Homeland Security refining polices to target of criminals instead of 'mothers of three'

SALT LAKE CITY — New federal immigration enforcement policies are doing more to zero in on convicted felons and people who are known threats to national security but the system is far from perfect, says John Sandweg, special counselor to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano.

"These are individuals who signed up to be law enforcement officers but they're also human beings. If they can remove a criminal instead a mother of three, they'd rather do so," said Sandweg, referring to the nation's front-line immigration enforcers.

Sandweg, speaking Friday at the national immigration conference here hosted by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' Migration and Refugee Services and Catholic Legal Immigration Network Inc., said the Obama administration inherited a "broken set of immigration laws."

While immigration authorities have some flexibility in how they enforce federal law, "there is no discretion whether you enforce those laws," Sandweg said.

Catholic advocates shared with Sandweg their experiences regarding Border Patrol agents waiting in prey at bus stations for immigrants without documents or mass raids conducted among farm workers.

DHS has no deportation quotas, Sandweg said. The agency is stressing "quality and smarts over quantity."

That's a significant culture change from the practices of the George W. Bush administration, which conducted a number of large-scale workplace raids. Napolitano has set about developing a "system of common sense priorities," Sandweg said.

The agency has evolved, from an "ad hoc system of filling the first 390,000 seats on the bus and we'll get the rest of them next year," to carefully identifying people who pose threats to public safety or national security or have repeatedly violated immigration laws for deportation proceedings.

In 2011, 55 percent of people deported from the United States had been convicted of criminal offenses, up from 50 percent in 2010. In 2008, less than a third of deportees were so-called "criminal aliens."

DHS's Safe Communities initiative allows the Federal Bureau of Investigation to share fingerprints with Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials to check against its immigration databases. "The most common sense place to find people who are public safety threats is in the jails," Sandweg said.

If the checks reveal that a person is is unlawfully present in the United States, ICE can take steps to deport those people who present the most significant threats to public safety.