Is it Population or Personnel? The Effects of Diversity on Immigration Policy Implementation by Sheriff Offices

Abstract

The federal-local cooperative immigration removal program Secure Communities (S-Comm) has resulted in wide variation into how aggressively national interior immigration policy has been implemented locally. Some communities have removed thousands, but others have removed few if any. Community composition explains much of the variation, but representative bureaucracy tells us agency diversity also influences implementation. Focusing on county sheriff offices, a vital local partner in S-Comm, this study finds that agency personnel diversity (specifically, offices with larger percentages of Hispanics and African Americans) produce fewer removals and submissions to ICE for immigration background checks. Other agency-specific factors are also important. Both the agency’s total budget and whether it has a 287(g) agreement with federal immigration authorities increase removals. Despite recent efforts to blur the distinction between immigration and criminal justice policy, this study finds no relationship between local removals and local crime.

Keywords:

• cooperation
• immigration policy
• personnel
• policy implementation
• representative bureaucracy

Notes

Notes

1 ICE defined “full participation” in S-Comm as all 3,181 U.S. counties within the 50 states and the District of Columbia and five U.S. territories participating, which happened on January 22, 2013. See “Secure Communities: Overview,” https://www.ice.gov/secure-communities.

2 Note that ICE uses the term removal, not deport or deportation. The latter is used by the press, and even many immigration scholars, but the unclear meaning of a “deportation” has created some confusion as to how many immigrants are deported each year (see Bennett, 2014). The clearly defined term of removal is used here.

3 Chae Chan Ping v. U.S., 130 U.S. 581 (1889).

4 An interoperability interface connects the FBI fingerprint system with a DHS fingerprint system. See DHS’s “ICE, S-Comm, Standard Operating Procedures” manual, p. 3: https://www.ice.gov/doclib/foia/secure_communities/securecommunitiesops93009.pdf.

5 See ICE’s discussion of Secure Communities for more details on ICE’s priorities for removing immigrants: http://www.ice.gov/secure_communities.

6 See ICE’s previous reports on “Activated Jurisdictions” in its digital library: https://www.hsdl.org/?abstract&did=682236.

7 See ICE’s “Secure Communities: Overview,” https://www.ice.gov/secure-communities.

8 ICE removed a total of 368,644 individuals in FY 2013, although the vast majority of those individuals (235,093) were apprehended by U.S. Border Patrol along the U.S. border. These individuals are then processed, detained, and ultimately removed by ICE. Many individuals, including some immigration scholars, fail to distinguish between individuals apprehended through S-Comm and those detained at the U.S. border. See ICE’s “FY 2013 ICE Immigration Removals: ERO Annual Report” https://www.ice.gov/doclib/about/offices/ero/pdf/2013-ice-immigration-removals.pdf.

9 PEP was effectively a more narrowly focused version of S-Comm. It still required nonfederal law enforcement agencies to submit biometric information to the federal government’s interoperability database; however, ICE officers were limited to issuing detainers for those who posed a threat to national security or public safety. See “Priority Enforcement Program,” https://www.ice.gov/pep.

10 “Secure Communities: Overview,” https://www.ice.gov/secure-communities.

11 See Executive Order 13768, issued January 25, 2017: https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/executive-order-enhancing-public-safety-interior-united-states.

12 See ruling: http://www.sfcityattorney.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Complaint.pdf.

13 See more information, including the codebook, for the BJS’s LEMAS survey: https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/icpsrweb/NACJD/studies/36164/summary.

14 A total of 717 sheriff offices out of 895 responded to the survey. This study is limited to 617 that provided data on race of personnel.

15 See testimony before the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, October 28, 2010, http://www.illinoispeoplesaction.org/uploads/1/2/6/2/12620849/ice-holds-are-voluntary.pdf.

16 Buquer v. City of Indianapolis, 797 F. Supp. 2nd 905 (S.D. Ind. 2011).

17 These are offenses resulting in at least multiple days of jail time. See County of Santa Cruz “Report Regarding Secure Communities,” p. 2, http://sccounty01.co.santa-cruz.ca.us/BDS/Govstream2/Bdsvdata/non_legacy_2.0/agendas/2012/20120522-559/PDF/055.pdf.

18 Also see U.S. DHS’s guidance for state and local agencies that do not wish for fingerprint information to be shared with ICE (U.S. Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General, 2012).

19 I use the 2013 report because it matches with the year from LEMAS. ICE stopped issuing interoperability reports after Obama’s November 2014 order ending S-Comm. The agency has not begun reissuing reports since Trump restarted S-Comm last January.

20 Because there were very few Asians officers reported in the LEMAS survey, I did not test for the effects of Asian officers.

21 See ACS here: https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/acs/. Immigration policy studies alternate between the use of Hispanic or foreign-born because the two are always highly correlated. I opt for Hispanic because it is more consistently available in the ACS, and I use Hispanic for the sheriff personnel variable.

22 You must choose between percent change Hispanic or foreign born because the two are highly correlated (e.g., Casellas & Leal, 2013; Facchini & Steinhardt, 2011). I use percent Hispanic change, in large part because it was used by Jaeger (2016), and the sheriff office personnel variable is percent Hispanic.

23 Percent Hispanic change data: http://www.pewhispanic.org/interactives/hispanic-population-by-county.

24 List of ICE contracted detention facilities: http://trac.syr.edu/immigration/detention/exit.shtml.

25 Here is ICE’s up-to-date list of participating 287(g) agencies: https://www.ice.gov/287g. Unfortunately, ICE’s list of participating agencies changes over time, and ICE does not provide an archive of its site to match those participating in 2013. However, the author of this article does retain the list from 2013, and the Capps et al. (2011, pp. 58–59) report cited contains a list of all agencies participating at the start of 2013, when the LEMAS survey was conducted. Nationally, there were 41 participating county sheriff offices through 2012. The Obama Administration halted new agreements in 2009 to review the program, and only again allowed new agreements for a limited version of the program, known as the jail model, after the start of 2013 (Immigration Policy Center, 2012; U.S. Department of Homeland Security, 2012).

26 Crime data reported to county agencies available here: https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2012/crime-in-the-u.s.-2012.

27 Obtained from ACS.

28 The ICE interoperability report indicates the number of days active (see Immigration and Customs Enforcement, 2013b).

29 p = 0.06.

30 Outlier cases listed from most to least removals are Los Angeles County, CA; Harris County, TX; San Diego County, CA; Orange County, CA; Dallas County, TX; and El Paso County, TX.

31 See Title 5 Administrative Personnel January 1, 2008. Part 213, Excepted Service. Code of Federal Regulations, Title 5 (2008): 68–71, http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CFR-2002-title5-vol1/pdf/CFR-2002-title5-vol1-sec213-3102.pdf; Government Organizations and Employees Act, U.S. Code 5 (2012) §§ 2301 and 2302.

32 See Pickering v. Board of Education, 391 U.S. 563 (1968).

33 See New York v. U.S., 505 U.S. 144 (1992) and Printz v. U.S., 521 U.S. 898 (1997).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Daniel E. Chand

Daniel E. Chand is an associate professor of political science and public administration at Kent State University. He studies policy implementation, specifically focusing on topics such as immigration and administrative adjudications, and nonprofits in the policy process. He has recently published articles in Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, Administration and Society, Social Science Quarterly, American Review of Public Administration and the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies.