Far fewer immigrants arrested by California law enforcement are being turned over to federal authorities for deportation since a new state law went into effect in January.
Until now, California has accounted for a third of deportations under U.S. Immigration and Custom Enforcement's Secure Communities program, which screens the fingerprints of arrestees for potential immigration violations.
Since sheriff's departments are responsible for most bookings, the AP surveyed those agencies in 23 counties responsible for most of California's deportations under the program.
Not all supplied data for the first two months of this year, but among the 15 that did, there was a 44 percent drop, from 2,984 people to 1,660. Those 15 counties included four of the five largest in the state — Los Angeles, San Diego, Riverside and San Bernardino. Orange County could not provide 2013 data because officials do not keep paperwork on this issue for more than a year.
http://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/ap-exclusive-california-immigration-holds-drop-23213130
But in the United States as a whole, it's a different story, according to a report in the New York Times:
With the Obama administration deporting illegal immigrants at a record pace, the president has said the government is going after “criminals, gang bangers, people who are hurting the community, not after students, not after folks who are here just because they’re trying to figure out how to feed their families.”
But a New York Times analysis of internal government records shows that since President Obama took office, two-thirds of the nearly two million deportation cases involve people who had committed minor infractions, including traffic violations, or had no criminal record at all. Twenty percent — or about 394,000 — of the cases involved people convicted of serious crimes, including drug-related offenses, the records show.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/07/us/more-deportations-follow-minor-crimes-data-shows.html
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