Secure Communities and Community Values: Local Context and Discretionary Immigration Law Enforcement

Abstract

In an effort to target dangerous criminals in the United States illegally, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) developed the nationwide deportation programme called Secure Communities. Ostensibly a nationwide programme, the use of this programme instead varies widely across the United States, with some jurisdictions seeing large numbers of deportations, with many others seeing none. Employing ICE deportation data and ordinary least squares (OLS) regression models, we examine what accounts for this variation. We find that local political attitudes play a role, with Republican-leaning jurisdictions and those in states that support restrictive state-level immigration witnessing more deportations. Perhaps surprisingly, jurisdictions with the most crime actually saw fewer. These dynamics were similar for models predicting both the number of deportations of individuals with criminal records and those without them. Instead of being driven by a desire to remove high-level criminal undocumented aliens, we conclude instead that the dynamics of this federal immigration enforcement effort are influenced by the local political setting.