Today ICE announced the creation of a new office to serve as a point of contact for those who have "concerns, questions, recommendations or important issues they would like to raise." Boy, do we!

The office will be led by Andrew Lorenzen-Strait, who has been at ICE since 2008, mainly working as an advisor on reforming detention practices. Prior to joining ICE, Strait was a legal services attorney in Prince George's County, Md. Read more...

Commissioners in Cook County, Ill., (which includes Chicago) are starting to feel some heat over an ill-conceived ordinance they enacted in September, requiring the county sheriff to ignore ICE requests to hold criminal aliens to enable the agency to initiate removal proceedings (detainers). Read more...

In July, 2005, then-governor of Arizona Janet Napolitano was keen on bringing an innovative public safety tool to her state to help "alleviate the strain" on local law enforcement of dealing with illegal aliens. She wrote to then-Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff, asking his agency to approve a 287(g) agreement for Arizona: "Officers often come into contact with large numbers of UDAs [Undocumented Aliens] during routine traffic or other law enforcement activities." In the letter, she approvingly noted that she would have the assistance of Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio in providing bed space for the criminal aliens she anticipated detaining for ICE. The Arizona Department of Corrections soon became the nation's fourth law enforcement agency to participate in the 287(g) program, followed into the program 17 months later by Maricopa County (which includes the city of Phoenix and is home to most of the state's population). Read more...

Opponents of Secure Communities have opened up a new front in their campaign to have the program ended. The new rallying cry against SC is that it is leading to the wrongful arrest of some unknown but deeply disturbing number of U.S. citizens. It all started with the release of a deeply flawed study from a group of anti-SC activists, which I've written about with my colleague W.D. Reasoner. Read more...

The Obama Administration has issued yet another "prosecutorial discretion" (read "Let'em go!") memo, this time changing USCIS policy so that certain illegal aliens whose applications for immigration benefits such as green cards, citizenship, or temporary status are denied may nevertheless avoid being forced to leave the country. Read more...

The White House web site says "President Obama has committed to making his administration the most open and transparent in history", but DHS still hasn't gotten the memo.

A reporter from FederalTimes.com, Andrew Medici, recently became frustrated at how notoriously difficult it is to reach the DHS public affairs personnel. You know, the federal government employees who get paid by us taxpayers to answer inquiries from the public. As reported in his story, "Don't call us, we'll call you", Medici filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to obtain the names, office phone numbers, and e-mail addresses of all the DHS public affairs staff. The response: 58 pages of the names of the many public affairs personnel – with all contact information blacked out. The DHS FOIA officer said that it would be "an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy" to release their office contact information. Read more...

Yesterday the House Judiciary committee declined to allow a proposal to eliminate one of many anachronisms in our legal immigration system – the green card quota for unskilled workers. Though tiny, this category serves no legitimate economic purpose and now is frequently used fraudulently to allow otherwise unqualified people to get around our rules, enriching crooked visa brokers and, possibly, unscrupulous U.S. employers in the process. Read more...

According to President Obama, the allegedly record-breaking deportation numbers released this week by ICE Director John Morton are "a little deceptive." I agree. They give the impression that this administration is enforcing the law more than, say, the previous administration. But other ICE numbers suggest that immigration enforcement is declining, not increasing. Read more...

ICE's "smart and effective" immigration enforcement policies again have proven to be neither. It was reported this week that ICE's New England office lost track of a key witness in a high-profile illegal alien drunk driving fatality case because ICE officials decided to release the witness, Luis Acosta, an Ecuadoran illegal alien who had fled twice before and also faced state charges, on an electronic monitoring bracelet rather than detain him. Read more...

If there is any ICE program the open-borders groups hate more than Secure Communities, it's 287(g). How ironic, then, that the result of their intense and hysterical campaign to derail Secure Communities in Massachusetts is the announcement on Wednesday that at least three county sheriffs have been approved and intend to launch 287(g) partnerships. Read more...

Cook County, Illinois (which includes the city of Chicago) passed an ordinance last week instructing the sheriff to disregard requests from ICE to hold suspected removable aliens who are arrested. This irrational directive already is sending violent criminal aliens back to the streets instead of into ICE custody, where a few of them might actually be deported, sparing future victims. ICE director John Morton probably doesn't care if Cook County keeps his agents from doing their job, but if Congress does, there is an easy fix – stop rewarding Cook County with millions of dollars in annual SCAAP payments until they start honoring the ICE detainers. Read more...

On August 20, Matt Denice, age 23, was out riding his motorcycle in his home town of Milford, Mass., when, according to police and witnesses, he was struck, dragged, and killed by an Ecuadoran illegal alien drunk driver, Nicolas Guaman. It was a horrific crime that has sparked widespread public outrage and renewed resentment toward Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick's sanctuary policies and ICE's reluctance to implement the Secure Communities program here. What I have found most interesting and refreshing, though, is the reaction of Milford officials, who have wasted no time in taking steps locally to address the conditions that encourage illegal settlement. Read more...

The recent guestworker protests at the Hershey chocolate plant in Palmyra, Penn. provide welcome exposure of the State Department’s cultural exchange visa charade. Billed as a form of public diplomacy to help foreigners better understand America, in fact most of these are cheap guestworker programs, wrapped up in the pretense of a cultural exchange. Read more...

Boston Mayor Tom Menino is the latest addition to the growing chorus of the nation’s liberal politicians who are making a show of wringing their hands over the Secure Communities program, which uses the existing federal fingerprint-sharing system to help ICE find foreign nationals who have been arrested and should be removed. Read more...

The recent New York Times article celebrating the supposed end of illegal Mexican migration to the United States offers little to inform a discussion of the illegal immigration problem, but does usefully illustrate the extent to which legal and illegal immigration feed off of one another. Read more...

One of the first acts of newly-elected Rhode Island governor Lincoln Chafee (who squeaked into office in a three-man race) was to rescind his predecessor Don Carcieri’s popular and court-approved executive order requiring all state agencies, contractors and grantees to use E-Verify. Read more...

Related: Video

A vital and effective immigration law enforcement program – Secure Communities – that should have been an easy immigration policy score for the Obama administration is now in a state of disarray, all because the president and his Get Smart-like immigration appointees cannot bring themselves to stand up to sanctuary cities and a trio of governors who would rather see residents of their states killed by illegal aliens (see here and here) than to allow local police and sheriffs to help with immigration enforcement. Read more...

Every year, ICE releases about 4,000 criminal aliens back into U.S. communities because their home countries will not accept them for deportation, and because the Supreme Court has ruled that they cannot be detained indefinitely. This group includes murderers, rapists, cop killers, child predators, and gang members who are then free to continue their life of crime here, and they get a work permit in case their crime doesn't pay enough. Read more...

A new GAO report discloses a fairly lackluster implementation of security enhancements to the Visa Waiver Program (VWP) by the Department of Homeland Security. The report reinforces the reputation that DHS has for putting travel facilitation above security considerations. Proponents of VWP expansion often tout the security enhancements as a justification for extending visa waiver privileges to more countries, but these GAO findings provide no support for this perennial proposal. Read more...

Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn has announced his intention to cancel the state's agreement with ICE to allow law enforcement agencies in his state to share arrest information with ICE under the Secure Communities Program, saying he was "not satisfied" with the results. Quinn expressed concern that ICE has removed a large number of illegal aliens who committed minor crimes in addition to dozens of criminal aliens with convictions for serious felonies. Read more...

The incarceration of criminal aliens cost the federal government more than $1.6 billion in 2009, according to a new GAO report. In addition, taxpayers shelled out tens of millions more that year to incarcerate aliens in state prisons and local jails.

Other findings:

For a preview of how a federally-run health care system might deal with uninsured illegal immigrants, watch Massachusetts. In 2006 the state enacted Romneycare, which many consider to be the precursor to Obamacare. A recent report from the Massachusetts Inspector General has found that state agencies have failed to implement controls to prevent ineligible people – including illegal immigrants – from getting free taxpayer-funded health care. Read more...

Last week I appeared on a CNN news program to discuss our recent report on the national security implications of the U.S. practice of granting citizenship to the children of foreign temporary visitors. This is related to, but distinct from the issue of citizenship for the children of illegal aliens. Read more...

The release of new Census data based on the 2010 count has focused public attention on immigration's role in driving U.S. population growth. I recently completed a report on how our prioritization of family immigration guarantees this outcome.

Among the findings: Read more...

There are approximately 2.1 million criminal aliens living in the United States, according to new figures from ICE's Secure Communities office. Of these, about 1.9 million are removable, and the remaining 200,000 are green card holders who committed lesser crimes allowing them to avoid removal.

According to ICE, each year about 900,000 aliens are criminally arrested. And, each year about 700,000 aliens are released from correctional custody (jail, prison, or probation). ICE estimates that there are more than 1.2 million criminal aliens who are at large in our communities. Read more...

A new report on the 287(g) program provides a wealth of information illustrating the tremendous public safety value and positive community impact of this initiative. It corroborates many of the findings of our 2009 report, "The 287(g) Program: Protecting Home Town and Homeland".

This is doubly remarkable considering that the new report was issued by the Migration Policy Institute, the Obama administration's pro-amnesty think tank. Read more...

Today's batch of press releases from ICE included several noteworthy announcements: an impressive successful MS-13 gang prosecution in San Francisco, the continued steady implementation of Secure Communities, and the usual report of a child porn case. But one in the group caught my eye: "ICE Seizes Counterfeit NFL Jerseys in Phoenix." Read more...

If Congress passes the version of the DREAM Act approved by the U.S. House last week, ICE will likely have to scale back its successful anti-gang program known as Operation Community Shield, because more than one-fourth of the potential targets could qualify for the amnesty. Read more...

A story in today's Washington Post reveals the lengths to which this administration will go to give people the false impression that they are serious about immigration law enforcement. Remember all that high-fiving and fist-pumping in October when ICE announced that it had broken all the records for removals? Read more...

In what appears to be yet another astounding display of mission apathy, a senior ICE official is now advising sanctuary jurisdictions on how they can opt out of his program. Earlier this month, the top manager of the Secure Communities program, David Venturella, suggested to the San Francisco Sheriff's Department that if the county did not wish to participate, it could simply ignore ICE's requests to take custody of the removable aliens that are discovered in county jails. Read more...