Study: Many Incorrectly Identified As Immigration Law Violators
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Increased federal efforts to use local officers to apprehend terrorists are also resulting in the identification of thousands of people as violators of immigration laws, many incorrectly, according to a study based on government data released yesterday.
The study, which the Migration Policy Institute issued at New York University Law School, is based on statistics from the Department of Homeland Security. It showed that 71% of violators identified through the federal program are Mexican immigrants. Two percent are from the Middle East and other predominantly Muslim countries.
The study said 42% of the people identified as violators were later classified as “false-positives,” meaning the department was unable to confirm that they had broken immigration laws.
“This likely damages police credibility, increases their legal liability, and undermines public safety by discouraging immigrant victims and witnesses from cooperating with police,” a professor at New York University School of Law, Michael Wishnie, said.
He called on local authorities to take a stance against the federal policy. Some police departments, such as Houston’s, have already done so.
The data used in the study was released after Mr. Wishnie and his students sued the Department of Homeland Security under the Freedom of Information Act.
It shows the effects of a recent shift in policy by the Department of Justice to engage local law enforcement authorities increasingly in immigration arrests. Since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, immigration violators have been entered in the National Crime Information Center database, a Federal Bureau of Investigation criminal database. Most immigration violations are civil or administrative.
Included in the newly established “immigration violators file” are immigration absconders and alleged violators of a program to register men from Muslim and Arab countries and North Korea.
New York City had the third highest incidence of any city of local authorities using the national database to identify immigrant violators. Between 2002 and 2004, there were at least 158 checks on immigration status resulting from the federal program, the study said.
The executive director of the New York Immigration Coalition, Chung-Wha Hong, said that while this number may appear relatively small, the ripple effect is much greater and could lead to illegal immigrants not reporting crimes.
This type of measure, she said, also undermines the mayor’s efforts to create a welcoming atmosphere for immigrants. In September 2003, the mayor signed Executive Order 41, creating a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy under which city employees are not allowed to ask or disclose immigration status, except in the case of police investigating illegal activity.
A spokesman for the New York Police Department, Michael Coan, said that because of this policy no police officer would make arrests based only on immigration status, regardless of what the database says.
“In the course of an investigation, if the only issue with this individual is immigration status, we are not going to hold you on that due to the mayor’s executive order,” he said.
Mr. Wishnie said, in fact, that the mayor’s executive order allows police officers to investigate immigration status, which he called a flaw in the policy that he had told the administration about two years ago.
Although the data released from the Department of Homeland Security did not indicate how many of the immigration checks resulted in detention or arrest, he said he assumed a large portion did. “If an FBI screen comes up saying we want this guy, I find it implausible that a young officer untrained in immigration law could walk away,” Mr. Wishnie said.