A story in the Washington Post exposes the Immigration and Customs Enforcement National Fugitive Operations Program – a program that received over $600 million from congress – as a federally funded racial profiling operation.
The program which, as it is named, is intended to be used to round up fugitives, is an abject failure by that measure. In 2007 nearly 1/2 of the people arrested were not fugitives from the law. The USICE says that number is going down but since they specifically allow non-fugitive arrests to be counted towards the quota that’s nonsense. In fact, it should be zero if they are only going after specific fugitives not stopping minorities at random. Clearly the USICE is simply going up to brown people and asking for their papers – and the video footage in the story supports exactly that conclusion.
In fact, according to the Post, some employees say that they were specifically directed to arrest non-fugitives to boost their arrest numbers. The USCIS and USDHS have declined to actually investigate the claims. That makes sense since it’s official policy.
The video evidence makes it clear the USICE officers were simply stopping men of Hispanic descent without reasonable cause or suspicion. The men detained included, Ernest Guillen, who was merely stopping for a cup of coffee on his way to be with his US citizen son who was receiving chemotherapy at John’s Hopkins and another man who was detained for 18 days even though he was in the United States legally.
The questions for the Obama administration are: 1) are you going to maintain a policy of racial profiling? 2) If you do believe racial profiling to be effective and are going to continue it will you expand it to include other agencies not related to immigration?
Or perhaps it’d be a better idea to use that muscle of yours to get comprehensive immigration reform passed.
