Immigration and Criminal Justice
Ziyada Alzhani
Kingsborough Community College
Although the issue of immigration policy has been at the center of political debates, largely discussed in the media and newspapers, no one have yet found a solution to this ill-defined problem, that would comply with the America’s core values. While I think the immigration policy does need a reform, the solution to this problem certainly is not a deportation of all undocumented residents.
Currently, there are nearly 40 million …show more content…
One of them is a S-COMM, federal immigration enforcement program being implemented by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Basically, the way it works is any time an individual is arrested and booked into a local jail for any reason, his or her fingerprints are electronically run through ICE 's immigration database. (American Civil Liberty Union’s blog post) S-COMM empowers police to arrests individuals for the very purpose of booking them and having their immigration status screened-without regard to whether that arrest leads to any criminal prosecution.(Quevedo, …show more content…
First, unlike criminal suspects, noncitizens who were detected by ICE and placed under arrest for suspected violations of the immigration laws do not receive "Miranda" warnings before they are questioned. The reason it happens is because courts have held that such constitutional protections are not required in "civil" proceedings. (Legal Action Center and the Immigration Policy Center of the American Immigration Council, 2013)
Second, through a program called “stipulated removal”, which works similarly to a citizen criminal accepting plea bargain and deciding not to go for a trial, ICE has deported over 160,000 noncitizens without ever giving them their day in court. The federal government applied this program mostly on noncitizens who lacked a way to find a lawyer, because unlike citizen criminals they don’t have a right to a free attorney. These noncitizens were given two choices, to either agree to the deportation, or to stay in immigration detention to fight the case. But often, government agents exaggerated the length of time detainees would spend in detention if they chose to fight their cases and see a judge, yet failed to tell detainees that they could secure release from detention on bond while fighting their cases, or that some might win the
Ziyada Alzhani
Kingsborough Community College
Although the issue of immigration policy has been at the center of political debates, largely discussed in the media and newspapers, no one have yet found a solution to this ill-defined problem, that would comply with the America’s core values. While I think the immigration policy does need a reform, the solution to this problem certainly is not a deportation of all undocumented residents.
Currently, there are nearly 40 million …show more content…
One of them is a S-COMM, federal immigration enforcement program being implemented by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Basically, the way it works is any time an individual is arrested and booked into a local jail for any reason, his or her fingerprints are electronically run through ICE 's immigration database. (American Civil Liberty Union’s blog post) S-COMM empowers police to arrests individuals for the very purpose of booking them and having their immigration status screened-without regard to whether that arrest leads to any criminal prosecution.(Quevedo, …show more content…
First, unlike criminal suspects, noncitizens who were detected by ICE and placed under arrest for suspected violations of the immigration laws do not receive "Miranda" warnings before they are questioned. The reason it happens is because courts have held that such constitutional protections are not required in "civil" proceedings. (Legal Action Center and the Immigration Policy Center of the American Immigration Council, 2013)
Second, through a program called “stipulated removal”, which works similarly to a citizen criminal accepting plea bargain and deciding not to go for a trial, ICE has deported over 160,000 noncitizens without ever giving them their day in court. The federal government applied this program mostly on noncitizens who lacked a way to find a lawyer, because unlike citizen criminals they don’t have a right to a free attorney. These noncitizens were given two choices, to either agree to the deportation, or to stay in immigration detention to fight the case. But often, government agents exaggerated the length of time detainees would spend in detention if they chose to fight their cases and see a judge, yet failed to tell detainees that they could secure release from detention on bond while fighting their cases, or that some might win the