Citing a report from 2005, Arizona Congressman Raul Grijalva, sent a letter to DHS informing the agency that “gang databases and other gang identification mechanisms are notoriously unreliable,” and requesting that the agency reveal the criteria it uses to determine whether “someone intentionally participated in an organized criminal gang.”
The congressman also asked what “safeguards are in place to contest erroneous gang identifications?”
The questions were included in a letter sent by Grijalva and 39 of his Congressional colleagues to Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson, requesting DHS “properly adhere to its new immigration enforcement priorities.”
According to Grijalva, the letter comes after “community members, advocates and media reports indicate that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has failed to apply, or inconsistently applies, mandated exceptions within each of these enforcement priorities and, in some cases, even targeted individuals who fall outside the enforcement priorities within DHS’s Policies for the Apprehension, Detention and Removal of Undocumented Immigrants.
Grijalva says that President Obama “did his part,” and now it is Johnson’s responsibility to “act quickly in providing the assurance to the American people that those who deserve protection from deportation are no longer living with a target on their backs.”
Grijalva’s other questions include:
Advocates report that during its latest enforcement action, ICE officers undertook many questionable tactics, including enforcement operations at homes and in public spaces. In one instance, ICE offices pretended to be local law enforcement officers and even hid the “ICE” insignia on their uniforms. What accountability mechanisms will DHS implement to ensure ICE does not employ these tactics in future enforcement operations?
What training and guidance materials is ICE employing to implement the enforcement priorities, especially the prosecutorial discretion exceptions? Specifically, what weight does ICE allocate to positive equities and negative factors? Will DHS commit to ensuring that convictions older than three years be given little to no weight in the prosecutorial discretion analysis?
Under priority categories 1(c), 1(d), 1(e), 2(a), and 2(b), DHS considers an individual with certain convictions an enforcement priority. Will DHS commit to exclude individuals who fall within these categories but who had their convictions expunged (or equivalent) from the enforcement priorities?
Will DHS commit to instructing ICE officers and lawyers to implement an affirmative screening mechanism to identify positive equities instead of placing the burden on immigrants seeking prosecutorial discretion?
The letter was signed by reps. Ruben Gallego, Hank Johnson, Luis Gutiérrez, Gwen Moore, Charlie Rangel, and Alan Grayson among others.