Expert: Immigration Arrests Surge to 'Highest Levels in Years'

But, argues Austin Kocher of Syracuse University, so do court-ordered releases and detention of those with no criminal history

Immigration and Customers Enforcement has just released long-awaited data on arrests, detentions and releases of immigrants, and the numbers are staggeringly high, according to analysis by an immigration data expert and researcher at Syracuse University.

After a months-long lag in reported data, ICE now reveals that around 65,765 people are in immigration detention -- topping April's levels by more than 5,000. The agency is also deporting nearly 1,250 people a day and is arresting around 1,474 people a day since late spring. That’s according to the Substack post “ICE Quietly Arresting More People Than Ever According to Latest Data” by immigration data expert Austin Kocher.

“It’s definitely the highest monthly arrest numbers by ICE specifically that we’ve seen in several years,” Kocher, a research assistant professor at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, told Sampan. He noted the detention data only include those in ICE centers.

Kocher’s analysis shows that the daily rate of ICE arrests in June was over 1,300, what he calls “the highest month of the Trump administration" so far. The following month, which only includes partial data, increased to 1,474 arrests per day. Data in the report extend to July 11.

“This is really high up there,” Kocher told Sampan of the current ICE arrests.

Source: https://austinkocher.substack.com/p/ice-quietly-arresting-more-people

In addition, data showed that around 2,000 people per month in May and June were let free by court orders. Court- ordered releases hit around 119 last October, he said, for comparison. But since January, court-ordered releases now total 10,649. In addition, based on his analysis, Kocher suspects at least one in four people who are detained and later let go after fighting the detention in federal courts are likely deemed detained “unlawfully.”

“I think that is a really important part of what the data is showing,” Kocher told Sampan. “When you look at the people who are released but not deported, for a variety of reasons, a quarter of those are being released because a judge is saying, ‘You can’t hold this person.’”

Emails to ICE’s New England office and main office seeking comment were not returned by deadline for this story.

One way people get released from detention is by filing a petition for habeas corpus, which can force authorities to justify a person’s continued detention. But these sorts of cases require the detained person to have a lawyer taking on their case, noted Kocher.

“The limiting factor is whether or not someone has an attorney and not whether or not someone’s detention is unlawful,” added Kocher. “So that number is essentially (likely) a floor and not a ceiling. "

Kocher did note, however, that the data show that most people who are going through detention are getting deported, at very high rates.

While federal officials have repeatedly said they are targeting “the worst of the worst” criminals immigrants, Kocher’s analysis argues that “of those people held in detention, the largest group continues to be immigrants with no criminal history whatsoever…” and many are instead arrested for alleged immigration violations.

"Of those people held in detention, the largest group continues to be immigrants with no criminal history whatsoever, reinforcing the now longstanding observation that the agency is not targeting the worst of the worst. In fact, the percentage of people in detention with nothing more than an actual or alleged immigration violation (with all of the utter meaninglessness that this administration has made of that category) continued to grow since April while the percentage of immigrants with charges or convictions declined as a percent of the total," according to Kocher.

As for how current enforcement fits into the U.S.’ history of immigration enforcement that, Kocher says that as an academic, he takes a long view. He notes increased, expanded and targeted enforcement actions and policies over the past decades, such as the roll out of Section 287(g) of the U.S. Immigration and Nationality Act that is used to deputize some state and local police to enforce federal immigration law, the FBI’s targeting of some groups of Muslim men after 9/11, and the poor treatment of Haitian and Cuban refugees in the 1980s and 1990s.

“So, this is not good, and a lot of these numbers are historic, but ... I was in North Carolina when 287(g) was rolling out, and that was terrifying for communities who were being pulled over and detained and deported in ways that they never expected. I was just getting out of the military after 9/11 in 2003 when ... Islamic men from certain Middle Eastern countries living in the United States were being targeted and interrogated and the FBI was putting moles and spies inside of mosques. I was there during the family detentions of the (Pres.) Obama years when mothers and children were being held in extremely inappropriate conditions,” he said. “The U.S.’ approach to immigration enforcement has always been and will always continue to be deeply concerning and problematic.”