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New Report Offers Deceptive Assessment of Immigration Enforcement
Submitted by admin on 1/10/2013 @ 2:53 PM
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Center for Immigration Studies
WASHINGTON, Jan. 10, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- A new report being promoted by the Migration Policy Institute (MPI), a research institute dedicated to promoting migration, paints a deliberately misleading picture of the state of immigration law enforcement. The report, titled Immigration Enforcement in the United States: The Rise of a Formidable Machinery, is presented as an objective assessment of immigration programs, and has been widely covered in the news media -- but is riddled with false statements, cherry-picked statistics and inappropriate comparisons. This compilation of bogus findings aims to convince opinion leaders and the public that the government has succeeded in creating an effective "bulwark" of immigration enforcement that cannot be improved upon much, and suggests that spending cuts might be in order. MPI seems to have issued this report in an attempt to help sell the President's immigration agenda, which includes amnesty for illegal immigrants, further restrictions on immigration enforcement, and expanded legal immigration.
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Researchers at the Center for Immigration Studies have found numerous problems in the MPI report. Below, in bold, are some of the false and/or deceptive statements found in the report's executive summary, followed by our critique.
-- "U.S. Spends More on Immigration Enforcement than on FBI, DEA, Secret
Service & All Other Federal Criminal Law Enforcement Agencies Combined;
Nearly $187 Billion Spent on Federal Immigration Enforcement over Past
26 Years." This is the headline on the MPI press release, and the most
egregious falsehood in the report. First, MPI grossly inflates the
immigration enforcement spending totals by tallying all spending by
three Department of Homeland Security agencies -- Immigration and
Customs Enforcement (ICE), Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and
US-VISIT. But a large share of these agencies' activities are not
immigration enforcement, including customs screening and enforcement,
drug and weapons interdiction, cargo inspection, returning stolen
antiquities, and intellectual property violations. Some of these
agencies' activities, such as inspecting incoming travelers at ports of
entry and maintaining databases, are not enforcement at all, but routine
administrative work. It is impossible to determine how much the federal
government has spent on immigration enforcement in any year, much less
the last 26 years, because the Department of Homeland Security and its
predecessor, INS, have never tracked these activities; but one thing is
obvious - that amount is certainly far less than $187 billion. It is
probably at least 25-30% less, judging by historical budgets for Customs
enforcement.
-- Second, MPI's comparison of immigration enforcement spending to other
federal law enforcement spending is similarly deceptive. MPI fails to
include several big-ticket agencies in its tally of other principal
federal law enforcement expenditures, such as the federal prison system
and the U.S. Attorneys. This is important, because MPI counted similar
program expenses in ICE and CBP's budget (immigration detention, Border
Patrol, and ICE trial attorneys).[i]
-- Further, MPI excludes expenses of more than a dozen other federal law
enforcement agencies that are part of "other federal law enforcement."
Some of these law enforcement agencies, such as the Transportation
Security Administration (TSA), have budgets larger than ICE, DEA, or
ATF.[ii]
-- A few simple adjustments turn MPI's dubious calculations upside-down.
Subtract a conservative estimate for customs enforcement ($4.4 billion)
from the immigration agencies, and add the Bureau of Prisons, U.S.
Attorneys, and TSA to the "All Others" total spending, then immigration
enforcement costs closer to half of "All Others," not more, as MPI
claims (See Table 1). Add in the other missing federal law enforcement
agencies and the whole point about a huge immigration enforcement
complex disappears.
-- Some of what MPI calls immigration enforcement overlaps and possibly
even surpasses the efforts of other federal criminal law enforcement
agencies. It would be interesting to compare, for example, the number
of CBP drug and weapons seizures with DEA and ATF statistics, and the
number of ICE gang arrests and prosecutions with FBI activities. That
is beyond the scope of this fact sheet, but such an analysis would give
some context to MPI's facile spending comparisons.
-- "Border Patrol staffing, technology and infrastructure have reached
historic highs, while levels of apprehensions have fallen to historic
lows." Border Patrol funding is higher than ever, but illegal
immigration has been higher in the last decade than 20 or 40 years ago.
Apprehensions are down overall, but that is an incomplete measure of
progress, according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO), which
has concluded that DHS had achieved operational control of only a small
share of the southwest border. According to the latest GAO report, the
border patrol is intercepting only an estimated 61% of illegal
crossers.[iii]
-- "CBP and ICE together refer more cases for prosecution than all
Department of Justice (DOJ) law enforcement agencies combined." This
MPI factoid is based on data they retrieved with a do-it-yourself
on-line analytical tool, and is therefore difficult to replicate.[iv]
In any case, immigration prosecutions are the fast food of the federal
criminal justice system; there are lots of offenders, the cases are
relatively simple, and the sentences (if any) are relatively short
because removal is usually the outcome. Another more accessible and
perhaps more reliable source, the U.S. Sentencing Commission, reports
that immigration cases represent a much smaller share of the federal
criminal justice docket than MPI suggests. Their 2011 annual report
says that immigration offenders were 35% of all those sentenced in
federal court that year, meaning there were twice as many sentenced
offenders from non-immigration agency prosecutions than from CBP and
ICE.[v] However, this same report notes that 10% of murderers, 31% of
drug traffickers, 34% of money launderers, 64% of kidnappers, and 28% of
food and drug offenders sentenced that year were non-citizens, so it's
easy to see why immigration enforcement should be such a high priority
in federal law enforcement. Obviously these two sets of data are
measuring different things - referrals for prosecution and sentenced
offenders -- but they are equally valid measures of the immigration
agencies' footprint in the federal criminal justice system. MPI
obviously preferred the more melodramatic of the two.
-- "Since 1990, more than 4 million non-citizens, primarily unauthorized
immigrants, have been deported from the United States. Removals have
increased dramatically in recent years . . . " As the President has
said, these numbers are "actually a little deceptive."[vi] The
"dramatic" increases in deportations, removals and returns occurred
between 2005 and 2009; since then, the numbers have flattened out.[vii]
By discussing the increases over the time span 1990 to 2011, MPI is able
to avoid drawing attention to the recent stagnation in enforcement. It
has been established that recent deportation statistics are heavily
padded with cases that were not previously counted as such.[viii] In
addition, ICE arrests have been trending downward since 2008, after a
sharp rise that year; it's hard to see how deportations can be rising
when apprehensions are falling.[ix]
-- "Fewer than half of the noncitizens who are removed from the United
States are removed following hearings and pursuant to formal removal
orders from immigration judges." MPI tries to give the impression that
noncitizens are being denied due process. As discussed in a recent CIS
publication,[x] there are many reasons why DHS is able to remove
noncitizens without a hearing. The main reason is because most of the
aliens selected for removal by ICE are not entitled to a hearing, either
because they are convicted criminals or because they have been ordered
removed before. Considering how backlogged the immigration court system
is, which MPI notes with great concern, the fact that DHS is using more
expedited processing in many cases should be viewed with approval, not
alarm.
-- "The average daily population of noncitizens detained by ICE increased
nearly five-fold between FY 1995-11 . . . . a significantly larger
number of individuals are detained each year in the immigration
detention system than are serving sentences in federal Bureau of Prisons
facilities for all other federal crimes." This is another silly
apples-to-anchovies comparison. MPI compares the static number of
federal prisoners (about 218,000) with a year's worth of immigration
detainees (429,000). It would have been more appropriate (but still
pointless) to compare the average daily immigration detention population
(33,000) with the BOP number. MPI probably also noticed on the Bureau
of Prisons web site that immigration offenders represent only 12% of the
federal inmate population, a statistic that does not fit in with their
portrayal of a massive immigration enforcement dragnet that dominates
the federal corrections system. But as MPI notes, the immigration
detention system is not at all like the federal prison system in purpose
or nature. Immigration detention is more comparable to the local jail
system, which has an average daily population of about 750,000
inmates.[xi]
Spending for Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agencies Compared To All Other Comparable Federal Law Enforcement Agencies: FY 2012 (in billions)
Immigration and Customs
-----------------------
Customs and Border Protection 11.8
----------------------------- ----
Immigration and Customs Enforcement 5.8
----------------------------------- ---
US-Visit 2.6
-------- ---
Total 20.2
----- ----
Estimated Customs Enforcement Expenses 4.4
-------------------------------------- ---
Total Adjusted for Customs Enforcement 15.8
-------------------------------------- ----
Other Comparable Federal Law Enforcement Agencies
-------------------------------------------------
Federal Bureau of Investigations 8.1
-------------------------------- ---
Drug Enforcement Administration 2
------------------------------- ---
Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives 1.2
--------------------------------------------------- ---
U.S. Marshals 1.2
------------- ---
Secret Service 1.9
-------------- ---
U.S. Attorneys 2
-------------- ---
TSA 7.8
--- ---
Total 24.2
----- ----
Estimated Customs Enforcement Expenses 4.4
-------------------------------------- ---
Total Adjusted for Customs Enforcement 28.6
-------------------------------------- ----
Source: DHS Budget in Brief 2012 and DOJ Summary of Budget Authority 2012
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[i] Moreover, the figures MPI uses for the immigration agencies' spending are actually budget requests, not appropriations or expenditures. In contrast, the other federal law enforcement spending figures are amounts actually expended. A small point, perhaps, but indicative of their sloppy methodology.
[ii] Other federal law enforcement agencies excluded include the National Park Service, Federal Protective Service, Treasury agents, and LEAs attached to the large federal departments, such as State, Defense (including Military Police), Agriculture, U.S. Postal Service, and so on.
[iii] Government Accountability Office, Border Patrol: Key Elements of New Strategic Plan Not Yet In Place to Inform Border Security Status and Resource Needs, http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-13-25.
[iv] http://tracfed.syr.edu/trachelp/tools/help_tools_godeep3.shtml.
[v] U.S. Sentencing Commission, 2011 Sourcebook of Federal Sentencing Statistics, http://www.ussc.gov/Data_and_Statistics/Annual_Reports_and_Sourcebooks/2011/SBTOC11.htm.
[vi] Vaughan, "Obama: Deportation Numbers Actually a Little Deceptive, "http://cis.org/vaughan/actually-a-little-deceptive.
[vii] DHS Immigration Enforcement Actions, 201, http://www.dhs.gov/immigration-enforcement-actions-2011.
[viii] Rep. Lamar Smith, http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/sep/26/obama-puts-illegals-ahead-of-americans/.
[ix] DHS Immigration Enforcement Actions, 2011
[x] Reasoner and Vaughan, "Secure Communities By the Numbers, Part 3,"http://cis.org/SC-by-the-numbers-critique-part3. "If the law doesn't require it; if Congress has provided other forms of due process outside of the immigration court venue; if immigration judge hearings are lengthy, often delayed, and costly to taxpayers; and if scheduling a hearing substantially prolongs the length of detention for many aliens who are neither entitled to be released on bond nor have any reasonable chance at relief from deportation, then there are few reasons why the government should opt to go the immigration judge hearing route when alternatives exist, whereas there are many sound reasons not to do so."
[xi] Bureau of Justice Statistics, http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/ and Bureau of Prisons, http://www.bop.gov/locations/weekly_report.jsp.
The Center for Immigration Studies is an independent, non-partisan, non-profit, research organization. Since its founding in 1985, the Center has pursued a single mission - providing immigration policymakers, the academic community, news media, and concerned citizens with reliable information about the social, economic, environmental, security, and fiscal consequences of legal and illegal immigration into the United States.
CONTACT: Jessica Vaughan,jmv@cis.org, (508) 346-3380
SOURCE Center for Immigration Studies