Immigration Laws: March, 2002 - Number #2

President Bush requested $6.3 billion for the INS in FY03, a $1.6 billion or 24 percent increase in the INS budget. The Bush proposal includes $380 million to implement an entry-exit system that would track the arrival and departure of non-US citizens. The proposed budget includes 137 positions for interior enforcement, a seven percent increase.

Border. Apprehensions along the Mexico-US border were down 45 percent in the first four months of FY2002, to 181,497 from 320,367 a year earlier. Some 9,065 agents patrol the 2,000-mile southern boundary with Mexico, and 345 patrol the 3,987-mile border with Canada.

A Mexican man was sentenced in February 2002 to 16 years in prison for smuggling illegal immigrants across the southern Arizona desert in May 2001; 14 of them died.

The State Criminal Alien Assistance Program provided $535 million to 400 state and local governments in 2001 to help them cover the cost of incarcerating criminal illegal immigrants. President Bush proposed ending the six-year program in FY03.

Benefits Fraud. A February 2002 General Accounting Office report concluded that immigration benefit fraud is "rampant." The report said: "INS officials believe that the problem is pervasive and serious; they also believe that some aliens are using the benefit application process to enable them to carry out illegal activities, such as crimes of violence, narcotics trafficking, and terrorism." Benefit application fraud involves presenting documents in order to illegally obtain US citizenship, residence, authorization to work or other changes of status.

About 68 percent of the four million applications and petitions filed each year with INS are sent to the four INS service centers, located in California, Texas, Nebraska and Vermont. The INS has 40 inspectors to detect fraud; they estimate in some places that 20 to 30 percent of the applications for benefits are fraudulent.

Applications for US citizenship increased in Fall 2001: more than 145,000 people applied for citizenship in October and November 2001, a 61 percent jump from the same months in 2000. The INS raised the fees for applying for most immigration benefits in February 2002. For example, the cost of applying for a green card went from $550 to $665 on February 19, 2002. The INS said increased fee income would reduce lags between application and green card.

Sanctions. In 1999, the INS announced that: "The strategic goal of interior enforcement is to reduce the size and annual growth of the illegal resident population." The INS laid out a new interior enforcement strategy whose priorities were, in descending order of importance, to identify and remove criminal aliens, deter and diminish alien smuggling, respond to community concerns and build partnerships, minimize benefit fraud and other document abuse, and block employer access to undocumented workers and remove unauthorized aliens located in US work places.

The INS suggested that its resources would be targeted on these priorities in this order, making employer sanctions the lowest priority. In FY 1998, for example, the INS apprehended 13,897 illegal aliens at work sites across the United States, an average 46 apprehensions for each INS investigator-workyear.

The INS said it wanted to go beyond "output" measures of performance, such as apprehensions, and assess its enforcement efforts against "the overall size of the resident illegal population, the costs of criminal alien incarceration in federal, state and local facilities, improvement in the competitiveness of employers who must survive against others who break the rules of the marketplace, increases in the availability of jobs for authorized workers and their wages and improved work conditions, and a dramatic reduction in the victimization of smuggled aliens as criminal organizations are dismantled."

The INS performance goals ended with the search for "evidence that INS enforcement operations are intended to - and do - solve problems in ways that do not violate individual and civil rights will greatly improve community support for its activities and for the goals of law enforcement in general."

Licenses. Four states- Virginia, Tennessee, Utah and North Carolina- allow unauthorized foreigners to obtain drivers' licenses. Instead of following their lead, Colorado in February 2002 decided to require persons exchanging licenses from these four states for Colorado licenses to prove they are legally in the US.

Visas. The US government issued regulations to implement the Victims Trafficking and Violence Prevention Act of 2000, which allows up to 5,000 victims of trafficking a year to remain in the United States if they can persuade immigration authorities they would face "extreme hardship involving unusual and severe harm" if returned to their native countries after cooperating with US authorities to prosecute their smugglers. After three years, victims can apply to remain in the US permanently and apply to have their spouses and children join them in the United States. Applicants under 21 may ask to have their parents join them.

The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) estimated that 50,000 women and children are trafficked into the U.S. annually for use in "slavery-like situations such as forced prostitution." A caveat: applicants for T-visas who are in the United States illegally are subject to removal if they do not receive the visa.

Louima. Haitian immigrant Abner Louima was assaulted by four New York City police officers August 9, 1997. The four officers were tried, convicted and sentenced to prison; New York City made an $8.7 million settlement with Louima, who now lives in Florida. The Louima case became a national symbol of police brutality and triggered a federal investigation that eventually cracked the "Blue Wall of Silence," the informal agreement that held that police officers do not testify against each other.

In February 2002, the convictions of three of the four officers were overturned by the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals; one of the three will be retried, the other two will go free. The officer who sodomized Louima pleaded guilty and will remain in prison.