Not just 'bad hombres': U.S. immigration arrests up one-third from 2016

Arrests of undocumented immigrants increased by nearly one-third in the first three months of this year compared to the same period in 2016, according to the agency tasked with enforcing U.S. immigration laws.

As May Day marchers in the U.S. on Monday protested deportation measures taken under the administration of President Donald Trump, statistics requested by CBC News from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement showed arrests within the country and at the border rose to 35,147 in the first quarter of 2017, up from 26,471 the previous year. That amounts to a 33 per cent increase.

• May Day marches see large crowds, some clashes with police
• U.S. lawmakers agree on $1 trillion funding bill

Trump's stated deportation plan was to take aim at "bad hombres," or convicted serious felons living in America illegally. Judging by ICE's statistics, authorities also rounded up thousands of unauthorized immigrants with otherwise clean records.

Nearly one-quarter of those arrested, or 8,557 people, had no criminal record in the first three months of 2017. That number more than doubled the 3,718 non-criminal arrests made by ICE over the same period in Barack Obama's last full year as president in 2016.

"These's a lot of rhetoric about 'I want to deport criminals,' but it's not what's actually been happening," says Prerna Lal, the Berkeley-based founder of DreamActivist, an online advocacy network led by undocumented youth.

"These are not dangerous felons. It's important to call [Trump] out on the fact his rhetoric doesn't match the reality," says Lal, herself a former undocumented immigrant who is now a lawful permanent U.S. resident. "For the people being arrested and put in [removal] proceedings, their only 'crime' is that they're here unlawfully."

A $1-trillion congressional spending deal brokered late Sunday to avoid a government shutdown denies the president funding for his oft-promised southern border wall. It also omits Trump's threat to pull federal grants from sanctuary cities that protect undocumented immigrants.

$1.5 billion for border security

But the agreement allocates $1.5 billion towards border security. It's unclear how the money would be spent and whether it would go towards projects such as expanding detention facilities, hiring more deportation agents or reinforcing the border.

Trump-era deportation figures might seem counterintuitive.

Fewer deportations have been processed under his watch than during his predecessor's tenure. CNN reported last week that ICE removed 54,564 people between Trump's Inauguration Day and April 24, down from 62,062 individuals deported within the same period last year under Obama.

But immigration experts believe that arrest figures — rather than removal stats — give a better picture of an administration's immigration enforcement efforts. That's because deportation cases can take several years to wind through backlogged courts. Border apprehensions often result in removal within days.

ICE's deportation stats wouldn't account for the long lag times, whereas arrests are "clearly the initial enforcement activity," says Randy Capps, director of research for U.S. programs with Washington's Migration Policy Institute, a non-profit and nonpartisan think tank.

Critics of Obama blasted him as "deporter in chief" owing to the spike in deportations to around 400,000 a year during the beginning of his term. Deportations fell after his executive action to relieve the pace of removals in November 2014, when his administration issued a memorandum prioritizing deportations for serious criminals and new arrivals.

Expanded deportation powers

The biggest change under Trump is a broadening of how ICE agents are free to interpret who should be deported. The expanded powers came courtesy of new immigration enforcement policies the president introduced in January executive orders.

In practical terms, unauthorized immigrants settled in the U.S. as law-abiding residents, including some with citizen spouses, are now as vulnerable to removal proceedings as serious criminals. For example, the Washington Post reported last week that about half of the 675 immigrants arrested in the days after Trump's inauguration either had no criminal convictions or had committed traffic offences. The data obtained by the newspaper cited drunk driving as the most common traffic offence.

Capps expects removals from inside the U.S. to soon start outpacing the number of removals at the border, "basically flipping the pattern that we had in the Obama administration."

The 2014 Obama-era executive actions to relieve deportations "had an enormous impact" as removals eased off to closer to 300,000 a year, said Lynn Marcus, co-director of the University of Arizona's Immigration Law Clinic. Many people without their papers were simply logged into databases and had their cases either terminated or "administratively closed" while more pressing cases became the focus.

"Although President Trump had said his focus would be on 'bad hombres,' he's clogging the system with working people who are integrated into communities in the U.S."

Back to Bush

To Lal, the former undocumented immigrant, the Trump policy change effectively winds the clock back to the end of the George W. Bush years and the beginning of Obama's term. Total deportations topped 1.17 million in 2008 and 974,000 in 2009, before eventually being more than halved to around 451,000 in 2016, according to the Migration Policy Institute.

Trump might soon inherit the "deporter in chief" label from Obama now that "anybody and everybody" in the U.S. without documentation is at equal risk of removal, Lal says.

"People used to criticize Obama, too. Now we're back to square one."