THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

ICE, that federal agency that sounds like a '60s movie criminal organization, used to have it easy. Simply request that any police agency having custody of an undocumented immigrant who has been convicted of a crime would be held until they sent a van around to pick them up. Then a federal judge called bullshit on that operation so now they have to find them all by themselves.

It used to be simpler for Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to locate and deport immigrants who had been convicted of crimes. The agency would contact local jails and ask that such inmates be held until an ICE van could pick them up.
But last year a federal judge found that practice illegal, prompting hundreds of counties to stop honoring the detainer requests. As a result, ICE officials say they have to rely on costly and dangerous manhunts like the one conducted Wednesday in Riverside. 

The agency's Fugitive Operation teams carry out raids across the country every morning.

Originally formed to locate immigrants who had failed to comply with a judge's deportation order, the program is increasingly being used to find immigrants with criminal convictions who have recently been let out of jail. Of the more than 27,000 people whom authorities arrested last fiscal year, which ended Sept. 30, 2014, about 78% had criminal convictions, according to ICE data.

"It would be so much safer for the community if we took custody of this individual in the jail," said David Marin, deputy director of ICE's Los Angeles field office. "It would have taken us two officers to do that, as opposed to the eight or nine that we have out here now."
ICE officials have held up the agency's new Priority Enforcement Program as a cheaper and safer alternative to dramatic neighborhood raids. Under the new program, ICE asks jails to notify the agency when potentially deportable inmates are being released from custody, and occasionally asks jails to hold detainees it considers especially dangerous.
Immigrant advocates don't buy that argument.

Newman and others say the agency's new jail program is simply a rebranding of a controversial earlier initiative, Secure Communities, the post-release detainer program that the federal judge found unconstitutional. Advocates say thousands of U.S. citizens were wrongfully detained and many immigrants with little or no criminal record were deported as a result of the program.

Since counties stopped honoring ICE detainer requests last year, the number of deportations has plummeted, along with the number of people held in immigrant detention, according to ICE data.

So now they get to put on their "Action Jackson" gear and storm into house looking for people who may have committed serious offenses or simply failed to answer a traffic ticket, it makes no difference to them. Now they get to be 'real cops'.