VivirLatino

I hate the term immigration reform. It feels heavy in my mouth, as if the boca knew that such a term hides just how and why the current U.S. immigration polices work against so many communities. It’s no accident or coincidence that hate crimes against Latinos have gone up at least 40% over the last few years.

Recently reveled information shows that about 3 years ago, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, aka as our friends at ICE, made a conscious decision to keep talking up the danger factor about undocumented immigration while targeting the not really dangerous at all. In other words, all that talk about good immigrants vs bad immigrants was just a cover.

But in fact, beginning in 2006, the program was no longer what was being advertised. Federal immigration officials had repeatedly told Congress that among more than half a million immigrants with outstanding deportation orders, they would concentrate on rounding up the most threatening — criminals and terrorism suspects.

Instead, newly available documents show, the agency changed the rules, and the program increasingly went after easier targets. A vast majority of those arrested had no criminal record, and many had no deportation orders against them, either.

Internal directives by immigration officials in 2006 raised arrest quotas for each team in the National Fugitive Operations Program, eliminated a requirement that 75 percent of those arrested be criminals, and then allowed the teams to include nonfugitives in their count.

In the next year, fugitives with criminal records dropped to 9 percent of those arrested, and nonfugitives picked up by chance — without a deportation order — rose to 40 percent. Many were sent to detention centers far from their homes, and deported.

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