New York moves to limit federal deportations of undocumented immigrants

A proposed New York City law would allow officials to decline requests by U.S. immigration authorities to detain immigrants for deportation proceedings unless a warrant is issued by a federal judge.

Even then, the city would only approve a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention request if the individual has been convicted of a violent or serious crime within the past five years.

The White House has said that its deportation policy focuses on immigrants with criminal records, or recent border crossers. Nonetheless, the Obama administration has faced increasing criticism for his policies on deportations and stalled reforms.

“By further limiting ICE’s role in the detention and deportation of immigrant New Yorkers, we set the national standard for the treatment of our immigrant population,” Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito, a sponsor of the bill, said in a statement. “Families will no longer be needlessly torn apart by ICE’s dragnet enforcement efforts.”

The legislation, due to be introduced next week, has the support of Mayor Bill de Blasio, and will be put before the city council. In Illinois, the sheriff of Cook County, which includes Chicago, has also refused many ICE requests.

ICE said in a statement Thursday that its policy of detaining individuals arrested on criminal charges is meant to “ensure that dangerous criminals are not released from prisons or jails and into our communities.”

New York City's Department of Correction handed over 3,000 people to federal immigration agents between October 2012 and September 2013, according to the city council. It denied 1,163 requests during the same period.

The announcement of the latest push back against deportation policies comes days after the Department of Homeland Security released official deportation figures for 2013. They show that well over 2 million immigrants have been deported under President Barack Obama’s time in office.

“You can’t look at this report and conclude that this administration has not been serious about immigrant enforcement,” Marc R. Rosenblum, director of the United States policy program at the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think-tank in Washington, D.C., said according to the New York Times. “This reinforces the message that he has been the deporter-in-chief.”

With wire services