Federal Law Enforcement Research Articles

The Household Financial Losses Triggered by an Immigration Arrest, and How State and Local Government Can Most Effectively Protect Their Constituents

Through a survey of 125 long-term resident households in Pima County, Arizona, this study finds that an immigration arrest costs each household an average of more than $24,000. These costs accumulate through the value of assets seized and not recovered, out-of-pocket costs for hiring an attorney, immigration bond, and other expenses involved in supporting an immediate family member as they navigate the immigration court system. But they also include lost income due to disruptions to employment resulting from the arrest, and a physical inability to work while in detention, appearing in court, and immediately following deportation. In this article, we discuss how, when measured at the scale of the household, these financial costs fail to discriminate according to immigration or citizenship status, and accumulate to affect issues of poverty, education, housing security, health and development, and generational wealth inequality — all matters of sustained interest to state and local government. In the second half of the article, we draw on our research findings to evaluate various policies that states, counties, and municipalities can implement to mitigate these financial burdens while promoting the overall well-being of their constituents. Policies considered include: The “Immigrant Welcoming City” paradigm The limitation of routine cooperation and custody transfer between local and federal law enforcement Expanding access to permissible forms of identification Universal representation for immigration defendants The cultivation of community bond funds The promotion of worker-owned cooperativesAlthough these kinds of state or local initiatives cannot replace meaningful federal action on immigration reform, they can do much to provide relief and promote economic security for established immigrant and mixed-status families living in the United States, while contributing to overall community well-being and economic vitality.

State Versus Federal Wiretap Orders: A Look at the Data

Title III, codified at Title 18 USC \S\S 2510-2521, allows for federal and state law enforcement interceptions of wire, oral, or electronic communications, which requires obtaining a court order. For the two parallel court systems in the United States, however, the operational standard being followed by law enforcement agencies may differ. This paper compares the outcomes from wiretap orders authorized by the federal and the state courts. Guided by an economic model of criminal behavior, we show that arrests and convictions increase in wiretap intensity (at a diminishing rate), but federal orders reach the peak point faster than state orders so. We do not find cross effects between the two layers of wiretap orders.

Anti-Science Politics

Political attacks against scientists and scientific research are nothing new, though the Trump Administration appears to have increased both the breadth and the depth of such attacks. What is new, it seems, are attacks on science that are not in service of protecting any regulated industry that can provide political benefits. Under the Trump Administration, the attacks on science are more systemic, and aimed more at reducing scientific capacity in the federal government, rather than mere one-off policy interventions. The essay suggests that the Trump Administration, more than previous administrations, has sought to use science as part of a political culture war, reviving a populist suspicion of intellectuals that has a long and cyclical history in American culture. This current episode of anti-intellectualism, while targeting the social sciences as past episodes have, has also uniquely targeted the biological and physical sciences, the difference being that findings in these fields are more firmly grounded in empirical fact than in the social sciences. The Trump Administration's attacks on science, writ larger, are non-epistemic in nature, seeking to build an ideology of hostility to science. This strategy builds upon a decades-long and continuing misinformation campaign to discredit climate scientists, but goes further, seeking to portray scientists as part of the "deep state" that is conspiring to victimize Americans. To be sure, federal funding for most research unrelated to industry regulation remains robust, even higher in some programs. But a manufactured suspicion of "regulatory science" (relating to industry regulation) has begun to bleed ominously over into policy arenas completely outside of regulation. The Trump Administration's policy meanderings to deal with the covid-19 crisis are emblematic of a growing and systemic subjugation of science to political objectives, ones that can be bizarrely unscientific. A number of cultural, political, and economic factors contribute to this latest resurgence of anti-intellectualism, one with a unique animus towards the hard sciences. A restoration of endangered and broken societal norms governing the advancement of science will require vigorous enforcement of federal administrative laws, but will also require the development of government policies that address the cultural, political, and economic roots of this latest crisis of science.

Nontraditional Criminal Prosecutions in Federal Court

Who, besides the U.S. Department of Justice, can prosecute criminal actions in federal court? This Article considers this question, which has arisen recently in various contexts—DOJ’s attempt to abort the prosecution of former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn, the contempt prosecution of former Sheriff Joseph Arpaio (who received a presidential pardon), the confrontation over the court-appointed interim U.S. Attorney in New York, and a local District Attorney’s threats to prosecute lawbreaking federal law enforcement officials. Consider first nontraditional trial-level federal prosecutions. The Constitution’s Take Care and Appointments Clauses, as well as standing, preclude private prosecutions and prosecutions by states and Houses of Congress. Court-appointed interim U.S. Attorneys may oversee federal prosecutions, and court-appointed special prosecutors may prosecute criminal contempt cases. However, court-appointed attorneys likely cannot undertake broader responsibilities. Consider next criminal appeals. While the Supreme Court has acknowledged the possibility of a state’s appellate standing where DOJ declines to appeal a federal criminal decision holding a state statute unconstitutional, that precedent is dubious. Moreover, even if a state’s standing is sometimes proper, the case for appellate standing of a House of Congress is weaker. Finally, consider state prosecutions in federal court. A state should have standing to appeal criminal cases to the Supreme Court, and to pursue properly removed state criminal prosecutions in the lower federal courts, as should any properly designated state governmental entity. To the extent a state allows private prosecutions, aggrieved individuals ought to be able to pursue such prosecutions if they are properly removed.

Examining the Clearance Rates of Violent and Non-Violent Offences in the United States: A Trend Analysis, 2011-2018.

The main objective of this study was to examine the clearance rates of violent and non-violent offenses in the United States for the years 2011 to 2018. This study focused specifically on the differences in clearance rates of incidents involving crimes against persons, crimes against property, and crimes against society. The analyses are based on the FBI's NIBRS data that have been reported by local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies for 8 years combined. The analyses focused on the characteristics of the distribution of clearance rates by the types of incidents. The clearance rates were calculated based on the number of incidents that were cleared by arrest or exceptional means. The results show that the average clearance rate for incidents involving crimes against persons is 48.6%, for incidents involving property crimes is 18%, and for incidents involving crimes against society is 78%. The trend analyses show that the clearance rates are gradually decreasing for all three types of offense categories.

Radiance in Reclamation

In the sharp frosty winds of the morning of January 9th, 2019, Indigenous activist group Idle no More and their allies shut down the Bloor Viaduct, a well-used truss arch bridge in Tkaronto, Ontario, Kanata (Three Fire Territories) that connects the city’s east-side to its downtown core. The action took place during rush hour in solidarity with the Wet’suwet’en First Nation. The Canadian government was once again violating unceded land by mobilizing armed federal law enforcement to forcibly remove the nation from their land in order to build a gas pipeline. In response to this violence, allies throughout the city, myself among them, decided to show Tkaronto that it was not business as usual by bringing traffic on the Viaduct to a halt. Importantly, the bridge looms over the Don River. Reclamation of this space was therefore a reminder of the sanctity of water, gesturing to the fact that it is a privilege to be able to access clean water, while also reminding us of the threat of contamination posed by the pipelines’ development. As the day came to an end and the sun retreated, cycling through its farewell hues of yellow and orange, the elders began to sing. We round danced, our bodies flowing as one like the river beneath us. Our melodic voices of hope and mourning, joining the gusts of wind that whistled between the bridge supports. After the protest, we continued to chant as we walked back, fists raised with the awareness that, although this action was over, our spirits had been rekindled for the next one. This photo essay seeks to echo the calls of resistance of that day. I capture the warm hopeful tones of the sunset in an otherwise frigid colour scheme, while using wide angles to capture the scope of attendance, and a low depth of field to center the role of femme-identifying water protectors in the movement.

'This Is Not a Patient, This Is Property of the State': Nursing, ethics, and the immigrant detention apparatus.

This paper opens with first-hand accounts of critical care medical interventions in which detainees, in the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), are brought to the emergency department for treatment. This case dramatizes the extent to which the provision of ethical and acceptable nursing care is jeopardized by federal law enforcement paradigms. Drawing on the scholarship of Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben, this paper offers a theoretical account of the power dynamics that inform the health care of patients who find themselves caught in the custodial scaffolding of a vast immigration and detention apparatus. It offers an analysis of the display of sovereign and biopolitical power over the lives (and deaths) of detainees (Foucault), as well as the ways these individuals are reduced to "bare life" under the political pretext of an emergency or "state of exception" (Agamben). Our purpose here is both theoretical and practical: to better understand the often hidden agency or impersonal "will" exercised by the immigrant detention system, but also to equip clinicians in these and cognate facilities (e.g., prisons) with the critical tools by which they might better navigate incommensurable paradigms (i.e., care vs. custody) in order to deliver the best care while upholding their ethical duties as a care provider. This is all the more pressing because hospitals are not sanctuaries and given the incursion of federal law enforcement agents, nurses may find themselves conscripted as de facto agents of the state.

Network-theoretic modeling of complex activity using UK online sex advertisements

Online sex has become a fast-growing business in both developing and developed network, with advertisements of (not necessarily unique) individuals numbering in the hundreds of millions across different Web portals. One such major hub of sex advertisement activity, before it was shut down by US federal agencies, was backpage.com. The backpage.com website was a classifieds-advertising portal that had become the largest marketplace for buying and selling sex by the time that federal law enforcement agencies seized it in April 2018. Since then, investigations have been actively underway. However, the data (which has recently been made available to us for research on UK Backpage) also offers valuable insights into the nature of the online sex business, including complex properties that can be best studied using network science. One of the challenges, however, is a rigorous modeling of the data as a network, since the primary data are web advertisements and metadata (backend database) on accounts that posted that ad. In this article, we conduct an empirical study of an important sample of the online sex marketplace using UK backpage, including presenting a methodology for constructing simple ‘activity networks’ that define some notion of real-world collaboration or connection between two entities (in our case, at the level of ad-posting accounts) and then studying the properties of these networks. We gather a set of insights into a domain that has not been studied at scale, let alone a national level, but that is continuing to be a growing social problem for many countries.

Unintended costs of a dual regulatory environment: Evidence from state-level cannabis legalization and bank audit fees

Since 2014, a number of U.S. states have legalized business activities related to the production, distribution, and use of recreational cannabis. These activities remain illegal at the U.S. federal level, creating a dual regulatory environment. The uncertainty related to the enforcement of federal cannabis laws affects businesses located in legalizing states, particularly federally-insured banks. Applying a difference-in-differences approach to a matched sample of banks in legalizing and non-legalizing states, we document an increase in audit fees incurred by banks located in legalizing states after cannabis legalization. This finding is consistent with increased auditor effort and engagement risk being an unintended consequence of state-level recreational cannabis legalization. In supplemental analysis, we find that the relation between banks’ audit fees and cannabis legalization was greater for banks having larger increases in banking activity, suggesting that audit fees increased primarily for banks that may be engaging in relationships with cannabis-related businesses.

Rescaling the Sanctuary City: Police and Non‐Status Migrants in Ontario, Canada

AbstractCanadian cities pledge to provide access to municipal services to non‐status migrants and withhold information identifying non‐status migrants from federal immigration authorities. Despite these promises, local police continue to cooperate with the Canada Border Services Agency, which raises questions about the capacity of cities to honour their promises. An empirical study involved interviews with high‐ranking police officers in eight local jurisdictions in Ontario about police perceptions regarding their role in the enforcement of federal immigration law and their obligations to honour sanctuary‐city policies. The results show that many police officers believe they possess legal authority to report non‐status migrants to federal authorities. We suggest that this belief rests on misconceptions about the relationship between criminal law and immigration law, claims of jurisdictional immunity from municipal government, and distortions of the principles of policing in Canada. Rescaling of sanctuary policies to the provincial level may offer solutions.

Multiracial Feminism: An Intersectional Approach to Examining Female Officers’ Occupational Barriers in Federal Law Enforcement

There has been a rise in scholarship targeting women’s experiences in federal law enforcement. Missing, however, are the women of color, as all previous studies capture women as a homogeneous group without regard to race/ethnicity. Using a combined survey dataset from sworn female officers (n = 1,189) employed by two federal law enforcement agencies, this article employs multiracial feminism as a framework to differentiate women’s experiences in the workplace and provides an exploratory analysis of occupational barriers utilizing an intersectional approach to race and gender. Specifically, this study employs an independent-samples t-test to explore the responses between White women and minority women, as well as each minority racial/ethnic group. The findings suggest women of color collectively, as well as individual minority racial/ethnic groups, have varying workplace experiences and perspectives in comparison to White women, especially in response to a perceived glass ceiling to promotions, an inclusive work culture, and experiencing sex discrimination.

Digital surveillance and access to encrypted communications in Australia

Australia’s counterterrorism laws have significantly expanded the powers of its law enforcement and intelligence agencies with regard to digital surveillance. In this article, we explain and evaluate Australia’s counterterrorism laws with respect to intercepting telecommunications, other forms of digital surveillance and access to encrypted communications. We focus on the statutory powers held by federal law enforcement agencies and the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), Australia’s domestic security intelligence agency. These powers confirm several important trends. They have further blurred the lines between intelligence and evidence and they have granted law enforcement and ASIO extraordinary powers to modify consumer technologies. They also create significant potential for conflict of laws across national boundaries. Significant strengthening of existing accountability mechanisms is needed to ensure public transparency and reduce opportunities for misuse.

“Cops and the Klan”: Police Disavowal of Risk and Minimization of Threat from the Far-Right

Critical scholars argue that contemporary policing practices reproduce colonial logics through the maintenance of racial and economic inequality. In this article, I extend the framing of policing as a colonial project grounded in white supremacy to an analysis of police responses to white power mobilization during a heightened period of activity and violence (2015–2017). Borrowing from Perry and Scrivens (2018), I identify the two most common police responses—“disavowal of risk” and “minimization of threat”—in the official investigations into the deadly “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, on August 12, 2017. Based on an analysis of newspaper reports from across the United States during the two-year period since then, I found that local and federal law enforcement consistently trivialized the presence of white power groups in the community, elevated the potential threat from protestors, concentrated intelligence efforts on activists, and provided differential protection to white supremacists.

Does Agency Type Matter for Female Federal Agents? Exploring the Offices of Inspectors General

Recent scholarship has examined the barriers women experience in well-known federal law enforcement agencies. However, there is scant research that examines a unique subgrouping of agents within the federal Offices of Inspectors General (OIGs). Drawing on survey data from 249 female agents, this study compares responses between female agents working in the OIGs and female agents working in all other federal law enforcement agencies to differentiate their experiences. Findings suggest that female agents in the OIGs experience less occupational barriers, namely, reduced number of relocations and incidences of sexual harassment, as well as higher agency adoption of family-friendly policies to promote work–life balance, resulting in women’s higher representation at those agencies.

Face Off: Law Enforcement Use of Face Recognition Technology

This white paper takes a broad look at the problems with law enforcement use of face recognition technology in the United States. Part 1 provides an overview of the key issues with face recognition, including accuracy, security, and impact on privacy and civil rights. Part 2 focuses on FBI’s face recognition programs, because FBI not only manages the repository for most of the criminal data used by federal, state, local, and tribal law enforcement agencies across the United States, but also provides direct face recognition services to many of these agencies, and its systems exemplify the wider problems with face recognition. After considering these current issues, Part 3 looks ahead to potential future face recognition capabilities and concerns. Finally, Part 4 presents recommendations for policy makers on the limits and checks necessary to ensure that law enforcement use of face recognition respects civil liberties.

Wege in die Digitale Gesellschaft: Computernutzung in der Bundesrepublik 1955-1990 [Towards a digital society: Computer use in West Germany 1955-1990] ed. by Frank Bösch

Reviewed by: Wege in die Digitale Gesellschaft: Computernutzung in der Bundesrepublik 1955-1990 [Towards a digital society: Computer use in West Germany 1955-1990] ed. by Frank Bösch Corinna Schlombs (bio) Wege in die Digitale Gesellschaft: Computernutzung in der Bundesrepublik 1955-1990 [Towards a digital society: Computer use in West Germany 1955-1990] Edited by Frank Bösch. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2018. Pp. 326. The volume unites contemporary history scholarship with the history of computing, technology, and business. The result is a densely researched compilation of studies on computerization in West Germany, in areas such [End Page 1248] as law enforcement and the military, banking, insurance, local utility companies, the printing industry, computer networking, and personal computer uses by hackers, crackers, and chess players. The contributing authors provide original insights into the histories of data security and automation, also raising important comparative questions internationally and between the two Germanies. They paint a picture of a slow but steady diffusion of computing, not a revolutionary overhaul. The authors provide a compelling historicization for current debates about national security and privacy by investigating computing in law enforcement. Contextualizing their studies in West Germany's student protests and the Red Army Faction's left-wing domestic terrorism in the late 1960s and 1970s, they expand the historiography of computing that so far has mostly discussed the counter culture movement as an inspiration for personal computing. In their chapter on data sharing systems in West Germany and the United States in the 1970s and 1980s, Constantin Goschler, Christopher Kirchberg, and Jens Wegener ask how the use of data files versus paper records affected transparency practices in democratic states in light of perceived national security threats. Rüdiger Bergien reveals that in West Germany from 1967 to 1989, federal law enforcement agencies accessed civilian databases including health insurance, unemployment offices, and motor vehicle records. But while new data security officers objected to the misappropriation of data for unintended purposes, law enforcement officers standardized data to overcome technical obstacles, caused for example by different formats for names in various databases. The studies disclose a history of conflict between data privacy and national security. In addition, the volume addresses the effects of computer automation on work, particularly in offices. In a notable chapter on computing in the printing industry in the 1960s and 1970s, Kim Priemel examines union responses to technological change. He contributes to growing evidence that union leaders were more supportive of new technologies than the rank-and-file union members who feared for their jobs and in some cases voted down conciliatory union contract proposals. Several chapters allude to the essential role of data entry for computerization: Janine Funke explores how insufficient data impacted the reliability of military simulations; Thomas Kasper argues that lacking data entry hindered the computerization of pension insurance; and Kim Priemel shows how unskilled typists (women) and electronic technicians threatened to replace skilled printers and typesetters (men). These observations invite further studies on labor, gender, skills, and control in computer automation. Finally, the authors contribute to the internationalization of computing history by decentering the United States as the model of computerization. Like Eden Medina in her seminal work on computing in Chile, they examine local conditions where computers were introduced. As Frank Bösch points out, West Germany was among the countries where civilian organizations [End Page 1249] played a more eminent role in computerization than the military-industrial-academic complex. Even the army, as Janine Funke reveals, used its first computers for materials logistics, and only later integrated computers into weapons systems and operations research, mostly through NATO cooperation. The West German legacy of state monopoly and government regulation in telecommunications also impacted computer networking. As Matthias Röhr shows, the postal service favored the hierarchically organized BTX and OSI services and standards over the internet and its de facto standard protocol TCP/IP, rendering computer networking costly to West Germans and delaying its wider use. While the international comparisons highlight local differences, East and West Germany had surprising similarities. Martin Schmitt argues that computerization in savings banks was centralized in both Germanies, albeit for different reasons. And Julia Erdogan finds similar subcultures of young male hobbyists...

Sanctuary Cities and the Power of the Purse: An Executive Dole Test

A constitutional clash is brewing. Cities and counties are flexing their muscles to frustrate national immigration policy while the federal Executive is threatening to interfere with local law enforcement decisionmaking and funding. Although the federal government generally has plenary authority over immigration law, the Constitution forbids the commandeering of state and local officials to enforce federal law against their will. One exception to this anti-commandeering principle is the Spending Clause of Article I that permits Congress to condition the receipt of federal funds on compliance with federal law. These conditions, according to more than thirty years of Supreme Court precedent since South Dakota v. Dole, must be clearly articulated in advance, related to the underlying purpose of the federal funds, and not deemed coercive by the courts. The Attorney General recently announced conditions on federal law enforcement grants that would defund police departments who do not cooperate with federal immigration officials. These new funding conditions triggered legal challenges by a dozen jurisdictions under the Spending Clause. While the case law is clear that Congress may delegate its authority to the Executive to add conditions on federal grants, two important questions remain unresolved: (1) does the authority to add conditions on spending inherently attach to delegations to implement federal grant programs or must that authority be delegated separately and unambiguously? and (2) are executive conditions subject to the same standards of clarity, germaneness, and non-coercion? Recent threats by the President to withhold funding for elections, education, and public parks amplify the need for clarity on these questions. In this Article, I argue that executive conditions on federal spending are unquestionably appropriate, but only when Congress has unambiguously delegated the authority to add conditions. This delegation should not act as a loophole in the Dole doctrine. In fact, because the central constitutional concern in Spending Clause cases is the undue aggrandizement of federal power at the (literal) expense of the states, I argue that executive conditions on federal spending should be subject to stricter limits than conditions imposed by Congress; inter-branch coordination poses a greater threat to state sovereignty than either Congress or the Executive acting alone. The upshot of stricter executive limits is that conditions on federal spending will likely shift away from the Executive to Congress, which may be desirable on accountability grounds. Finally, the recent appointment of Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court have raised the stakes of this particular debate. Both of the new Justices have publicly articulated concerns about expanding federal power and federal administrative power in particular. The question of sua sponte executive conditions on federal grants-in-aid thus pose a ripe opportunity for skeptics of the administrative state to rein in the regulatory state in particular, and the Spending Clause more generally.

The Law: “Witch Hunts” and the Rule of Law: Trump, the Special Counsel, and the Department of Justice

AbstractThis article summarizes the previous behavior of presidents subjected to independent counsel investigations, and compares President Donald Trump's behavior to theirs. It concludes that while Trump's behavior is part of a larger pattern of presidential use of various executive prerogatives to try to counteract independent counsels, it departs from that pattern in several distinct ways. I conclude that several developments in the broader political environment over the last several decades have contributed to his distinctive behavior, including the highly fragmented media market, the degree of partisan polarization in the electorate, the conservative populist distrust of federal law enforcement, and the mainstreaming of the unitary executive theory in the courts and executive branch.

Women and Public Organization: An Examination of Mentorship and Its Effect on Reporting Workplace Discrimination

A number of studies have focused on mentorship as a variable often associated with career advancement; however, there is little to no research on the impact mentors have with women reporting workplace discrimination, specifically sex-based discrimination to include sexual harassment. Using a survey dataset of 1,113 female officers from a large federal law enforcement agency, this research employs coarsened exact matching to examine mentorship and to include mentor’s gender and its effect on women’s reporting behaviors. This study finds that the probability of reporting sexual harassment increases when women have mentors; however, the existence of mentors did not lead to a significant difference in reporting sex discrimination. In addition, there is no significance on the mentor’s gender with women’s reporting behaviors.

Will the Supreme Court Rein in “Excessive Fines” and Forfeitures? Don’t Rely on Timbs v. Indiana

The Supreme Court’s decision in Timbs v. Indiana, 139 S. Ct. 682 (2019), last term buoyed the hopes of those who saw it as a powerful signal to states and municipalities to rein in excessive fines, fees, and forfeitures. Yet, the Court seems disinclined to fill the term “proportionality” with robust meaning or wrestle with Eighth Amendment challenges to fines and fees. Those steps would be required for the Excessive Fines Clause to function as an effective backstop against revenue-raising and increasingly abusive local and state practices. In the end, state courts and state legislative changes may more likely address effectively the essential question of what is excessive and restrain criminal justice actors from imposing ever heavier financial burdens on those caught up in the system. This article first sets out the Supreme Court’s decision in Timbs in light of the incorporation debate and prior case law in the area. Next it turns to the underlying but unaddressed contours of “excessive” in the context of fines and forfeitures. The article then provides a broader look at forfeiture, including the interplay between state and federal law enforcement in the area. Finally, the piece addresses state and local fines and fees, which will now be subject to Eighth Amendment analysis. The Court, however, rejected the first opportunity to take up such a challenge. At least for now, litigants may be more successful in reining in abusive fines and forfeitures in state legislatures and state courts.