years ago and say, you know, we really have to take a serious look at whether we can get rild of these things and if so how. a lot of people were taken up short by that. there was a theory that in the world of the blind, the one-eyed man is king, if somebody develops in their back garage a nuclear weapon and threatens a denuclearized world with it, will that be the end-all and be-all of danger? happily, we see conventional force playing some role in that. happi happily, we see the potential for some serious interest in moving in that direction. and it will be a challenge, obviously, if we can make any progress there, but we've made progress in other fields as well. a third and important issue or a fourth and important issue for us is perhaps also connected with the larger players. it's 2008 and 2009. the cluster of questions that runs from basically the failure

of our home mortgage system to report honestly on what it was that was being marketed as clusters of home mortgages all the way through to a macroeconomic crisis, potential failures in major banks, in some cases the failure, major involvement by the governments in stabilizing the economies and propping them up, a real crisis in europe, certainly great potential for a country like greece more or less to drop out of the world economy for a while, and significant challenges in how and in what way we institutionalize a little better. the operation of the world financial system and the world banking system, how we bring it in in a way that accords with some of the institutional attentions we have paid to trade and the regulation and indeed the international role played in evening up the trade picture, removing unfair practices and

seeking new ways to move. we are now challenging the world with two major trade agreements east and west. they can provide an important and i think very significant addition to multilateral trade arrangements, which have fallen on hard times. they're an important complement to the many bilateral trade agreements we have around the world. we are recovering. p re the rest of the world is not doing as well, particularly in europe. it's important, obviously, for world stability that we continue to move ahead, and it's important that we not produce once again the kind of behavior in the united states which helped to unhinge a great deal more of the world's economies than we ever anticipated. the next question that i think is important for us, it's been around for a long time, is countries on the path of

development and change. i call it poverty, growth, and development. i look at food, water, and health as major ways of dealing with a cluster of questions. i look at many issues that come out of this set of problems. not all economically determined but in many cases they are. everything from failed and failing states to crime and narcotics to migration, again, to effects on trade. a whole series of intimately related issues that have to do with how and in what way we continue to address the developing world and the issues that are there. it would be surprising tonight if i were never to mention ebola. it is clearly just an example in effect of how closely we are now linked many the world to even

the most disadvantaged states at the farthest remove and how much what happens there affects us in many ways. again, the crisis may have been overdramatized. we won't know until we see it received. again, it's required a particular determination on the part of people who are well trained and able to protect themselves. it's involved self-sacrifice in an enormous way. i spent two years in nigeria. nigeria, the spread was stopped by a wise doctor with two assistants who found the victim, went out and found all of those people the victim was associated with, the doctor did that at the expense of his life. it stopped it so far in nigeria, a country that is slightly better provided for than

liberia, sierra leone and guinea, but one that not necessarily is so and one that has the largest metropolises in africa, because you don't understand what that might have been. we do need constantly to think about how and in what way we deal with that part of the world, whether it is for reasons of the best sort of self-interest reasons of the best sort. they're remarkably combined in what we see out there now. and i think that no one has had an entirely successful foreign aid program, and i suppose the opposite is also true -- no foreign aid program has so colossally failed that it hasn't helped somebody. but we do need to think about it. we have jumped from pilar to post too often in my view, from focus on agriculture to a focus

on health to a focus on education. when the reality is that most countries need all of the help in all of the regions in whatever way they can. we have struggled with the issue of good governance and how important that is to make progress in dealing with that issue and how we cannot produce that. that has to come from the state itself, from their own people and from the leadership. and leadership has been very differential, and we see across the board serious problems. but we have no opportunity to re-create the colonial world. that's gone. and in many ways we have to operate in a situation where we have fully to respect not only leaders but publics while at the same time seek to work with them to persuade them that their future can be better and that we're in a position to help. i just talked some time ago

about energy, the environment, and climate change. i won't say a lot about that. i do think that, as we move ahead, climate change is a hugely befuddling and very challenging problem. it's one of the few problems now whose life span is a great deal longer than ours and therefore those who are comfortable and have reached advanced age but are still in charge of decisionmaking feel less imperative and less imperative about venturing large amounts of money to deal with something that they find very hard to detect. but we are seeing this gradually year by year, increasingly bringing difficult news to us. the best scientists tell us that indeed it's a real phenomenon an we have now seen a significant

disappearance of traditionally iced-over areas. the argument is of course that normal variations in climate are producing this, none of it is man made. those particular challenges are real. i believe in fact now it has gone on so far and so fast that we have to look at the mad-man possibilities and we have to deal with it. and i suppose you can say for those of us who have children and grandchildren and beyond we ought to look at it from their perspective as much as our own, and i hope we do. but it is a very difficult problem. we have done a pretty good job in part because we've learned how to get gas out of shale. in move eight wing away from pu excessive amount of carbon in the atmosphere, but we are a long way from being there, and that challenge will remain. let me wind up now very briefly, as i've already overstayed my

time i'm sure much too much, with one other question. our government is not well prepared in my view or organized to deal with the problems of the 21st century, and that was before we saw the standoff at the okay corral, which takes place on a daily basis on capitol hill. i think that it is significant that we need to move in the direction, particularly in the executive branch, of how we can deal with problems worldwide and domestic on a much stronger whole of government basis. we are still too stove pipe, still in many ways too separated in our ability to bring the full concentration of the government across a broad spectrum to deal with issues as they come up. mobilization times are slow. our military have shown the way in being able to put the four services together to be able to deal with their problems.

but their showing the way has now opened the door for the civilian side of the government to move that way. and finally, internationally, our institutions, we have many, maybe too many, they are all spread out. some of them lack what i would call the commitment to deal with the problem. other areas i think lack better institutions. i mentioned banking and finance a while ago. and so there are even if we are able to get our domestic government in shape, significant challenges out there in the world, whether it is at the united nations or at nato or all the other institutions that are out there. i won't dwell at length on that. you've been kind to listen to me for so long. and let me now open the floor to your questions. [ applause ].

>>ly start here by saying we have till a little after 8:10, so we can -- >> we can go to 8:15. >> 8:15. so we have some 20 minutes for questions. really in the interest of getting as much student participation as possible, i will -- i'll forgo the first question and let's just go right to the audience. >> if you pick. >> all right. right here. can you wait for the microphone? it's coming to you. >> so at this point in time the united states is probably, like, the lance armstrorgest superpow world, but at the same time we're living in an increasingly multipolar world, but there are a lot of other countries or b c blocs like the eu that have significant power. how do you perceive ideally the united states playing into all these problems that you've touched on?

like, should we be leading the charge on all of them? should we purposely be stepping back and trying to get other countries to take primary responsibility for a lot of them? how do you see that playing out? >> i think it's a great question, and i think that there are a couple of ideas here. i think we consulted more with our friends during the cold war than we have since. that's my experience. we learned a lot, and our leadership was very effective because they played a role, even though they were going to follow us, in supporting the direction in which we chose to go, which was often in many ways informed by their ideas. so i think participatory, consultative ways of proceeding, even with people that were that we're estranged from, a are significant. it's very interesting that russia, for all our problems on ukraine, is still playing a very major positive role in the iranian negotiations and seems

to be continuing, if anything, maybe more positive. why? i don't know yet, except i guess they don't want iran with a nuclear weapon either. i also mentioned that with many of these countries and with many of these problems we have common interests. we don't want the world run by islamic fundamentalists. we don't want people with nuclear weapons all over the place. there are things that we can do to strengthen the international financial system if we're prepared each to ante up. and in many ways one of the great tricks of leadership is getting everybody to believe that your best idea was really their best idea. and so i think that's where we should be in the diplomacy. i think that the notion -- final point -- that we were a unilateral superpower, if you define it as we could do anything we wanted when we were

in that state without the help of anyone else, i don't think that ever existed. and we never operated that way. we may have operated pretty premp or thely at some point, and that was a mistake, but i don't think we operated in a way that totally disregarded everybody else and just went out, hell for leather, doing what we wanted. >> okay. please, here. yes. don't turn around. you're the one. okay. you've got the dot. >> in your talk you mentioned some of the challenges facing global institutions today. specifically, i wanted to know -- and this has been discussed a lot -- whether or not there has to be or should be structural reform to the united nations security council and specifically, is it time for the world to consider elimination of the veto power? >> well, i'm glad you asked that question, because i was lunatic

enough when i was the u.s. representative to the u.n. without asking washington to give a speech every once in a while to say we should really take another look at the veto power. it wasn't working in our interest. happily, nobody heard that or if they did they were kind enough not to come down on my head. look, i have thought for years that if you chalked up the veto power and those who exercised it, most of it was for ephemeral or rather silly reasons. china exercised a veto in guatemala case over taiwan, something silly. we did often in the middle east, i think when we really didn't need to, but it was an easy way out. i also think that a proposal which said let's take genocide. and let's make that a particular case for reform, and while there

are disputes about it, we pretty much can define it. it's easier to define than terrorism. and let's say now -- and i thought there was a time when we could convince the five permanent member, not now, but let's say there is a time when you could convince the five permanent members, unless three of them said they were prepared to vote against a draft, that they would all agree to abstain or vote in favor. and that would do several things. that would crystallize the negotiations on a draft and it would give us a better chance to get a tougher draft on genocide questions, which in my view is very important. i think you could take out of the mix right away things that states, as they -- has a clause in the nuclear test ban treaty fa if it's in your vital interest to go back to testing you have an out. but i would, you know, limit

that as much as you possibly could. but i think moving it away from those kinds of things would be important for us. i think you could maybe extend it to nonproliferation and maybe to state-to-state aggression all over international boundaries. and that's a way forward. it may not be the only way forward. another structural change is obviously to put states on as permanent members who, in fact, are now very large, prepared to play a major role in the world scene. i won't say nuclear powers because if it happens by circumstance that all five permanent members are nuclear power, but i don't want to make that a hurdle somebody has to jump through to become a permanent member, it's time then to cut down the veto. it's a perfect opportunity so that it isn't overused. i think it would help transform the security council a great deal if there were constructive thought give on the that.

do i think there's a chance in hell that will happen? no. >> all right. let's move over to this side for a question. yes, please. >> so regarding the arab spring, how effective do you think it has been given that egypt had horrible experience after only a year, libya is eventually a failed state, and syria is still in the midst of a civil war? >> and iraq isn't doing so good and yemen is a mess. >> isis is on the rise. >> everything's okay. it seems like the monarchies have escaped pretty well, although in some ways i think they paid their way, if i could put it that way, and made sure that their people got advantages consistent with the kind of autocratic rule that they have and maybe are beginning to think

that they have to open up. do i think the arab spring was a howling success? no. do i think it brought about changes that in one way or another were engendered by popular opposition? yes. did popular opposition channel itself into the right course in one way or another or could we help it? probably we couldn't help it much, and probably in one way or another significant forces that were at work in the country were more significant than the people who opened the door to tahrir square, unfortunately. will it change again? i don't know. i think president assisi has to know that he's not being judged against the mubarak standard. he's being judged against some little bit less choate but i

think slightly more liberal standard than before. will that, in fact, engender change? will the military in egypt give up power? will we see something moving on to political parties and political competition in the near future? i'm afraid not. i wish i could see it, but i don't think it's going to happen. >> okay. >> i think tunisia is a happy example, but even tunisia's got problems. >> okay. i'm still looking to this side for questions. yes, all the way in the back. >> touching back on russia and the potential energy crisis with russia and the e.u., there is the idea floating around that the u.s. wants to export more oil and natural gas to the european union in the next few years to maybe counteract russia's share in energy there. is this going to be plausible in the next few years? is this something that's going to be more effective than the current sanctions that we have? or should we be looking at

something more multilateral outside the u.n., obviously? >> another great series of question, because everybody's wrestling with this issue now. i would say the following -- i think that one of the effects that we would feel at home if we began to export gas -- and i'll talk about why that's hard -- is that european gas prices are three times ours. so once the marginal british thermal unit of gas begins to go at higher prices, i suspect it's going to drive up domestic prices. that'll push inflation. that will not give us the advantages we have now with cheap energy, protected in some ways by our failure to export. to export gas we have to build expensive liquefied natural gas compression and freezing facilities two, three, four years at least to get them under

way. one of the things we can do, i suppose, and we are doing, is take less of the world's gas, although we're heavily relied on canada and mexico, and maybe less of the world's liquids. and so, in fact, we push that surplus in the direction of people who need it. my own feeling is that the most effective sanctions on mr. putin in the long run will be to take advantage of his strategic error of not using his oil income over the last 15 years to diversify and strengthen russia's economy outside the area of hydrocarbons. and so he's very vulnerable to market changes. interestingly enough, the present drop in the price of oil hassen effect on russia. the general feeling is russia has balanced its budget at about

$100 oil, and it's now down at $80, so that's having an effect. i think also russia's political fast and loose activities have had a serious effect on the russian economy, more than i think any of us expected to see at this stage. a serious increase in capital flight, many billions of dollars have left. almost no foreign direct investment. ruble exchange rate against the dollar that's gone 10% against the ruble. almost no growth in the russian economy. oil prices down, so income is down. they may well account for at least mr. putin's temporary paying attention to the minsk agreement of early september over how to deal with the problem in ukraine, not beautifully, not perfectly, not without exception, but some of that's happening. if we could get the europeans

who are now between 40% and 50% dependent on russian hydrocarbons weaned off that, that would in many ways give them the opportunity to stay to the russians, our off take is so low from you, we can temporarily suspend that or we can find other sources. to do that, we have to find other sources for the europeans. happily, as i said earlier, iraqi oil is undisturbed and it's been growing. it's gone from a million barrels a day to almost 3.5 million or can get there. that if we have an agreement with iran, iran can get up to 3 million barrels a day, it's down to a million barrels because of sanctions. that could fill back some of the losses. it is also clear that in other places in the world they're beginning to look at exploitation of shale. not all of it is as good as ours

but not all of it totally unproductive. and so that will begin to change some of the oil availability that we can see. and so maybe we can convince the europeans germany has to leave. germany so far is not ready to move. germany is getting rid of its nuclear, although that's not until 2021 or 2022, so we have some chance at least with germany to bridge the gap. but i think there are all of these kinds of things plus new technologies. interestingly enough, solar is coming down in price and we seem to be doing better. wind has been less productive, although it's been expanded in many places in this country and europe. china has perhaps one of the greatest wind farm production capacities of anybody, even if, in fact, it's not a particularly big piece of china's production. >> okay. yes, in front here.

yes. the young woman with your hand up here. >> here it comes. >> hi, ambassador. >> hi. >> i just wanted to know what your favorite part of your career was. >> oh, gosh. well, interestingly enough, i was in a lot of strange and sometimes difficult places. i liked them. i think for me the most satisfying was the opportunity that i had in new york in 1990 when iraq invaded kuwait to work with the security council for three very sbeintensive months bringing it together, pushing on resolutions for sanctions, for increasingly tightening the strings on saddam hussein. it didn't produce the result we wanted, but it produced the coalition that hung together and it produced enough of a basis that even the shy members of the democratic party voted enough to

support u.s. military involvement, which in itself did produce a result in large measure because we had a limited political goal in mind and stuck to it. >> okay. this will have to be our last question and -- please. yeah. >> thank you very much. i was wondering, tying off of russia and china, you mentioned the problems with many of these relations being how they're often defined by all these negative factors -- disputes regarding territory like in ukraine and cry mkrim ya or theh china sea, and we've talked about solutions regarding sanctions and pressures, but you mentioned -- what kind of positive --

>> they're particularly hard to deal with. the populations -- of the leader. i used to say back when we were dealing with saddam hussein that he owns the last chicken sandwich in iraq. but he makes all the decisions. on the other hand, targeted sanctions have some interesting possibilities. it is also true that over the years the u.s. treasury was loathe to impose financial sanctions because they thought it would destroy the world banking system. so far that hasn't happened. they've been among the most

effective in iran, because, in fact, they've said through the international banking system, if you want to do business in iran, you won't do business in the united states. that's a pretty harsh judgment, but it means in effect that we dry up the country's ability to trade, the country's ability to export in some things, which is very important, and that in itself is a pretty draconian sanction and has a lot of effect. and i think one of the drivers of iranian interest in early agreement on the nuclear question is that because president rouhani wants to be able to demonstrate to his population that he can change the economic equation as well as bring iran back into the world community. so that's had some effect. threats of war play a role. inducements sometimes. we seem to always be more interested in spending trillions of dollars of war rather than

billions of dollars maybe to buy off somebody. that's not a very happy circumstance. but in some cases it works. in some cases we have found financial solution to international problems, some big, some small. i had the great pleasure of going to china to explain why we bombed their embassy and how we did it in belgrade. but the end result was that each side compensated the other because there was a lot of damage done to our buildings in china as a result of chinese encouragement of popular -- put it this way -- demonstration. so each of us -- each of us paid for the damage that was done to the other, and that's a way of settling international dispute. going to court is not a bad idea, and many countries have settled boundary disputes that way. the courts have been pretty good about it. they take into account the international legal regimes that apply to that, that are agreed by states and which states work under, and that would make sense

if, in fact, we could do so. big powers don't particularly like to do that. we did go to court with nicaragua. we lost. then we decided we'd give up compulsory jurisdiction. in my view, not the right answer. >> well, i hope you will join me in thanking -- >> thank you very much. >> we certainly want to thank ambassador pickering, and i hope you'll join me in thanking him not only for this evening but for his extraordinary career and his enormous contribution to this country. >> thank you very much. [ applause ].

the uggs economy added 214,000 jobs in october with the unemployment rate dropping to 5.8%. that's the lowest unemployment rate in six years. the labor day announced those numbers this morning. in the last four years, the house of representatives has voted more than 50 times to repeal all or part of the affordable care act. yesterday house speaker john boehner held a news conference and he said the house will vote again to repeal the so-called obamacare legislation. >> -- 40-hour work week. the second paragraph in "the wall street journal" talked about it. how do you walk this balance between getting sucked back into that being the predominant issue -- or is it a predominant issue when you have new freshmen coming in who have never had the chance to vote no or repeal obamacare and try to tweak this in some way to go for a full

review? >> obamacare is hurting our economy, it's hurting middle-class families, and it's hurting the ability for ploirs to employers to create more jobs. so the house i'm sure at some point next year will move the repeal obamacare because it should be repealed, it should be replaced with commonsense reforms and respect the doctor/patient relationship. now, whether that can pass the test, i don't know. but i know in the house it'll pass. but we're going to pass it. but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't do other things. there are bipartisan bills that have passed the house, sitting in the senate, that would, in fact, make changes to obamacare. you know, there's a bipartisan majority in the house and senate for repealing the medical device act. i think there's a bipartisan majority in the house and senate for getting rid of the independent payment advisory

board, the rationing board in obamacare. how about the individual mandate? there are a lot of democrats and republicans who believe this is unfair. just because we can't get wefrg we want doesn't mean we shouldn't try to get what we can. >> [ inaudible ] the number gets up into the 60s or 70s in terms of [ inaudible ]. >> there are bipartisan majorities in the house and senate to take some of these issues out of obamacare. we need to put them on the president's desk and let him choose. >> congress has been in recess since september, and this upcoming wednesday both the house and the senate will reconvene at 2:00 eastern. awaiting action in the house, federal spending for the remainder of fiscal 2014, the government's currently operating on temporary funding that expires in december, and in the senate votes are planned on judicial nominees and a child

care block grant program. also next week both parties will hold leadership elections for the 114th congress which starts in january. when congress was back in session, live coverage of the house is on c-span, and you can see the senate live on c-span2. here are just a few of the comments we've recently received from our viewers. >> ju >> caller: just calling to tell you how much i enjoy "q&a." at 5:00 sunday everything stops in my house. i turn off my phone, get my cup coffee. it's the most enjoyable hour of television. >> the guests were informative. i enjoyed listening to him and the comments that was done today. his -- me, myself, living over in the middle east, he was very accurate and he was on point, not -- he was not using his own personal innuendo.

and i greatly enjoyed it, and i hope you have more guests like that, but he was right on target this morning. >> caller: i'm calling to say that i think, like many people, c-span is wonderful, but as to criticisms, i almost have none. and i'm a very partisan kind of person. but the reason i almost have none is i think you all do a tremendous job of showing just about every side of everything and the way people look at things in d.c. and elsewhere. i take my hat off to you. thank you very much. >> and continue to let us know what you think about the programs you're watching. call us at 202-626-3400, e-mail us at xhecomments@c-span.org, o sen us a tweet @c-spa @c-span, #comments. like us on facebook, follow us on twitter. a little bit later today on our companion network, c-span,

samantha power, u.s. ambassador to the u.n., she'll be speaking at the american enterprise institute this afternoon about potential changes to u.n. peacekeeping. that will be live at 1:00 p.m. eastern on c-span. and then on c-span2 at the same time, veterans affairs secretary robert mcdonald will be speaking at the national press club here in washington regarding efforts to improve medical care and other services for veterans. that will be live on c-span2, as i said, starting at 1:00 p.m. eastern. coming up on c-span, senate vetera veter veterans affairs committee chairman bernie sanders will talk about his expectations for the new republican majority in the senate come january. he's our guest on "newsmakers" sunday on c-span starting at 10:00 a.m., again at 6:00 p.m. eastern. with live coverage of the

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the u.s. immigration system wutz overhauled in 2003 when the department of homeland security was created. the migration policy institute recently released a report on u.s. deportations in the last ten years and potential changes to deportation policy. this is about an hour and a half. >> okay, we're going to get started and start of course with saying good morning and welcome to our program this morning. my name is dorismeister. i'm a senior fellow at the policy institute where i direct our work on u.s. immigration policy programs and where we are very pleased this morning to be releasing a new report, which we're calling deportation and discretion, reviewing the record and options for change.

now, this event this morning is both in person for those in the room and also live streamed, so we welcome both sets of audiences. the report that we're going to be talking act is coming at an important moment in that there is again the possibility of an executive action on immigration sometime toward the end of this year. that executive action may well take into account some changes in the guidelines that presently are being used where removals and deportations from the united states are concerned. this work that we'll be talking about offers the most detailed look yet at the record of removals and deportations from the department of homeland security since its inception. so what we're going to be looking at today is data from 2003, fy-2003 through fy-2013.

the work builds on a large body of work that the migration policy institute has developed over the years that have to do with various aspects of the enforcement system. this particular work today deepens a report that we released in the spring called the deportation dilemma. it digs more fully because we have more data into the information and into the findings that we developed at that time. you have bios on your chair of the speaker, and you also have a copy of the report, so i won't give detailed introductions for the speakers and their backgrounds other than to say that our lead speaker is mark rosenblum, who is also the lead author on the report. he is the deputy director here at mpi of our u.s. immigration policy program.

his overall presentation of the report will be followed by comments from rebecca gambler, who is the director of the homeland security and justice team at gao, the u.s. government accountability office, and our second comment will come from mark nefari, an enforcement fellow at the u.s. immigration council and also works -- extensively on related issues and the issues of the criminal justice system and immigration connections. so with that, i'm going to turn the mike over to mark. he will do the presentation and the comments and then have time for q&a from the audience. thank you, and again, welcome. >> thanks, doris, and thanks to you and to the team at mpi for helping pull the support together. it was definitely a group effort. i want to especially acknowledge my co-author, kristin mckay, a co-author and huge contributor to this report and is unable to be here today.

so as doris mentioned, this report analyzes every formal removal implemented by dhs between 2003 and 2013. and basically what the report does is it gives a profile of who's being -- who has been deported from the u.s., a description of the removal patterns, how people are being removed, where and how they're being removed, and then we spend some time talking about how the actual enforcement practices line up with dhs' announced enforcement priorities described in the morton memos in 2010 and 2011. then we explore how potential changes to dhs's enforcement priorities could affect future removals. let me just briefly say something about how we did this. the main thing that we did is to analyze administrative record from isis ep forcement integrative database, their main removal database. the data were obtained through

"the new york times" and we're thankful to "the new york times" for sharing the data with us. the database includes both removals and a certain number of informal returns. our report and my presentation today focus exclusively on formal removals. we're taking the returns out of the conversation. we also used dhs data to model the nonremovals that don't appear in the data set that are in the dhs data set because they were also removed. that's basically cpv removals to mexico and canada, nonjudicial removals to mexico and canada. and then throughout the report and my presentation the data measure removal events, not unique individuals so, what that means is some people are deported more than wasn't and they appear more than one time in the data set so it's a certain bias in the data toward these sort of repeat customers. all together, 3.7 million people have been removed between 2003

and 2013, so that's the universe that we're looking at over that 11-year period. just sort of a basic profile of who's been deported during that period, fornally removed during that period, 91% of removals have been men versus about half of all unauthorized immigrants who were men. 91% of removals have been to mexico and the three northern triangle countries -- el salvador, guatemala, and honduras -- versus about three-quarters of unauthorized immigrants to those countries. so the system leans in those directions. some more sort of general information about who's been removed, this looks at previous criminal convictions, so this is lifetime, have people ever been convicted of a crime. simply being -- unauthorized immigration by itself is not a criminal offense, and most people, 59% of all removals

since 2003 are of people who have never been convicted of a crime. this tendency was especially pronounced during the bush administration when removals of noncriminals grew faster than removals of criminals. so the share of noncriminals among the removal population peaked at 67% in 2008. removals of noncriminals fell between 2009 and 2011, during the first years of the obama administration, so that drove the share of noncriminals in the removal population down to about 50%. you can see where the lines converge there. and then more recently removals of noncriminals have once again grown faster and we've actually seen removals of criminals tick down in 2013. so in 2013 about 55% of removals were of noncriminals. the data and the report allow us to get into much more detail about the types of crimes that people have been convicted of,

people who have been removed have been convicted of. so what you can see on the left side of the slide, the left pie graph is describing for the entire period that we're looking at and then the right side is just looking at zooming in on 2013. so as i mentioned, you know, 59% have never been convicted of a crime. and then looking at the specific types of crimes, about 13% of people removed have been convicted of a violent crime. about 9% have been convicted of a drug crime. about 8% have been convicted only of an immigration-related crime. and then the remainder are other nonviolent crimes and drug crimes, except i think i'm pointing -- yeah, and drug crimes. folking in on 2013, you can see that the share of noncriminal removals has gone down a little bit.

the share of people convicted exclusively of immigration crimes has gone up. the other ether wedges are with about 1% of their decade-long average. so up with of the sort of key findings of this report is that looking at the aggregate data that i just described hides some really interesting differences between people apprehended at the border and people apprehended within the united states. so this picture is border removal, and what you can see is the great majority of border removals are of noncriminals, the blue band, and -- or of people whose only criminal conviction is for an immigration-related crime, the red band. those two categories together, so people who have never been convicted of any nonimmigration crime have consistently casualtied for between 82% and 90% of border removals throughout this whole period, and about 87% of border removals in 2013. among people who have been

convicted of any type of violent crime at the border, that represents about 4% of border removals in 2013. so 4% violent crimes, 87% no criminal offense or just an immigration offense. the picture is completely different for interior removals, so just to, you know, emphasize this point, those pictures look very different. for interior removal, for the entire period, about a third of everybody who's been deported from within the united states were noncriminals, and that number fell to 13% in 2013. immigration crimes for the entire period remitted 6% of interior removals, and that climbed to 13% in 2013. so that means that three-quarters of people removed from the interior in 2013 had been convicted of a nonimmigration crime. and this slide goes into more detail about what types of

crimes people removed from the interior and from the border had been convicted of. so looking at the left side of the picture, as i said, about three-quarter of people removed from the border have never been convicted of a crime. then, you know, another -- whatever it was, 12%, have been convicted of an immigration-related offense. and then every other type of crime, about 1% or 2%. among interior removals, about a quarter have been either never convicted of a crime or om grags only crime. 20% have been convicted of violent crimes. 15% are in the category of general nonviolent crimes. 18% are drug crimes. and 13% are traffic offenses. of the traffic offenses, about two-thirds of those are dui and other types of traffic offenses. again, very different pictures

at the border than in the interior. one reason it's important to understand the differences between border enforcement and interior enforcement, data shows about where enforcement is taking place. where pictures show, the bars in this picture are the total number of removals. the black line is the number of border removals. people apprehended at the border and removed. the red line is people apprehended in the interior. so, you know, a first thing can you see from this picture, which bears emphasis, is that the total number of removals has been at record levels during the obama administration. the lowest year of removals during the obama administration is higher than the highest year than for any other president. the last two have set all-time record for removals. there's some confusion in the discussion about removals.

there's no ambiguity removals are at an all-time high. what's interesting about this picture is we see four distinct periods between 2003 and 2014. the first three years of the bush administration, removals were basically flat. and the ratio between border removals and interior removals was pretty much unchanged. there was a status quo, no dramatic changes to the enforcement system early in the bush administration. and then what we see beginning in 2006 is a steep increase between 2006 and 2009 in the total number of removals. what happened then is that with the failure of the comprehensive immigration reform legislation in the senate in 2006, the bush administration initiated a real enforcement surge. that was driven overwhelmingly by increased interior enforcement. these were the work site raids and the other operations of the fugitive operations teams. this shows up in the data here as increased interior

enforcement. those numbers flattened out during the first years. obama administration. the total number of of removal was flat and there's no real change in the ratio of border to interior enforcement. most recently since 2011, we've seen removals have started to increase again and that ets driven entirely by increased border enforcement while interior enforcement has actually fallen during this period of rising removals. they different things going on. another way border and interior removals differ is by enforcement pipeline or by how enforceme enforcement implemented. the border removals are ma joerly expa decided removals. 30% are reinstatement removals. 84% of border enforcement is

nonjudicial. either reinstatement or expedited versus 16% judicial removals. in the interior, we see over half of all removals are judicial removals. and we see that many few are expedited removals, because that's a new tool for design entries. 29% of interior removals are reinstatements and another 7% is administrative removal, which are nonjudicial removals for certain criminal offenders. so, one last sort of removal pattern piece -- set of information i'll share is looking at the time between when people enter and when they're apprehended. as we'd expect among border apprehensions, people are apprehended much more quikly. 90% of border apprehensions occur within two weeks of entry versus just 6% that occur a year or more after somebody enters

the country. and, of course, the pattern is different for interior apprehensions. interior apprehensions just 11% occur within two weeks of entry versus two-thirds that occur more than two years after entry. it's a way of seeing these populations look differently from each other in terms of their fixedness in the u.s. it's also interesting to look at this reinstatement because this is a controversial procedure. what reinstatement means is somebody who's been previously formally removed, if they get reapprehended, that previous removal order gets reinstated without having opportunity to appear before a judge and maybe argue that your circumstances have changed. what we see is that 72% of reinstatements occur within two weeks of the entry-entry versus 15% that occur a year after re-entry. so, the other key set of

findings or another set of findings from this report and key set of analysis is that we compare actual removals to dhs's enforcement priorities. and the bottom line findings are most remoouls are consistent with dhs's priorities. the purple stripe. recent immigrants, reconstruction, and people who have been convicted of crimes. three points about the overall findings here. one is that 95% of all dhs removals since 2003 -- between 2003 and 2013 fall within these categories. 95% of everyone removed meets dhs's priorities. that includes 93% of everyone removed by the bush

administration. the bush administration adhered to obama's priority enforcements. so when you look at these data, it's a little surprising the morton memos should have been a major source of controversy because it's clear both historically and in the data they formalized long-standing formulas that already existed going back to the ins era. a third observation we see in the slides, some trends translate into adherence of these priorities. so although the morton memos didn't break radical new ground, they did sort of redirect reinforcement. during bush administration reinforcement surge between 2008, and we look at this in more detail in the report, the share of nonpriority cases increased. and actually 2008 was the year

nonpriority cases peaked at 10% of all mooufls and that trend reversed as soon as obama came into office and the knob priorities fell to less than 1% in 2013. you see that after the memos came out in 2010 and 2011. so, the morton memos have been effectively implemented but they've always been criticized by some advocates for immigrant rights because they define dhs's priorities very broadly. in particular, i mentioned the three categories. recent entrants defined as anybody who's been apprehended within three years of entering the united states as well as anyone apprehended by cbp regardless of the timeline. immigration obstructionists are defined as anyone who's -- excuse me, anyone who's ever

been ordered deported and anyone who fails to appear at immigration hearing. criminals is defined as anyone who's been convicted of any crime. those are a broad definition of those terms. so what this table does is two things. one thing -- in this first row what we look at is if dhs were to strictly adhere to their enforcement priorities, meaning anyone who fell out of those priorities, how would that change the enforcement numbers? this only looks at i.c.e. removal cases. we can't look at cbp cases because we don't have enough information about them. removals would have fallen from 2.9 million to 2.7 million, a 7% reduction. what the rest of the table does is ask the same question but if the priorities were defined somewhat more narrowly. instead of all criminals, what if we only focused on -- what

you can see is excluding immigration crimes from the priorities doesn't actually move the needle. when you look in detail it only removes 7,000 over the entire 11-year period. i'll say something in a moment. we don't really see these numbers go up until we look at really significantly narrowing the criminal categories we're going to focus on by not emphasizing level three i.c.e. offenders or violent criminals. all these numbers are smaller than we expected. so that was something that we were interested in and we looked into and one of the reasons for that, is that most people who fall into one of i.c.e.'s priority categories fall into more than one of i.c.e.'s categories.

so, the example i was just about to say something about the immigration crimes, most people convicted of an immigration crime are apprehended at the border and convicted of an immigration crime so they're not just seen as an immigration crime priority they're also seen as a recent border crosser. same with reinstatements. most people reinstated are apprehended at the border and may also have been convicted of an immigration crime so a lot of people fall into all three priority categories or fall into two of the three priority categories. and the obama years, 58% of all removals fell into more than one priority category. so that's one reason why the numbers in that previous table were a little smaller than we expected. so in this table we looked at some more complicated scenarios where, well what if we change more than one of these priorities at the same time? what you can see is that this does show that removals would fall more, you know, which is what we'd expect. and i'll just sort of talk you through a couple of cases, because it's a lot of numbers to throw at you. so, what this row is showing is that if dhs no longer focused on

nonviolent criminals as a top enforcement priority, and they no longer focused on 10-year-old yes row moveal orders, didn't consider people who had been removed ten years earlier we would project removals would have fallen by 17% over the previous eleven years. what this row is showing you is if dhs no longer emphasized non-dui traffic crimes, and defined recent entrants to mean be who came in in the last one year instead of three years removals would have fallen by 9% versus 7% or 8%. the most sort of far reaching set of changes that we model is to de-emphasize nonviolent criminals to or deprioritize to deprioritize people who entered more than a year ago, and people with 10-year-old or older removal orders and that would have reduced removals by about 19%.

so, these numbers are a little bigger than the previous table. you know, one of our takeaways is still that we were surprised that playing with the enforcement priorities or doing these -- thinking about the enforcement priorities doesn't produce a larger reduction in numbers. so one reason is because most removals -- a second reason is that most removals fall into core dhs interests. you know, most people removed from the border are apprehended at the border within three days of entering. and those are people that dhs views as an enforcement priority most people removed from the interior have been convicted either of violent crimes or of drug crimes or dui, and those are people who are viewed as sort of core enforcement priorities. so for that reason, change in the enforcement priorities doesn't push the numbers down that much. this relates to a third point. which is that, if we think about exercising prosecutorial discretion during the

enforcement process, as a form of executive action designed to reduce removal numbers, it's important to recognize that discretion during the enforcement process has a different kind of impact on immigrant communities than an affirmtive doca-style program in which unauthorized immigrants would actively apply for relief. discretion during enforcement is less concrete and it's more difficult for immigrant communities to observe because most people who could potentially benefit from discretion during enforcement don't ever experience that benefit because they never enter the dhs enforcement system. so if you think about an unauthorized immigrant who lives in the united states and never commits a crime, they just don't interact with dhs for the most part, so they're never going to see dhs's discretion in action. so, that's how this type of discretion should work. it means that i.c.e. is focusing on high priority cases instead of, you know, these people who would benefit from discretion.

but it also means thalt psychological impact of discretion during enforcement and the politics of any changes to the enforcement priorities are quite different than those for an application-based doca-style program where people would affirmatively seek relief. so i'm going to pause there. i'll just remind you my three key takeaways, stark difference between border and interior enforcement across the board. the vast majority of current removals meet dhs's enforcement priorities and changes to the priorities would likely have a modest impact on the total removal numbers. >> okay. all right. hope that gives you a good summation of an enormous amount of numbers, more of which you will find in the report itself. but they actually do really add up to these broad conclusions. so with that let me turn to you, rebecca. >> thank you, doris. and thank you, mark. and good morning to everyone. i just want to thank mpi for inviting me to participate in

today's discussion. i really appreciate the opportunity to be able to discuss some of gao's work. looking at some of the issues and topics related to some of the issues and top iblgs that are raised mpi's report, which are being issued today. before i turn to my remarks on some of gao's more specific reports, i just want to give you a little more background on me and also who gao is in case some of you who may not be familiar about who we are as an agency. so as doris mentioned, i'm a director in gao's homeland and security justice team, and in that capacity i lead our work an border security and immigration issues. now, gao as an agency is located in the legislative branch. we are sometimes referred to as the investigative arm of congress or the congressional watchdog. and so in that capacity we examine how federal taxpayer dollars are spent and we examine

how government programs and initiatives and efforts operate. most of our work is done at the request of chairs or ranking members of committees of jurisdictions 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've covered a range of topics. on the border security side we've looked at issues like goals and metrics for assessing border security efforts. we've also done work looking at dhs's management and oversight of efforts to acquire and deploy

surveillance technologies along the border. we've also done work looking at how different 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 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 on two or three key reports that relate to some of the issues and topics

that are raised in mpi's report. the first report that i'm going to spend most of my time discussing is a report that gao issued in the summer of 2012 on the secure 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. trends in 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 data we saw in that population of aliens. so those are the two key reports that i'll focus on. and so let me turn first to our work on the secure communities program.

so, as you're all probably aware, the security xhunlts program is one of i.c.e.'s programs for identifying potentially removalable 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 individual's fingerprints are taken and automatically checked against fingerprint databases 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. so, as i get into my remarks now on some of the trends in data i'll 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. so, 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 secure communities program. and we looked at removals of aliens identified by the secure communities program relative to all i.c.e. removals during the time period of our study. and what we found is the secure communities program accounted for an increase in percentage of all i.c.e. removals during the period that we looked at, which was fiscal year 2009 thou 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 year 2009. now, we also looked at some data on the secure communities program in terms of the type of offense that aliens who 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 secure communities or they had a record of 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 were 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 their removal but they were nonetheless removable because, for example, 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 1 offenses, 17% were convicted of level 2 offenses and 30% were convicted of level 3 offenses. so level 1 includes aliens convicted of aggravated felonies or basically two or more felonies. level 2 includes any aliens convicted of any felony or three

or more what are generally referred to as mid-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% were entries without inspection or they were vice sa 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 variation across fiscal years and 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

3 offenders removed from about 40% of total removals in fiscal year 2009 to 26% during the first half of fiscal year 2012. we also found there was some change among level 2 offenders as well. and part of the -- or part of what i.c.e. attributed to those changes were the i.c.e. had continued to prioritize its resources to focus on the identification and removal of null aliens convicted of felonies. and also that i.c.e. did have some redefinition of its criminal offense levels between fiscal year 2010 and 011. 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 it was managing its contracting process for updating or modernizing its systems used as

part of the secure communities program. and we also made a recommendation 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 prisons increased about 7% from 51,000 in fiscal year 2005 to about 55,000 in fiscal year 2010. and for context, the criminal alien population as a total of

the federal -- total federal inmate population has remained relatively constant since 2001 at about 25% to 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 that 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, 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 mark, 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 that work, i do work on deportation and detention, as mpi does as well. 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 and legislative, and third to briefly describe a paper on 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

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 set out in an earlier paper this year. but at these funding levels, 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 family, particularly this year we've seen that from central america. and they are processed generally through expedited 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 effectuated in her time at the ins. 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, understandably. and within that he prioritize serious violent criminals 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're seeing increasing numbers of reinstatement. and so as dhs makes serious efforts to effectuate these priorities, and within them the highest of their 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 backlogs. the 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're quicker. through nonjudicial removals it's possible to apprehend someone in fy14 and remove them

in fy14. 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 removals in the same way. cities, counties and states across the nation are adopting noncompliance policies, 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 through the political 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

administrative 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 as dhs prioritizes its allocation of that funding? or put another way, as the picture becomes clearer through reports such as mark's today and mpi's work over the last couple of years, will the american public agree with the political branch's 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, whether 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. so, 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 that programs such as secure communities, have little impact on u.s. crime. albeit impact on unlawful 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 who 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, will 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 overcriminalization 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 the jurisdictions, many with high immigrant populations, are starting to evaluate the trade-offs of expanded 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

may be where the flash point is. lastly, i thought i would mention a couple of words about detention that mpi has asked me to write. again, 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 a lesser claim to stay in the united states because they've 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 thank doris and mark and randy again for having me here and hand it back to doris. >> okay. thanks very much, mark. that was a -- 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 was just wonder 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'll post the powerpoint on the website, so yes to your first question. the short answer to your second question is also yes. that date 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 the immigration crimes are 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. so crossing the border, being apprehended while crossing the border. >> i saw a hand in the back. yes. >> hi. i'm from the southeast asia research action center agency, 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, long-time residents with legal status. >> so, we would not be able to see if they entered as refugees or not. we do -- i do -- we do have a field in the data that is a self-reported green card holder. you know, i.c.e. asks people, what's your status and if people answer, they have a green card, that's how it gets reported. 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.

but 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 who identified as green card holders had been -- there was a pretty high core addition 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. >> mark, 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? here in the front. >> thank you. in connection with the interior goals, and this is probably for both of you, one of the things i was looking at recent numbers, and there's been an increase -- surprising increase of removals from caribbean countries, jamaica, haiti, dominican republic, and on and on. i wondered 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's something that would be interesting to look 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 database, 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 c.a.p.'s prison-based screening programs where they screen people, you know, post-sentencing while they're incarcerated, or whether it's a c.a.p. team, you know, because c.a.p. has task forces also. so you can't -- you know, the data don't give you clear information about sort of -- at that level of detail about including, for example, whether a detainer was issued. >> mark?

>> that said, at the american immigration council, we're doing some research now that actually gets at some of those questions mark answer the, by which program someone came into the system, whether it's c.a.p.'s or secure communities. and that's something we're looking to put out in the next several months. >> here. >> thank you. i have a question for matt. besides those -- besides those causes that you think it's attributed to where they're putting priorities, 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 that we can identify five years ago that could be used to understand now?

>> so, let me -- i'm glad you asked that second question because it reminds me of something that i was 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. and the border patrol and dhs have had a 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. and, you know, what's driving that is an increasing share of apprehensions are being formally removed, rather than permitted to voluntarily return as they had been in the past. so, historically, most people apprehended at the border are sort of 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. and 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. you know, 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 communities or another criminal alien program. and, you know, the effort at the i.c.e. field offices is to, you know, sort of prioritize and people who have been convicted of a crime, but also people who have previously been deported, and to a lesser extent, people

who can't document how long they've been in the u.s. those are -- those are going to be the priorities. you know, overall we know that the unauthorized population in the u.s. has fallen by about a million since 2007. so, you know, the available pool of unauthorized immigrants is going down, you know, 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, you know, because of the universal implementation of the secure 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. and as -- 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? >> 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 sort of 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. i.c.e. only counts daisht only cases that are included in the i.c.e. 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. i mean, the returns, as you would expect, are less likely to have been convicted of a crime.

that's the main thing i can tell you 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, you know, or more detailed data about where they came there. but something we would be very interested in is being able to disaggregate within the u.s. about where people are being apprehended. but, you know, obviously dhs has that data but we don't have that data. >> i take it your question is where they originated, which state in mexico, which region in guatema guatemala. is that what you were 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 then hoping that the problem will be 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 immigrant 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 a link in between recidivism and these three different ways of removing mexicans. >> 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 criminal 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