The USA Today reports that last year immigration officials had ongoing discussion relating the need to "ratchet up" deportations of individuals convicted of minor crimes because the agency was falling way short of their criminal deportation quotas. Apparently, criminal deportations had drastically fallen from the year before and senior ICE officials in Washington instructed regional enforcement chiefs to get the numbers back up.
Some of the tactics considered in internal ICE emails are as follows:
- "Trolling" state driver's license records for information about foreign-born applicants;
- "Dispatching" ICE agents to traffic safety checkpoints conducted by police departments; and
- Processing more immigrants booked into jails for low-level criminal charges (i.e., driving while brown).
In a masterful display of political spinnery ICE spokesperson Gillian Christensen issued a statement that "ICE does not have quotas." Instead, she explained that the agency has "annual performance goals" that "reflect the agency's commitment to using the limited resources provided by Congress." No statement was made regarding whether ICE is utilizing any of the above listed "tactics" to meet their "annual performance goals."
Incidentally, ICE has also not released information about how many of the 225,390 "criminal deportations" from FY2012 involved individuals that were encountered after a "routine traffic stop."
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