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WASHINGTON -- Immigration and Customs Enforcement requested that local law enforcement agencies hold more than 800 U.S. citizens -- a majority of whom were never convicted of a crime -- between 2008 and 2012, according to ICE data released Wednesday by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.
ICE routinely asked local law enforcement to hold people after arrests if they were suspected of being in the United States without authorization. In most cases, those requests were for undocumented immigrants, but legal permanent residents, who can be deported under certain circumstances, and U.S. citizens could get caught up in the mix.
ICE asked law enforcement to hold 834 U.S. citizens and 28,489 legal permanent residents between fiscal year 2008 and the beginning of fiscal year 2012, according to Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, which is affiliated with Syracuse University. Overall, ICE issued 949,126 detainer requests in that period.
But U.S. citizens are not deportable, and neither, usually, are legal permanent residents. The figures also show that plenty of non-criminals were caught up in the immigration system; 77 percent of detainers were issued for individuals with no criminal record, and only 8.6 percent for those with a top-priority offense.
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