A slip on the I.C.E.

Via Bender’s Immigration Daily comes the not-at-all surprising news that “criminal aliens” were never a particular target of the wasteful, stupid and counter-productive when it came to “Homeland Security”.

And, given the ineptitude of the Bush Administration, it’s no real surprise that the Benjamin A. Cardoza School of Law obtained Presidential Memorandums saying exactly that.  In other words, the morons knew the immigration raids were a failure, but went ahead anyway.

…the data reveals that while the human costs of ICE’s home raid strategy were painfully high, the law enforcement gains were shockingly low.

“ICE’s home raids have primarily led to the arrests of individuals who posed no risk to society and have come at a significant cost to immigrant families and to ICE’s own enforcement priorities,” explained Professor Peter L. Markowitz, Director of Cardozo’s Immigration Justice Clinic, which represented the plaintiffs in the lawsuit. “ICE has created tremendous bureaucratic incentives for fugitive operation teams to abandon focus on high priority targets in favor of a shotgun approach of undisciplined home raids.”

Three ICE memoranda issued in 2006, which have never before been released, set forth a series of dramatic policy changes that collectively set the stage for the Bush administration’s widely publicized campaign of immigration home raids.  Prior to 2006, ICE fugitive operation teams (FOTs), consisting of approximately seven agents each, were expected to arrest 125 so-called “fugitives” – purportedly high priority targets – per year.  Moreover, 75% of those arrests were required to be, what ICE termed, “criminal aliens.”  In early 2006, facing political pressure to look tough on immigration enforcement, ICE increased each FOT’s annual arrest quota from 125 arrests per year to 1000 arrests per year.  Overnight, these same seven person teams were expected to become eight times more productive.  These memoranda also reveal that FOTs were encouraged to abandon any purported focus on “high priority targets,” as ICE eliminated the requirement that 75% of the arrests needed to be “criminal aliens,” and, despite ICE’s previous denials, allowed FOTs to count any arrest at all, even arrests of merely undocumented

Heck of a job, Bushistas!

Before anyone sends one of those “what part of illegal didn’t they understand?” comments, and suggests that just arresting undocumented aliens is somehow justifies the waste, fraud and abuse of federal funds, and court time (and detention facilities, etc., etc., etc.), they need to remember that illegal entry is not a criminal matter, but an administrative one under U.S. law.