87% Of Undocumented Immigrants Will Stay Under Obama’s New Policies, Report Says

Under new immigration enforcement programs the Obama administration is putting in place across the country, the vast majority of unauthorized immigrants — up to 87 percent — would not be the focus of deportation operations and would have “a degree of protection” to remain in the United States, according to a report published Thursday by the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan research group in Washington. The report found that about 13 percent of an estimated 11 million immigrants without papers, or about 1.4 million people, have criminal records or recently crossed the border illegally, making them priorities for deportation under guidelines the administration announced in November and put into effect July 1. The new program is likely to result in a drop in overall deportations from inside the country by as much as 25,000 a year, the report finds, but an increase in deportations of immigrants who were convicted of serious crimes, pose national security threats or were caught crossing the border illegally. The findings come as federal and local immigration enforcement policies are under intense scrutiny after the killing on July 1 of Kathryn Steinle, who was fatally shot on a pier in San Francisco by a Mexican immigrant with a long record of felony convictions and deportations. The immigrant, Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez, was released by the sheriff in San Francisco, a self-declared sanctuary city, without federal agents being notified. Although the Migration Policy Institute is not an advocacy organization, its research has lent support to measures granting legal status to unauthorized immigrants. Its report is based on data from the Department of Homeland Security and the Census Bureau, among other sources...more