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Initially created as an extensions of the Department of Homeland Security as a response to 9/11. However, ICE is assigned the job of removing undocumented immigrants from the interior of America. Many of these immigrants have lived in America for more than a decade.

Under Obama's administration Mauritanian immigrants were required to check-in at least once a year.

For the first time since its creation, ICE endorsed a presidential candidate in 2016.

Under the Trump administration ICE was instructed to require Mauritanian immigrants to appear more often, once a month. ICE officers went to their homes and would harass the immigrants. These abrupt drop ins meant many life interruptions.

Under the Trump Administration arrests of illegal immigrants went up by 42% in the first 8 months due to the removal of many formal restraints. ICE began going to the homes of documented immigrants

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A long-running inferiority complex, vast statutory power, a chilling new directive from the top-inside America's unfolding immigration tragedy

Settling into a sense of safety is hard when your life's catalog of memories teaches you the opposite lesson. Imagine: You fled from a government militia intent on murdering you; swam across a river with the uncertain hope of sanctuary on the far bank; had the dawning realization that you could never return to your village, because it had been torched; and heard pervasive rumors of former neighbors being raped and enslaved. Imagine that, following all this, you then found yourself in New York City, with travel documents that were unreliable at best.

This is the shared narrative of thousands of emigrants from the West African nation of Mauritania. The country is ruled by Arabs, but these refugees were members of a black subpopulation that speaks its own languages. In 1989, in a fit of nationalism, the Mauritanian government came to consider these differences capital offenses. It arrested, tortured, and violently expelled many black citizens. The country forcibly displaced more than 70,000 of them and rescinded their citizenship. Those who remained behind fared no better. Approximately 43,000 black Mauritanians are now enslaved-by percentage, one of the largest enslaved populations in the world.

After years of rootless wandering-through makeshift camps, through the villages and cities of Senegal-some of the Mauritanian emigrants slowly began arriving in the United States in the late 1990s. They were not yet adept in English, and were unworldly in almost every respect. But serendipity-and the prospect of jobs-soon transplanted their community of roughly 3,000 to Columbus, Ohio, where they clustered mostly in neighborhoods near a long boulevard that bore a fateful name: Refugee Road. It commemorated a moment at the start of the 19th century, when Ohio had extended its arms to accept another influx of strangers, providing tracts of land to Canadians who had expressed sympathy for the American Revolution.

Refugee Road wasn't paved with gold, but in the early years of this century, it fulfilled the promise of its name. The Mauritanians converted an old grocery store into a cavernous, blue-carpeted mosque. They opened restaurants that served familiar fish and rice dishes, and stores that sold CDs and sodas imported from across Africa.

Over time, as the new arrivals gave birth to American citizens and became fans of the Ohio State Buckeyes and the Cleveland Cavaliers, they mentally buried the fact that their presence in America had never been fully sanctioned. When they had arrived in New York, many of them had paid an English-speaking compatriot to fill out their application for asylum. But instead of recording their individual stories in specific detail, the man simply cut and pasted together generic narratives. (It is not uncommon for new arrivals to the United States, desperate and naive, to fall prey to such scams.) A year or two after the refugees arrived in the country, judges reviewed their cases and, noticing the suspicious repetitions, accused a number of them of fraud and ordered them deported.

But those deportation orders never amounted to more than paper pronouncements. Where would Immigration and Customs Enforcement even send them? The Mauritanian government had erased the refugees from its databases and refused to issue them travel documents. It had no interest in taking back the villagers it had so violently removed. So ice let their cases slide. They were required to regularly report to the agency's local office and to maintain a record of letter-perfect compliance with the law. But as the years passed, the threat of deportation seemed ever less ominous.

Then came the election of Donald Trump. Suddenly, in the warehouses where many of the Mauritanians worked, white colleagues took them aside and warned them that their lives were likely to get worse. The early days of the administration gave substance to these cautions. The first thing to change was the frequency of their summonses to ice. During the Obama administration, many of the Mauritanians had been required to "check in" about once a year. Abruptly, ice instructed them to appear more often, some of them every month. ice officers began visiting their homes on occasion. Like the cable company, they would provide a six-hour window during which to expect a visit-a requirement that meant days off from work and disrupted life routines. The Mauritanians say that when they met with ice, they were told the U.S. had finally persuaded their government to readmit them-a small part of a global push by the State Department to remove any diplomatic obstacles to deportation.

Fear is a contagion that spreads quickly. One ice officer warned some Mauritanians sympathetically, "It's not a matter of if you'll be deported, but when." Another flatly said, "My job is to get you to leave this country." At meetings, officers would insist that the immigrants go to the Mauritanian consulate and apply for passports to return to the very country whose government had attempted to murder them.

One afternoon this spring, I sat in the bare conference room of the Columbus mosque after Friday prayer, an occasion for which men dress in traditional garb: brightly colored robes and scarves wrapped around their heads. The imam asked those who were comfortable to share their stories with me. Congregants lined up outside the door.

One by one, the Mauritanians described to me the preparations they had made for a quick exit. Some said that they had already sold their homes; others had liquidated their 401(k)s. Everyone I spoke with could name at least one friend who had taken a bus to the Canadian border and applied for asylum there, rather than risk further appointments with ice.

A lithe, haggard man named Thierno told me that his brother had been detained by ice, awaiting deportation, for several months now. The Mauritanians considered it a terrible portent that the agency had chosen to focus its attention on Thierno's brother-a businessman and philanthropically minded benefactor of the mosque. If he was vulnerable, then nobody was safe. Eyes watering, Thierno showed me a video on his iPhone of the fate he feared for his brother: a tight shot of a black Mauritanian left behind in the old country. His face was swollen from a beating, and he was begging for mercy. "I'm going to sleep with your wife!" a voice shouts at him, before a hand appears on-screen and slaps him over and over.

In 21st-century America, it is difficult to conjure the possibility of the federal government taking an eraser to the map and scrubbing away an entire ethnic group. I had arrived in Columbus at the suggestion of a Cleveland-based lawyer named David Leopold, a former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. Leopold has kept in touch with an old client who attends the Mauritanian mosque. When he mentioned the community's plight to me, he called it "ethnic cleansing"-which initially sounded like wild hyperbole. But on each of my trips back to Columbus, I heard new stories of departures to Canada-and about others who had left for New York, where hiding from ice is easier in the shadows of the big city. The refugees were fleeing Refugee Road.

Video: Fleeing ICE

Since taking office,Donald Trump has regularly thundered against the "deep state." With the term, he means to evoke a cabal of bureaucrats burrowed within law enforcement, the intelligence community, and regulatory agencies, a nebulous elite that will stop at nothing to countermand his will-and, by extension, that of the people.

But one segment of the deep state stepped forward early and openly to profess its enthusiasm for Trump. Through their union, employees of ice endorsed Trump's candidacy in September 2016, the first time the organization had ever lent its support to a presidential contender. When Trump prevailed in the election, the soon-to-be-named head of ice triumphantly declared that it would finally have the backing of a president who would let the agency do its job. He's "taking the handcuffs off," said Thomas Homan, who served as ice's acting director under Trump until his retirement in June, using a phrase that has become a common trope within the agency. "When Trump won, [some officers] thumped their chest as if they had just won the Super Bowl," a former ice official told me.

Whatever else Trump has accomplished for ice, he has ended its relative anonymity. His administration's "zero tolerance" immigration regime has triggered a noisy debate about the organizations he has deployed to enforce his policies. For weeks this spring, the nation watched as officers took children from their parents after they had crossed the U.S.-Mexico border in search of asylum. Although ice played only a supporting role in the family-separation debacle-the task was performed principally by U.S. Customs and Border Protection-the agency has emerged as a shorthand for what critics say is wrong with Trump's immigration agenda. Virtually every Democratic politician hoping to flash his or her progressive bona fides has called for ice's abolition.

The history of the agency is still a brief one. When terrorists struck the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, ice didn't exist. In the Justice Department, there was the old Immigration and Naturalization Service. But while the mission of INS had always included the deportation of undocumented immigrants-and it occasionally staged significant workplace raids-it never had a large force that would enable their systematic removal from the nation's interior.
Since its 2003 creation, ICE has grown at a remarkable clip for a peacetime bureaucracy.
But following the shock of 9/11, ice was created as part of the Department of Homeland Security, into which Congress awkwardly stuffed a slew of previously unrelated executive-branch agencies: the Secret Service, the Transportation Security Administration, the Coast Guard. Upon its creation, DHS became the third-largest of all Cabinet departments, and its assembly could be generously described as higgledy-piggledy. ice is perhaps the clearest example of where such muddied, heavily politicized policy making can lead.

Since its official designation, in 2003, as a successor to INS, ice has grown at a remarkable clip for a peacetime bureaucracy. By the beginning of Barack Obama's second term, immigration had become one of the highest priorities of federal law enforcement: Half of all federal prosecutions were for immigration-related crimes. In 2012, Congress appropriated $18 billion for immigration enforcement. It spent $14 billion for all the other major criminal law-enforcement agencies combined: the FBI; the Drug Enforcement Administration; the Secret Service; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives; and the U.S. Marshals Service.

ice quickly built a sprawling, logistically intricate infrastructure comprising detention facilities, an international-transit arm, and monitoring technology. This apparatus relies heavily on private contractors. Created at the height of the federal government's outsourcing mania, DHS employs more outside contractors than actual federal employees. Last year, these companies-which include the Geo Group and CoreCivic-spent at least $3 million on lobbying and influence peddling. To take one small example: Owners of ice's private detention facilities were generous donors to Trump's inauguration, contributing $500,000 for the occasion.

An organization devoted to enforcing immigration laws will always be reflexively and perhaps unfairly cast as a villain. But borders are a fundamental prerogative of the nation-state: The policing of them is a matter of national security, and a functioning polity maintains orderly processes for admitting some immigrants and turning others away. By definition, elements of this mission are exclusionary and hard-hearted. The liberal immigration policies practiced within the European Union have shown how what seems like a simple generosity of spirit can also be deeply destabilizing. A balance needs to be found.

Still, ice, as currently conceived, represents a profound deviation in the long history of American immigration. On many occasions, America has closed its doors to both desperate refugees and eager strivers. But once immigrants have reached our shores, settled in, raised families, and started businesses, all without breaking any laws, the government has almost never chased them away in meaningful numbers. In 1954, Dwight Eisenhower's Operation Wetback-this was its official designation-removed more than 1 million Mexican immigrants. It is remembered precisely because it was so dissonant with America's self-styled identity as a nation of immigrants.

ice, however, is assigned the task of removing undocumented immigrants from the country's interior, and it has approached this mission with cold, bureaucratic efficiency. Until recently, the agency had a congressional mandate to maintain up to 34,000 beds in detention centers on any given day with which to detain undocumented immigrants. Once an immigrant enters the system, she is known by her case number. Her ill intentions are frequently presumed, and she will find it exceedingly difficult to plead her case, or even to know what rights she has.

Approximately 11 million undocumented immigrants currently live in this country, a number larger than the population of Sweden. Two-thirds of them have resided in the U.S. for a decade or longer. The laws on the books endow ice with the technical authority to deport almost every single one of them. Trump's predecessors, Barack Obama and George W. Bush, allowed for a measure of compassion, permitting prosecutors and judges to stay the removals of some defendants in immigration court, and encouraging a rigorous focus on serious criminals. Congress, for its part, has for nearly two decades offered broad, bipartisan support for the grand bargain known as comprehensive immigration reform. The point of such legislation is to balance tough enforcement of the law with a path to amnesty for undocumented immigrants and the ultimate possibility of citizenship.

Yet no politician has ever quite summoned the will to overcome the systematic obstacles that block reform. Democrats didn't make it a top priority when they briefly controlled Congress during Obama's first term, and Republican reformers have again and again been stymied by anti-immigration hard-liners in the House. A comprehensive reform bill passed the Senate in 2013 by a resounding 68-32 margin, but then-Speaker John Boehner refused to allow it a vote in the House. The 2016 GOP presidential hopeful Marco Rubio went from staking his political identity on immigration reform to suggesting that he'd never truly supported the reforms in the first place.

Under the current administration, many of the formal restraints on ice have been removed. In the first eight months of the Trump presidency, ice increased arrests by 42 percent. Immigration enforcement has been handed over to a small clique of militant anti-immigration wonks. This group has carefully studied the apparatus it now controls. It knows that the best strategy for accomplishing its goal of driving out undocumented immigrants is quite simply the cultivation of fear. And it knows that the latent power of ice, amassed with the tacit assent of both parties, has yet to be fully realized.

n a last-minute trip to Columbus,I booked a room in a boutique hotel on the upper floors of a newly refurbished Art Deco skyscraper. I had arranged to meet a 20-something African immigrant, whom I will call Ismael, and his lawyer at the Starbucks in the lobby the next morning; I would accompany them to Ismael's regularly scheduled appointment with ice.

Short, gaunt, and taciturn, Ismael came from Africa last year by way of a smuggling route through Mexico-a circuitous trek that culminated in his capture while crossing into California and several months in ice detention. When I met Ismael, he rolled up a snug-fitting leg of his black jeans to show me the monitoring bracelet strapped around his bony ankle-a condition of his release. He had also received permission to relocate to his cousin's apartment in Columbus. Because ice prohibited him from working while he awaited authorization papers, Ismael had improved his English by watching copious television. It was good enough for him to tell me, "I came to America to be free. This is not freedom." As we made our way to ice, I was startled to discover that we would not be leaving the premises. ice had office space on the third floor of the building my hotel occupied. It was a small but jolting illustration of the ubiquity of the relatively new agency.

Unsurprisingly, the waiting room at ice was not part of the skyscraper's upscale refurbishment. It was like a dentist's office stripped of magazines, posters that importune flossing, and pretty much any other splash of color. A small, older woman from Central America wandered through the perfectly quiet room with a piece of paper stapled to a manila envelope: "I don't speak English. Please help me."

A heavy, locked door separates the waiting room from ice's main office, where officers interview immigrants and sometimes detain them. When a functionary in a flannel shirt opened the door and summoned Ismael, his lawyer rose to accompany him. But the officer waved a forefinger in her direction. "Sorry, lawyers aren't allowed back," he told her. A look of confusion compressed her face. "But I've been allowed back in the past. I think I'm allowed back," she told him. "Can I talk to a supervisor?"

Two minutes later, an officer with a shaved head, a black Under Armour hoodie, and a gun on his belt leaned his body through the door to stare intently at Ismael. "Why have you been working?" he asked. "We know you've been working." It appeared to be an annoyed response to the lawyer's resistance, hurled without evidence, perhaps in the hopes of provoking a self-incriminating response. It seemed of a piece with the fraught atmosphere in the waiting room. Earlier, there had been an announcement that a car was parked illegally outside and needed to be moved. Ismael's lawyer had leaned over to tell me that this would be widely presumed to be another trick: Many immigrants under ice scrutiny are not allowed to drive.
ICE consistently ranks among the worst workplaces in the federal government. In 2016, the organization ranked 299th on a list of 305 agencies.
When immigration lawyers in Columbus deal with ice, they are tentative, fretful that anything that might reek of complaint could provoke ice into seeking retribution against their clients. So Ismael's lawyer struck a stance of studied conciliation. As she gently explained herself, Ismael disappeared behind the door for his appointment and another manager emerged. He said that the man handling Ismael's "intensive supervision" worked for a private contractor hired by ice, and that the company's contract with the federal government prohibited lawyers from attending its sessions with immigrants. "Just out of curiosity," the lawyer asked, "can I see a copy of the rules?" The supervisor returned with a sheet of paper. He pointed to the crucial passage in a section enumerating "participant rights." It described "the right to confidentiality with the exception of information requested by ice." The lawyer flashed me a furtive smirk as she refrained from commenting on the bravura display of doublespeak: Ismael had been denied his right to an attorney in order to protect his confidentiality. But the manager, a Latino man with an untucked shirt and glasses, earnestly attempted to explain himself. He said that he wanted to help, and he mentioned the possibility of Ismael getting a work permit soon. "Look," he said, "I'm very sympathetic to him."

When Ismael returned to the waiting room, he supplied one-word answers to the lawyer's questions about the meeting. It had ultimately amounted to little more than a rote brush with the system. Still, it left the lingering sense that a terrible outcome had merely been postponed-which was perhaps the whole point.

No one, as a child, dreamsabout growing up to deport undocumented immigrants. Some 6,000 officers work in the Enforcement and Removal Operations (ERO) wing of ice, but this is not always a first-choice career option. "Many in ice applied to other agencies that rank higher in law-enforcement prestige," says David Martin, a scholar of immigration law who served in the Clinton and Obama administrations. The ranks of ice are drawn in large part from retired members of the military and from former Border Patrol agents, who prefer the metropolitan locations of ice offices to the remote outposts dotting the nation's southern border. The job is a solid option for high-school graduates, who are not eligible to apply to federal agencies that require a college education. It makes for an accessible entry point into federal law enforcement, a trajectory that comes with job security and decent pay, and perhaps the hope of someday storming buildings or standing in the backdrop of press conferences, beside tables brimming with seized contraband. Such reveries are easy enough to entertain, until the first day on the job.

ice consistently ranks among the worst workplaces in the federal government. In 2016, the organization ranked 299th on a list of 305 federal agencies in a survey of employee satisfaction. Even as Trump smothered the organization with praise and endowed it with broader responsibilities, ice still placed 288th last year.

The culture of ice is defined by a bureaucratic caste system-the sort of hierarchical distinctions that seem arcane and petty from the outside, but are essential to those on the inside. When ice was created, 15 years ago, two distinct and disparate workforces merged into one. The Immigration part of the agency's name refers mostly to deportation officers who came over from the freshly dismantled Immigration and Naturalization Service. The Customs part of the name refers to investigators imported from the Treasury Department. This was a shotgun marriage, filled with bickering and enmity from the start. The customs investigators had adored their old institutional home and the built-in respect it accorded them. They were given little warning before being moved to a new headquarters, with new supervisors, a nebulous mission, and colleagues they considered their professional inferiors. When I interviewed one of the customs investigators, who later had a top job at ice, he still referred to the "unfortunate events of March 1, 2003"-the day ice came into official existence.

After several false starts, the customs investigators were eventually restyled into a unit called Homeland Security Investigations. HSI managed to consistently find its way to glamorous cases that involved transnational crime-software piracy, child pornography, the bust of the Mexican kingpin Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán Loera, the investigation of terrorist bombings in Paris. But for all their efforts, HSI agents still found themselves dogged by their ties to ERO and the emotionally charged issue of immigration. They were shunned by police in big cities that refused to cooperate with ice, not allowing for the fact that HSI functioned as its own distinct entity. Indeed, this summer 19 HSI agents signed a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, asking her to officially separate their division from ice. The agents wrote: "HSI's investigations have been perceived as targeting undocumented aliens, instead of the transnational criminal organizations." They explained that they felt HSI was paying a reputational price for its connection to ERO.

There is arguably a certain institutional hauteur to HSI. "They think of themselves as aristocrats," one former homeland-security official told me. Among other benefits, working for HSI brings the rank of "special agent"-what's known in federal guidelines as 1811 status-which sets officers on the same level as FBI agents. Meanwhile, ERO officers carry an 1801 classification. This position typically comes with a less favorable pay scale and limited powers. For instance, these officers are not allowed to execute search warrants.

An ERO officer's day-to-day existence is at a distant remove from the televised image of federal law enforcement. It often consists of paper-pushing and processing immigrants through the various stations of deportation. In many instances, when ERO officers are assigned to detain criminals who are at large, they brush up against bureaucratic limitations. "You go bang on a door and they're not there," John Sandweg, a former acting director of ice, told me. Even if the person is home, he has the right to refrain from letting officers inside. If that happens, officers have no recourse other than to sit outside and wait.

"Regular cops get frustrated when a plea agreement is too soft," says Sandweg. "With ERO, about 50 percent of the people you arrest will still be in the country a year later." This is one of the many consequences of a system that-whatever one's political views on immigration-has obvious elements of dysfunction. ice's capacity to detain immigrants long ago outstripped the capacity of courts to process them. Immigration courts currently have a backlog of 700,000 cases, which means that someone might wait several years before ever seeing a judge. A sense of futility, therefore, has become a prevailing ethos for much of the ice rank and file. One former agent recalls learning a maxim on his first day on the job: "It's not over until the alien wins."

Even as some ice officers suffer from a sense of their own impotence, the outside world often depicts them as heartless jackboots. Thomas Homan has described how, as acting director of the agency, he would wake up every morning and read the latest complaints and negative coverage from the American Civil Liberties Union and mainstream media. And those aren't the only sources of criticism. Most ice agents work in cities. Many of them are themselves Latino or have married an immigrant. As John Amaya, a former deputy chief of staff of ice, told me, "Their kids go to school and hear things; they go to the grocery store and hear shit. They are not immune."

When I asked how ice responds to complaints and criticism, I was repeatedly told that officers can have genuine qualms about their work. Like any large organization, ice has its share of bad apples. But officials from the Obama administration vociferously countered any notion that ice is teeming with racists. Carlos Guevara, who served as an adviser to the homeland-security leadership, told me, "There are a lot of good officers ... And I don't think a lot of them feel great about picking up abuelita "-someone's grandmother-"or somebody who's been here for 20 years, much less being part of a policy separating kids from parents."

To navigate this moral thicket, ice officers tell themselves comforting stories. The agency was founded, after all, in the aftermath of 9/11, when the government had failed to prevent evildoers from infiltrating the homeland and killing thousands. As one former ice official told me, "You numb yourself by saying everything we do has a national-security focus. By God, if we let this one slip by, it's the tip of the iceberg. We never know when we're confronted with the real threat." The likelihood of that genuine threat, of course, is very much open to debate. Statistically speaking, an immigrant who has lived in the United States for decades, has an immaculate criminal record, and comes from Central America (like many ice targets) poses so negligible a national-security threat that it is virtually nonexistent. No immigrant from the region has ever committed a terrorist attack on U.S. soil, which is something that cannot be said of native-born Americans.

This fragile institutional psyche was on full display in ice's obstreperous response to Obama. During the first term of his presidency, Obama pursued an aggressive policy of immigration enforcement. As late as 2013, he expelled 438,000 undocumented immigrants, a far higher number than any other recent administration did. This extreme crackdown was intended as a down payment on comprehensive immigration reform. Republicans had clamored for proof of Obama's sincere commitment to enforcement, and he supplied it. Alas, that down payment would never be recouped. Immigration reform collapsed thanks to the guerrilla tactics of the GOP hard-liners in the House. And so, in the face of congressional inaction, Obama set about steering ice toward a more compassionate strategy. He wanted to give the agency a set of explicit and rigid priorities for whom it would detain and deport. Previously, almost any undocumented immigrant had been fair game. Now Obama set about focusing ice's efforts on serious criminals and recent arrivals. By the middle of his second term, the administration had figured out how to translate its priorities into bureaucratic reality. It supplied ice with clear procedures-with checklists and paperwork-to ensure that the organization hewed closely to the new goals.

In the parlance of certain factions of ice, these Obama-era priorities were the "handcuffs" that prevented officers from doing their job. At various moments during these years, a broad swath of ice officers behaved as a rogue unit within the federal government. In 2012, after Obama proposed his enforcement priorities, the union representing ice officers initially didn't allow its members to attend training sessions that inculcated the new approach. When Obama issued his plans for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (daca) that same year, the head of the union, Chris Crane, sued top administration officials to block the move. Crane became a favorite witness of then-Senator Jeff Sessions, who called Crane "an American hero."

Upon entering the political scene, Donald Trump promoted himself as ice's salvation. By flaying Obama's immigration policy with uncharacteristic consistency and specificity, he spoke to the deep resentments of many ERO officers. Lavishing them with praise-"We respect and cherish our ice officers"-he constantly asserted their importance to public safety. When the ice union assembled to endorse a presidential candidate, Trump received 95 percent of the vote. And he returned the favor: During a speech exactly five days after his inauguration, the president pointed to Crane and declared, "You guys are about to be very, very busy doing your jobs."

e know all the common knocks against government: how it overcomplicates tasks, how it resists change, how it has a remarkable capacity for inventing inefficiencies. But ice has quickly created a system of incredible scale, an industrialized process for removing human beings from the United States.

Take the example of ice Air. Twelve years ago, ice set about creating an internal mechanism for transporting deportees back to their native lands by establishing its own airline. ice Air has access to 10 planes, most of them Boeing 737s, each capable of carrying 135 deportees, dispatched from airports in five hub cities: Mesa, Arizona; San Antonio and Brownsville, Texas; Alexandria, Louisiana; and Miami. Maps like the ones found in seat-back pockets show the arcing trajectories of ice Air's most common routes, extending out across the hemisphere. (In 2016, ice Air flew 317 trips to Guatemala, its top destination.) Like most airlines, ice Air has a baggage limit: no more than 40 pounds. Unlike most airlines, ice Air forbids passengers from wearing belts and shoelaces, for fear they might use them to commit suicide. If nothing goes amiss, stewards serve granola bars and water, or on longer flights a full meal. Sometimes they unlock the handcuffs of the deportees who have been shackled.

Yet provisions on ice Air have been a source of controversy. Last winter, a flight carrying 92 Somalians made a pit stop in Dakar, Senegal. During the layover, the plane waited for a fresh crew, which was delayed due to issues at its hotel. So the plane reportedly sat on the runway for almost 24 hours, the passengers never disembarking. ice has disputed accounts of the long delay, but some of the Somalians say that the agency failed to supply them with sufficient food and drink, and that because of faulty air-conditioning, they found breathing difficult. According to one account, they weren't allowed to walk the aisles to the lavatory, so they relied on empty water bottles-and when their urine outpaced the supply of water bottles, they were forced to wet themselves.

To coordinate ice Air requires a certain logistical genius, especially given the organization's aim-familiar to anyone who relies on commercial air travel-of filling as many seats as possible on each of its flights. (To execute such deportations, ice Air prefers to charter its own flights; the agency tries to avoid placing deportees on commercial flights, because airlines won't board a passenger who actively refuses to fly.) One former ice official recalls a conversation in which a colleague boasted of an especially complex deportation to Gaza, which required traversing the Sinai Peninsula. He said the agency has felt intense congressional pressure to demonstrate that no nationality, no matter how small its presence in the United States, is beyond its deportation capacity.

ice has numeric goals, and it goes to great lengths to achieve them. Among the most important of these goals is the drive to constantly run its detention facilities at maximum capacity. In 2004, Congress directed ice to add 8,000 new beds a year. (In 1994, the government maintained a daily average of 6,785 detainees; this year, the expected average is 40,520.) This required a massive investment in detention, which Congress wanted to ensure didn't go to waste. In 2009, Robert Byrd, the late Democratic senator from West Virginia, quietly added a provision to an appropriations bill mandating that ice "maintain a level of not less than 33,400 detention beds." The provision was never debated and left room for competing interpretations. But for large stretches of the Obama years, Byrd's amendment was regarded as an obligatory quota. (Last year Congress finally removed the Byrd quota, but Trump's goals for detention far outstrip anything Congress has ever mandated.)

It's one thing for a city to require cops to issue a minimum number of parking tickets; it's another for the federal government to proscribe a daily goal for the number of human beings it will deprive of liberty. But the system that Byrd helped enshrine encourages precisely that. Jeremy Jong, an attorney with the Southern Poverty Law Center, described to me a conversation he had with an ice official at a Louisiana detention facility. The official bragged that "he always did his best to fulfill his contractual obligation to keep the center's beds full of inventory."

The description of immigrants as "inventory" is a logical extension of how ice has outsourced detention to private firms, for which each confinement represents additional profit. Detention is a boom industry, backed by such megafunds as Vanguard and BlackRock, and it has experienced a decade of steroidal growth. In the months following Trump's election, the stock prices of the biggest detention companies, the Geo Group and CoreCivic, rose by more than 100 percent. (Those prices have leveled out since then.) Last year, the bipartisan army of lobbyists employed by the Geo Group and its primary competitors included power firms Akin Gump and the Gephardt Group, founded by former House Majority Leader Richard Gephardt. That fall, the Geo Group celebrated its good fortune by holding its annual leadership conference at the Trump National Doral resort, in Miami.

Both CoreCivic and the Geo Group maintain that they do not lobby for or promote specific legislation shaping immigration policy. But according to NPR, the detention industry donated money to 30 of the 36 co-sponsors of the infamous S.B. 1070, a broad and harsh crackdown on undocumented immigrants, which then-Arizona Governor Jan Brewer signed into law in 2010. Additionally, two of Brewer's top advisers were former lobbyists for CoreCivic. (The bill was eventually shredded by the courts on constitutional grounds.)

There are, of course, genuine public-policy rationales for ice's contracting with private companies for detention facilities. The principal alternative is to rely on county jails, where ice reportedly rents beds for $130 a night. The detention system is supposedly encoded in civil law, but jails are inherently rooted in the criminal system. Many of the immigrants detained in jails wear brightly colored jumpsuits and live surrounded by bars and wires. Many of these jails, unlike the private facilities, have no capacity for handling non-English speakers.

Still, the private facilities are run with the explicit goal of profit-a motive that can come at the cost of the well-being of detainees. Several are in remote, rural areas, where land and labor come especially cheap. One of the primary private facilities in the South is in Lumpkin, Georgia, on the Alabama border, 140 miles from Atlanta. Civil detention is explicitly not meant to be punitive-merely a necessary step in the administrative process of deportation-but the distance to some facilities makes regular visits from relatives extremely difficult. Immigration lawyers told me that they tend not to take cases in such facilities, because access would be so difficult. Marty Rosenbluth, a lawyer from North Carolina, relocated to Lumpkin. "I'm currently the only attorney doing defense against removal cases, that I know of, between Lumpkin and Atlanta," he told me. "I actually opened up a one-room B&B in my house to try and lure attorneys down here, since part of their excuse for not taking cases here is that the nearest hotels are an hour drive." Even with his presence, a 2015 University of Pennsylvania Law Review study found that only 6 percent of detainees in the facility have a lawyer. Nationwide, the figure isn't much better: 14 percent. And without a lawyer, their chances of victory in immigration court slump from slim (21 percent) to nearly hopeless (2 percent).

Private detention companies' contracts with ice stipulate that they uphold a set of rigorous standards, but they of course seek to tamp down costs, which means that they may skimp on basic care for detainees. Take the CoreCivic facility in Elizabeth, New Jersey, which a group of lawyers and health professionals assembled by Human Rights First toured last year. What they discovered on their visits were reports of maggots in the showers and raw food served in the cafeteria, not to mention drinking water described as "pure bleach." Several detainees said they avoid asking for dental care because the dentist at the facility only performs extractions, even when a filling would do. Mental-health treatment commonly includes "bibliotherapy"-the assignment of self-help books-despite the obvious fact that prolonged detention can bring stress and depression. CoreCivic maintains that Human Rights First's report contained "numerous false and misleading allegations." But these aren't merely the stray observations of an activist group. In December, John V. Kelly, the acting inspector general of the Department of Homeland Security, issued a comprehensive report based on a series of surprise visits to detention facilities. His findings read: "We identified problems that undermine the protection of detainees' rights, their humane treatment, and the provision of a safe and healthy environment."
Where immigration is concerned, Trump has installed ideologues with a deep understanding of the law-enforcement machinery they now control.
Like many bureaucracies, ice strains for growth. When the agency was created, it employed just over 2,700 deportation officers, roughly the same number of employees as the San Diego police department. That workforce has since doubled, and the organization's ambitions have ballooned. Beyond its own budget and its network of private contractors, ice has availed itself of a provision in an immigration law signed by Bill Clinton in 1996. That provision empowered the federal government to partner with state and local police. In effect, this means ice can deputize police to enforce federal immigration laws. Not every jurisdiction has wanted to align itself with ice-indeed, most major cities have strenuously resisted, especially in the Trump era. But plenty of local police forces, many of them in suburban counties, have gladly taken up ice's offer to collaborate.

Gwinnett County, in northern Georgia, once epitomized the old rural South, sparsely populated and largely white. But over the past few decades, its population has exploded in both size and racial diversity. Demographers say the county's white majority is on track to be displaced by 2040. When Trump signed an executive order allowing ice to detain essentially any undocumented immigrants it encounters, the Gwinnett County police responded enthusiastically. The number of undocumented immigrants transferred to ice from local jails jumped by 248 percent during the first four months of Trump's presidency, relative to the prior year. Gwinnett police weren't rounding up dangerous gang members: When the Migration Policy Institute studied the new pattern of enforcement, it found that police were primarily arresting immigrants for traffic violations before handing them over to ice.

The early Trump era has witnessed wave after wave of seismic policy making related to immigration-the Muslim ban initially undertaken in his very first week in office, the rescission of daca, the separation of families at the border. Amid the frantic attention these shifts have generated, it's easy to lose track of the smaller changes that have been taking place. But with them, the administration has devised a scheme intended to unnerve undocumented immigrants by creating an overall tone of inhospitality and menace.

Where immigration is concerned, Trump has installed a group of committed ideologues with a deep understanding of the extensive law-enforcement machinery they now control. One especially skilled participant is L. Francis Cissna, the head of the Office of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Cissna is a longtime bureaucrat at the Department of Homeland Security who styled himself a dissident during the Obama years. In 2015, he temporarily left the department to work "on detail" for Republican Senator Chuck Grassley. An MIT graduate and the son of a Peruvian immigrant, Cissna began his career as a Foreign Service officer in Haiti and then Sweden. Over time, he became a policy savant; even his ideological opponents confess that he is more fluent in the immigration system's intricacies than they are.

From his perch in the Trump administration, Cissna has repeatedly broadcast the agency's new attitude toward immigration. In February, he rewrote its mission statement, erasing a phrase that described the United States as a "nation of immigrants." He explained the change by stating that he wanted to emphasize the "commitment we have to the American people"-as if there were intellectual tension between the two sentiments. Then, in June, he announced the opening of an office that would review the files of naturalized citizens, reexamining fingerprints and hunting for hints of fraud that might enable the revocation of citizenship.

Cissna is part of a close-knit coterie of former Capitol Hill staffers whom Trump has placed in charge of the immigration system. Before Trump took office, the group clustered in the offices of the conservative politicians most committed to restrictive immigration policy, especially Senators Grassley and Sessions. Even in a time when GOP policy on immigration had swung far to the right, these staffers-Stephen Miller, now a White House senior adviser, is the most famous of the bunch-existed far outside the party's mainstream. According to former colleagues, the offices of senators such as John McCain and Marco Rubio would lose patience with them because of their eagerness to detonate any viable version of immigration reform. "They are a little cabal," one Republican staffer who dealt closely with them told me. They specialized in churning out missives to DHS that requested information about individual immigrants so detailed, they sometimes seemed intent purely on overwhelming the system. One letter signed by Grassley, Sessions, and their Senate colleague Michael Lee asked DHS to respond "in precise detail" to queries about 250,000 immigrants.

Aside from Miller, perhaps the most important architect of Trump's immigration policy is another young Sessions acolyte, Gene Hamilton. In 2008, while he was a law student at Washington and Lee University, Hamilton took an internship at an ice detention facility in Miami. In 2012, he scored a job as an ice lawyer in the Atlanta field office. (Back then, Atlanta was known as one of the most aggressive cities when it came to immigration enforcement: The court there granted asylum to just 2 percent of the seekers whose cases it heard. The national average is about 50 percent.)

At the beginning of the Trump presidency, Hamilton joined DHS as a senior counselor to then-Secretary John Kelly. Last year, he left DHS to serve as a top adviser to Attorney General Jeff Sessions. The logic of the job switch was made apparent to me by one former ice official, who described Sessions as the "de facto secretary of homeland security," given his comprehensive influence over immigration policy. Together, Sessions and Hamilton have instituted a highly insular, fast-moving enforcement operation.
The government doesn't have the resources to remove the nation's 11 million undocumented immigrants. But it can create circumstances unpleasant enough to encourage them to leave on their own.
The work undertaken by Sessions, Hamilton, Miller, and their ilk is based to some degree on a theory first developed by Kris Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state. Over the past year, Kobach has emerged as a prime bête noire of the left because of his ferocious, ultimately doomed attempts to stamp out a phantom epidemic of voter fraud. But for many years, he served as a lawyer for an offshoot of the Federation for American Immigration Reform-the loudest and most effective of the groups pressing for restrictive immigration laws. In that position, he helped write many of the most draconian pieces of state-level immigration legislation to wend their way into law, including Arizona's S.B. 1070.

Kobach set out to remake immigration law to conform to a doctrine he called self-deportation or, more clinically, attrition through enforcement-a policy that experienced a vogue in 2012, when Mitt Romney, campaigning for president, briefly claimed the position as his own. The doctrine holds that the government doesn't have the resources to round up and remove the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the nation, but it can create circumstances unpleasant enough to encourage them to exit on their own. As Kobach once wrote, "Illegal aliens are rational decision makers. If the risks of detention or involuntary removal go up, and the probability of being able to obtain unauthorized employment goes down, then at some point, the only rational decision is to return home." Through deprivation and fear, the government can essentially drive undocumented immigrants out of the country.

Once you understand that self-deportation is the administration's guiding theory, you can see why immigration hawks might take satisfaction in supposed policy defeats. Even if putative fiascoes such as the initial Muslim ban and family separations at the border fail in court or are ultimately reversed, they succeed in fomenting an atmosphere of fear and worry among immigrants. The theatrics are, in effect, the policy.

The Trump administration made explicit its policy that every undocumented immigrant is unsafe with the executive order that Trump signed during his first month as president, repealing Obama's policy of prioritizing the deportation of immigrants who had committed serious crimes. As Thomas Homan testified before Congress last year, "If you're in this country illegally and you committed a crime by entering this country, you should be uncomfortable ... You should look over your shoulder, and you need to be worried."

The administration has attempted to encode the spirit of that warning across the spectrum of immigration enforcement. For years, such enforcement has abided by a policy intended to give undocumented immigrants a sense of safety in "sensitive locations." ice has, for instance, refrained from apprehending immigrants at schools, places of worship, and hospitals. The theory is that even if an immigrant might be at risk for deportation, she shouldn't think twice about, say, visiting a doctor. But anecdotal evidence suggests that ice has been operating more often in the vicinity of sensitive locations: Agents arrested a father after he dropped off his daughter at school, and detained a group soon after it left a church shelter. ice has also attempted to undermine so-called sanctuary cities, which decline to hand over undocumented immigrants whom their police happen to arrest. ice has loudly trumpeted its escalation of raids in those cities, sending the message that any notion of sanctuary is pure illusion.

To date, there is little evidence that self-deportation is occurring in any meaningful numbers. Ample data, however, show that increased fear has caused immigrant families to alter their life routines. One study by the Kaiser Family Foundation found that undocumented immigrants tried to limit their driving in order to lower the chance of an inadvertent interaction with the police. Many immigrant parents now keep their kids indoors as much as they can. One woman told Kaiser she noticed that once-vibrant playgrounds in her neighborhood were suddenly vacant.

Likewise, police departments around the country have noted a sharp decrease among Latinos reporting domestic violence and abuse. (In Los Angeles, for instance, reports by Latinos of sexual assault dropped by 25 percent in the first four months of 2017 compared with the same period in 2016.) Women would apparently rather tolerate battery than expose their partner to the risk of deportation-or risk deportation themselves. According to the Houston Chronicle, waiting rooms at many health clinics serving undocumented immigrants in South Texas are half as full now as they were before Trump took office. And schools in suburban Atlanta report that immigrant parents are reluctant to sign their kids up for reduced-price lunch programs.

Researchers from UCLA interviewed teachers and counselors at schools across 12 states to gauge the impact of zero-tolerance immigration policies in the classroom. They found that children of undocumented immigrants consistently expressed fear at the prospect of returning home from school only to find their parents and siblings gone. An art teacher reported that "many students drew and colored images of their parents and themselves being separated, or about people stalking/hunting their family."
Even with the recent surge of central Americans, illegal border crossings are a fraction of what they were in the 1980s and '90s.
Fears of ice can be exaggerated by word of mouth or compounded by hyperbolic news reports, especially in the Spanish-language media. But the activists who interact most frequently with ice, who pay daily visits to detention centers and immigration courts, share immigrants' sense of trepidation. This spring, an immigration lawyer from Santa Fe named Allegra Love went to Mexico to visit a caravan of Central Americans headed to the California border. By the time she arrived, the procession, organized by the activist group Pueblo Sin Fronteras, or "People Without Borders," had swollen to hundreds of asylum seekers and attracted the attention of the media, especially Fox News. President Trump described the caravan as a "disgrace." Although Love has made a career of advocating on behalf of immigrants, she had come to Mexico with an explicit message of discouragement. "I wanted to keep these people safe and needed to explain to them how willing our government is to make them suffer," she told me. She conducted a workshop in a makeshift refugee camp in the city of Puebla. As hundreds of migrants gathered, she addressed them with a microphone: "The system has become so appalling. You need to be afraid. You need to take that into account." For the first time in her life, she was actively attempting to deter people from seeking refuge in the United States. This is the terrible irony of Trump's policy: It turns even devoted activists into unwitting servants of its goals.

Donald Trumptalks a lot about the crisis at the border. But over the past generation, the U.S. has spent tens of billions of dollars sealing the frontier with Mexico. It has invested vast sums in surveillance, fencing, drones, agents. A generation ago, politicians bemoaned the influx of Mexicans into the country. Ten years ago, Mark Krikorian, one of the most prominent conservative theorists on the subject, wrote a highly touted book warning about Mexican plans for a reconquista: Through mass migration, he argued, Mexico would attempt to erode American sovereignty and exert influence over the United States. Yet just as he promulgated that argument, the problem he diagnosed was disappearing. The nation's rigid security has made casually traversing the border much harder. In recent years, there has often been more migration to Mexico than from Mexico. The Pew Research Center has estimated that there were 1.3 million fewer undocumented Mexican immigrants in the United States in 2016 than in 2007. Even with the recent surge of Central Americans fleeing violence in Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala, illegal border crossings are a fraction of what they were in the 1980s and '90s. In 2000, the U.S. apprehended 1.7 million people crossing the southwest border; last year, it nabbed just over 300,000. Contrary to widespread belief-and the president's frequent complaints-very few borders have the dense, protective security layers present on America's border with Mexico.

But even as the nation solves one problem, politicians and bureaucracies concoct new ones. Border Patrol has started aggressively taking advantage of an old regulation, long ignored, that permits an expansive definition of border, encompassing all terrain within 100 miles of the physical frontier. It has leveraged this flexible interpretation to set up checkpoints along I-95 in Maine and to board buses in Florida to ask passengers about their immigration status. Border Patrol has become a regular presence in cities such as Las Vegas and San Antonio-and its officers can be seen cruising highways in northern Ohio.

A similar mission creep afflicts ice. It's hard to argue with the need for a bureau that can deport criminals who reside in the country illegally. But there are only so many of them. Study after study has shown that immigrants commit crimes at much lower rates than the native-born population. ice simply doesn't have enough criminal targets to justify its enormous budget. That's why, when Obama provided ice with strict priorities, its number of detentions quickly plummeted.

"Abolish ice" is a slogan, now fashionable among Democrats, that has a radical edge. Prudent policy, however, requires not smashing the system, but returning it to a not-so-distant past. Only five years ago, the political center deemed the legalization of the country's 11 million undocumented immigrants a sensible element of a broad compromise. Only 15 years ago, before the birth of ice, America had a bureaucracy that didn't treat them as a policing problem. Immigration enforcement was housed in an agency devoted to both deportation and naturalization. There's no reason to wax nostalgic for INS, which had plenty of problems of its own. But the U.S. can now borrow from its positive example and design an institutional structure that restores a sense of proportion to the limited dangers posed by the immigrants embedded in American communities.

acking a large number of worthy targets, ice will train more of its attention on the likes of Jack, an undocumented immigrant from Mauritania whom I met this spring. (Jack is not his real name, but he does go by an Americanized nickname.) As Jack drove me around Columbus in his aging but meticulously maintained sedan, I came to think of him as an evangelist. With his round face, shaved pate, and impressive mustache, he exuded an optimism so cheery that it can only be described as faithful. I found myself disappearing into his homilies, as he set out to convert me to his version of the American dream.

As we meandered past Refugee Road toward his neighborhood, he wanted me to know that he had had the vision to buy a model home at a good price long before the developer had filled out his street. When we arrived at his place, he asked me to gaze out upon his little village of cookie-cutter houses and winding asphalt. The morning's drizzle had turned to mist, and Jack closed his eyes and theatrically inhaled, an expression of self-satisfaction like one might see in a TV commercial.

He took me inside through his garage, past a shelving unit filled with four tiers of sneakers. Jack, a farmer's son, takes huge-and very American-pleasure in abundance. Nearly every room in his house seemed to have a television set tuned to CNN. I saw pictures of his young son-born in Columbus, and a U.S. citizen-as well as an image of the former Ohio State University football coach Jim Tressel, whom Jack once met at a parade. I followed him to his basement, which he is in the early phases of transforming into a shrine to the team. The walls will be painted in the school's colors, scarlet and gray. "It will be my man cave," he told me.

Jack then led me up to his office, which has his favorite view in the house. It looks down on his deck and grill, across a grassy expanse of yard. Jack, who is in his mid-40s but looks older, is a professional mover. He works for a big company that specializes in long-distance relocations. At the beginning of the Trump administration, Jack even packed up the home of a soon-to-be senior Cabinet member and hauled his belongings to Washington. On the shelf opposite his desk, he keeps the awards he's collected from his company for the excellence of his work.

"I refuse to give all this up," he said. An officer at ice, whom he considers especially kind, has told him that it's only a matter of time before he is detained and deported. But Jack, ever the American optimist, believes there's no problem that can't be solved. "I will tell them that I know I did the wrong thing. I came here without papers. But look at me. I've never broken a law. Fine, deport the guys who have committed a crime. I will say, 'Look. It's me, Jack.' I will joke with them and let them know I'm not a threat. When I talk to them reasonably, they will relax." Even with the threat of deportation hanging over him, he has disciplined himself to keep on believing. A few days earlier, he had bought a truck to start his own hauling company. "I want to employ people, to give them opportunities like I had."

As we went through his office, he became wistful. He opened his closet and showed me the suit he had worn on his flight to America as a young man, almost 20 years ago. He had me run my hands along its frayed lapel. Then he grabbed a leather-bound notebook sitting on his printer and opened it. "Here are things that my girlfriend will need to know." He had written instructions on how to access his bank accounts, open his safe, sell his house, reach his son. As he showed this to me, he finally broke from his customarily cheery character and said nothing. He closed the book and traced the cover with his finger one last time. Then he looked at me and said, "When the day comes."
This article appears in the September 2018 print edition with the headline "How ICE Went Rogue."

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A long-running inferiority complex, vast statutory power, a chilling new directive from the top-inside America's unfolding immigration tragedy Settling into a sense of safety is hard when your life's catalog of memories teaches you the opposite lesson.

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Immigrants today make up 13.7% of the U.S. population

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The United States has more immigrants than any other country in the world. Today, more than 40 million people living in the U.S. were born in another country, accounting for about one-fifth of the world's migrants. The population of immigrants is also very diverse, with just about every country in the world represented among U.S. immigrants.

Pew Research Center regularly publishes statistical portraits of the nation's foreign-born population, which include historical trends since 1960. Based on these portraits, here are answers to some key questions about the U.S. immigrant population.

How many people in the U.S. are immigrants?

The U.S. foreign-born population reached a record 44.8 million in 2018. Since 1965, when U.S. immigration laws replaced a national quota system, the number of immigrants living in the U.S. has more than quadrupled. Immigrants today account for 13.7% of the U.S. population, nearly triple the share (4.8%) in 1970. However, today's immigrant share remains below the record 14.8% share in 1890, when 9.2 million immigrants lived in the U.S.

What is the legal status of immigrants in the U.S.?

Most immigrants (77%) are in the country legally, while almost a quarter are unauthorized, according to new Pew Research Center estimates based on census data adjusted for undercount. In 2017, 45% were naturalized U.S. citizens.

Some 27% of immigrants were permanent residents and 5% were temporary residents in 2017. Another 23% of all immigrants were unauthorized immigrants. From 1990 to 2007, the unauthorized immigrant population more than tripled in size - from 3.5 million to a record high of 12.2 million in 2007. By 2017, that number had declined by 1.7 million, or 14%. There were 10.5 million unauthorized immigrants in the U.S. in 2017, accounting for 3.2% of the nation's population.

The decline in the unauthorized immigrant population is due largely to a fall in the number from Mexico - the single largest group of unauthorized immigrants in the U.S. Between 2007 and 2017, this group decreased by 2 million. Meanwhile, there was a rise in the number from Central America and Asia.

Do all lawful immigrants choose to become U.S. citizens?

Not all lawful permanent residents choose to pursue U.S. citizenship. Those who wish to do so may apply after meeting certain requirements, including having lived in the U.S. for five years. In fiscal year 2019, about 800,000 immigrants applied for naturalization. The number of naturalization applications has climbed in recent years, though the annual totals remain below the 1.4 million applications filed in 2007.

Generally, most immigrants eligible for naturalization apply to become citizens. However, Mexican lawful immigrants have the lowest naturalization rate overall. Language and personal barriers, lack of interest and financial barriers are among the top reasons for choosing not to naturalize cited by Mexican-born green card holders, according to a 2015 Pew Research Center survey.

Where do immigrants come from?

Mexico is the top origin country of the U.S. immigrant population. In 2018, roughly 11.2 million immigrants living in the U.S. were from there, accounting for 25% of all U.S. immigrants. The next largest origin groups were those from China (6%), India (6%), the Philippines (4%) and El Salvador (3%).

By region of birth, immigrants from Asia combined accounted for 28% of all immigrants, close to the share of immigrants from Mexico (25%). Other regions make up smaller shares: Europe, Canada and other North America (13%), the Caribbean (10%), Central America (8%), South America (7%), the Middle East and North Africa (4%) and sub-Saharan Africa (5%).

Who is arriving today?

More than 1 million immigrants arrive in the U.S. each year. In 2018, the top country of origin for new immigrants coming into the U.S. was China, with 149,000 people, followed by India (129,000), Mexico (120,000) and the Philippines (46,000).

By race and ethnicity, more Asian immigrants than Hispanic immigrants have arrived in the U.S. in most years since 2009. Immigration from Latin America slowed following the Great Recession, particularly for Mexico, which has seen both decreasing flows into the United States and large flows back to Mexico in recent years.

Asians are projected to become the largest immigrant group in the U.S. by 2055, surpassing Hispanics. Pew Research Center estimates indicate that in 2065, those who identify as Asian will make up some 38% of all immigrants; as Hispanic, 31%; White, 20%; and Black, 9%.

Is the immigrant population growing?

New immigrant arrivals have fallen, mainly due to a decrease in the number of unauthorized immigrants coming to the U.S. The drop in the unauthorized immigrant population can primarily be attributed to more Mexican immigrants leaving the U.S. than coming in.

Looking forward, immigrants and their descendants are projected to account for 88% of U.S. population growth through 2065, assuming current immigration trends continue. In addition to new arrivals, U.S. births to immigrant parents will be important to future growth in the country's population. In 2018, the percentage of women giving birth in the past year was higher among immigrants (7.5%) than among the U.S. born (5.7%). While U.S.-born women gave birth to more than 3 million children that year, immigrant women gave birth to about 760,000.

How many immigrants have come to the U.S. as refugees?

Since the creation of the federal Refugee Resettlement Program in 1980, about 3 million refugees have been resettled in the U.S. - more than any other country.

In fiscal 2019, a total of 30,000 refugees were resettled in the U.S. The largest origin group of refugees was the Democratic Republic of the Congo, followed by Burma (Myanmar), Ukraine, Eritrea and Afghanistan. Among all refugees admitted in fiscal year 2019, 4,900 are Muslims (16%) and 23,800 are Christians (79%). Texas, Washington, New York and California resettled more than a quarter of all refugees admitted in fiscal 2018.

Where do most U.S. immigrants live?

Nearly half (45%) of the nation's immigrants live in just three states: California (24%), Texas (11%) and Florida (10%). California had the largest immigrant population of any state in 2018, at 10.6 million. Texas, Florida and New York had more than 4 million immigrants each.

In terms of regions, about two-thirds of immigrants lived in the West (34%) and South (34%). Roughly one-fifth lived in the Northeast (21%) and 11% were in the Midwest.

In 2018, most immigrants lived in just 20 major metropolitan areas, with the largest populations in the New York, Los Angeles and Miami metro areas. These top 20 metro areas were home to 28.7 million immigrants, or 64% of the nation's total foreign-born population. Most of the nation's unauthorized immigrant population lived in these top metro areas as well.

How do immigrants compare with the U.S. population overall in education?

Immigrants in the U.S. as a whole have lower levels of education than the U.S.-born population. In 2018, immigrants were over three times as likely as the U.S. born to have not completed high school (27% vs. 8%). However, immigrants were just as likely as the U.S. born to have a bachelor's degree or more (32% and 33%, respectively).

Educational attainment varies among the nation's immigrant groups, particularly across immigrants from different regions of the world. Immigrants from Mexico and Central America are less likely to be high school graduates than the U.S. born (54% and 47%, respectively, do not have a high school diploma, vs. 8% of U.S. born). On the other hand, immigrants from every region except Mexico, the Caribbean and Central America were as likely as or more likely than U.S.-born residents to have a bachelor's or advanced degree.

Among all immigrants, those from South Asia (71%) were the most likely to have a bachelor's degree or more. Immigrants from Mexico (7%) and Central America (11%) were the least likely to have a bachelor's or higher.

How many immigrants are working in the U.S.?

In 2017, about 29 million immigrants were working or looking for work in the U.S., making up some 17% of the total civilian labor force. Lawful immigrants made up the majority of the immigrant workforce, at 21.2 million. An additional 7.6 million immigrant workers are unauthorized immigrants, less than the total of the previous year and notably less than in 2007, when they were 8.2 million. They alone account for 4.6% of the civilian labor force, a dip from their peak of 5.4% in 2007. During the same period, the overall U.S. workforce grew, as did the number of U.S.-born workers and lawful immigrant workers.

Immigrants are projected to drive future growth in the U.S. working-age population through at least 2035. As the Baby Boom generation heads into retirement, immigrants and their children are expected to offset a decline in the working-age population by adding about 18 million people of working age between 2015 and 2035.

How well do immigrants speak English?

Among immigrants ages 5 and older in 2018, half (53%) are proficient English speakers - either speaking English very well (37%) or only speaking English at home (17%).

Immigrants from Mexico have the lowest rates of English proficiency (34%), followed by those from Central America (35%), East and Southeast Asia (50%) and South America (56%). Immigrants from Canada (96%), Oceania (82%), Europe (75%) and sub-Saharan Africa (74%) have the highest rates of English proficiency.

The longer immigrants have lived in the U.S., the greater the likelihood they are English proficient. Some 47% of immigrants living in the U.S. five years or less are proficient. By contrast, more than half (57%) of immigrants who have lived in the U.S. for 20 years or more are proficient English speakers.

Among immigrants ages 5 and older, Spanish is the most commonly spoken language. Some 42% of immigrants in the U.S. speak Spanish at home. The top five languages spoken at home among immigrants outside of Spanish are English only (17%), followed by Chinese (6%), Hindi (5%), Filipino/Tagalog (4%) and French (3%).

How many immigrants have been deported recently?

Around 337,000 immigrants were deported from the U.S. in fiscal 2018, up since 2017. Overall, the Obama administration deported about 3 million immigrants between 2009 and 2016, a significantly higher number than the 2 million immigrants deported by the Bush administration between 2001 and 2008. In 2017, the Trump administration deported 295,000 immigrants, the lowest total since 2006.

Immigrants convicted of a crime made up the less than half of deportations in 2018, the most recent year for which statistics by criminal status are available. Of the 337,000 immigrants deported in 2018, some 44% had criminal convictions and 56% were not convicted of a crime. From 2001 to 2018, a majority (60%) of immigrants deported have not been convicted of a crime.

How many immigrant apprehensions take place at the U.S.-Mexico border?

The number of apprehensions at the U.S.-Mexico border has doubled from fiscal 2018 to fiscal 2019, from 396,579 in fiscal 2018 to 851,508 in fiscal 2019. Today, there are more apprehensions of non-Mexicans than Mexicans at the border. In fiscal 2019, apprehensions of Central Americans at the border exceeded those of Mexicans for the fourth consecutive year. The first time Mexicans did not make up the bulk of Border Patrol apprehensions was in 2014.

How do Americans view immigrants and immigration?

While immigration has been at the forefront of a national political debate, the U.S. public holds a range of views about immigrants living in the country. Overall, a majority of Americans have positive views about immigrants. About two-thirds of Americans (66%) say immigrants strengthen the country "because of their hard work and talents," while about a quarter (24%) say immigrants burden the country by taking jobs, housing and health care.

Yet these views vary starkly by political affiliation. Among Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents, 88% think immigrants strengthen the country with their hard work and talents, and just 8% say they are a burden. Among Republicans and Republican-leaning independents, 41% say immigrants strengthen the country, while 44% say they burden it.

Americans were divided on future levels of immigration. A quarter said legal immigration to the U.S. should be decreased (24%), while one-third (38%) said immigration should be kept at its present level and almost another third (32%) said immigration should be increased.
Note: This is an update of a post originally published May 3, 2017, and written by Gustavo López, a former research analyst focusing on Hispanics, immigration and demographics; and Kristen Bialik, a former research assistant.
CORRECTION (Sept. 21, 2020): An update to the methodology used to tabulate figures in the chart "Among new immigrant arrivals, Asians outnumber Hispanics" has changed all figures from 2001 and 2012. This new methodology has also allowed the inclusion of the figure from 2000. Furthermore, the earlier version of the chart incorrectly showed the partial year shares of Hispanic and Asian recent arrivals in 2015; the corrected complete year shares are 31% and 36%, respectively.

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Today, more than 40 million people living in the U.S. were born in another country, accounting for about one-fifth of the world's migrants.

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10.3% of Grand Rapids Population

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U.S. Census Bureau QuickFacts: Grand Rapids city, Michigan

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Frequently requested statistics for: Grand Rapids city, Michigan

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Xenophobia against immigrants is one of main modern day sources of racism.
Migrants are often discriminated in housing, education, healthcare, and work.

Migrants are more likely to be:
-Trafficked
-Detained and held in administrative centers or prisons

One of the greatest obstacles for migrants is persistent anti-immigration policies and discriminatory practices.

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Combating Discrimination against Migrants

The Durban Declaration pointed out that xenophobia against non-nationals, and in particular, migrants, constitutes one of the main sources of contemporary racism. Migrants are often discriminated against in housing, education, health, work or social security. It is a global issue affecting the countries of origin, the countries of transit and the countries of arrival. According to the Population Division of the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, around 200 million people live outside their country of origin, which will amount to 3.1% of the world population in 2010. Estimates showed that between 1945 and 1990, the number of migrants increased by around 45 million people per year.

Migrants arriving irregularly in a new country and victims of trafficking stopped by the police are often detained in administrative centers or in prisons. Although the deprivation of liberty should be a last resort under international human rights law, migrants are often detained as a routine procedure and without proper judicial safeguards. Overcrowded immigration detention centers often have poor access to healthcare, inadequate food, sanitation or safe drinking water and a lack of separate sanitation facilities for men and women. Equally, there is an increasing tendency to criminalize migration offenses, which has, in some cases, resulted in violations of migrants' rights.

Today, one of the key obstacles hindering migrants' integration and equal access to human rights in host societies is persistent anti-migrant sentiments and discriminatory practices. Such sentiments and practices are often reinforced by legislation, regulations and policies to restrict migratory flows, as evidenced by the increasing tendency to criminalize irregular migration. The global economic crisis and rising unemployment have further aggravated these trends. Addressing negative perceptions of migrants within host communities is therefore a key element of promoting their integration and enhancing their contribution to development. Various international instruments, and in particular, the International Convention on the Protection of the Rights of All Migrant Workers and Members of their Families, address the issue of discrimination and provide guidance on human rights safeguards. Special Procedures, treaty bodies and the Universal Periodic Review mechanism have also addressed these issues.
Activities of the UN human rights office

Identifies the protection of human rights in the context of migration and the elimination of discrimination as two of its core strategic thematic priorities for 2010-2011.

Supports the activities of human rights treaty bodies which monitor the implementation of the core human rights treaties, some of which play a key role in combating migrants' discrimination, such as the Committee on Migrants Workers, the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination and the Committee on the Rights of the Child. The Office assists the independent Special Procedures mechanisms of the Human Rights Council to address either country situations or global thematic issues. Several thematic special procedures play a role in combating discrimination against migrants, such as the Special Rapporteur on the human rights of migrants; the Working Group on Arbitrary Detention; as well as the Special Procedures working to protect human rights while countering terrorism; on trafficking in persons, especially women and children; on freedom of religion or belief; on violence against women, its causes and consequences; on extreme poverty; on the right to education; on contemporary forms of slavery and on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance.

Services intergovernmental activities and expert mechanisms where discrimination against migrants is addressed, such as the Durban Review Conference and related processes.

Aims at building national capacity to eliminate migration-related discrimination through advisory services, research and analysis, raising awareness and mobilizing support for anti-discrimination measures - such as legislation, policies and programmes - and engages with the wider community forging partnerships in this field.

Advocates for the protection of human rights throughout the migration process, including through coordinated action and cooperation within the Global Migration Group, a UN coordination body on migration related issues.

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OHCHR | Combating Discrimination against Migrants

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The Durban Declaration pointed out that xenophobia against non-nationals, and in particular, migrants, constitutes one of the main sources of contemporary racism. Migrants are often discriminated against in housing, education, health, work or social security. It is a global issue affecting the countries of origin, the countries of transit and the countries of arrival.

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A brief look at some historical acts and policies that have discriminated against immigrants of color

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A public charge is one of the earliest forms of immigrant restrictions. In 2019 the Trump Administration further expanded a list of factors when determining if an Immigrant would be considered a public charge.

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Allows undocumented immigrants to work and live in the U.S. while their home countries recover from natural disasters or political conflicts.

DACA also known as "Dreamers" is protection for immigrants who were brought here as children and provides them with work permits.

Both of these programs have recently been under attack by mostly republican politicians who wish to put an end to them.

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Remaking the nation's immigration system has been a central theme of President Donald Trump's tenure in the White House, meaning the 2020 elections will likely serve as a referendum on his actions so far and an opportunity for Democrats to propose a different path.

From the treatment of asylum-seeking Central Americans to the fate of the 11 million undocumented immigrants already living in the U.S., the 2020 campaign is expected to feature intense disagreements over how many and what kind of immigrants are allowed to enter the U.S.

The outcome of those contests will decide the fate of millions of would-be immigrants, and affect the lives of millions of Americans whose neighbors, co-workers and classmates are increasingly foreign-born.

As Democratic presidential candidates continue developing their immigration proposals, here's a look at the key issues they'll face on the campaign trail and where both parties have generally stood on each topic.

DACA

Trump moved in 2017 to terminate the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which has shielded from deportation more than 800,000 undocumented immigrants brought to the country as children and granted them work permits.

Federal courts have blocked Trump from ending the program, but the Justice Department is appealing those rulings. That means the program remains active, but the Supreme Court could take up the case later this year.

Most Democrats, and some Republicans, want to grant permanent protections to DACA recipients and put them on a path to U.S. citizenship. Some Republicans, including immigration hardliners within the Trump administration, claim former President Barack Obama exceeded his executive authority when he created DACA in 2012. They oppose bills that would grant DACA recipients permanent protections.

The key questions on the campaign trail will be whether, and how many, so-called "dreamers" should be protected. More than 800,000 undocumented immigrants have been approved for DACA since the program started in 2012, but there are an estimated 3.6 million total "dreamers" who were brought to the U.S. as children.

Temporary Protected Status

In a similar move, the Trump administration has tried to phase out the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) program, which has allowed more than 300,000 foreigners to legally live and work in the U.S. as their home countries recover from natural disasters and armed conflicts.

Federal courts have blocked Trump from ending those protections. But the Justice Department is appealing and the case could end up before the Supreme Court.

Just like DACA, most Democrats, and some Republicans, want to grant permanent protections to TPS recipients and put them on a path to U.S. citizenship. Most TPS recipients have lived in the U.S. for more than two decades, and supporters say its unfair to force them to return to their home countries after establishing their lives in the U.S.

But some Republicans, including hardliners within the Trump administration, say the program was always intended to be temporary and has been extended for far too long. They say most of the 10 countries on the TPS list have recovered - including Haiti, Honduras and Nepal- and are ready to handle the return of their citizens.

The key questions on the campaign trail will be whether the TPS program should be eliminated entirely, whether it should be reformed to end more quickly in the future, and what to do with the 300,000 TPS recipients already in the program.

11 million undocumented immigrants

One of the most vexing and long-standing debates between Republicans and Democrats has been over the fate of undocumented immigrants living in the U.S.

That population exploded throughout the 1990s and the first decade of the 2000s, peaking at 12.2 million in 2007, according to the Pew Research Center. The number of undocumented immigrants has been steadily falling ever since as the Mexican economy has improved and more Mexican citizens have returned to their country. But that still leaves 11 million undocumented immigrants living and working in the U.S.

Democrats have consistently pushed for a "pathway to citizenship" that includes criminal background checks, payment of back taxes, and other qualifications. Many Republicans have labeled such plans as "amnesty" that would unfairly reward people who knowingly violated U.S. laws.

A central debate during the campaign will be whether to provide a pathway to citizenship, or forever bar undocumented immigrants from citizenship.

Family separations

The summer of 2018 was defined by the Trump administration's "zero tolerance" policy that led to the separation of more than 2,800 migrant families that had crossed the southern border.

That plan was panned by so many people in both political parties that it led Trump to issue a rare about-face when he signed an executive order in June to stop the family separations. A federal judge went a step further just a few days later, ordering the administration to reunite all those families in a case that continues to identify additional families that were separated starting as early as 2017.

While the systemic policy of family separations has ended, Border Patrol agents continue separating migrant families, albeit in smaller numbers.

The main questions facing candidates will be whether the system needs to be regulated more closely by Congress, and whether immigration judges should be required to approve future separations.

Asylum and refuge in the U.S.

The Trump administration has tried to slow down, and in some cases halt entirely, the ability of foreigners to seek refuge in the U.S.

Asylum and refugee status are granted to foreigners who fear persecution in their home country based on their religion, race, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social group. The main difference is that refugees make their request while living abroad, and asylum seekers make their request after arriving in the U.S.

White House officials have claimed both systems are fraught with abuse and vulnerable to infiltration by terrorists. They've taken multiple steps to limit each program, such as instituting a controversial travel ban that temporarily shut down the refugee program entirely and implementing multiple policies to limit asylum along the southern border.

Several of those polices have been blocked by federal judges.

Democrats say closing America's doors to the most vulnerable people in the world destroys the centuries-old ideal of the U.S. as a beacon of hope for oppressed people of the world.

The key questions on the campaign trail will be how to reform the existing asylum laws to handle the record numbers of Central American families that are coming each month, and the proper role of the refugee system for Syrians and others.

Treatment of migrants in detention

The Department of Homeland Security says it has been overwhelmed by the record number of migrants crossing the border each day, leaving Border Patrol stations and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention centers unable to house them all. That has led the department to house migrants in tent cities, outside Border Patrol facilities and even under a highway overpass in El Paso, Texas.

At least six migrant children died in those conditions over a span of eight months.

Homeland Security has requested more than $1 billion from Congress to improve conditions for migrants and have ordered mandatory medical screenings of arriving children. The Trump administration says the situation won't improve until Congress changes U.S. asylum laws.

Democrats place the blame solely on the Trump administration, arguing that Homeland Security officials have treated the migrant crisis more as a security threat than a humanitarian one.

The main questions on the campaign trail will be how each candidate would improve the treatment of migrants in its custody, and whether U.S. laws need to be changed to make such an improvement.

Aid to Central America

Migrants are primarily coming from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, and the U.S. has been sending hundreds of millions of dollars a year to help those countries improve their security, economic and judicial systems to encourage more citizens to stay there.

But Trump cut off $450 million in funding to those countries in March, arguing that their governments were stealing the money and not doing enough to stop their citizens from heading north to the U.S.

Democrats, and some Republicans, say cutting off funding to Central America is counterproductive, since the move will drive those countries into further chaos and force more of its citizens to embark on the dangerous journey north.

The main questions on the campaign will be whether the federal government should restart aid to those Central American countries, and whether U.S. officials should more closely scrutinize how the money is allocated.

Merit-based immigration

The U.S. approves about 1.1 million green cards a year, handing out 63% to foreigners with family connections in the U.S. and about 13% based on their skills and ability to contribute to the economy.

Trump wants to flip that around.

The president has advocated for Canada's "merit-based" immigration system. That idea was cemented in an immigration plan developed by his adviser and son-in-law, Jared Kushner, that would grant most green cards based on a points system that rewards applicants for their education, English proficiency and standing job offers.

Such changes are needed, Trump argues, to limit the family-based migration system that Republicans decry as "chain migration." The system currently allows U.S. citizens and green card holders to sponsor their children, parents and siblings, but Trump wants to limit that to only spouses and minor children.

Democrats claim such a change would unfairly lock out low-income and low-skilled immigrants, fundamentally altering the nation's history of welcoming the tired, poor, huddled masses that Emma Lazarus wrote about in her poem affixed to the Statute of Liberty. They also accuse the president of hypocrisy, since first lady Melania Trump's parents were recently sworn in as citizens, which may not have been possible without family-based migration.

Candidates on the campaign trail will be expected to lay out their vision for what legal immigration should look like, and whether the U.S. should scrap its family-based immigration system in favor of an economic-based one.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement

While the situation along the southern border has received most of the attention, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents have dramatically increased arrests of immigrants living and working in the interior of the U.S.

Under Obama, ICE agents were directed to target mostly undocumented immigrants with criminal records. But Trump overturned that restriction, allowing ICE agents to arrest anybody they encounter, no matter their criminal background. That has led to a sharp rise in the number of undocumented immigrants arrested without a criminal record.

ICE agents under Trump have also returned to the massive workplace raids that were used frequently under former President George W. Bush and largely eliminated under Obama. Those raids have mostly targeted workers, not the employers who hire them.

Democrats have decried that enforcement strategy, with some even calling for ICE to be abolished. That movement gained steam during the 2018 election cycle, but most major Democratic presidential candidates are calling for a more scaled-back approach, including reforms to, but not the abolition of, the immigration enforcement agency.

Republicans have largely defended Trump's crackdown, arguing that all undocumented immigrants have broken immigration law and should not be immune from deportation.

The key questions for candidates will be whether they want to completely abolish ICE, reform the agency, return to the Obama-era approach of targeting more undocumented immigrants with criminal records or maintain Trump's hardline approach.

Sanctuary Cities

One of the most controversial developments in recent years is the emergence of so-called "sanctuary cities," a general term used to describe city, county and state governments that do not fully comply with federal immigration efforts.

One of the core disagreements is whether local jails should hold suspects for up to 48 hours solely to give ICE agents time to decide whether they will pick them up for immigration violations.

The Trump administration has tried to crack down on those local governments under the argument that such policies endanger U.S. citizens by allowing dangerous undocumented immigrants to be released into communities.

The Department of Homeland Security published several reports listing localities that allowed criminals to be released despite ICE requests to hold them - those reports were discontinued after they proved to be riddled with errors. The Department of Justice also tried to withhold federal grant money from local governments it deemed had sanctuary policies, but that move was partially shot down by a federal judge.

Officials in sanctuary cities, mostly Democrats, argue that immigration enforcement is a federal responsibility and that local police cannot, and should not, be enlisted to serve as immigration agents. Doing so, they argue, would drive immigrants to distrust their local police officers and not report crimes they are victims of, or witnesses to.

They also argue that its illegal to hold suspects without proper probable cause, an argument that has been upheld by several courts, but that ICE has tried to eliminate by changing how they make their requests to local police.

The key questions on the trail will be whether sanctuary policies should be embraced or punished.

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Here are the 10 key immigration issues presidential candidates face on the campaign trail

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Remaking the nation's immigration system has been a central theme of President Donald Trump's tenure in the White House, meaning the 2020 elections will likely serve as a referendum on his actions so far and an opportunity for Democrats to propose a different path.

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Explore and do research on candidates at a local, state, and federal level. Make sure that the people we are voting for are protecting the rights of our potential future clients. We must be a voice for the people in this country who are currently allowed to use theirs!

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Importance of Voting for Naturalized Citizens - Immigration Lawyers

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Voting is a fundamental right guaranteed in the United States Constitution, and with the assistance of legislation like the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

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Do Your Research In Order To Be A Culturally Competent Ally and Advocate

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Do Your Research In Order To Be A Culturally Competent Ally and Advocate

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As future social workers, we all need to be able to expand our understanding of immigrants. We should understand their perspectives and experiences. We need to understand how these things impact the individual.

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Immigration to United States began in the 17th century, and ever since, the country has been the destination for millions of people as they search for a better life. According to recent Pew Research data, there are approximately 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. Of these, 5.6 million are of Mexican descent, 1.8 million are from Central America, and 1.5 million are from Asia. The U.S. civilian workforce includes 8 million unauthorized immigrants.

Ever since the passage of the Asian Exclusion Act in 1875, the U.S. government has made several attempts to exclude undocumented immigrants and prevent their access to citizenship. This includes the strategy of creating more stringent immigration policies for specific groups in response to political pressures. U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the federal agency responsible for immigration enforcement that created in response to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, exemplifies this approach.

Since the 2016 presidential campaign, debates about the construction of a wall across the U.S.-Mexico border and the status of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program have been elevated to key issues in the current socio-political climate. Recent changes in policies have impacted several groups of undocumented immigrants. In January 2017, an executive order halted entry into the U.S. from primarily Muslim countries including Chad, Yemen, Sudan, Somalia, Iraq, Iran, and Libya. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the order for five of the seven countries. In April 2018, an executive order affecting undocumented immigrants led to the forced separation of over 2,000 children at the border. The American Psychiatric Association released a press statement in May 2018 and adopted a formal position statement in December 2018 opposing separation of children from parents at the border because of the adverse mental health impacts of such policies.

Carlos, 17 years old

Carlos is a 17-year-old undocumented Mexican American with no previous psychiatric history. He was sent to the school mental health clinic by his 11th grade teachers for a marked change in behaviors. While previously an honors student looking forward to attending college, Carlos reports that his grades have recently dropped due to "constant stress." In addition to schoolwork, Carlos was previously involved in extracurricular activities and part-time employment to support his family. When probed about his future, Carlos feels that college is "no longer an option" because of the uncertainty surrounding the DACA program. Constant worries about deportation have made everyday activities like attending school and shopping for groceries challenging and fear-ridden for Carlos and his family. Read more

Mental Health Risk Factors

Trauma and stressors before, during, and after immigration: Undocumented immigrants often experience trauma at various stages of the migration process:

Before: Financial issues, sense of failure, escape from violence, poverty, political oppression, threats or disasters

During: Violence, environmental hazards, abandonment/separation, witnessing death

After: Limited resources given their status, intra- and interpersonal conflict, stress from adjusting to their new environment, exploitation, fear of deportation

Racism and Discrimination

Overt and subtle acts of racism and discrimination: These include experiences that can range from poor treatment and verbal and physical attacks to systematic marginalization and disparities in healthcare, academics, employment and other socially imposed barriers.

Racial profiling: Depending on race/ethnic background and appearance, undocumented immigrants are often profiled as gang members or other types of criminals. Profiling can lead to fear, anxiety, isolation, and a compromised sense of safety and identity.

Implicit/explicit bias and microaggressions: These incidents, whether intentional or not, can deeply affect individuals. A lifetime of cumulative microaggressions can lead to adverse mental health consequences.

Religious discrimination: Some undocumented immigrants face discrimination because of their religion. Studies show that there are detrimental mental health effects as a consequence of targeting and isolating religious minorities.

Treatment in school and the workplace: Research suggests that low-income, immigrant, and racial/ethnic minority children are disproportionately placed in low-ability groups early in their education, while adults experience discrimination and stigma in the workplace.

Stigma: Undocumented immigrants are often subjected to stigma at work, in school, and by society.

Shifting family structures and dynamics: Undocumented immigrants have varying family situations and mixed-status families are common. Some individuals are in the U.S. alone; others have large families, and some have children who are citizens. This can create strained family situations, including varying levels of inclusion, exclusion, acculturation, and desires for assimilation among family members. These shifting and potentially disparate priorities often lead to increased intergenerational conflicts.

Social isolation: Stigma often leads to social isolation and a decreased level of support in the community. Isolation can be a risk factor for mental health disorders.

Separation from family: Undocumented immigrants can be separated from family and children may be placed in foster homes or other custodial arrangements. Separation from family can be traumatic, especially for children, and can lead to mental health symptoms. In addition, studies have shown that young children entering foster families may avoid engaging with a new caregiver and, even if reunited with their parents, may respond to feelings of abandonment by rejecting them. This can create a self-perpetuating cycle that prevents nurturing and responsive care and ultimately exacerbate dysfunctional family dynamics.

Institutional racism and social determinants of mental health: Racism is a social determinant of mental health. Institutional racism aggravates other social determinants of mental health, including access to quality education, safe housing, gainful employment, appropriate health care, and a clean environment.

Low socioeconomic status (SES): Racial and ethnic minorities tend to have lower socioeconomic status, as determined by education, income, and occupation. Low SES has been significantly associated with stress related and induced mental illness. Undocumented immigrants have fewer opportunities for work given their immigration status.

Housing segregation and frequent moves: Given socioeconomic disparities, undocumented immigrants often live in poor neighborhoods, have fewer resources, and are more likely to move frequently. This instability affects access to consistent health care and access to quality education.

Fear and distrust

Distrust of the U.S. legal system: Studies show that undocumented immigrants have increased rates of fear and distrust of the U.S. legal system, causing decreased participation in civic life, including advocacy efforts. They also have a decreased likelihood of using the legal system even when they are victims of illegal activities. This distrust can extend to the health care system and act as a barrier to care.

Fear of deportation: Given the current political climate, undocumented immigrants live in widespread fear of deportation, which limits their use of health care and social services and prevents social integration.

Higher overall risk for mental health issues for some undocumented immigrants:

Undocumented immigrants who have had exposure to violent trauma are at high risk for depressive disorders, post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and substance use disorders.

Unaccompanied minors have a higher number of traumatic exposures on average than minors who migrate accompanied by family, which increases their risk for mental health problems like PTSD.

Compared to U.S.-born Latinos, Latinos who are undocumented immigrants are more likely to have multiple psychosocial problems, including those related to employment, access to health care and the legal system. However, undocumented immigrant Latinos use fewer mental health services use than U.S.-born Latinos do.

Immigration-related stressors can increase suicidal ideation and risk due to the distress associated with cultural stress, social marginalization and intergenerational conflicts in addition to PTSD and other psychological disorders.

Suggested Assessment and Treatment Recommendations

1. Please see Suggested Assessment and Treatment Recommendations for Marginalized Populations

2. Consider protective factors: Studies have shown that the most important protective factor for undocumented immigrants' mental health is whether they receive adequate social support. Other protective factors include pride in ethnicity, bilingualism and multilingualism, and spirituality.

Encourage and advocate for the unification of patients with their families.

Connect patients to resources. Emphasize the importance of social supports for the well-being and recovery of disenfranchised populations. Connections with resources can be just as important as receiving treatment.

Provide consistent and accessible follow up. Undocumented immigrants often distrust the health care system and may require more frequent and consistent follow-up to create a sense of trust. Collaborative decision- making and motivational interviewing can be helpful when culturally sensitive.

Spirituality and faith should be assessed and incorporated into treatment planing if the patient desires.

Minimize language barriers. Make an attempt to offer resources in patients' native languages. Provide opportunities to learn English if patients show an interest.

Collaborate with community organizations that support undocumented immigrants in multiple facets of their lives, including family supports.

3. Recognize culturally specific concepts of distress, normative cultural factors, and cultural humility: Be sensitive to culturally specific phenomena when treating patients, but also treat each patient as an individual and assess what their culture means to them. For example, in many Latino cultures, PTSD symptoms may be attributed to susto ("soul loss"), instead of being recognized as a mental illness. The Cambodian language has no word for depression or anxiety, so these patients may present with complaints of "khyal attacks" or "wind attacks," which are described as dizziness, shortness of breath, and palpitations. At the same time, not all individuals from Latino and Cambodian cultures, respectively, ascribe to these concepts.

4. Encourage clinicians to examine their own implicit and explicit biases.

Suggest regular training that promotes reflective self-examination and awareness of implicit bias.

Evaluate, challenge, and address structural and practice-level factors that perpetuate explicit bias, discrimination, and inequalities for immigrant and other vulnerable populations.

5. Consider the many external and internal factors that influence the course of a person's life:

Use a "socio-cultural ecological framework" that considers the complex interplay between individual, relationship, community, cultural, and societal factors that influence mental health. Community-focused interventions that integrate school, community, physical and mental health care, and faith-based organization providers can increase access to care and provide social support.

Conduct psychiatric testing in a format that accommodates the individual's culture and/or language or that applies to many cultures.

6. Combat psychosocial stressors: Undocumented immigrants often experience a large variety and number of psychosocial stressors.

Assess needs using standard instruments or assessments such as the Brief Risk Overview survey, and take into consideration the possible effects of adverse childhood experiences.

Employ early assessment of psychosocial stressors, substance use, and barriers to care when treating undocumented immigrants.

Identify accessible social services and supports for addressing psychosocial stressors in the lives of undocumented patients.

Think about partnerships with organizations that offer trusted spaces within the specific community, including faith-based organizations, schools, or community centers.

Consider increased follow-up and connecting patients to services such as peer navigators, health coaches, college resources, or legal assistance. Resourceful thinking can help bridge cultural or language gaps, such as advocating for testing in a different language for a child in school or using innovative but accessible technology.

7. Screen for trauma: Given the high risk for trauma among undocumented immigrants, consider screening for trauma and practicing trauma-informed care even if patients do not meet the criteria for PTSD.

Screen for trauma exposure and symptoms, anxiety, depression, substance use disorders, and sleep disorders. Whenever available, use screening measures developed for the population the patient identifies with.

Recognize the impact of violence on development and coping, and identify recovery from trauma as a primary goal. An empowerment model maximizes patient control, collaboration, and a safe environment. This model also emphasizes resilience, minimizes retraumatization, and practices cultural competency and cultural humility.

Consider early interventions for dual pathology of PTSD symptoms and alcohol or substance use disorder (AUD/SUD in immigrants with trauma history, particularly for Latino immigrants, who are at high risk for comorbid PTSD and AUD/SUD.

Since trauma-informed care involves both the individual treatment of a patient by a provider and the policies of systems-based practices, consider re-examining policies that may restrict access to social services and health care for the undocumented.

8. Inform patients of their rights: Research indicates that fear of deportation is common among immigrants; when undocumented immigrants understand their rights, they can use that information to advocate for themselves, decrease their chances of being separated from loved ones, and protect their mental health. Some examples of this include connecting patients with legal aid or providing appropriate language information to notify them of their rights. Victims of crime may be eligible for changes in immigration status if they help law enforcement investigate the crime.

9. Use narrative therapy and cognitive restructuring: Allowing patients to tell their stories and recreate their narrative often helps immigrants process and prevent symptoms of depression, anxiety, and PTSD. Narratives allow people to access their story in a less damaging and more therapeutic way. These strategies are known to help with issues related to identity and stress.

10. Encourage self-advocacy and empower patients: Inform undocumented patients of the legal rights that they have. Provide links to legal and social services that can assist patients in learning how to practice self-advocacy and to access resources they need for themselves and their families.

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Immigration to United States began in the 17th century, and ever since, the country has been the destination for millions of people as they search for a better life. According to recent Pew Research data, there are approximately 11 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S.

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All of the values and ethical principles outlined in the Code of Ethics are necessary to apply when working with future clients that are immigrants.
Service, social justice, dignity and worth of person, importance of human relationships, integrity, and competence are all relevant values from the Code of Ethics for working with Immigrants.

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Preamble

The primary mission of the social work profession is to enhance human well-being and help meet the basic human needs of all people, with particular attention to the needs and empowerment of people who are vulnerable, oppressed, and living in poverty. A historic and defining feature of social work is the profession's dual focus on individual well-being in a social context and the well-being of society. Fundamental to social work is attention to the environmental forces that create, contribute to, and address problems in living.

Social workers promote social justice and social change with and on behalf of clients. "Clients" is used inclusively to refer to individuals, families, groups, organizations, and communities. Social workers are sensitive to cultural and ethnic diversity and strive to end discrimination, oppression, poverty, and other forms of social injustice. These activities may be in the form of direct practice, community organizing, supervision, consultation, administration, advocacy, social and political action, policy development and implementation, education, and research and evaluation. Social workers seek to enhance the capacity of people to address their own needs. Social workers also seek to promote the responsiveness of organizations, communities, and other social institutions to individuals' needs and social problems.

The mission of the social work profession is rooted in a set of core values. These core values, embraced by social workers throughout the profession's history, are the foundation of social work's unique purpose and perspective:

service

social justice

dignity and worth of the person

importance of human relationships

integrity

competence.

This constellation of core values reflects what is unique to the social work profession. Core values, and the principles that flow from them, must be balanced within the context and complexity of the human experience.

Purpose of the NASW Code of Ethics

Professional ethics are at the core of social work. The profession has an obligation to articulate its basic values, ethical principles, and ethical standards. The NASW Code of Ethics sets forth these values, principles, and standards to guide social workers' conduct. The Code is relevant to all social workers and social work students, regardless of their professional functions, the settings in which they work, or the populations they serve.

The NASW Code of Ethics serves six purposes:

1. The Code identifies core values on which social work's mission is based.

2. The Code summarizes broad ethical principles that reflect the profession's core values and establishes a set of specific ethical standards that should be used to guide social work practice.

3. The Code is designed to help social workers identify relevant considerations when professional obligations conflict or ethical uncertainties arise.

4. The Code provides ethical standards to which the general public can hold the social work profession accountable.

5. The Code socializes practitioners new to the field to social work's mission, values, ethical principles, and ethical standards, and encourages all social workers to engage in self-care, ongoing education, and other activities to ensure their commitment to those same core features of the profession.

6. The Code articulates standards that the social work profession itself can use to assess whether social workers have engaged in unethical conduct. NASW has formal procedures to adjudicate ethics complaints filed against its members.* In subscribing to this Code, social workers are required to cooperate in its implementation, participate in NASW adjudication proceedings, and abide by any NASW disciplinary rulings or sanctions based on it.

The Code offers a set of values, principles, and standards to guide decision making and conduct when ethical issues arise. It does not provide a set of rules that prescribe how social workers should act in all situations. Specific applications of the Code must take into account the context in which it is being considered and the possibility of conflicts among the Code's values, principles, and standards. Ethical responsibilities flow from all human relationships, from the personal and familial to the social and professional.

* For information on the NASW Professional Review Process, see NASW Procedures for Professional Review.

Furthermore, the NASW Code of Ethics does not specify which values, principles, and standards are most important and ought to outweigh others in instances when they conflict. Reasonable differences of opinion can and do exist among social workers with respect to the ways in which values, ethical principles, and ethical standards should be rank ordered when they conflict. Ethical decision making in a given situation must apply the informed judgment of the individual social worker and should also consider how the issues would be judged in a peer review process where the ethical standards of the profession would be applied.

Ethical decision making is a process. In situations when conflicting obligations arise, social workers may be faced with complex ethical dilemmas that have no simple answers. Social workers should take into consideration all the values, principles, and standards in this Code that are relevant to any situation in which ethical judgment is warranted. Social workers' decisions and actions should be consistent with the spirit as well as the letter of this Code.

In addition to this Code, there are many other sources of information about ethical thinking that may be useful. Social workers should consider ethical theory and principles generally, social work theory and research, laws, regulations, agency policies, and other relevant codes of ethics, recognizing that among codes of ethics social workers should consider the NASW Code of Ethics as their primary source. Social workers also should be aware of the impact on ethical decision making of their clients' and their own personal values and cultural and religious beliefs and practices. They should be aware of any conflicts between personal and professional values and deal with them responsibly. For additional guidance social workers should consult the relevant literature on professional ethics and ethical decision making and seek appropriate consultation when faced with ethical dilemmas. This may involve consultation with an agency-based or social work organization's ethics committee, a regulatory body, knowledgeable colleagues, supervisors, or legal counsel.

Instances may arise when social workers' ethical obligations conflict with agency policies or relevant laws or regulations. When such conflicts occur, social workers must make a responsible effort to resolve the conflict in a manner that is consistent with the values, principles, and standards expressed in this Code. If a reasonable resolution of the conflict does not appear possible, social workers should seek proper consultation before making a decision. The NASW Code of Ethics is to be used by NASW and by individuals, agencies, organizations, and bodies (such as licensing and regulatory boards, professional liability insurance providers, courts of law, agency boards of directors, government agencies, and other professional groups) that choose to adopt it or use it as a frame of reference. Violation of standards in this Code does not automatically imply legal liability or violation of the law.

Such determination can only be made in the context of legal and judicial proceedings. Alleged violations of the Code would be subject to a peer review process. Such processes are generally separate from legal or administrative procedures and insulated from legal review or proceedings to allow the profession to counsel and discipline its own members.

A code of ethics cannot guarantee ethical behavior. Moreover, a code of ethics cannot resolve all ethical issues or disputes or capture the richness and complexity involved in striving to make responsible choices within a moral community. Rather, a code of ethics sets forth values, ethical principles, and ethical standards to which professionals aspire and by which their actions can be judged. Social workers' ethical behavior should result from their personal commitment to engage in ethical practice. The NASW Code of Ethics reflects the commitment of all social workers to uphold the profession's values and to act ethically. Principles and standards must be applied by individuals of good character who discern moral questions and, in good faith, seek to make reliable ethical judgments.

With growth in the use of communication technology in various aspects of social work practice, social workers need to be aware of the unique challenges that may arise in relation to the maintenance of confidentiality, informed consent, professional boundaries, professional competence, record keeping, and other ethical considerations. In general, all ethical standards in this Code of Ethics are applicable to interactions, relationships, or communications, whether they occur in person or with the use of technology. For the purposes of this Code, "technology-assisted social work services" include any social work services that involve the use of computers, mobile or landline telephones, tablets, video technology, or other electronic or digital technologies; this includes the use of various electronic or digital platforms, such as the Internet, online social media, chat rooms, text messaging, e-mail and emerging digital applications. Technology-assisted social work services encompass all aspects of social work practice, including psychotherapy; individual, family, or group counseling; community organization; administration; advocacy; mediation; education; supervision; research; evaluation; and other social work services. Social workers should keep apprised of emerging technological developments that may be used in social work practice and how various ethical standards apply to them.

Professional self-care is paramount for competent and ethical social work practice. Professional demands, challenging workplace climates, and exposure to trauma warrant that social workers maintain personal and professional health, safety, and integrity. Social work organizations, agencies, and educational institutions are encouraged to promote organizational policies, practices, and materials to support social workers' self-care.

Ethical Principles

The following broad ethical principles are based on social work's core values of service, social justice, dignity and worth of the person, importance of human relationships, integrity, and competence. These principles set forth ideals to which all social workers should aspire.

Value: Service
Ethical Principle: Social workers' primary goal is to help people in need and to address social problems

Social workers elevate service to others above self-interest. Social workers draw on their knowledge, values, and skills to help people in need and to address social problems. Social workers are encouraged to volunteer some portion of their professional skills with no expectation of significant financial return (pro bono service).

Value: Social Justice
Ethical Principle:Social workers challenge social injustice.

Social workers pursue social change, particularly with and on behalf of vulnerable and oppressed individuals and groups of people. Social workers' social change efforts are focused primarily on issues of poverty, unemployment, discrimination, and other forms of social injustice. These activities seek to promote sensitivity to and knowledge about oppression and cultural and ethnic diversity. Social workers strive to ensure access to needed information, services, and resources; equality of opportunity; and meaningful participation in decision making for all people.

Value: Dignity and Worth of the Person
Ethical Principle: Social workers respect the inherent dignity and worth of the person.

Social workers treat each person in a caring and respectful fashion, mindful of individual differences and cultural and ethnic diversity. Social workers promote clients' socially responsible self-determination. Social workers seek to enhance clients' capacity and opportunity to change and to address their own needs. Social workers are cognizant of their dual responsibility to clients and to the broader society. They seek to resolve conflicts between clients' interests and the broader society's interests in a socially responsible manner consistent with the values, ethical principles, and ethical standards of the profession.

Value: Importance of Human Relationships
Ethical Principle: Social workers recognize the central importance of human relationships.

Social workers understand that relationships between and among people are an important vehicle for change. Social workers engage people as partners in the helping process. Social workers seek to strengthen relationships among people in a purposeful effort to promote, restore, maintain, and enhance the well-being of individuals, families, social groups, organizations, and communities.

Value: Integrity
Ethical Principle: Social workers behave in a trustworthy manner.

Social workers are continually aware of the profession's mission, values, ethical principles, and ethical standards and practice in a manner consistent with them. Social workers should take measures to care for themselves professionally and personally. Social workers act honestly and responsibly and promote ethical practices on the part of the organizations with which they are affiliated.

Value: Competence
Ethical Principle: Social workers practice within their areas of competence and develop and enhance their professional expertise.

Social workers continually strive to increase their professional knowledge and skills and to apply them in practice. Social workers should aspire to contribute to the knowledge base of the profession.

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Read the NASW Code of Ethics, which outlines the core values forming the foundation of social work’s unique purpose and perspective.

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Citizenship Test: Another barrier that makes coming to America more difficult for immigrants.

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Migrants from South America and Mexico outline in the article the extreme conditions they are trying to escape and the struggle of the journey to get to the U.S. borders.

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Getty Images photographer John Moore has spent years covering stories about immigration between Mexico and the United States-border enforcement, drug smuggling, undocumented workers, and more. Earlier this year, he traveled south to the Mexico-Guatemala border, where Central American immigrants cross the Suchiate River, beginning their long and perilous journey north through Mexico. He traveled with some of the thousands of immigrants who ride atop freight trains, known as "la bestia," or the Beast, toward the U.S. border. Riders on the Beast risk a great deal-robbery and assault by gangs who control the train tops, or the loss of life or limb in a fall. Only a fraction of the immigrants who start the journey in Central America will traverse Mexico completely unscathed-and all this before illegally entering the United States and facing the considerable U.S. border security apparatus designed to track, detain, and deport them. Moore has captured images not only of their difficult journey, but of the faces of these travelers, telling their stories through compelling portraits taken in shelters and jails along the way.

View this page Hints: full screen. Skip to the next and previous photo by typing j/k or ←/→.

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Getty Images photographer John Moore has spent years covering stories about immigration between Mexico and the United States-border enforcement, drug smuggling, undocumented workers, and more. Earlier this year, he traveled south to the Mexico-Guatemala border, where Central American immigrants cross the Suchiate River, beginning their long and perilous journey north through Mexico.

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Outline of Immigration in the United States

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Outline of Immigration in the United States

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Starting in 1776 all the way up until 2018, this outline takes a deeper look into the history of Immigration in the United States. Some key points include the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Immigration Act of 1891, the opening of Ellis Island, Effects of World War I and II, and Amnesty to Illegal Immigrants in 1986 just to highlight a few.

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U.S. Immigration Timeline: Definition & Reform - HISTORY

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A timeline of U.S. immigration shows how, from the 1600s to today, the United States became a nation of people from hundreds of cultures, languages and beliefs.

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Each of these current issues show the resilience and the strengths that immigrants have in order to overcome the many barriers that are thrown their way.

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Migrant Legal Aid: Our Roots Make Us Strong

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Migrant Legal Aid: Our Roots Make Us Strong

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This local organization aims to advocate for migrant workers here in West Michigan. They help them overcome many obstacles such as language barriers, poverty, and discrimination. They do community outreach and education. They advocate for legislation for migrant workers rights.

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Michigan Migrant Workers - Migrant Legal Aid

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Migrant, seasonal, and agricultural workers are vital to Michigan's community and economy. Our mission is to protect their legal rights.