Government Security News February 2017 Digital Edition

Hot Topics: More opinions on Immigration
Abandoning priorities will make immigration
enforcement work much harder
Photo: t3hWIT
By Mary Giovagnoli
The Trump administration ensured
this week that its immigration
enforcement policies will be
a chaotic affair marked by mistakes,
civil rights violations and
overzealous enforcement. They
did this by outlining measures
that they claim simply return
power to immigration agents to
do their jobs—measures such as
authorizing the hiring of thousands
more border and interior
enforcement officers, eliminating
targeted priorities for removal,
and creating an aggressive
plan to deputize local law
enforcement.
Significantly,
the administration also rescinded
virtually all guidance on the
use of prosecutorial discretion.
In the short-term, this dramatic
rescission of guidance leaves
officers with no framework for
decision-making, except the
vague idea that their mission is
to deport as many unauthorized
immigrants as possible. In the
long-term, it turns the authority
to arrest, detain, and deport individuals
into a type of unchecked
power that once unleashed is
hard to pull back and is bound to
create chaos.
One of the defining measures
of the Obama administration’s
Priority Enforcement Program
was discretion. Over the
years, officers were given
a set of enforcement priorities
that emphasized
the removal of persons
convicted of serious
crimes, or who were national
security threats,
or who had recently
crossed the border. The
memos categorized enforcement
priorities not to
32
keep officers from doing their
job, but to ensure that officers
had guidance that gave them a
framework for using their resources
and making good choices
about individual cases based
on more than just the authority
to arrest and detain someone.
The November 2014 memos
issued by former Secretary Jeh
Johnson emphasized that even
within these priority categories
there were reasons why an individual
case might merit a decision
to decline to prosecute.
These memos and others emphasized
the favorable exercise of
discretion—in other words, the
need to triage cases, starting first
with the nature of the violation
(is this person a convicted killer
or a jaywalker?) and then walking
progressively through other factors
such as whether this person
was a victim of domestic abuse,
or an asylum seeker, or had U.S.
citizen children. The goal was
to ensure that limited resources
were used to remove those who
posed a threat to safety or securi-
More on page 42