U.S. aim: Let aliens long here settle in

WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama's administration has begun a shift in its enforcement of the nation's immigration laws, aiming to hasten the integration of long-term illegal aliens into society rather than targeting them for deportation, according to documents and federal officials.

In recent months, the Department of Homeland Security has taken steps to ensure that the majority of America's more than 11 million illegal aliens can stay in the country, with agents narrowing enforcement efforts to three groups: convicted criminals, terrorism threats or those who recently crossed the border.

While public attention has been focused on the court fight over Obama's highly publicized executive action on immigration, the department has with little fanfare been training thousands of immigration agents nationwide to carry out new policies on everyday enforcement.

The legal battle centers on the constitutionality of a program that would officially shield up to 5 million eligible illegal aliens from deportation, mainly parents of U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents. A federal judge put that program on hold in February after 26 states sued.

But the shift in the Homeland Security Department's enforcement priorities, which are separate from that program and have not been challenged in court, could prove even more far-reaching.

The new policies direct agents to focus on the three priority groups and leave virtually everyone else alone.

Demographic data show that the typical illegal has lived in the United States for a decade or more and has established strong community ties. While the new measures do not grant them a path to citizenship, their day-to-day lives could be changed in countless ways.

Now, for instance, many illegal aliens say they are so afraid to interact with police, for fear of being deported, that they won't report crimes and often limit their driving to avoid possible traffic stops. The new policies, if carried out, could dispel such fears, advocates said.

In describing the initiatives, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson has echoed the language often used by advocates of a comprehensive immigration policy overhaul, which remains stalled on Capitol Hill.

"We are making it clear that we should not expend our limited resources on deporting those who have been here for years, have committed no serious crimes and have, in effect, become integrated members of our society," Johnson said in a recent speech in Houston.

He added, "These people are here, they live among us, and they are not going away."

Since the new policies took effect in January, Johnson's instructions have been conveyed to agents throughout the department.

"We decided we're going to draw a clear line between individuals who now have significant equities in the country versus those who are recent entrants," said one department official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe internal deliberations.

"If people are not an enforcement priority," the official said, "... bottom line, the secretary has said don't go after them."

America's immigration dragnet is shrinking rapidly, both because of the new enforcement policies and declining flows of new people crossing the southwest border, Homeland Security Department officials said.

Deportations also are dropping. The Obama administration is on pace to remove 229,000 people from the country this year, a 27 percent drop from last year and nearly 50 percent less than the all-time high in 2012.

Fewer people are also in the pipeline for deportation. The number of occupied beds at immigration detention facilities, which house people arrested for immigration violations, has dropped nearly 20 percent this year.

And on Johnson's orders, officials are reviewing the entire alien-detainee population -- and each of the 400,000 cases in the nation's clogged immigration courts -- to weed out those who don't meet the new priorities. About 3,000 people have been released from custody or had their immigration cases dropped, Homeland Security Department officials said.

"It does have the potential to be extremely significant. It would allow people to live without that noose over their heads of the threat of deportation at all times," said Marielena Hincapie, executive director of the National Immigration Law Center, referring to the policy shift.

But Hincapie and other advocates -- who have long clashed with the administration over its aggressive enforcement -- said there is widespread skepticism in the alien community about whether agents on the ground will adjust their activities to match the new priorities.

"It all sounds great, but it means nothing if it's not applied," said Kica Matos, director of human rights and racial justice at the Washington-based Center for Community Change. She faulted U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, part of the Homeland Security Department, for what she said has been a series of broken promises to more humanely enforce immigration laws.

"[The Department of Homeland Security] is an agency that has terrorized our community for a really long time," Matos said, "so the level of distrust and fear is really big."

During Obama's first presidential campaign, he spoke of illegal aliens, telling CNN in March 2007, "It's absolutely vital that we bring those families out of the shadows."

When his administration took power, the government was adding thousands of new agents hired at the end of President George W. Bush's term and as a result ramping up enforcement efforts. Under pressure from Obama's supporters to end Bush's crackdown on illegal aliens, the Homeland Security Department tried to target enforcement efforts.

"There were no comprehensive, written enforcement priorities," said John Sandweg, a top immigration adviser to then-Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano. "Everyone in the country unlawfully was fair game."

At Immigration and Customs Enforcement, then-director John Morton put out two 2011 memos laying out the agency's priorities: protecting public safety and national security and securing the border.

In a move cheered by activists, Morton also said agents could exercise "prosecutorial discretion" and decide not to deport certain illegal aliens taken into custody, on the basis of factors such as their length of stay in the United States.

At the same time, the Homeland Security Department expanded a Bush administration program called Secure Communities. It allowed Immigration and Customs Enforcement to lodge official requests with local police departments that had arrested someone the agency wanted to deport.

The requests called on police to hold the aliens for up to 48 hours after their scheduled release so agency personnel could pick them up.

As Secure Communities took hold, deportations kept climbing, reaching an all-time-high of 409,000 in 2012. Even as Republicans blasted the administration for what they called lax enforcement, prominent Hispanic and other groups derided Obama as the "deporter in chief."

"There was a lot of big talk coming out of [Homeland Security], big promises that they were going to be more sensitive to immigrant families," said Nick Katz, a staff attorney for Make the Road New York, an immigration-rights group. "And then it didn't make a fundamental impact on the ground."

Soon after Johnson took office in December 2013, he took on a presidential request. Obama -- frustrated by the failure months earlier of legislation that would have given illegal aliens a path to citizenship -- gave the new homeland security secretary the task of determining what the administration could do on its own.

A former corporate lawyer and Pentagon general counsel, Johnson immersed himself in the legal details, reading the 2011 Immigration and Customs Enforcement memos and earlier internal documents. He spotted what he considered some of the same flaws activists had pointed out, department officials said.

The 2011 Immigration and Customs Enforcement memos, for example, had put a priority on deporting people who re-entered the country illegally after being removed from the country before, even if the initial deportation was years earlier and they had since lived law-abiding lives in the United States.

Long-term illegal aliens with families and other community ties were being arrested -- many under the Secure Communities program -- for minor offenses and sent to Immigration and Customs Enforcement for deportation.

"These individuals were being picked up based on that priority, nothing else was looked at, and they were removed from the country before they had their day in court," a second Homeland Security Department official said.

A rebellion was also brewing against Secure Communities, which had been billed as a way to crack down on aliens who had committed serious crimes. About 300 communities, including major cities such as Baltimore and Los Angles, ended or scaled back their participation.

"In some ways, [Secure Communities] got away from itself," the second department official said.

Johnson's answer was a pair of memos, released in November on the same day as Obama's much-publicized speech about his executive order on immigration.

Johnson spelled out that aliens could be deported only if they had been convicted of crimes, not just arrested. And he specified that only people who had crossed the border since January 2014 could be deported purely for an immigration violation, not someone who had been deported years earlier, re-entered the country and lived a law-abiding life.

He also did away with Secure Communities, replacing it with a new Priority Enforcement Program to begin later this summer.

Under this plan, Immigration and Customs Enforcement will still coordinate with local police about illegal aliens who are in custody but will ask to be notified 48 hours before the scheduled release of an alien who is targeted for deportation, rather than seeking to have aliens held beyond their scheduled releases.

Immigration advocates expressed widespread skepticism about Johnson's changes, saying they fear that people who have lived in the U.S. long-term but are low-level offenders will still be targeted.

But Sandweg, the adviser to Napolitano, said they should keep an open mind.

"I think these new priorities are incredibly significant," he said. "They will obviously have an impact on the lives of millions of people."

A Section on 07/03/2015

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