January 7, 2013
by Julia Preston
The Obama administration spent nearly $18 billion on immigration enforcement last year, significantly more than its spending on all the other major federal law enforcement agencies combined, according to a report published Monday by the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan research group in Washington.
Based on the vast resources devoted to monitoring foreigners coming into
the country and to detaining and deporting illegal immigrants,
immigration control has become “the federal government’s highest
criminal law enforcement priority,” the report concluded.
In recent years, it found, the two main immigration enforcement agencies under the Department of Homeland Security
have referred more cases to the courts for prosecution than all of the
Justice Department’s law enforcement agencies combined, including the
F.B.I., the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Bureau of Alcohol,
Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. Total spending on those agencies was
$14 billion, official figures show.
The 182-page report was an opening salvo in a contentious debate over immigration that President Obama
has pledged to lead this year. Its purpose was to marshal publicly
available official figures to show that the country has built “a
formidable enforcement machinery” since 1986, the last time Congress
considered an overhaul of the immigration laws that included measures
granting legal status to large numbers of illegal immigrants. Spending
on immigration enforcement was 15 times greater last year than in 1986,
the report found.
The report responds to lawmakers, mainly Republicans, who have argued
that federal authorities must do much more to strengthen enforcement
before Congress can consider any legalization for an estimated 11
million illegal immigrants in the country.
“The ‘enforcement first’ policy that has been advocated by many in
Congress and the public as a precondition for considering broader
immigration reform has de facto become the nation’s singular immigration
policy,” the report concluded.
Although the institute includes both Democrats and Republicans and did
not offer any recommendations in this report, it has previously
supported policies to bring illegal immigrants into the legal system,
rather than expelling them.
According to the report, financing, staffing and technology investments
for the Border Patrol have reached “historic highs,” while apprehensions
of illegal border crossers have plunged by 53 percent since 2008. As a
result of huge increases in spending, deportations have also “increased
dramatically,” the report says, with far more immigrants removed in
expedited proceedings that do not involve any formal proceeding before
an immigration judge.
The budget for Immigration and Customs Enforcement,
which handles interior enforcement and detention, has increased by 87
percent since 2005, to nearly $6 billion, according to the report. The
number of foreigners the agency detains annually increased to 429,247 in
2011. In December, the agency announced it had deported 410,000
foreigners in 2012, giving Mr. Obama the record for the highest number
of removals during his term.
“As a result of 25 years of investment,” said Doris Meissner, an author
of the report who is a senior fellow at the institute, “the bulwark is
fundamentally in place.” She said the existing system made it unlikely
that an immigration overhaul could unleash a new wave of illegal
migration, like the surge since the amnesty of 1986.
Ms. Meissner, who served as commissioner of the immigration service in
the Clinton administration, said public perceptions of uncontrolled
migration across the border with Mexico “have not caught up with the
reality.”
Since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, federal law enforcement agencies
have revamped and coordinated databases for monitoring the movement of
foreigners into the country. An immigration databank that federal
authorities have created is the “largest law enforcement electronic
verification system in the world,” said Donald Kerwin, another author of
the report.
Some critics said the report’s figures were misleading because they
include the entire budget for Customs and Border Protection, another
Department of Homeland Security agency, which also oversees cargo
inspections on land and at seaports.
“A large amount of that spending has nothing to do with immigrants,”
said Mark Krikorian, the executive director of the Center for
Immigration Studies, a research organization that supports tough
measures against illegal immigration. Immigration enforcement still has
“gaping holes,” he said.
One of them, Mr. Krikorian said, is the lack of a national system for
employers to verify that new hires are legally authorized to work. He
also noted that the United States still has no system to confirm that
foreigners leave the country when their visas expire.
Other experts said the report was an accurate summary of a recent
transformation in immigration control. “There is no question that there
has been a big, big increase in enforcement across the board,” said
Edward Alden, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
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