The Deterrence Strategy Of Homeland Security

When the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) refers to its new deterrence strategy, the agency is not talking about nuclear arsenals, missile defense, or border security. For DHS, deterrence is a strategy of immigration control that relies on what U.S. law enforcement does best: imprisonment.

The United States has more people in jail—2.3 million—than any other nation. Although the United States has less than 5% of the world’s population, it holds almost a quarter of the world’s prisoners. One of every 100 adults in the “land of the free” is locked up.

Immigrants are the fastest-growing sector of the U.S. prison population. The DHS agency Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detains 300,000 immigrants annually, with some 32,000 immigrants in ICE detention centers on any given day. ICE’s budget for its Detention and Removal Operations has jumped from $959 million in 2004 to $2.3 billion today.

The rise in the number of immigrants detained or incarcerated by the federal government for immigration-related offenses dates back to the mid-1990s when Congress passed the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act and the Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act.

The combined effect of the two acts was to dramatically expand the definition of a “criminal alien” to include immigrants—legal and illegal—who falsify their identity documents and Social Security numbers, or who have been convicted of any misdemeanor or crime, as minor as shoplifting or disturbing the peace.

An immigrant who does not appear at a scheduled immigration hearing is labeled a “fugitive alien” and is subject to immediate detention and deportation, or, as ICE’s Homeland Security deterrence strategy increasingly kicks in, possibly sentencing, imprisonment, and then “removal.”

From the start DHS adopted military terminology—security, surges, protection, operations, deterrence, etc.—for its immigration initiatives and strategies. As part of the department’s strategic plan, the newly created Detention and Removal Operations (DRO) set forth its Operation Endgame strategy. DRO is component of ICE.

The DRO strategic plan “sets in motion a cohesive enforcement program with a 10-year time horizon that will build the capacity to “remove all removable aliens,” eliminate the backlog of unexecuted final order removal cases, and realize its vision.”

Operation Endgame sees the detention and removal of aliens as a fundamental component of a national security strategy: “Moving toward a 100% rate of removal for all removable aliens allows ICE to provide the level of immigration enforcement necessary to keep America secure.”