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When federal immigration authorities find out that an arrestee—whether it's state, local or the federal level—is an undocumented immigrant, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement places a detainer on the individual.
The detainer allows ICE to take custody of an undocumented immigrant before a law enforcement agency releases the individual.
And those detainers, which number in the thousands, declined by 39 percent from October 2012 to March 2014, according to Syracuse University's Transactional Records Clearing House.
The report, which was released November 12, describes the drop as dramatic and equating to 9,000 fewer detainers issued per month, which translates to 100,000 fewer detainers per year.
"During FY 2012, ... ICE issued over a quarter of a million detainers—an average of 22,832 detainers each month. This volume fell to a monthly average of 17,777 during FY 2013. The most recent data covering the five month period ending in March 2014 reveal that the average monthly number of ICE detainers issued has now fallen to just 13,898," the report states. "The results are based upon detainer-by-detainer records obtained from ICE by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)."
Texas and California, however, account for 42 percent of all detainers issued in the country and both states experienced declines, according to the report.
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