Sonny's Corner: Immigrant Detention in the Heartland: Nebraska’s Place in the Immigration Debate

Sonny Foster "Sonny's Corner" is a regular column in Prairie Fire, featuring commentary on civil rights and justice issues. Our friend and Omaha colleague, Joseph P. "Sonny" Foster, died suddenly at age 54 in August 2005. He left an uncompleted agenda, as did many of our civil rights and justice mentors and heroes. We shall attempt to move forward on that unfinished agenda through this column.

By Juan Manuel Pedroza

Nebraska stands at a crossroads on immigration policy, even if the state does not make many people’s list of immigration hot spots. As reported recently in the national media, momentum behind restrictive policies in the state is mounting. As the federal government steps up enforcement and states enact policy experiments, immigrants face a formidable challenge: staying under the radar while living and working in a hostile climate. Urban Institute research sheds light on how immigration policies can cause collateral damage. Learning from past experience, Nebraska can do better than simply retreading policies that criminalize workers, separate families and overlook immigrant victims of crime.

Worksite Raids and “Criminal Aliens”

Four years ago, worksite raids drew attention to a meat-processing plant in Grand Island. The Urban Institute interviewed unauthorized immigrants detained during raids, including Nebraska arrests. At the time, raids routinely resulted in prolonged detention. In Grand Island, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detained parents for months. In our follow-up study (“Facing Our Future”), we revisited families with unresolved cases more than a year and a half after the raid.

Compare what happened more recently in 2008. When we interviewed unauthorized immigrants after California and Iowa raids, prolonged detention was less common. ICE implemented release guidelines for arrests of 25 or more people. The guidelines apply to specific groups such as single mothers and parents of young children. Despite the improvements, parents routinely found themselves in legal limbo for a long time. More than a year after their arrest, immigrants we interviewed after the 2008 raids did not know whether (or when) they might be deported.

Parents arrested in 2008 worksite raids had experiences similar to those of a Nebraska woman arrested during a 2006 raid. More than three years after her arrest, she only recently fended off criminal charges for “aggravated identity theft.” Hundreds of Iowa workers were convicted on these charged and then deported. A 2009 Supreme Court decision (Flores-Figueroa v. United States) later dismissed the rationale for the charge as logically flawed. When Congress debates options for immigration reform, efforts to expand aggravated felonies may resurface. If so, unauthorized immigrants would again navigate a line in the sand that separates nonviolent offenders from criminal aliens.

Immigrant Detention and Deportation

Immigration reform remains in stalemate, and ICE deports hundreds of thousands of people each year. Between 1999 and 2009, the Department of Homeland Security estimates that it deported more than 100,000 parents with U.S.-born children. We documented pervasive behavior problems among children of deported parents. Parents also expressed anxiety and symptoms of depression. Families moved, scrambled to make ends meet and planned for an uncertain future.

Immigrant detention and deportation from Nebraska jails follow national trends. Few immigrant detainees receive publicity, and isolated immigrant arrests fall outside the ICE release guidelines. As a result, the number of ICE detainees in Douglas and Phelps counties quietly spiked after the collapse of immigration reform debates in 2006–2007. Meanwhile, Douglas and Lancaster counties began checking arrestees’ legal status in August 2010 under the federal government’s new Secure Communities program. To justify increased enforcement, ICE recently reiterated it would focus on serious offenses such as homicide and robbery.

State and Local Immigration Policy Experiments

As ICE steps up enforcement, state and local authorities have turned up pressure to repel unauthorized immigrants. Such initiatives can embolden civilians and law enforcement to refer suspected unauthorized immigrants to local jails haphazardly. For example, recent efforts to prevent unauthorized immigrants from renting apartments in Fremont, Neb., set a tone that can precipitate a cultural of fear among unauthorized immigrants.

Our research turned up evidence of such a siege mentality in Northwest Arkansas and Oklahoma, where restrictionist policy experiments have taken root. Untargeted arrests netted nonviolent offenders, including victims of domestic violence and people who failed to buckle their seat belts.

Looking Ahead at Immigration in the Heartland

Historically, Nebraska hasn’t been a major immigration destination the way, say, Chicago and Los Angeles have been. Still, its unauthorized workforce garnered national attention during the upsurge of immigration raids between 2006 and 2008. Since then, even without raids, hundreds of unauthorized immigrants in the state have been arrested.

The nation is watching new immigrant destinations like Fremont and Douglas County as places where local officials and communities draw the line between unauthorized immigrant and criminal alien. If our research so far is any indication, the full costs of immigrant family separation will likely surface there, alongside an atmosphere of fear.

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