ICE Director John Morton Resigns
Monday morning, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Director John Morton announced his resignation. In four years at the helm, Morton has overseen record-high deportation levels.
He has also been at the center of the Obama administration’s signature enforcement strategy: prioritizing the deportation of undocumented immigrants with criminal records. Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano praised Morton’s leadership in a statement Monday, emphasizing that on his watch a far greater share of deportees have criminal records (55% last year, up from 38% in 2009).
Immigrant rights advocates, however, have long accused the Obama administration of “juking the stats” to present a distorted picture of who is actually being deported. Administration officials, including the president himself, often invoke national security and public safety as their primary objectives in immigration enforcement. They imply a link between deporting criminals and keeping the United States safe. It would be reasonable to assume that when President Obama or Secretary Napolitano say “criminal” in this context, they mean dangerous or violent criminals. During a presidential debate last October, President Obama asserted that enforcement should be focused on “gangbangers,” rather than hard-working community members. According to ICE’s own records, Morton’s legacy includes no such focus. Reporting on Morton’s exit for ABC/Univision, Ted Hesson noted that in 2011, 69% of those deported had either a misdemeanor conviction or no criminal record at all.
Morton also issued a prominent June 2011 memo directing ICE attorneys to use their discretion to close deportation proceedings against non-criminal immigrants who pose no threat to national security or public safety. Though the Obama administration trumpets prosecutorial discretion as evidence of its compassionate, common sense approach to immigration enforcement, its implementation has proved to be an abject failure, here in Western North Carolina and across the country.
Last summer, an internal Department of Homeland Security (DHS) review revealed that prosecutorial discretion had been used in only 1.5% of cases. The initiative has been undermined by ICE quotas calling for record-setting deportation levels each year. Internal e-mails obtained last year by the North Carolina ACLU showed that national ICE officials had surreptitiously advised regional offices on how to game the system to keep deportation numbers high. High deportation targets have also led to unprecedented damage to immigrant families, as ICE deported over 200,000 parents of U.S. citizen children between June 2010 and September 2012.
Prosecutorial discretion has also proved to be a false promise in local cases. Buncombe County resident Audencio Aguilar Diaz, a victim of over $10,000 in wage theft whose 3-year-old daughter is a U.S. citizen, has no criminal record and has received broad public support. Still, ICE attorneys in Charlotte have repeatedly refused to close his case. Diaz’s former co-worker, Flor Funes, was initially denied prosecutorial discretion as well, until an 11th-hour press conference outside Senator Kay Hagan’s downtown Asheville office brought widespread attention to her case.
John Morton’s tenure as ICE Director draws to a close as undocumented immigrants in Western North Carolina and across the U.S. continue to organize against the harsh, punitive enforcement regime he helped to build. The struggle continues locally, as communities contest deportations on a case-by-case basis, and nationally, as undocumented immigrants and allies fight for a just reform of U.S. immigration law.
