ICEcapades

From the immigration front. I don’t know if it isn’t an admission that the state can’t resolve a problem when it starts assessing progress by assigning points. But it’s an admission that the whole program is out of control when it has to fudge the numbers.

As part of its 2003 Endgame strategic plan, ICE set the goal of eliminating the fugitive backlog by 2012. At first, there was also a strong emphasis on measuring progress by the number of “criminal aliens” arrested rather than “fugitive aliens” who have no criminal history.

But ICE has since dropped the criminal alien standard. As a DHS report on the program observed, the “productivity” of the teams was inhibited by the criminal alien guideline. Now ICE measures the program’s “productivity” by the total number of fugitive aliens, criminal aliens, and immigration violators caught, and by decreases in the fugitive backlog.

In January 2006 ICE set a goal of 1,000 annual apprehensions for each Fugitive Operations Team—a goal that fosters broadly targeted sweeps by the teams.

(Tom Barry, The Dragnet for “Fugitive Aliens”, 20 June 2008, IRC Americas Program)