Congressional Quarterly - ICE Deportations Create Partisan Divide

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Congressional Quarterly - ICE Deportations Create Partisan Divide

Republican appropriators in the House on Thursday criticized a decline in the number of deportations from raids as evidence the Obama administration is trying to defy immigration laws.

Kentucky Republican Harold Rogers, the ranking member of the House Appropriations Homeland Security Subcommittee, told Immigration and Customs Enforcement head John Morton that his agency's preoccupation with removing illegal immigrants that have committed crimes has caused it to ignore its other duties.

"So the way I see it, Assistant Secretary Morton, it looks as though you are an enforcer trapped in a poorly veiled administrative effort at so-called immigration reform," Rogers said. "But, last I checked, our immigration laws have not changed."

On the other hand, subcommittee Chairman David E. Price, D-N.C., praised the agency for removing criminal illegal immigrants, which his panel has encouraged. ICE increased these deportations by 7 percent annually between 2002 and 2007, but the numbers jumped by 12 percent in 2008 and 19 percent in 2009, he said.

"These are real results that show ICE's commitment to target its resources based on threats in our society," he said.

Price expressed concern that the ratio of criminal illegal immigrants to other detainees in ICE's detention facilities could reach 80 percent in the future. If that's the case, the agency will have to take steps to keep the non-criminals safe. The chairman also said improvements at the facilities were taking too long, especially regarding medical care.

"I had hoped that in this hearing we would be applauding the significant progress made since then," Price said. "Unfortunately, many of the promised solutions to this issue, such as a new electronic medical-records system, are still years away from implementation."

Morton said the improvements are a top priority, as is expanding the Secure Communities program, which finds illegal immigrants in U.S. prisons and deports them. The agency should achieve its goal of establishing the program at 190 additional prisons this year, although ICE will have to move faster to establish the program at 870 additional locations by 2011 and all jailing facilities by 2013.

The assistant secretary told Rogers that ICE was attentive to work-site enforcement.

"I agree with Mr. Rogers 100 percent that we can't have an immigration enforcement system focused solely on criminal offenders," he said.

But when the ranking member trotted out statistics, including a 68 percent decrease in work-site arrests between fiscal 2008 and 2009 and a 58 percent decline in indictments, Morton conceded that there has been a drop in numbers.

"It's a concern to me . . . and we will do better," he said.

The figures reflect priorities ICE has established under the current administration, Morton said. Its first concern is finding and deporting criminal illegal immigrants, followed by securing U.S. borders and pursuing fugitives, he said.

Rogers countered that arrests of employers who hire illegal immigrants have risen 180 percent.

"I don't see how you can proceed with that -- employers arrests -- and ignore the illegal immigrants working for those employers," he said.

John Carter, R-Texas, the third subcommittee member to attend the hearing, joined Rogers in criticizing the agency's detention policies.

While Rogers complained that only 29,000 of the agency's 33,000 beds were filled, Carter said the agency should not allow private contracts for compliance officers to expire in April because doing so would cause the agency to lose experienced workers.

Morton said ICE wants to replace 40 contractors with federal employees, but he wasn't sure if that number represented all of the compliance officer positions. The agency has become entirely dependant on contractors for the stewardship of its detention facilities, and that was unacceptable, he said.

"We got to the point over the past few years where literally no ICE employees were involved," he said.

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