ICE Scraps Pilot Program To Encourage Illegal Immigrants To Give Up

[babylonsister]

ICE Scraps Pilot Program To Encourage Illegal Immigrants To Give Up
By Karoun Demirjian, CQ Staff


Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials are scrapping a pilot program intended to encourage illegal immigrants to enable their own deportations after only a handful of people signed up, vindicating skeptics who derided the program.

The program, called “Scheduled Departure,” was geared toward illegal immigrants who have received final notices of deportation from the immigration courts and have no other criminal history — approximately 457,000 people — and offered a trade-off: immigrants who came forward and agreed to be deported within 90 days of reporting to an ICE agent would be assured that they would not be forcibly deported in a raid.

After three weeks, eight people turned up to take advantage of the offer: an Indian couple and a Guatemalan in Chicago, Ill.; a Mexican man in San Diego, Calif.; an Estonian in Phoenix, Ariz.; an El Salvadorian in Charlotte, N.C.; and two Lebanese and a Guatemalan immigrants from Santa Ana, Calif., according to ICE tabulations. None have yet left the country.

Immigration advocates, who labeled the program everything from “a non-idea” to “a joke” when it was proposed, did not temper their views this week. But many also expressed fear that ICE’s efforts to promote a softer, friendlier image through the voluntary deportation program was a publicity stunt to give the agency an excuse to justify tougher tactics.

“ICE knows their offer was laughable,” said Jorge Mario Cabrera, a director with the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights in Los Angeles. “They knew that their effort to arrest, detain, deport families, and tear families apart was causing them a media nightmare, a P.R. nightmare. . . . I am worried that they would utilize this failed attempt of having people turn themselves in to say now they have the duty to go after every one of these folks.”

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http://www.cqpolitics.com/wmspage.cfm?parm1=144&docID=news-000002940255

[treestar]

1. Just shows how difficult it is to enforce the current immigration laws

There's even a final order of deportation on a person, and they are still out there. The only advantage of this would be ICE not coming down upon you unexpectedly one particular day, but if a final order of deporatation can still leave you comfortable enough to stay put, then ICE obviously can't keep up with even those, let alone the millions of aliens who have never come to their attention in the first place.

We need a more functional law. Or more ICE agents, but to enforce the law we have now would take an immigration department that would be the largest US bureaucracy ever and probably be even larger than the military. Do we really want that number of law enforcement agents of any kind running around?