Undocumented immigrants in jail: Who gets deported?

False · Mar 21, 2012

While federal policy focuses on serious offenders, data show hundreds flagged for deportation for minor infractions

http://www.statesman.com/news/state...in-jail-who-gets-deported-2244677.html?page=2

Good article in the Statesman for people who want to learn more about who gets placed into Removal (deportation) proceedings. The data presented seems to undermine the claim leveled against the Obama Administration by the left that he has betrayed hispanic supporters by deporting more people. Instead, it appears that the institutional intertia argument is a better understanding of the vast increase in deportations. ICE under the direction of the Obama Administration is effectively fighting back against Secure Communities program instituted under Bush by cutting back the rate of detainers from 2009-2011.

The number of detainers filed on people charged with Class C misdemeanors has been dropping over the past two years, from an average of 46 a month in the first half of 2010 to an average of 23 a month in the last half of 2011. Since ICE Director John Morton's memo last June instructing employees to use greater discretion, ICE agents have filed about 150 detainers on Class C offenders
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Of course we have our dear rep, Lamar Smith of San Antonio, says that the use of discretion by ICE is akin to a “back-door amnesty.” He is probably a intelligent individual, so he's being disingenuous - amnesty implies some type of benefits of status beyond being able to be present in the country.

Secure Communities helped those agents become more efficient by running the fingerprints of everyone booked into the jail through immigration databases. As of Jan. 31, Travis County ranked 11th nationally in the number of people deported from its jails — 2,614, or roughly 19 per week — through Secure Communities, according to ICE data.

And once they are flagged through automated computer checks, undocumented immigrants are more likely to be deported from Travis County than almost any other major population center. Of the 56 U.S. counties with at least 500 deportations through Secure Communities, Travis County ranks third with a 41 percent deportation rate, behind only Charleston County, S.C., and Imperial County, Calif. The reason for Travis County's high rate of deportations is unclear.

Secure Communities has created an odd contrast in Austin, which many consider a "sanctuary city" for undocumented immigrants in part because police are instructed not to ask people's immigration status.

"What people don't realize is that Travis County doesn't have any control of that," Wade said. "It's not Travis County or the Austin Police Department who's deporting anybody; it's the federal government. We don't have any dog in that hunt."
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Austin, Texas representing. Not in the way I'd like, but I imagine this has more to do with how hard the San Antonio Immigration judges are on immigrants, rather than something Austin does differently.

ICE says on its website that 90 percent of the undocumented immigrants it removed from the country last year had been charged with a crime or fell under one of its other high-priority categories, such as re-entering the country after being removed.

But for every violent criminal like Escobar, there are more like Zamora, the UT student who said he and his mother and three brothers entered on a tourist visa when he was 6 or 7 and never left. Because he was brought into the country as a child and graduated from a Texas high school, he pays in-state tuition through the Texas Dream Act, the state law that Gov. Rick Perry signed in 2001 that treats undocumented students the same as state residents for tuition purposes.

After being identified as undocumented by an ICE agent in the jail, Zamora spent more than two years tangled in the federal immigration system, which involved a weekend in jail, a stint at a federal detention center, long visits with lawyers, appearances in federal court and rafts of legal paperwork as he tried to avoid being sent back to a country that he last saw as a 10-year-old during a family trip.

"In a way it was my fault because I didn't pay the ticket," he said.

In the end, he avoided deportation when an immigration judge closed his case in January. But his request for deferred action — a type of disposition that opens the door for immigrants to apply for work permits — was denied
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Undocumented immigrants in jail: Who gets deported?

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