Immigrant rights activists at the Federal Building in Manhattan 5 April 2014. Michael Fleshman/Flickr. Creative Commons.
The neologism ‘crimmigration’ crept into the vocabulary of activists and researchers in 2010, a year that saw widespread, migrant-led activism and civil disobedience against Arizona’s Senate Bill 1070. In the name of ensuring public safety, the bill encroached on immigration legislation that has long been the prerogative of the US federal government. The bill created crime categories at the state level that targeted undocumented migrants and authorised the enforcement of federal immigration law by local police. Two years later the US Supreme Court struck down several of these new categories of crime and certain police powers as unconstitutional. However, its decision let stand a key measure authorising local police to arrest and detain a person if they had reasonable grounds to suspect that the person was undocumented.
Cooperation among different levels of law enforcement on immigration matters long pre-dates SB 1070, and many federal incentives exist to bring local police departments and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), an agency created in 2003, closer together. The 287(g) delegated authority programme and the discontinued Secure Communities programme depended on local law enforcement to hand over “criminal aliens” to ICE. They could be legal permanent residents or undocumented migrants. Current immigration laws also permit ICE agents to identify non-citizens incarcerated for ‘aggravated felonies’ and then transfer them to immigration detention after they complete their sentence in order to be deported.
