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President Donald Trump has threatened nationwide mass raids by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

While these mass raids have yet to happen, the specter of sweeping immigration raids have stoked fear among immigrants and mobilized immigrant rights advocates across the country.

Threats of mass raids in communities at large are representative of how the Trump administration has shifted the focus of immigration enforcement since the Obama administration, making changes that could have significant implications for U.S. democracy and the rule of law.

I investigated patterns of interior enforcement under the Trump administration in a report published in July with the American Immigration Council's Guillermo Cantor and the University of Southern California's Reed Humphrey.
Elimination of enforcement priorities
President Obama was criticized by some in the immigrant rights community as the "deporter-in-chief", given the high number of removals during his administration relative to preceding administrations.

However, the Obama administration's approach to immigration enforcement was organized by a clear, hierarchical set of priorities.

Enforcement focused on people who posed a threat to national security, as well as those immigrants with serious criminal convictions and who recently crossed the border. Unauthorized immigrants who did not fall within these categories were not a priority for enforcement action.

President Trump overturned these enforcement priorities through executive order during his first week in office.

The Trump administration's stated policy is to target virtually any unauthorized immigrant - regardless of their length of residence in the U.S. or their social, economic and family ties to the U.S.
An increase in encounters, arrests and removals
Through a public records request of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement, we obtained data on 1,199,026 ICE encounters, 381,370 arrests and 650,944 removals that occurred between January 2016 and September 2018.

Given the possible seasonal fluctuations, we looked at the same months in consecutive years between 2016 and 2018. We found a consistent increase in the number of ICE encounters - interviews, screenings and determinations of individuals' citizenship, nationality and lawful presence.

Between 2016 and 2017, there was a significant uptick in the monthly number of arrests. This leveled out and remained relatively stable in 2018.

The number of removals in 2017 was lower than in 2016 for most months. But this changed in 2018, which had a consistently higher number of removals than in 2016 and 2017.
Who is subject to enforcement?
Our report revealed two key changes in the population of people subject to enforcement in the interior of the country.

A defining characteristic of U.S. citizenship is its guarantee that one cannot be deported from the country. Yet our findings in our immigration enforcement study suggest that some U.S. citizens may be more vulnerable than others to violations of this basic legal guarantee.

During the last year of the Obama administration, ICE interviewed and screened 5,940 U.S. citizens about their legal right to stay in the country. In the first year after President Trump took office, 27,540 U.S. citizens were subject to this process.

This sharp increase in the number of U.S. citizens encountered by ICE raises important questions about whether certain U.S. citizens who may "appear deportable" - likely people of color - have become increasingly vulnerable to enforcement actions.

What's more, we found that proportionally, ICE encountered and arrested more women during the Trump administration than it did during the last year of the Obama administration.

During the last part of the Obama administration, about 11.67% of those encountered by ICE were women, compared to more than 13% in the first part of the Trump administration. Underlying these percentages are thousands of female immigrants: 46,759 (Obama) versus 103,910 (Trump).

Likewise, about 6.86% of those arrested in the last part of the Obama administration were women, compared to 8.22% in the first part of the Trump administration.

Many of these women subject to enforcement actions are likely to be mothers and primary caregivers to children. This means that family separation is a humanitarian problem not only at the U.S.-Mexico border, but also inside the U.S.
Costs of enforcement
These changes in enforcement patterns likely come at a high cost to U.S. communities.

Studies have documented not only the enormous fiscal costs of maintaining the current enforcement system - the annual budget for ICE increased from US$6 billion to $7.6 billion between 2009 and 2019 - but also the vast social and economic costs of mass deportations to U.S. society.

According to one estimate, mass deportation would reduce U.S. GDP by $4.7 trillion over 10 years. U.S. citizen children whose parents have been deported experience numerous emotional and behavioral challenges. Research indicates that raids and deportations make community members more fearful and mistrustful of public institutions, curtailing their civic engagement and crime reporting behavior.

There is also the difficult-to-measure, but critically important, cost to democracy that policymakers and the public have yet to fully appreciate. My studies show that enforcement actions that are perceived by immigrants to be arbitrary, discriminatory or unjust breed governmental distrust and undercut their confidence in the legitimacy of the law and legal authorities.

Whether and to what extent mass raids will take place in the coming weeks remain to be seen, but I think that their implications for U.S. democracy and the rule of law could be far-reaching.
This post originally appeared at The Conversation. Follow @ConversationUS on Twitter.

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How ICE Enforcement Has Changed Under The Trump Administration

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President Donald Trump has threatened nationwide mass raids by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement. While these mass raids have yet to happen, the specter of sweeping immigration raids have stoked fear among immigrants and mobilized immigrant rights advocates across the country.

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Donald Trump's refugee ban, explained [Updated]

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When Moshe Schulman's then fiancee visited the United States consulate in Casablanca, he believed that she would leave her interview - for a K-1 visa - with permission to return to New York and they could finally stop conducting their relationship long-distance.

Instead, she walked out with even more paperwork.

The supplementary form she was assigned - DS-5535 - is a brainchild of Donald Trump's administration. After an executive order and memorandum from the White House calling for "enhanced vetting" of foreign nationals, the state department also announced a three-page document for visa applicants whom consular officers believe could pose terrorist or national security threats.

That experience - in finding sudden new barriers to legal immigration to the US - is hardly unique. From more in-person interviews, to stricter guidance on denying student visas, to travel bans, to lower refugee caps, experts say recent policy shifts have impacted the number of foreign nationals who are coming to America. On top of that is recent news that the Trump administration wants to close all international offices of US Citizenship and Immigration Services, shifting the paperwork back to the US - but almost certainly adding to delays for those seeking to come to America from abroad.

Is it deliberate? I would say that there's nothing being done to facilitate more efficient processing

Denise Bell

As more data from the last two years become available, the long-term effects of such actions are finally coming into focus.

During the first nine months of fiscal year 2018, immigration application denials increased by 37% since fiscal year 2016, according to the Cato Institute's immigration policy analyst David Bier. Reuters reported that more than 37,000 visa applications were refused in 2018 as a direct result of the administration's travel ban on primarily Muslim-majority countries.

K-1 visas for fiances of US citizens dropped 35.7% in fiscal year 2018, compared to 2016, and student visas declined by 23%, according to state department data.

"The key is that this is no longer speculation. We're now seeing the consequences of the rhetoric and the policy," said Miriam Feldblum, executive director of the Presidents' Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration.

Schulman's partner - who asked to remain anonymous - spent a year in the US for an internship and completed her master's degree in France. But her history in the west didn't prevent her from being flagged for additional vetting.

Schulman suspects his partner's obviously Arabic name had something to do with why she was targeted.

"To me, it's Islamophobia. It's racist, in my opinion," Schulman told the Guardian.

An estimated 65,000 visa applicants annually now have to fill out DS-5535, which requires a 15-year travel log, social media handles, a list of prior addresses and a 15-year employment history, among other information. The document is just one of myriad changes under the current administration that have made it more difficult for people to enter and stay in the country through lawful means - even as Trump says publicly that he wants foreigners in the US, but "they have to come in legally".

Some students are now opting to study elsewhere, avoiding an immigration climate that feels unwelcoming and hostile to foreigners. Among those who still want an American education, certain populations appear to be especially at risk of scrutiny.

Masume Assaf, the director of international student and scholar advising at Penn State University, has noticed Chinese nationals are suddenly being funneled into administrative processing for further review. She has watched as Iranian students have been unable to visit Iran; one of her PhD candidates who went home for a brother's wedding was barred from re-entering the US for months.

But perhaps the most dramatic testament to the administration's perceived aversion to foreigners is the major drop in refugee resettlement. In fiscal year 2016, the US admitted nearly 85,000 refugees. Two years later, that number plummeted to 22,491.

In fiscal year 2016, the US admitted nearly 85,000 refugees. Two years later, that number plummeted to 22,491

"Is it deliberate? I would say that there's nothing being done to facilitate more efficient processing," said Denise Bell, the researcher for refugee and migrant rights at Amnesty International USA.

On a research mission to Lebanon and Jordan in November, Bell met refugees who had been stranded because of Trump-era policies. Among them were Fawzi, his wife and two sons, who fled Iraq for Lebanon in 2013 because they feared retaliation for being Christian.

In August 2016, Fawzi and his family say they received a letter with conditional approval to resettle in the US. The letter warned it would be a minimum of four months before they could get on a plane.

"Four months," Fawzi's family told the Guardian, "and we are now in two years and [a] half."

Every time they ask officials about why they are stuck in Lebanon, they get the same answer: security procedure. It's a similar rationale that justifies the administration's extreme vetting protocols for visa applicants.

However, experts in immigration policy say there's no evidence many of the new vetting policies affecting foreign nationals work. Bier said the requirements have been devised primarily to "obstruct legal immigration".

"The ultimate goal is making it more difficult to live in the United States legally," Bier said.

"I'm not sure any if these steps actually improve our security," added Ali Noorani, executive director of the National Immigration Forum. "These are political moves by the administration to reduce immigration."

Noorani and Schulman expressed frustration that people who are trying to follow the law must now jump through cumbersome hoops as the administration cracks down on legal as well as undocumented immigration. But at least his partner's visa was eventually approved.

She traveled to the US on 29 December, and they married at a court in Brooklyn four days later. Then they spent the next two and a half weeks poring over forms to continue her legalization process.

"I think the average American doesn't know the time, the money and the energy it takes to actually do legal immigration," Schulman said. "I think people don't give enough credit to the folks who are doing that."
Topics

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Why Trump-era policies create new barriers to legal immigration to the US

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When Moshe Schulman's then fiancee visited the United States consulate in Casablanca, he believed that she would leave her interview - for a K-1 visa - with permission to return to New York and they could finally stop conducting their relationship long-distance. Instead, she walked out with even more paperwork.