will of our work is done at the request of chairs or ranking members of committees of jurisdiction in congress, or our work can also be mandated by committee reports or public laws. our reports are available on our website which is gao.gov. and many of our reports contain recommendations to agencies that we are reviewing on changes or improvements that they can make to their programs. on the border security and immigration work in particular we have covered a range of topics. on the border security side we've looked at issues like goals and metrics for assessing border security efforts. with also done work looking at dhs' management and oversight of efforts to acquire and deploy surveillance technologies along the border. we've also done work looking at how to agencies that have some

responsibility for border security efforts coordinate and collaborate on their efforts. on the immigration side we've done work looking at various enforcement efforts including i.c.e. oversight of schools that admit foreign students. we've also done work looking at overstay enforcement issues. and on the immigration benefits side, we've done work looking at u.s. cis's processes and systems for adjudicating immigration benefits and we've also done some work looking at employment verification issues. i just wanted to share those remarks by way of introduction give just to give you a flavor of who gao is as an agency and the range of work we've done on border security and immigration issues. for today's discussion i want to focus my remarks really are two or three key reports that relate to some of the issues and topics that are raised in mpi's report. the first report and going to spend most of my time discussing is a report that gao issued in

the summer of 2012 on the security communities program. in the report we present some data and trends on removals of aliens identified by the secure communities program which i think are related to some offed trends and data that mark just discussed in mpi's report. so i will spend the bulk of my time talking about that report. i will spend a little less time talking about a report that gao issued in 2011 looking at data and statistics on criminal aliens who are incarcerated in federal, state and local prisons. i think that data is relevant just to give you kind of a sense of what were some of the trends and gate to that we saw in that population of aliens. so those are the two key reports that i will focus on, and so let me turn first to our work on the secure communities program. as you are all probably aware, the secure communities program is one of i.c.e.'s programs for identifying potentially

removable aliens who are arrested by state or local law enforcement agencies. under the program when an individual is arrested by the state or local enforcement agency, the individuals think of fingerprints are taken and automatically checked against fingerprint data bases to include dhs's fingerprint system. if there's a match i.c.e. conducts additional checks and determines whether not to request the law enforcement agency hold the individual so that i.c.e. can take custody for further enforcement action. as i get into my remarks now on some of the trends and data i will present i just want to provide one or two definitions for some terms and concepts. for our report a criminal alien is a noncitizen in the united states who may be present on a lawful basis or not who's been convicted of a crime. it's important to note a criminal alien lawfully in the u.s. may be removable depending on the nature of the particular offense for which the alien was

convicted. i'm going to talk about a couple of sets of data that we present in our report. the first set of data i want to talk about is trends that we looked at in terms of i.c.e.'s enforcement actions under the security communities program. and we look at removal of aliens identified by the secure communities program relative to all i. c.e. removals during the time period of our study. what we found was the secure communities program can afford increase in all i.c.e. removals during the period that we looked at which was fiscal year 2009 through the first six months of fiscal year 2012. so we found, for example, that secure communities was responsible for identifying about 20% of the approximately 400,000 aliens that i.c.e. removed in fiscal year 2011 up from approximately 4% of the aliens that i.c.e. removed in

fiscal 2009. we also looked at some data on the security communities program in terms of the type of offense that aliens were identified by the program had. what we found was that majority of aliens who were removed and identified by the secure communities program had been convicted of a criminal offense. again during the time period that we are looking at, which is october 2008 through march 2012, about 74% of aliens removed and identified by the securities program had been convicted of a criminal offense. that is either the offense that led to their identification under security communities, or they had a record of a conviction for a previous offense. 21% of aliens removed did not have a criminal conviction known to i.c.e. prior to their removal but were identified as one of i.c.e.'s other removal priorities such as aliens who are fugitives or

who re-entered the u.s. illegally after re-entry. excuse me after removal. the remaining 5% also did not have a known criminal conviction prior to the removal but they were nonetheless removable because they entered the country without inspection, or they had violated their terms of admission. to further break down these data, we found that 27% of the aliens who were removed by i.c.e. after being identified by secure communities were convicted of level one offenses, 17% were convicted of level two offenses. and 30% were convicted of level three offenses. so level one includes aliens convicted of aggravated felonies or basically to a more -- two or more felonies. level two includes aliens convicted of any felony, or three or more what are generally referred to as misdemeanors. and level three includes aliens who were convicted of offenses punishable by less than one year. so in addition to those data,

the 26% of aliens who were removed by i.c.e. after being identified by the security communities program that had no confirmed criminal convictions, 18% were prior removals or returns, 5% entries without inspection, or they were visa violators and the other 3% were i.c.e. fugitives. that just gives you some sense of the data and trends that we saw looking specifically at removals under the secure communities program during the time frame that we studied. in addition, we also looked at the variation across fiscal years in the proportion of aliens removed according to the criminal level under the secure communities program. so, for example, we found that there was a decrease in the proportion of convicted level three offenders removed from about 40% of total removals in fiscal year 2009, the 26% during the first half of fiscal year

2012. we also found there was some change among level two offenders as well. and part of the -- what i.c.e. attributed to those changes were that i.c.e. had continued to prioritize its resources to focus on the identification and removal of aliens convicted of felonies. and also that i.c.e. did have some redefinition of its criminal defense levels between fiscal year 2010 and 2011. so in closing of this report, we did not make any recommendations to dhs having to do with the data or trends that we reported. but we did make recommendations to the department related to how is managing its contracting process for updating or modernizing its systems use as part of the secure communities program and we also made recommendations related to dhs developing a workforce plan related to using resources under the program.

and dhs concurred with those recommendations and is acting on them. so let me now briefly turn to a report we issued in 2011 on criminal alien statistics. these data were last updated through fiscal year 2010, but i think they provide some useful information for the discussion today on the numbers of incarcerated criminal aliens and the types of offenses for which they were arrested or convicted. so let me get into some of the trends that are identified in our report. first, we found the number of criminal aliens incarcerated in federal prison increased about 7% from 51,000 in fiscal year 2005 to about 55,000 in fiscal year 2010. and for context, the criminal indian population as a total of the federal, total federal inmate population, has remained relatively constant since 2001 at about 25-27%.

we also used as part of our study a random sample of 1000 criminal aliens, and made some estimates based on that sample. and so, for example, we estimated the criminal aliens had an average of seven arrests, about 65% were arrested at least once. for an immigration offense and about 50% were arrested at least once for a drug offense. immigration, drugs, and traffic violations accounted for about half of arrest offenses, and about 90% of the criminal aliens sentenced in federal court in fiscal year 2009 were convicted of immigration and/or drug related offenses. so there's more data in that report should anybody be interested. i won't get into all of the data now for the sake of time, but that report is available on our website. the last report, very quickly if i can, doris, just call your

attention to but i won't make remarks on today is in 2012, gao issued a report looking at data on border patrol enforcement efforts specifically along the border while our data did not include removals, which are part of mpi's report that's being released today, we did look at other data on border patrol enforcement efforts, including data on illegal entries, apprehensions, recidivist rates and so on. and so i would commend that report to you as well should you have any interest in some of the other, or some different data on border patrol enforcement efforts along the southwest border. so again, thank you, doris and mark, for inviting me. >> okay, thank you very much for that rebecca. i hope everybody had their coffee this morning because i know we are giving you a barrage of numbers. but we decided we would make this be a research panel because there really is a lot of

information that is pertinent to an issue that is very important in the public policy discussion. we're going to continue on that, on that trajectory with marc although his work takes a slightly different angle of vision. so marc, let me turn the microphone over to you now. >> thanks, doris, and thanks also to mark and to randy capps as well for bringing me here today. i worked as an enforcement fellow at the american immigration council. we're a nonpartisan organization whose mission is to shape a more rational immigration policy. and as part of the work, i do work on deportation and detention. i'd like to do three things in my brief time. one is to emphasize the importance of this paper and mpi's work over the last couple of years in helping to understand modern u.s. immigration enforcement. secondly, given this data that's been put out to look into the future and forecast some of the

coming debates policy around legislative and third to briefly describe a paper an immigration detention that mpi has asked me and my co-author robert kohlish at the university of maryland to write which complements their work on deportation. so first, this is a very valuable paper and it's part of a series of valuable papers that mpi has done over the last couple of years that examine the enforcement system that congress has funded, and particularly in this paper, dhs prioritization of that funding. under different administrations. but it's worth noting the key driver here is congressional funding. as mpi's 2013 report which doors doris and others put out the u.s. spends more on immigration enforcement than all other law enforcement agencies combined. that's $18 billion to cbp and

i.c.e. in fiscal year 2014. so this administration has been trying to walk a tight rope in between choosing between tough and humane enforcement, as mark said at an earlier paper this year. but at these funding levels in any administration would have to walk a tight rope in choosing between those sometimes competing goals. so let me summarize a little bit about what this data in this paper tells us about the policy. first, one of the important things that mark's paper brings out is how the obama administration has shifted its priorities to border enforcement. from interior enforcement. and moreover, from this data how they're very different systems and processes they use and the individuals involved. at the border the processes are generally nonjudicial removals out of court. at the interior they are generally in-court removals.

at the border, removals are rising. they're generally of noncriminals or of criminals only for immigration crimes. most are apprehended soon after entry. at the interior there's a shrinking share of removals. they are mostly of individuals with criminal convictions. they are mostly apprehended after some time in the united states. over one year. that said, both border and interior enforcement involve difficult policy choices, and some inevitable human impact. at the border you may have border crossers that are returning to join family, particularly reflected in the reinstatements of a prior removal order. you may have asylum seekers that are seeking to join families, particularly this year we've seen that from central america. and they are processed generally to expedite removal. so border enforcement still has impact inside the border. and removal through the summary out-of-court processes has attracted criticism for due

process concerns. my organization, the council has been one of the organizations that has raised those issues. secondly, in the interior, most have criminal convictions. the majority are not serious convictions. it is a higher percentage than it is at the border but it is not a majority. moreover, many have deep u.s. ties. and even more so today than a decade ago. the pew hispanic trust is put at information this year that shows that of the 11 million unauthorized the median time they've spent in the country is now 13 years. only 15% have been here less than five years. 38%, 4 million about, live with u.s. citizen children. so even with the shifting of these priorities to effectuate a more humane enforcement policy, there is inevitable human impact. now, these priorities are not new.

and as mark sets out, dhs along with the legacy i.n.s. has always focused on these priorities. in the 2011 morton memo priorities are in many ways a logical extension of the priorities that commissioner meissner effect outed in her time at the i.n.s. but one possibility that is raised by this data is that with such high funding levels, it may be getting harder practically to have such robust enforcement without raising difficult choices. without deporting the harder cases, for lack of a better word. and notably as well among these priorities, the least of the priorities is increasingly occupying more of dhs' resources. let me explain what i mean by that. john morton's memo prioritized

public safety threats as number one, understoonbly. and within that he prioritize serious violent over minor criminals. but as this paper shows most convicted of crimes often not violent, or not serious criminals. an increasing percentage are immigration convictions. secondly the morton memo prioritized immigration of obstructionists, and within that he prioritized public safety threats as well as those with a prior deportation order. but we are seeing increasing numbers of reinstatement. and so as a dhs make serious efforts to effectuate these priorities and within them the highest other priorities. in practice they are increasingly deporting the least of the worst, so to speak. so these priorities will inevitably have human impact and inevitably draw public scrutiny. now that said, i think these priorities are likely to remain through the obama administration

and very likely into the next, particularly because it's getting harder for i.c.e. to accomplish interior removals for two main reasons. one is the impact of the immigration courts being underfunded. these enforcement funding increases have not been accompanied by commensurate court funding increases. so there are record-breaking court backlog. average case now takes over a year and a half to be processed in immigration court. for removal numbers to stay steady year over year, if that was the goal, it would be almost practically impossible to do that without accomplishing more removals out of court. simply because they are quicker. through nonjudicial removals it's possible to apprehend someone in fy-14 and remove them in fy-14. in a way that that is not very likely in court. secondly, the impact of local noncompliance with i.c.e. enforcement is making it much harder for i.c.e. to accomplish

interior removal in the same way. cities, counties and states across the nation are adopting noncompliance policy. rather remarkably. many are refusing to now turn over any person with a criminal charge to i.c.e. not even minor criminals, any criminal charge. this is now 250 counties across the u.s. i.c.e. could respond to this by conducting raids in the same localities that have expressed this noncompliance. that might engender further opposition to the logical process. so for those reasons it's likely that the state of affairs mark describes will remain over the next couple of years with enforcement shifted to the border. with the major exception of, depending on if the administration chooses to provide some affirmative administered relief this fall which remains to be seen.

so the further questions looking forward, one may be is congress getting what it wants as it funds enforcement and just dhs prioritizes its allocation of that funding? or put another way, as the picture becomes more clear through reports such as mark's today, and mpis work over the last couple of years, will the american public agree with the political branches decisions? congress and the executive branch? after these two decades since 1996, very robust enforcement at high funding levels it's becoming harder for dhs to draw a bright line between removing those with the least claims to stay in the united states, legal, equitable or moral, and exercising discretion over the most. as mark says in the report, dhs lacks the capacity to precisely fine-tune enforcement. but any law enforcement agency of this size would lack that capacity. as we look ahead, there's an

unavoidable impact on those inside the border. the enforcement net remains wide and in some cases becomes wider. but we have an unauthorized population with deeper ties. we have studies, academic studies that are showing programs such as secure communities have little impact on u.s. crime. albeit impact on lawful migration but little impact on u.s. crime. and we're seeing little local opposition to increased enforcement. so one of the questions is, is that if congressional funding remains constant at these levels, i think one is are there any policy choices that this administration or future one could make without impacting residents inside the united states? many have a vote. or another way of putting it is that the flashpoint going forward for change may be congress. the administration's decision to shift enforcement to the border may deflect some of that

political criticism, but perhaps not all of it. and more broadly still, one of the questions is as we look forward, with the political dynamics of immigration enforcement change as the political dynamics surrounding criminal justice have changed over the last years? for decades we have had a political consensus that has supported tough on crime policies. recently that has changed. in a bipartisan way. we have senator cory booker and senator rand paul introducing bills on sentencing reform. we have a bipartisan house judiciary task force on over criminalization chaired by representative sensenbrenner. now in the immigration realm there has not been the same sustained widespread opposition to harsh consequences for noncitizen minor criminals as there has been in the criminal justice world. but we see around the country that jurisdictions many with high immigrant populations are starting to evaluate the

trade-offs of expand immigration enforcement and starting to register opposition through the political process. now, i think one question is whether that local opposition will register at the federal level, and particularly in the appropriations process which may be fundamentally the main driver of the policies that this data describes. and again shifting resources to the border where enforcement is less visible in communities may deflect some of that criticism. it may not be that the same political opposition emerging at the local level in certain cities rises up to the federal level of communities registering their opposition in the appropriations process but that maybe where the flash point is. last i thought i would mention a couple of words about detention that mpi has asked me to write.

edding this is with robert kohlish who is a political scientist at the university of maryland and director of their law and society program. it complements mpi's work on deportation with data on detention, which is a substantial part of i.c.e.'s interior budget, $2 billion and it provides similarly granular data that allows us to evaluate i.c.e.'s choices regarding detention. we gained this information through freedom of information act responses regarding i.c.e.'s new risk assessment tool. this is a computerized tool that evaluates flight and public safety risk and issues a recommendation whether to detain or not. i.c.e. began using it in 2013, we have several hundred samples from baltimore. so using this data we can evaluate who i.c.e. decides to detain or not in greater detail. we can see i.c.e.'s recommendations as to flight risk and public safety. we can see collective criminal history and in really groundbreaking fashion we can

see personal history. this data records family ties whether someone has a u.s. citizen spouse or child. whether someone has a stable address. whether someone has work authorization. it allows us to provide greater detail to tell some of the stories and even further detail i think and complement what mark has done. for example, of those with criminal convictions, are they more stable in fact? even if they might have lesser claim to stay in the united states because they committed a crime during their time here. do they have a greater claim in another sense because they have long-standing family? and it will tell us also something about the utility of mandatory detention laws because it will give us i.c.e.'s own evaluation of the risk of people it arrests even though subject to mandatory detention. with that i'd like to think doris and mark and randy again for having me here and hand it

back to doris. >> okay. thanks very much, mark. that was not purposeful but still somewhat of a teaser for things to come. so we'll be continuing of course to be working on these kinds of issues and this work that marc is doing should be particularly interesting as another follow-up. we turn to q&a now, and i'm going to, since we're streaming, and recording i want to be sure that you wait until the mike comes to you. but when it does come to you, please give us your name and affiliation, and then answer your question -- ask your question. so i'm ready for hands. over here. [ inaudible ] >> mark some of the slides that you put up did not appear to be in the report itself and i'm just wondering if those will all be available, for example on

mpi's website for reference purposes? and the other question that i have basically is, is there any way of knowing in terms of immigration offenses for deportation how many of those involve such things as alien smuggling as opposed to simply being in violation of the immigration law? >> i think we will post the powerpoint on the website so yes to your first question. the short answer to your second question is also yes. that data is in, i mean, that level of detail is in my data set. i don't have exact numbers in my head, but i can tell you that the overwhelming majority of immigration crimes are of illegal entry and illegal re-entry. i can't remember if that's on the order of 85%, 90%, 95%, but it's somewhere in that range. are illegal entry, illegal re-entry. and the other -- you know the

other crimes that are included in the immigration crime category are document fraud and there's a smuggling offense in there. an alien smuggling offense in there. but the great majority of them are entry and re-entry. crossing the border. being apprehended while crossing the border. >> i saw a hand in the back. yes. >> i am from the south east asia research action center, serac. the majority of people deported in serac's communities are originally refugees, cambodia, laos and vietnam and are green card holders. usually who get in trouble with the law when they're teenagers or young adults. i'm wondering in any of the data sets that you're looking at including from this foia request, can you look at the impact of these -- this enforcement regime on green card holders, maybe even those who originally entered as refugees? and in general, longtime

residents with legal status. >> so, we would not be able to see if they entered as refugees or not. we do have a field in the data that is a self-reported green card holder. i.c.e. asks people, you know, what's your status, and if people answer they have a green card, that's how it gets recorded. so, you know, it's not confirmed but we wouldn't expect that that number is going to be underreported. you would expect perhaps it's overreported, not underreported. and we found surprisingly few green card holders in the data set. i mean, it was on the order of around 5,000 a year out of, you know, around 300,000 or 400,000 removals a year. again, i apologize i don't have all the exact numbers in my head. but, you know, i'm happy to follow up with both of you all and give you exact percentages. it was a surprisingly -- i was expecting to find a little bit bigger number than we found.

and legally the reason that green card holders would be deportable is if they've committed a removable offense. and we did find that the people identified as green card holders have been, it was a very high correlation that they had been convicted of crimes that looked like they would have been removable offenses. so we didn't find -- in the data we didn't find evidence of green card holders being deported without being convicted of a crime. >> up here. any addition to that? >> sure. so in our detention data set there's not a checkbox that mentions whether they were refugees. there is an assessment of special vulnerabilities, whether they're at risk of persecution. and there is not a checkbox for lpr status in that risk assessment, whether they should be is another question but there is not. there is a checkbox for work authorization, which may be related, although not exactly the same as green card status.

>> okay. other hands? in the front. >> thank you. in connection with the interior goals, and probably for both of you. one of the things you have looked at recent numbers and there's been an increase, surprising increase of removals of nationals from caribbean countries, jamaica, haiti, dominican republic, and on and on. if there is any specific reason for that? the other thing is i wonder if you have been able to correlate i.c.e. detainers with the trends with removals, and that's why part of the world you're doing right now, also? >> i didn't notice that trend. it's something we could look at. it's not something that jumped out at me in looking and spending a lot of time looking at these data.

but it could certainly be there. you know, what comes out clearly in our data is within the interior that people convicted of a crime are a rising share of those interior removals. so i don't know if that could've been part of the driver. i didn't really find another interior trend that was obvious to me. and we unfortunately don't have detainer data in our data set but that is something we would be interested in looking at. let me just say one other thing, and you know, the i.c.e. eid data set in one of the other things were frustrated by in this data set -- >> what's eid? >> enforcement integrated data base, the main i.c.e. removal database isn't designed to really track exactly how people flow into the system. so there's an arrest program

listed, but a lot of those arrests are by the criminal alien program which is the biggest part of i.c.e.'s removal operation. and you can't see whether somebody came into the system because they were identified through secure communities or whether they were identified through one of cap's prison-based screening programs where they screen people you know post-sentencing while they're incarcerated. or whether it's a cap team, you know, because cap has task forces also. so you can't, the data don't give you clear information about sort of, that level of detail about including for example, whether a detainer was issued. >> at the american immigration council we're doing some research now that actually gets at some of those questions mark answered, by which program

someone came into the system whether it is caps or secure communities and that's something we're looking to do in the next several months. >> besides those causes that you think is attributed to whether putting priority, did you identify any triggers probably in the past or any patterns in which we could start identifying some of the -- of these cases? and i was also going to ask you in regard to the border removals, are they also proportional to immigration patterns? is there anything we can identify five years ago that could be useful to understand now? >> i'm glad you asked that second question because reminds me of something i supposed to

add to my comments and i forgot to, which is that the border removals are not predicted by apprehensions. what i mean is that during the period that border removals have increased, apprehensions have been falling. the border patrol and dhs have had purposeful policy of placing a higher share of apprehensions in formal removal. this is something we talked a lot about in our april report, but border removals are going up while border apprehensions are going down. what's driving that is an increasing share of apprehensions are being formally removed, rather than permitted to voluntarily return as they have been in the past. so historically most people apprehended at the border are put on the bus or put on the plane and sent home with sort of no additional consequences. there's been a systematic effort to instead increasingly formally remove people which makes them ineligible for a visa to come back. in many cases to charge them with illegal entry or illegal

re-entry which makes them convicted of a u.s. crime and potentially subject to jail time in the u.s. so that's been a, you know, an enforcement strategy and that's really been the biggest driver of increased removals at the border. despite falling apprehension numbers. in the interior, you know, we know that most people apprehended in the interior are identified through one of the criminal justice related programs either through 287g or secure committees or other criminal alien program. the effort of the i.c.e. field offices is to sort of prioritize and people have been convicted of a crime. but also people who have previously been deported into a lesser extent people who can't document, you know, how long they've been in the u.s. those are -- those are going to be the priorities. overall, we know that the

unauthorized population in the u.s. has fallen by about 1 million since 2007. so the available pool of unauthorized immigrants is going down, which may be part of what's driving the interior numbers down. but the number of people passing through i.c.e.'s filter is going up because of the universal implementation of the security communities. so i.c.e. has access to a larger and larger potential enforcement pool and they're using it fairly selectively, particularly in the last couple of years. is what the data show. >> over here. >> thank you. matt graham from the bipartisan policy center. i've looked at similar data, maybe the same data set and one

thing that struck me is that starting in fiscal 2007, there are substantial number of returns in the data. i think the code is voluntary return witness. on the order of 10%, sometimes more of the removals. so i was wondering, did you all examine or notice this, and if so, what do you make of it? >> so i think i saw you sneak in late, and what i said before you got here is we exclude all those returns from our analysis. mostly in order to be able to look at a consistent trend. so we only focused on the removals. the reason that returns appear in the data set in 2007 is that prior to 2007 returns were not counted among the i.c.e. removals. i mean, it's not they they start increasing in 2007. it's that they were zero before 2007 and they represent about 10% of all i.c.e. deportations

after 2007. that was an accounting rule that decision was made at the end of the bush administration to begin counting those witness returned as i.c.e. removals. so that's been a source of confusion and, you know, among some of the people looking at the data. the only cases that are included in i.c.e.'s data set are as you said, the witness returned. so if they give somebody a voluntary return and can't confirm that that person actually departed, they don't get counted. but we decided to only focus on the removals. and i did look a little bit at the returns. the returns as you would expect are less likely to have been convicted of a crime. that's the main thing i can do about the returns is that -- i mean, they appear to be, you know, consistent with i.c.e.'s discretion rules. that they appear to be the lower

priority cases. as you said it's about 10% of the cases, so we were more interested in having the trend over time than complicating the analysis. >> anymore than it already is. >> yeah. >> right there. >> hi. i'm wondering if the data that you have at your disposal, does it have details on where they come from, which particular region in the country? and whether the analysis takes into account the concentration of people coming from a particular part of the country, and how then the information is relayed back to the region back to those countries. thank you. >> we have data about where people came from, what country they came from but only at the

national level, not you know, we have their citizenship and birth countries, and we have data on the port of exit, where they were deported through. but we don't have data on where they were apprehended, other than by, you know, by program, by cdp versus i.c.e. or more detailed data about where they came from. but something we would be very interested in is being able to disaggregate within the u.s. about where people are being apprehended. but obviously dhs has that data but we don't have the data. >> i take it your question is where they originated, which state in mexico, which region in guatemala? is that what you're getting at? >> within mexico or guatemala there might be certain poorer regions. and if that's the case, how is the dialogue between -- it's not just sending them and hoping that the problem will be

resolved. the problem is not going to be -- so is there a two-way dialogue at the political level to say these are people coming from a specific coastal area or down by where there are drugs or whatever, what sort of policies can you put in place to contain? >> i can tell you that, you know, with respect to mexico, most people are repatriated to the closest port of entry. there is a program. there used to be a program called the mexico interior repatriation program. the new program is called the interior repatriation initiative, the iri, which does involve bipartisan, by national coordination through which certain mexicans are deported by air back to mexico city and then by bus back to their hometown. it's a pretty small share of total removal.

i don't member exactly how many the iri has managed. do any of you all know? its small. it's in the few thousands, tens of thousands. [ inaudible ] >> that has a program where we find job opportunities for people that are being repatriated in mexico. we have statistics of the cities that they're going to. and, of course, those troubled areas are where most of the people are going through. we would be more than happy to post something about it on our website. i will try to make sure it is up by tomorrow. i will by monday. >> can i add one thing to the previous point that mark was making about sort of where aliens who are identified for removal are removed from? in our report, and again is just focused on the secure communities program which is a smaller population, but we actually include a map that shows data by state on the

arrest locations of aliens who were identified for removal to the secure communities program for the time period we studied so if anybody's interested in the data on state-by-state basis, again just as relates to secure communities we do include some of the information in our report as well. i just wanted to add that. >> okay, thanks. others? in the front. >> i am from safe foundation. a couple of questions. one is the term reinstatement, and if you could explain that, what is. and second one is, those mentioned that there are some counties which refuse to cooperate with, i don't know, nowadays they don't use the term i.n.s., so i.c.e., and what the reasons could be. and third, you didn't focus on the prison conditions with how

these i78 grant populations were held by i.c.e. and what was the reason for that. >> so i'll try to answer those and then if others want to also add their answers. so a reinstatement is a noncitizen who has been previously formally removed, who's been subject to a removal order because a judge ordered them removed or because they were apprehended at the border and formally removed. if they're subsequently apprehended again within the united states, then dhs can reinstate the removal order, turn it back on and formally remove them again without any opportunity to appear before a judge, or to petition for relief to make a case that they've got equities that would allow them to stay in the united states. in terms of why some communities are opting out of secure communities, this has been sort of a long story. when secure communities was

first rolled out, it was presented as a voluntary program that i.c.e. negotiated agreements with states to include them in it. later, i.c.e. decided that they didn't need to have an agreement from the localities because the heart of secure communities is communication between i.c.e. and, between dhs and the department of justice to share federal information, and then when dhs determines that a removable immigrant has been arrested, the local i.c.e. field office can request that the arresting agency hold the person for i.c.e. to pick them up. some communities don't want to participate in that because, i guess there are two main reasons. one reason is there are concerns they don't get reimbursed to hold people, so there's fiscal, you know, it costs money for local jurisdictions to hold people for i.c.e. but i think the more fundamental reason is

that there are concerns that the program is being used to hold and to deport people who aren't public safety risks. and so this has an impact on the local immigrant communities. it strains relations between immigrant communities and local laws forced the agencies. so law enforcement agencies that want to do community policing have a hard time, you know, maintaining good relationships with immigrant communities, if they are deporting members of those communities who may not be viewed as a priority. so i think those are sort of the two main concerns is the cost effects and the impact on communities, and concerns that the program is not fine-tuned to only focus on high priority cases. and then -- i don't know, do others want to add? and i can say something about detention, also. do others want to say anything about? >> i would just say that your question regarding sort of

detention conconditions. gao has issued two reports related to immigration detention standards issue. week issued a report last looking at how i.c.e. addresses sexual abuse and assault in immigration detention facilities. and last week we issued a report looking at how i.c.e. manages detention facility costs and standards. and so those reports are available on our website. i'm happy to discuss findings if anyone has any questions, but we have done some work looking at issues related to standard in immigration detention facilities. >> and we have a report on the detainer issue also at the american immigration council although i think mark summarized it very well. >> yes, here. >> hi, i'm brenda from the development bank. in terms of removal of mexicans, you've mentioned the iri, also

the repatriation through the closest port of entry, and there was also the aliens transfer program. i was wondering whether you've looked into recidivism rates, whether there is looked into reicidivism of thes three different ways of removing mexicans, thank you. >> so we don't do that in this report. that's something that cdp has been looking, you know, systematically at. so cdp through it's consequence delivery system tracks recidivism rates just along the border, not those who are apprehended in the u.s. and are able to describe recidivism for people who are voluntarily returned, people who are removed, or through a judge or reinstatement expedited removal

and also back when they had the interior repatriation right. and they have found, and also people who face acriminal charges, and generally, what they have found is that people who are formally removed have lower recidivism rates than people who are voluntarily returned, people who have current charges have lower recidivism rates of people who have -- i don't think they have published any of those data, but some of those data has been published in some of those other sources, i know there was a congressional research services report that came out in 2013 that i did when i worked at crs that have some of those data that cdp made available at the time. atap doesn't appear in the data to have -- doesn't appear to reduce recidivism rates, it's a little bit confusing to look at atep, because it's always

combined with some other removal strategy, but -- and also because the human costs of atep can be very high because people can be deported back to a community where they don't have a connection, so it's a controversial program. >> and so for the purposes of understanding, define atep. >> atep is the ailian transfer exit program. and that's a program, so normally mexican -- unauthorized mexicans or removal of mexicans are departed back to the closest port of entry. people and prehelpeded in arizona may be deported through texas or through arizona, and the emphasis -- typically people who are deported back to the closest port of entry may reconnect with the smuggler who helped them enter and just more generally may be able to attempt

re-entry more easily than somebody who is departed far away. it's an expensive program to second people to different parts of the country, and immigrant rights groups have argued, i think convincingly that it really creates difficult circumstances for people who may be deported to high crime communities, you know, and they may lose their documents and/or not have money when they arrive and so there's some real vulnerabilities that result from atep so it's a controversial program i think for that reason. >> joanne? >> thank you. i have two equestions, first one more mark rosen bloom, i just wanted to drill down a little bit more on the final paragraph in your executive summary that any proposed changes to the enforcement priorities would result in only moderate reductions in overall removals. would that make any difference if the president extended the

guidance to cdp? >> yeah, you know, and modest is -- so modest is not a very precise word, i think it's not hard to describe a scenario where you could see removals go down by 10 or 15% or maybe 20%, or some of the scenarios that we described. but, certainly you know, cdp has -- as we described in our last report, there's been a sea change in how cdp does enforcement, just over the last less than 10 years, from mostly voluntary returns to overwhelmingly formal removals. so if what you're talking about specifically is reducing formal remov removals. you could reduce that substantially if you decided we'll go back to ang era where you're going to violence tearily return most people. which you may or may not tie to

enforcement priorities, but having said that, the data do suggest that the great majority of people that cdp and prehengds, they apprehend within three days and especially between two weeks of entry. if people who are apprehended within two weeks of entry is a top priority, that's mostly what cdp does. >> and the second question is for mark, and when you were saying that congressional spending and appropriations is a primary driver of the deportation system and doris, i was wonderering if you could comment on that given your years as former ins commissioner, whether or not the actual, you know, high congressional appropriations really has made the exercise of prosecutorial discretion lucmuch more limited what this -- i want to push one

more premise, i want us to question whether a certain amount of congressional spending necessarily means that that has to be 400,000 removals per year, because that has certainly been the way the administration has -- at the same time internally we know that many are trying to push for qualitative remov removals, as opposed to k'wa quantitative removals. >> it's definitely a debate and it's definitely a discussion. both externally and i think within the executive branch. the -- you know, an executive -- any agency that gets money from congress has a certain degree of flexibility, in how that spending takes place, that is very, i mean you know as an agency when the congress is trying to give you money generally for carrying out a

mission and when it is very specifically targeted. and it's really -- you're at your peril when, with appropriators, having the discussions that go on between appropriators and administrators, an administrator acts differently from what the congress intends. now it is certainly true that the -- has intercepted the funding for deportation is quantitative, but also because that's been very clear that that's what the appropriate fors are asking for. so i don't think that -- i mean, i think that the executive branch has some and i.c.e. in particular here, has some interest in what you see in the numbers. last year the deportation numbers fell to 300,000, or

something like that. now they're back up to some 430,000, so there certainly is that degree of fluctuation which has not caused, you know, a huge problem for the executive branch, but at the same time, congress expects that money to be used for detention and deportation and administrators within i.c.e. and dhs probably have a little bit of moving room with that, but they would not in a wholesale fashion ignore what it is that's in that proem appropriations language, i think. so the funding is a very important driver. >> anybody want to make final comments? >> i was just going to get to that, are there any other final questions from the audience? okay, any final comments anybody would like to make? >> thank you, again. >> rebecca, how about you?

>> i wasn't queuing you because i didn't have enough to say. >> you've had enough air time? >> i have had enough air time. thank you all for coming, we somewhat apologize for the density of this information, but not truly because this is very important research and the numbers tell us a great deal and so we're thankful for your attention. i do want to turn -- i do want to make an announcement about a future event which is next tuesday, we have the annual immigration law and policy conference, which mpi does in collaboration with center for migration studies in new york and clinic as well as georgetown law centers. it's on tuesday at georgetown law center. we have a very, very substantive lineup of panels for this year, very, very good speakers, very,

very topical, so the subject is on your chairs, registration closes on friday, so we hope to see you all there next week, with that let me close this and invite people to come forward for any further conversation if you would like to carry on the dialogue, thank you very much. next on american history tv and prime time. a discussion of the history and -- one of the first african-american labor unions in the united states. then iowa state university professor talks about king george's war, which took place in the 1700 in north america between european and colonial powers. next on american history tv, a panel discussion on the history and legacy of the brotherhood of sleeping car porters, one of the first african-american labor unions in the united states.