Immigration Law

“It’s well known that ICE has been pursuing a campaign of indiscriminate arrests, but it’s less well known that even as ICE has arrested more people who likely could win their cases and stay in the United States, arrests have been ending more often in deportation,” report author David Hausman, co-director of the Deportation Data Project and assistant professor of law at UC Berkeley, said in a statement. “One big factor is that detention causes people to give up on their cases.”

Dozens of students from the UC Berkeley School of Law gathered April 7 to discuss the ways gender-based violence has shaped recent activity by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. 

Historically, ICE made relatively few arrests at homes, worksites, and other public places. Instead, “the vast majority of arrests that ICE used to conduct were really transfers of custody from a state or local authority to the federal government,” said David Hausman, a UC Berkeley Law assistant professor and the faculty director of the Deportation Data Project. As Hausman recently explained to my colleague Christian Paz, however, that norm has changed — and radically — under President Donald Trump. ICE now carries out thousands of “at-large” arrests in public.

“Someone with a pending charge who is not convicted is not usually called a ‘criminal’ in our criminal system,” said David Hausman, an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley School of Law who directs the Deportation Data Project.

“The crackdown is bigger than what it would seem,” David Hausman, a University of California, Berkeley, assistant professor of law and codirector of the Deportation Data Project, a repository of federal immigration enforcement data, told USA TODAY. He pointed to large increases in arrests within the United States, which often get conflated with arrests at the border that have dwindled dramatically under Trump.

“What we find, which is at first a little puzzling, is actually the opposite — that deportations went up even more quickly than arrests,” said David Hausman, a co-director of the Deportation Data Project.

David Hausman, a UC Berkeley School of Law assistant professor and the faculty director of the Deportation Data Project, discusses how ICE is operating in a completely different way to how it has historically worked.

Comparing the month before the inauguration to the month of July, arrests of people with no criminal charges or convictions across the country have gone up about ten times, said David Hausman, an assistant professor at Berkeley Law and the director of the project, a repository of ICE data collected largely via FOIA request. 

“The data really is a gold mine of information about what’s happening in interior immigration enforcement,” said David Hausman, the project’s faculty director and an assistant professor at Berkeley Law.

“We don’t see ourselves as antagonistic and try to strike a collaborative tone because we think the agencies can actually benefit from releasing the information,” said Professor David Hausman. “Our goal in the most basic way is to get data out to the people, to update it and publicize it.”