The Obama administration has instructed federal immigration lawyers to release illegal immigrants with "old" drunken-driving convictions as well as identity thieves, says a senior attorney for Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Patricia Vroom, an ICE lawyer in Arizona, has filed a discrimination complaint detailing how top agency officials ordered her to close cases and not deport illegal immigrants deemed "low-priority" offenders by President Barack Obama.
Federal officials disparaged identity-theft convictions from Arizona, contending that its laws were too strict and that stealing someone's identity in order to get a job should not be a deportable offense,
The Washington Times reported.
In her complaint, Vroom said that in a September discussion, top ICE lawyers told staff to ignore "old" DUI convictions if immigrants had ties to the community or family responsibilities in the United States that were said to outweigh their criminal behavior.
She described an Aug. 16, 2013, conference call about how to handle a "dreamer" – an illegal immigrant brought to the U.S. as a child – who had been convicted of identity theft under Arizona's law.
ICE's local field office was pursuing the case, but senior agency officials wanted it dropped.
Vroom told officials in Washington that since they were pressing to kill the case, they should make the cancellation request. But a top ICE official rejected that suggestion in an email: "No way. Keep it local Pat. Figure it out."
During Obama's administration, ICE has come under fire from critics who say it is too permissive in dealing with illegal aliens who commit violent and nonviolent offenses alike.
An ICE document obtained by the
Center for Immigration Studies says that in 2013, the agency freed from detention more than 36,000 illegal immigrants with nearly 88,000 convictions for crimes ranging from fraud and possession of stolen property to homicide, sexual assault, kidnapping, and aggravated assault.
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