A Salt Lake City-based immigration task force approaches the home of suspected criminal immigrant last year. Below, an arrested suspect is taken to a detention center.

A Freedom of Information Act lawsuit has shed light on how immigration enforcers have been doing their job.

Documents suggest rather than finding the worst lawbreaking immigrants, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement just took the immigrants they could find. You can read the report from the Migration Policy Institute here.




The report discusses fugitive apprehension programs, such as those operated in Salt Lake City. The report relies heavily on documents obtained through suing ICE and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security under FOIA.

The report's conclusion says:

NFOP was established to further important goals: locating, apprehending, and removing fugitive aliens who endanger the nation or their communities. Congress has exponentially increased NFOP’s budget to enable ICE to achieve this mission.

Yet ICE’s own data indicate NFOP has failed to focus on the priorities it claimed in justifying its program to Congress. Since shifting the objective in January 2006 to 1,000 arrests per fugitive operations team, and crediting arrests of some nonfugitives towards this total, the program has apprehended the easiest targets, not the most dangerous ones.

— NC

Labels: Crime, FOIA