December 9, 2012. Greenville News.
Guest Column by Victoria Middleton, Executive Director, ACLU of SC
We need a blueprint for immigration reform that affirms constitutional values and brings fiscal responsibility to enforcement. Calls to “secure the border” as part of a comprehensive immigration reform proposal discount the huge over-spending in border security that adds to our country’s fiscal woes. The annual budgets for the federal Customs and Border Protection (CBP) agency have doubled (from $5.8 billion in 2003 to a proposed $11.9 billion in 2013), at a time when governments on all levels face a fiscal crisis.
Unauthorized immigration to the United States is down, and Border Patrol arrests on the Mexican border have dropped 80 percent since 2000, while the number of agents has doubled since 2004. One Border Patrol agent recently testified before a congressional caucus that “The spending is to expand bureaucratic turf, not to protect our nation.”
Another ineffective and bloated program is the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) 287(g) program that deputizes state and local police to enforce federal immigration laws. The program, which includes four counties in South Carolina, is the only part of federal enforcement that allows state and local police to act as immigration agents. It hurts community policing, the proven strategy that has helped reduce violent crime by 65 percent over the past 20 years, by keeping immigrants, including victims like domestic violence survivors, from reporting crimes and cooperating with the police.
The Government Accountability Office reported that the program lacks internal controls and performance indicators. The DHS Office of Inspector General has criticized the integrity and efficiency of the program. Yet 287(g) program funding increased from $5 million in 2006 to $68 million last year. This should stop, and DHS should disband 287(g) in South Carolina.
We think the same reasoning should apply to the costly Secure Communities program, S-Comm. Anyone arrested and booked into a local jail has his or her fingerprints electronically run through DHS’s immigration database. All jails in South Carolina participate in this program.
Despite the fact that Congress intended S-Comm to be used to identify and deport people convicted of serious crimes, nearly 60 percent of individuals deported were non-criminals or convicted of misdemeanor offenses only. This means that 60 percent of those deported under the $750 million spent on the program over the past three years were not serious criminals or a threat to public safety. Last year’s federal budget included a request for a record $2 billion for immigration detention beds, many of which are unnecessary in light of vastly cheaper, effective alternatives to detention.
The border-industrial complex and flawed interior enforcement are not just extravagant and wasteful. They promote systemic racial profiling. Along with 287(g) and S-Comm’s flaws, Border Patrol agents engage in harassment and unlawful stops and detentions. They have used force disproportionately, with violent and tragic results. Many immigrant detention centers are in violation of governing standards and human rights abuses are rampant.
Any proposals for comprehensive immigration reform that do not respect the constitutional rights of immigrants in our country to equal protection and due process under the law and fail to bring fiscal responsibility to runaway enforcement spending do not deserve to be called “reforms.”