ACLU Obtains Emails That Prove ICE Officials Set Deportation Quotas - COLORLINES

ACLU Obtains Emails That Prove ICE Officials Set Deportation Quotas

A set of e-mails obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union of North Carolina show U.S. immigration officials developed strategies to increase the number of deportations so they could surpass the previous year’s record deportation numbers.
Federal immigration authorities have claimed to target people who pose a threat to public safety but these email show officials targeted immigrants convicted of minor crimes.
“These recently reported documents suggest that ICE’s ‘targeted’ approach may have less to do with public safety or a focus on serious crimes, and more to do with the agency’s laser focus on meeting deportation levels,” said Seth Freed Wessler, Colorlines.com’s investigative reporter.
Wessler says the documents provide evidence to support what advocates have long argued: immigration enforcement as it’s currently practiced looks more like a dragnet than a harpoon.
USA Today analyzed the emails and point to some of the strategies used to increase the number of deportations:

Among those new tactics - detailed in interviews and internal e-mails - were trolling state driver’s license records for information about foreign-born applicants, dispatching U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to traffic safety checkpoints conducted by police departments, and processing more illegal immigrants who had been booked into jails for low-level offenses. Records show ICE officials in Washington approved some of those steps.
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In April, officials told field office heads to map plans to increase removals, then instructed at least one field office that supervises enforcement throughout Georgia, North Carolina and South Carolina to go ahead with efforts to mine DMV records and step up their efforts to deport people who had been booked into county jails, among other measures.

ICE spokeswoman Gillian Christensen told USA Today in a statement that “ICE does not have quotas.” She said the agency sets “annual performance goals” that “reflect the agency’s commitment to using the limited resources provided by Congress.”
Immigration advocates say this news doesn’t come as a surprise.
“The revelations about the Obama Administration’s deportation quotas are shocking, but not a suprise” said Arturo Carmona, Executive Director of Presente.org. “Anyone who knows the hard working people that the Administration is calling ‘criminals,’ who are being jailed by the thousands and deported by the millions, knows that government officials have such internal quotas. Other officials do an injustice to us all when they repeat false claims that there is some sort of legal mandate to deport 400,000 people a year. There’s not. And now everybody can see the ‘bonuses,’ deceit and dirty politics behind the immigrant tragedy.”
Chris Newman, Legal Director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network says the findings are offensive.
“Setting immigration policy by a deportation quota runs counter to every talking point the Obama administration has used in the past five years. It has endangered public safety. It offends both constitutional values and has led to grave civil rights violations,” Newman said.
“It’s the exact reason why the first step in immigration reform must be a suspension of deportations,” Newman went on to say.

TAGS: Deportation Dragnet ICE

Federal initiative to help schools recognize youth sex trafficking | The Center for Public Integrity

Federal initiative to help schools recognize youth sex trafficking

Students suspended or expelled can become more vulnerable to exploitation

By Susan Ferriss email

4:35 pm, February 7, 2013 Updated: 9:08 am, February 8, 2013

Children involved in commercial sex trafficking are often recruited first by classmates at school who are doing the bidding of pimps, U.S. Department of Homeland Security and other officials warned Wednesday at an event at the U.S. Department of Education.
Officials also warned that educators could unwittingly leave students vulnerable to victimization if they suspend or expel troubled students from school — leaving them unsupervised — or place them in alternative school settings where they are also exposed to potential recruiters.
“In my school district we are looking at our disciplinary practices,” said Jenee Littrell, director of guidance and wellness at the Grossmont Union High School District in San Diego County. She was invited to the U.S. Department of Education describe her efforts to identify and help school-aged youth exploited by pimps. The Obama Administration is attempting to disseminate more information to schools on this problem.
Littrell talked about two girls who, unknown to school staff, had become involved in child prostitution. The girls’ behavior had become especially aggressive with staff, and one girl was suspended from school, Littrell said. She was discovered at a track, an hour later, Littrell said.
Littrell said that, in her experience, girls who are lured into prostitution have been poor and affluent and from all ethnic backgrounds. But recruiters, both boys and girls working for pimps, Littrell said, zero in on kids in foster care and students with troubled home lives or special-education needs.
Warnings signs teachers can look for: when kids buy lunch for other kids, or flash around money, or become fiercely protective of their cell phones because they contain information about pimps. One girl, Littrell said, ultimately disclosed to adults that she had been sent to work hundreds of miles away in another California city, where her prostitution at a truck stop brought in a thousand dollars a day.
Alice Hill, senior counselor to Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, said human trafficking, whether to serve the sex industry or the job market, has been designated a national-security threat. “We call it ‘hidden in plain sight,’ “ Hill said. Some of the trafficked are foreigners smuggled into the United States. They are often promised jobs in offices or industries and then forced into prostitution once they are here.
But other victims are Americans, some younger than teens.
Hill said between 100,000 and 300,000 American children are at risk of being trafficked for sex, according to University of Pennsylvania and U.S. Justice Department studies. Almost half of sex-trafficking activity involves minors. Gangs have become deeply involved in recruiting and controlling child prostitutes. One of the more notorious of these gangs, Hill said, is MS-13, the transnational crime group with networks in Central America and the United States.
Hill said gangs have started putting tattoos on girls whose prostitution they control. “It’s a form of showing ownership of the victim,” Hill said. Under federal law, no youth who is under 18 who is prostituting can be charged with sex-trafficking; he or she is considered a victim under the law. Underage recruiters, however, can be charged.

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Sunday, February 17, 2013