Reply #114: no charts here

[William Z. Foster]

ICE Numbers Belie Obama Promise on Immigration Enforcement

The Obama administration had long promised to shift the focus of immigration enforcement from workers to employers. In real terms, that means less of the high-profile raids like those at electronics and meatpacking plants in Postville, Iowa and Laurel, Miss. that characterized the last years of the Bush administration. Those led to the arrests of hundreds of immigrant workers, but only a trickle of employer prosecutions.

Instead, as John Morton, assistant secretary of Homeland Security under President Obama, promised in a rare public speech earlier this year at the Migration Policy Institute in Washington, D.C., his agency would "focus on the employer" and pursue "aggressive criminal and civil enforcement against (employers) who knowingly violate the law." "But it hasn't been done," said Crystal Williams, executive director of the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA).

Although Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) worksite arrests appear to be trending down, worksite raids continue. I-9 or Employment Eligibility Verification audits designed to spot unauthorized workforces have leapt in number. Meanwhile, ICE’s own statistics — which the agency shared with New America Media — show that the agency’s efforts to investigate employers have yet to yield an increase in prosecutions. In fact, the opposite happened — ICE brought less charges against employers in 2009 than it had the previous year.

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Taken together, the total number of ICE cases referred to the federal courts ballooned to 20,411 in fiscal year 2009 — a 12 percent increase over the prior year — according to data from the Transactional Records Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University.

http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=d16434d06ea38b81f6425cfa5944433c