Excerpt
The Obama administration spent nearly $18 billion on immigration enforcement last year, significantly more than its spending on all the other major federal law enforcement agencies combined, according to a report published Monday by the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan research group in Washington.
Based on the vast resources devoted to monitoring foreigners coming into the country and to detaining and deporting illegal immigrants, immigration control has become “the federal government’s highest criminal law enforcement priority,” the report concluded.
In recent years, it found, the two main immigration enforcement agencies under the Department of Homeland Security have referred more cases to the courts for prosecution than all of the Justice Department’s law enforcement agencies combined, including the F.B.I., the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Total spending on those agencies was $14 billion, official figures show.
The 182-page report was an opening salvo in a contentious debate over immigration that President Obama has pledged to lead this year. Its purpose was to marshal publicly available official figures to show that the country has built “a formidable enforcement machinery” since 1986, the last time Congress considered an overhaul of the immigration laws that included measures granting legal status to large numbers of illegal immigrants. Spending on immigration enforcement was 15 times greater last year than in 1986, the report found.
The report responds to lawmakers, mainly Republicans, who have argued that federal authorities must do much more to strengthen enforcement before Congress can consider any legalization for an estimated 11 million illegal immigrants in the country.
“The ‘enforcement first’ policy that has been advocated by many in Congress and the public as a precondition for considering broader immigration reform has de facto become the nation’s singular immigration policy,” the report concluded.
Although the institute includes both Democrats and Republicans and did not offer any recommendations in this report, it has previously supported policies to bring illegal immigrants into the legal system, rather than expelling them.
According to the report, financing, staffing and technology investments for the Border Patrol have reached “historic highs,” while apprehensions of illegal border crossers have plunged by 53 percent since 2008. As a result of huge increases in spending, deportations have also “increased dramatically,” the report says, with far more immigrants removed in expedited proceedings that do not involve any formal proceeding before an immigration judge.
No comments:
Post a Comment