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Immigration officials have made significantly fewer requests to local police authorities to hold arrested immigrants they are planning to deport, according to a recently released report.
In April, for instance, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement issued slightly less than 8,000 detainers — the term for the request to hold a person in jail until ICE can assume custody.
That number is 30 percent fewer than the 11,355 ICE issued in October 2014, which was just before ICE’s parent agency, the Department of Homeland Security, said it would be restricting the use of detainers.
The April detainer numbers mark an even sharper drop from the peak use of them in March, 2011, which saw roughly 28,000 issued.
The report, by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), an independent research organization at Syracuse University, drew a link between the decline in the use of detainers and the uptick in criticism of a program, called Secure Communities, that centered on joint efforts between federal immigration officials and local police departments.
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