Immigration Enforcement, Policing, and Crime

• Author: Elina Treyger,Aaron Chalfin,Charles Loeffler
• Date: 01 May 2014
• Published date: 01 May 2014
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9133.12085

RESEARCH ARTICLE

IMMIGRATION ENFORCEMENT,

POLICING, AND CRIME

Immigration Enforcement, Policing, and

Crime

Evidence from the Secure Communities Program

Elina Treyger

George Mason University

Aaron Chaln

University of Cincinnati

Charles Loeer

University of Pennsylvania

Research Summary

In 2008, the federal government introduced “Secure Communities,” a program that

requires local law enforcement agencies to share arrestee information with federal

immigration officials. We employed the staggered activation of Secure Communities

to examine whether this program has an effect on crime or the behavior of local

police. Supporters of the program argue that it enhances public safety by facilitating

the removal of criminal aliens. Critics worry that it will encourage discriminatory

policing. We found little evidence for the most ambitious promises of the program or

for its critics’ greatest fears.

Policy Implications

Although a large body of evidence reports that municipal police can have an appreciable

effect on crime, involving local police in federal immigration enforcement does not

seem to offer measurable public safety benefits. Noncitizens removed through Secure

Communities either would have been incapacitated even in the absence of the program

or do not pose an identifiable risk to community safety.

Keywords

local immigration enforcement, policing, crime, Secure Communities

Direct correspondence to Elina Treyger, George Mason University School of Law, 3301 Fairfax Drive, Arlington,

VA 22201 (e-mail: etreyger@gmu.edu).

DOI:10.1111/1745-9133.12085 C2014 American Society of Criminology 285

Criminology & Public Policy rVolume 13 rIssue 2

Research Article Immigration Enforcement, Policing, and Crime

Unauthorized immigration to the United States has attracted increasing attention

over the course of the past 25 years. During this time, the modern immigra-

tion enforcement apparatus has developed into a “formidable machinery,” in

the words of one former Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS) commissioner

(Meissner, Kerwin, Chishti, and Bergeron, 2013). Spending has grown 15-fold since the

mid-1980s, and was used not only to fortify the country’s borders but also to intensify

immigration enforcement in its interior. And the number of annual deportations increased

from approximately 30,000 in 1990 to a record high of more than 419,000 in 2012.1This

expansion of deportation efforts raises several public policy questions. Apart from debates

regarding the efficacy of a heavy reliance on deportation to manage demographic change,

considerable concerns exist over the spill-over effects of immigration enforcement on public

safety and criminal law enforcement. Proponents of more robust enforcement commonly

contend that it will enhance public safety. Opponents, however, argue that such policies

alienate noncitizen communities and erode public safety. Controversy also surrounds the

involvement of state and local law enforcement agencies (LEAs) in the enforcement of fed-

eral laws. Proponents view such participation as invaluable assistance to the resource-limited

federal government. Opponents, for their part, view it as inimical to the core mission of

local law enforcers.

This article investigates these questions in the context of “Secure Communities,” a pro-

gram launched by the federal government to improve the efficiency of interior enforcement

and to enhance the capacity for targeting deportable individuals with criminal convictions,

known as “criminal aliens.”2Unlike previous initiatives, which generally required volun-

tary cooperation of local law enforcement agencies, Secure Communities enables automatic

transmission of fingerprints taken upon arrest to the Department of Homeland Security

(DHS) for verification of an arrestees’ immigration status. The program is unprecedented

in its scope and mandatory involvement of local LEAs. Proponents of the program have

argued that it not only enables a more efficient identification of criminal aliens but also

1. The statistics on immigration enforcement are complicated by the multiple standards for what counts

as a “deportation,” a nonlegal term for the expulsion of noncitizens, or as a “removal,” a legal term of art

referring to the expulsion pursuant to an official order of removal. This article relies on statistics reported

by various parts of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which adopt different definitions for

different purposes. We use the term “deportation” in its nontechnical meaning to refer loosely to any

government-mediated expulsion of a noncitizen from the country. When citing statistics on

deportations, we follow and cite appropriate official sources. Here, the deportation figures include all

noncitizens deported with an official order of removal, whether issued by an immigration court after a

hearing or by a DHS officer through an expedited process without a hearing (“expedited removal”) but

do not include deportations or “returns” without an official order of removal (another 230,000 in 2012)

(DHS Office of Immigration Statistics [OIS], 2012). The figures include noncitizens found in the interior, as

well as within the extended border of the country, and identified by either Immigration and Customs

Enforcement (ICE) or Customs and Border Protection (CBP).

2. The criminal alien category includes noncitizens who entered the country unlawfully, as well as those

who entered lawfully, but violated conditions of their stay.

286 Criminology & Public Policy

Treyger, Chalfin, and Loeffler

augments public safety. Critics of the program have expressed concern that the program

encourages local LEAs to engage in discriminatory policing practices, making arrests for the

sole purpose of checking an individual’s immigration status. An atmosphere of fear created

by Secure Communities, according to the critics, also erodes the cooperation with the police

among immigrant communities, which only undermines effective law enforcement.

Although there is a growing literature about the legal consequences of the interpenetra-

tion of immigration and criminal law and the corresponding enforcement apparatuses, it is

only recently that scholars have begun to examine the empirical effects of local involvement

in immigration law enforcement (Davies and Fagan, 2012; Kirk, Papachristos, Fagan, and

Tyler, 2012; Koper, Guterbock, Woods, Taylor, and Carter, 2013) or to investigate the

effects of Secure Communities specifically (Cox and Miles, 2013).3In this article, we con-

tribute to this nascent empirical literature by reporting on the results of our investigation

of the effects of Secure Communities on the local crime rates and the arrest behavior of

municipal police agencies. In short, we found little to substantiate either the most ambitious

promises of the program’s champions or some of the greatest fears of the program’s critics.

Background: Immigration Enforcement and Secure Communities

Implications of Modern Federal Immigration Enforcement for Public Safety and Policing

Unlike enforcement at the border, which is predominantly carried out by federal officers,

interior enforcement increasingly relies on state and local LEAs to identify and apprehend

deportable noncitizens, who are subsequently processed and deported by agents of the DHS

ICE. In the past decade, willing LEAs have become involved in federal enforcement in sev-

eral ways. First, LEAs have been able to identify suspected immigration violators under

the auspices of federal or local partnership programs. So-called “287(g)” partnerships and

the Criminal Alien Program (CAP) are the most noteworthy of such cooperation efforts

(Meissner et al., 2013: 105; Rosenblum and Kandel, 2012). Section 287(g) of the Immi-

gration and Nationality Act of 1952 (INA) authorizes federal authorities to deputize local

LEAs to perform certain functions, such as screening people for immigration status, issu-

ing detainers to hold potential violators, and even issuing charging documents that trigger

removal proceedings. Approximately 75 LEAs of a total of 17,985 such agencies (Reaves,

2011) have participated in some way in such partnerships, leading to the identification of

more than 300,000 potentially removable aliens since 2006. Under CAP, an umbrella for

several programs, prisons and jails allow ICE agents access to their records, to interview

suspected deportable immigrants, and to provide for the removal of the latter prior to release

if necessary (Rosenblum and Kandel, 2012: 14). CAP has been responsible for a growing

number of removal proceedings in recent years, peaking at more than 230,000 in 2009, up

3. Cox and Miles (2013) provided the first nationwide empirical examination of Secure Communities as

part of a larger project.

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