Comments Elsewhere

Immigration Profiling Destroying lives and separating families for the sake of the numbers. Juicing the numbers by means of police-state dragnets. From USA Today: – – – quote – – – “WASHINGTON – U.S. immigration officials laid out plans last year that would ratchet up expulsions of immigrants convicted of minor crimes as part of an urgent push to make sure the government would not fall short of its criminal deportation targets, new records obtained by USA TODAY show. “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 ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS [sic] WHO HAD BEEN BOOKED INTO JAILS FOR LOW-LEVEL OFFENSES. Records show ICE officials in Washington approved some of those steps. “President Obama’s administration has made deporting convicted criminals a central feature of its immigration policy, while also saying it would halt some efforts to remove low-priority immigrants who pose little risk to public safety. [sic — see above; see below] . . . By the time the government’s fiscal year ended in September, ICE had deported 225,390 criminal immigrants [sic] – a record, and well above the agency’s target of 210,000. ICE has not specified how many of those deportations were based on minor offenses; the year before, it reported that MORE THAN A QUARTER OF THE PEOPLE IT CLASSIFIED AS CRIMINALS HAD BEEN CONVICTED ONLY OF TRAFFIC OFFENSES. . . .” – – – quote – – – http://www.fdlreporter.com/usatoday/article/1919737 I should say that even if these police-state dragnets only netted people guilty of “major” criminal offenses this would still be absolutely appalling, because the *means* are appalling whatever results you might get from them, and because there’s no reason other than pure discrimination why immigrants convicted of crimes ought to be punished by being banished from the country when non-immigrants convicted of crimes are not. However, as it stands, the claim that the administration’s tactics are targeting those who “pose a risk to public safety” are purely propagandistic lies. In either case, adopting these tactics in order to destroy people’s lives and livelihoods, for the sake of meeting bureaucratic statistical targets is despicable.