New York illegal immigrants are massively sent to prison: what is happening and what does Trump have to do with it

In New York, they began massively sending illegal immigrants to prisons. Even those who pose no threat to society are being arrested. The publication shares the details BuzzFeed.News.

What's going on

Four years before U.S. President Donald Trump came to power, about half of low-risk immigrants arrested in New York who were considered low-risk were released from custody pending trial. Today, 96% of them, according to the new lawsuit, are in prison for up to three months.

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) now jails almost every immigrant arrested in New York - even those who pose no threat. The prisoners are sent to jail for weeks or even months until they are brought to trial. This is stated in a recently published lawsuit.

What does Trump have to do with it?

It was after Donald Trump became president of America that the ICE began to use the new “risk assessment” algorithm and make stricter decisions regarding immigrants. The New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) and the Bronx Defenders, who filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration on Friday, February 28, came to this conclusion.

“This policy violates due process and has dramatically increased the number of immigrants detained,” said Amy Belsher of New York University.

An ICE spokeswoman said the agency is "not commenting on pending trials."

On the subject: Obama vs Trump: how the policy of arresting and deporting illegal immigrants has changed

The data in the complaint covers only the New York region. However, at the same time, they highlight the changes that have occurred across the country after Trump took office and dramatically changed the policy of arresting and deporting illegal immigrants.

New algorithm in action

The fate of the arrested immigrants in America is decided by the ICE. Since 2013, the service has used a special risk classification assessment algorithm. With its help, it was determined how much freedom can be granted to an immigrant before the trial. It worked like this: an ICE employee entered into the system answers to 178 questions related to public relations, biographical and other data of the prisoner, after which the algorithm gave an answer. There were four possible answers: imprisonment, release on bail, release without bail or transfer of the decision to the head of the ICE department.

In June 2017, the Trump administration changed the algorithm in such a way that it no longer recommends the release of a single immigrant, which was first reported to Reuters in 2018. Now only two options are possible: to delay or contact the head of the ICE.

This had a massive effect in New York, the lawsuit claims. Four years before the change of algorithm, about half of the immigrants arrested in New York who were considered low-risk were released pending trial. Now, 96% of them are sent to prisons for up to three months, the lawsuit says.

In 2018, the first full calendar year since the changes, the algorithm recommended contacting the supervisor for 119 out of 128 (93%) low-risk immigrants in New York. the remaining nine were advised to be detained, according to NYCLU.

Consequences of detention

“The impact of detention on immigrants can be devastating, separating people from their families and communities,” said Thomas Scott-Railton, Immigrant Justice Corps officer in the Bronx. "Detention can be especially harmful - even fatal - for people with physical and mental health, because medical services in prisons in the New York area are grossly inadequate."

These changes, in particular, contributed to a massive increase in the number of illegal immigrants detained at ICE. At the end of April 2019, about 50 thousand people across the country were held in ICE pretrial detention facilities, according to the Transaction Information Exchange Center at the University of Syracuse. This is almost double the number of detainees in 2015. 64% of detainees as of April 2019 had no criminal record, compared with 39% at the beginning of 2015.