INSIDE THE CENTER FOR IMMIGRATION STUDIES, THE IMMIGRATION FALSE-FACT THINK TANK
The Daily Beast
May 16 2014
A new report from the Center for Immigraiton Studies says the Obama
administration released 36,000 undocumented criminals from detention
last year. Scary numbers, but there’s more to the story.
“Feds Released Hundreds of Immigrant Murderers, Drunk Drivers,
Sex-Crimes Convicts”–The Washington Times.
“A New Level of Illegal Immigration Chaos”–Frontpage Magazine.
“ICE Ordered to Stay Silent on Release of 36,000 Criminal Illegal
Immigrants”–Breitbart.
“Release of 36,000 Criminal Illegals Impeachable
Offense?”–WorldNetDaily.
“Is Hillary Responsible for Releasing Criminal Aliens?”–National
Review Online.
To say the right-wing media pounced on this week’s announcement
by the Center for Immigration Studies–a D.C.-based, questionably
nonpartisan nonprofit research organization–announcing that the
Obama administration released 36,007 undocumented criminals last year
would be an overstatement. It was more of a leisurely grab, as the
report was released on Monday. Nonetheless, by midweek, a slew of
fear-inducing headlines had sprouted up, of the kind sure to clutter
Facebook newsfeeds this weekend.
Yet as one Newsbusters’ headline put it, the report has been virtually
ignored by the “networks” or so-called mainstream media outlets. The
numbers certainly sound shocking, if not attention-grabbing at
the very least. So what gives? These numbers portend to illuminate
society-threatening failures within the current immigration enforcement
system. But the CIS report and the coverage surrounding it actually
offer as much, if not more insight into how the national conversation
surrounding immigration reform is manipulated by the interests of
those covering it.
Before taking a closer look at the disturbing data being passed
around, it would be in everyone’s best interest to consider its
source. The Center for Immigration Studies refers to itself as a
nonprofit, nonpartisan, independent research organization, boasting
the puzzling tagline “Low Immigration, Pro Immigrant.” One of CIS’s
founders, John Tanton, a retired ophthamologist from Michigan and
known anti-immgration activist, was also behind Numbers USA, an
immigration reduction organization that, according to The New York
Times, helped kill President George W. Bush’s attempt at comprehensive
immigration reform in 2007. Another one of Tanton’s groups, the
Federation for American Immigration Reform, or FAIR, helped draft
Arizona’s controversial SB-1070, permitting police to detain illegal
immigrants. Numbers USA, FAIR, and CIS were all part of the effort
that successfully defeated the DREAM Act in the Senate in 2010.
Since 1995, CIS has been led by Mark Krikorian, the child of
Armenian immigrants who didn’t learn English until kindergarten; he
was paradoxically an early opponent of the movement toward bilingual
education in the United States and has made a career crusading against
mass immigration.
A longtime columnist at the conservative National Review (and the
author of that “Is Hillary Responsible for Releasing Criminal Aliens”
post mentioned above), Krikorian is an advocate of “enforcement
by attrition,” a concept better known, thanks to Mitt Romney,
as “self-deportation.” As a testament to Krikorian’s, and CIS’s
influence in D.C., a June 2013 Washington Post profile entitled,
“The Provocateur Standing in the Way of Immigration Reform,” reframed
the question of whether immigration reform can pass as, “Can Mark
Krikorian be stopped?”
Coverage of Krikorian by the nonprofit Southern Poverty Law Center,
which tracks extremists and hate groups in the United States, has
been far more critical, if not scathing. Krikorian, the SPLC claims,
has been known to “hobnob with extremists.” According to the SPLC,
Krikorian accepted an invitation to speak alongside known Holocaust
denier Nick Griffin and so-called “racial realist” Jared Taylor at the
Michigan State chapter of Young Americans for Freedom in 2007, despite
the group having recently made news for orchestrating such offensive
events as “Catch an Illegal Immigrant Day,” a “Korean Desecration”
competition, and covering the campus in “Gays Spread AIDS fliers.”
Despite affiliations like these, the SPLC argues that CIS has
managed to project the image of a reliable source for immigration
research while pumping out “study after study aimed at highlighting
immigration’s negative effects.” One example of this is “Hello, I
Love You, Won’t You Tell Me Your Name: Inside the Green Card Marriage
Phenomenon,” a 2008 CIS report which concluded, “If small-time con
artists and Third-World gold-diggers can obtain green cards with
so little resistance, then surely terrorists can do (and have done)
the same.”
There’s no question that CIS’s latest report–proclaiming that the
Obama administration released 36,007 undocumented immigrants with a
combined 88,000 convictions between them, including homicide, sexual
assault, kidnapping, aggravated assault, drunk or drugged driving,
and flight escape–intends to highlight the negative effects of
immigration and, more specifically, immigration enforcement policy
under the current president. The report’s author, CIS Director of
Policy Studies Jessica Vaughan, admits as much. With ICE data Vaughan
says she received from one government official and verified with two
others, CIS hopes to raise questions “about the Obama administration’s
management of enforcement resources, as well as its enforcement plans
and priorities.”
In a statement to The Daily Beast, ICE deputy press secretary Gillian
Christiansen highlighted key points that CIS failed to address, such
as the fact that convicted criminals are only sent into ICE custody
for deportation proceedings once they’ve completed their criminal
sentence. Many of the 2013 releases, ICE says, were required by law.
For example, as a result of the 2001 Supreme Court decision in Zadvydas
v. Davis, the U.S. is required to release detainees whose home country
either denies the return of its nationals or has diplomatic beef with
the United States, such as North Korea or Cuba.
Christiansen says some detainees with less serious offenses were
released at the discretion of enforcement officers based on “the
priority of holding the individual, given ICE’s resources, and
prioritizing the detention and removal of individuals who pose a risk
to public safety or national security.” Immigration court judges,
on the other hand, ordered the majority of releases for people with
convictions of more serious crimes. “For example, mandatory releases
account for over 72 percent of the homicides listed,” ICE said.
Muzaffar Chishti, the New York director of the Migration Policy
Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, argues that understanding the
circumstances of each release is critical to forming an opinion of
the data CIS has shared. Was it an immigration judge’s order? Are they
helping law enforcement officials with criminal investigations? In the
latter case, Chishti notes, not only are people released but they’re
typically also given a green card. Additionally, understanding the
type of convictions these people carry is also valuable.
“Homicide is a very broad category,” Chishti said. “You can have
vehicular homicide. Not everyone is an ax murderer.”
“This may sound like a large number, but in our overall criminal
justice system people get released all the time,” told The Daily Beast
in response to the CIS report. “How does this stack historically? This
is a select presentation of a set of facts without any comparative
analysis that can lead to misleading conclusions.”
The American Immigration Council’s response to the CIS report was less
tempered. In an email blast Thursday, AIC–which recently released
a searing report of its own on the lack of response to complaints
of abuses by Border Patrol agents–called CIS “nativist” and its
“oversimplified” report “an attempt to derail an honest debate about
immigration policy.”
The fear-inducing stats aren’t so scary once they’re broken down,
AIC argues, noting that the list of crimes ranges “from tax fraud
and disturbing the peace to aggravated assault and kidnapping.” Some
32,800 traffic convictions (including DUIs) are grouped together
with more serious crimes. “The point is that looking at this group
of people as an undifferentiated whole doesn’t tell you much about
who poses a risk to public safety and who does not.”
AIC also note that even within our immigration system, foreign-born
individuals, documented or not, are afforded at least some legal
protections: the freedom from being held indefinitely without cause,
the right to a bond hearing that determines whether they pose
a danger to public safety or are a flight risk, and the right to
contest their deportation.
“The U.S. Constitution does not permit the creation of an immigration
gulag in which being born in another country can earn you a life
sentence,” AIC writes.”This latest report from CIS is anti-immigrant
fear-mongering at its lowest. Immigrants are demonized as dangerous
criminals, despite the fact that they are less likely to commit serious
crimes or be behind bars than the native-born,” AIC writes, pointing
to its own study demonstrating this argument. “Individual cases of
serious crimes committed by immigrants are held up as proof that all
of “them” are a threat to “us.” This is a cynical and small-minded
view of the world that bears no relationship to reality.”
Jessica Vaughan acknowledges that the CIS report offers no context
for why these convicted criminals were released by ICE nor how many
of them aren’t actually free but under ICE restrictions such as GPS
monitoring via an ankle bracelet, telephone monitoring, supervision
or bond as they await deportation proceedings. And while she hopes
ICE will provide more details on who these criminals are and the
decision-making behind their release, she also doesn’t think it matters
much whether they are technically under ICE restrictions or not.
“There is a huge difference in the level of supervision over this
group,” Vaughan told The Daily Beast. “Some of them are not supervised
at all, released under their own recognizance. Others may be under
what ICE calls supervision, they have to show up once every few
months to an ICE office to check in, or make a phone call. That’s
what’s called ‘supervision’ but it’s not like anyone is supervising
what they’re doing.”
For over five years, ICE has been required by a Congressional directive
known as the “bed mandate” to have an average 34,000 detainees in
its custody every day. Depending on who you ask, that’s excessive
and expensive, or not nearly enough. To Vaughan and CIS, it’s the
latter. Vaughan says ICE needs to petition Congress for more detention
funding because, “in the short run, given that most of them are not
going to show up for their detention hearings, keeping these people
in custody not only protects the public, but it sends the message
that our immigration laws are going to be enforced and people will
be sent home when they are arrested and convicted for crimes.”
The other thing Vaughan and Krikorian say ICE can and should do is
insist that the State Department stop issuing visas to people from
those countries where criminals, once in the United States, cannot
be returned.
“This is the most basic form of immigration law enforcement,” Vaughan
said. “If we can’t even manage to hold onto criminal aliens, how can
this administration be trusted to do more routine immigration law
enforcement that protects American jobs and how can they be trusted
to implement complex comprehensive immigration reform that they’re
asking Congress to pass?”
The window for passing immigration reform before the November
midterm elections is quickly closing and whether Congress will pull
it off is still anyone’s guess. President Obama made another push
for reform during a law enforcement briefing this week and just
this Thursday, a Tea Party Express co-founder urged conservatives to
seize on immigration reform as an opportunity for growth. Meanwhile,
Republican senators said they’ll work to pass immigration reform if
they win back the Senate, undermining the Democratic argument that
failing to pass reform this year would ruin the GOP’s reputation with
Hispanic voters ahead of 2016.
CIS clearly has a dog in this fight, and early reactions to the report
from some of the House Republicans who hold the keys to passing
immigration reform suggest that Vaughan and Co. are eliciting the
exact amount of outrage from lawmakers that they’re looking for.
“This would be considered the worst prison break in American history,
except it was sanctioned by the president and perpetrated by our own
immigration officials,” said Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Tx) according to The
Washington Times. House Judiciary Committee chairman Rep. Bob Goodlatte
(R-Va) said DHS Secretary Johnson has some explaining to do.
Both of them reportedly said, “These criminals should be locked up,
not roaming our streets.”