The Napolitano Files: The opportunistic Immigration record of the new UC president

EAST BAY EXPRESS
By: Alice Bates
Published: January 22, 2014
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In her comprehensive article, Ashley Bates, with commentary from Justice Strategies' Director Judith Greene, escorts the reader on the wide circle that has brought former Homeland Security Secretary and now University of California President, Janet Napolitano, face-to-face with the real-life personal, academic and legal challenges of undocumented UC students; challenges brought about by the very policies and political atmosphere that she, in her former role as a high-ranking government official, helped to fashion, champion and vigorously enforce.

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287(g) is a tiny provision in federal immigration law that allows Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to take local police away from their mission of fighting crime, and pull them into the murky territory of targeting immigrants for arrest without suspicion of crime. ICE described the 287(g) program as a public safety measure to target “criminal illegal aliens,” but its largest impact has been on law-abiding immigrant communities. Rather than focusing on serious crime, police resources are spent targeting day-laborers, corn-vendors and people with broken tail-lights. This report details findings from a year-long investigation of 287(g) by Justice Strategies, and recommends that the ICE program be terminated.

People who live in immigrant communities say that 287(g) brings the problem of racial profiling to their neighborhoods. Our analysis shows that 61 percent of jurisdictions that have entered into 287(g) agreements have crime rates that are lower than the national average. Census data show that 87 percent, however, are undergoing an increase in their Latino populations higher than the national average. Read more »