Vol. 73/No. 7      February 23, 2009

A report just released by the Migration Policy Institute tracks how the scope of ICE’s National Fugitive Operations Program (NFOP) was quietly widened to give immigration cops authority to target any and all immigrants, not just those who have been convicted of a crime, or “fugitive aliens,” defined as people who have been ordered deported but have not left the country.

The Clinton administration began the program by setting up “abscondee removal teams.” These were qualitatively expanded in 2002, as Democrats and Republicans took advantage of the 9/11 events to step up all police operations and make big incursions on workers’ rights. The NFOP was set up with an initial mandate from the Justice Department to prioritize fugitives who “come from countries in which there has been Al Qaeda terrorist presence or activity.”

The percentage of “dangerous fugitives” detained was 32 percent of all NFOP arrests in 2003. But by 2007, immigrants with criminal records were a mere 9 percent of the total number detained. In those four years, the program resulted in the arrests of 96,000 people. The number of local fugitive operations units deployed across the country increased to 75 and the number of cops employed by 1,300 percent.

In 2006 ICE introduced two policy changes. The annual arrest quota for each fugitive team was increased from 125 to 1,000. A few months later, ICE lifted the restriction that 75 percent of the people arrested had to be “criminal aliens.”

A study funded by the U.S. Justice Department and released in October 2008, titled “Taking Back the Streets,” conceded that ICE raids against “criminal aliens” are in reality aimed at immigrant workers. “Immigrant gang members rarely make a living as gangsters,” it said. “They typically work by day in construction, auto repair, farming, landscaping, and other low-skill occupations.”

Unlike most police operations, the ICE fugitive units have the power to conduct warrantless searches and to interrogate individuals who are not on their list of supposed fugitives. According to former Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff, “if deemed to be here illegally,” such people “may be arrested without warrant.”

An ICE fugitive dragnet in California in September 2008 netted 1,157 arrests, and a similar one in New Jersey, 76. In early February of this year, ICE cops in Florida picked up 117 workers, most of them from Haiti, the Bahamas, Trinidad and Tobago, and Guyana.

The report does not oppose these ICE raids—one of its authors, in fact, is Doris Meissner, who was commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service under Clinton. Instead it argues that ICE’s current approach “is inefficient and costly,” including in political terms. It notes that ICE raids have sparked “fear and anger” among some trade unions, church groups, community organizations, and the media.

Janet Napolitano, the new secretary of Homeland Security, has announced her office will conduct a review of the fugitive arrest program, but she also argued that while “criminal” immigrants should be the priority, “it doesn’t mean to say that you give a blank check to everybody else.”  
 
 
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