WASHINGTON, Feb. 5 (UPI) -- A U.S. program billed as catching dangerous illegal immigrants evading deportation orders instead often targeted people with no criminal record, findings show.
By 2007, fugitives with criminal records dropped to 9 percent of those arrested and non-fugitives without deportation orders rose to 40 percent, a report by the Immigration Legal Clinic at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York City and the Migration Policy Institute in Washington said.
Under President George Bush, federal immigration officials repeatedly told Congress they were rounding up the most threatening criminals and terrorism suspects illegally in the United States.
But the National Fugitive Operations Program changed the rules in 2006 to boost arrest totals, the report said. The program eliminated a requirement that 75 percent of those arrested be criminals and let agents include non-fugitives in their count, it said.
As this was happening, immigrant advocates complained that armed Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents conducted harsh and indiscriminate raids of homes and in neighborhoods, The Washington Post reported.
They accused the government of racial profiling, illegal searches, false arrests, family separations and other humanitarian abuses, the newspaper said.
U.S. Rep. David Price, D-N.C., chairman of the House of Representatives Appropriations Subcommittee for Homeland Security, told the Post he was "discouraged that ICE's previous leadership misrepresented the goals of the expanded Fugitive Operations Program and chose not to use its additional resources as Congress instructed."
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has ordered a review of which immigrants are targeted for arrest, the Post said.
