of their time deporting men like Reyes. Newly-released internal data from the the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement unit, or ICE, shows that,60 percent of "removals" between October 2008 and February 2011 were of individuals who had either no criminal background or were in the lowest priority category for removals -- i.e. individuals like Reyes who had a past violation for an old crime.
And in March, the New York Civil Liberties Union released a study on the implementation of Secure Communities -- the 2008 program which gives federal immigration officials access to any detainee at the point of arrest -- in New York found that in the first 49 days of the program, 80 percent of the immigrants targeted for deportation had no criminal background. An additional six percent were classified in the lowest tier of priorities because they only had misdemeanor offenses. In six out of eleven counties in New York, 100 percent of the immigrants identified through the Secure Communities program had no criminal record.
The U.S. is deporting a massive number of people every year. But public consciousness around illegal immigration is largely focused on threats to public safety, even though immigrants are less likely to commit crimes. So you end up with something like people who think you can cut the deficit by eliminating only "waste fraud and abuse" or by getting rid of foreign aid. There are eleven million undocumented immigrants in this country, and very few are violent criminals--you can't solve the problem of illegal immigration through mass expulsion of undocumented immigrants, and you certainly can't do so by simply by deporting "the bad ones." Focusing on criminals was supposed to give the administration political space to pursue immigration reform, but mostly it's just resulted in record numbers of deportations.
That failure has rankled supporters of immigration reform like Rep. Luis Gutierrez, who recently said he wasn't sure whether he'd support Obama for reelection in 2012. Whether or not Gutierrez ultimately changes his mind, I certainly wouldn't be surprised to see a future Republican president pursue immigration reform, perhaps along the lines of the compromise in Utah.
