U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement
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During a meeting with several sheriffs of border counties this past weekend, Gov. Greg Abbott said he wants the state to give more money to bankroll local law enforcement in enforcing immigration laws. “Our goal is not to release them,” the governor said. “Our goal is to jail them.”
Enforcing immigration laws is the task of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), but the agency often partners with local police and sheriffs to target undocumented immigrants convicted of crimes. Under the arrangements, local agencies that arrest immigrants on criminal charges will hold them in jail at ICE’s request for possible deportation.
Federal immigration data suggests that many of those being held in jail in several Dallas-area counties that have agreements with ICE are holding immigrants who don’t have any criminal convictions on their record, rather than allowing them to post bond.
According to federal immigration data from Tarrant, Rockwall and Smith counties, the three counties with ICE agreements closest to Dallas, in a roughly four-year period, fewer than 16% of all the immigrants detained had been convicted of a crime.
The data was originally obtained and published by TRAC, Syracuse University’s immigration research group. It covers detainments by local authorities from late 2007 through December 2011. More recent data on criminal convictions from these counties are unavailable, as ICE no longer releases information about the criminal history of those targeted through its local partnerships.
According to TRAC, Only 171 of the 1,082 people targeted by local authorities on ICE’s behalf during this period had any form of criminal conviction, from minor traffic violations to violent felonies. In Smith County Jail, only 5% of those detained during this period had any criminal history.
These numbers cover the bulk of former President Barack Obama’s first term in office. Throughout his tenure, Obama touted a “felons, not families” approach to immigration enforcement, aiming to focus immigration enforcement efforts on noncitizens convicted of serious crimes.
“If we have to turn them loose or they get released, they’re coming back to your neighborhood and my neighborhood.” – Sheriff Bill Waybourn, Tarrant County
Nationally, fewer than a quarter of those targeted by local law enforcement during the period had been convicted of a crime.
Despite robust evidence of increased racial profiling in counties that take part in the program, ICE quadrupled the number of counties with such agreements throughout the years after Obama’s departure, from 32 counties in March 2016 to 145 by January 2021.
In Tarrant County, where nearly 75 percent of the detainments from the three counties took place, Sheriff Bill Waybourn renewed his office’s partnership with ICE in June 2020 despite protests by local activists. Both Smith and Rockwall renewed their agreements around the same time.
While speaking at the White House in 2019, Waybourn claimed releasing undocumented immigrants would result in more drunk driving deaths. “If we have to turn them loose or they get released, they’re coming back to your neighborhood and my neighborhood,” he said. “These drunks will run over your children and they will run over my children.”
According to a study in the American Journal of Public Health, undocumented immigrants were less likely to be arrested for drugs or alcohol-related offenses than U.S.-born citizens between 1990 and 2014.
In 2019, while Donald Trump was president, apprehensions on the southern border skyrocketed, according to the PEW Research Center. In 2017, after Trump signed an executive order expanding ICE’s authority to detain undocumented immigrants, the number of those arrested inside the country swelled by 30%.
Since coming to office in January, President Joe Biden has made immigration a policy centerpiece, saying he aims to refocus immigration enforcement towards targeting unauthorized immigrants with serious criminal convictions.
But meanwhile, the number of people in ICE detention has grown steadily. According to TRAC, there are 27,217 people in ICE detention nationwide as of July 8, the highest number since the pandemic hit early last year.
