By: Real America News Updated 10 Mar 2022, 17: 60 pm ITS T
Congress advanced with the approval of $1.5 billion dollars of federal funds that contemplate an increase for the office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), in order to implement new policies on undocumented immigrants.
A division of that agency, the Office of Enforcement and Deportation (ERO), will be one of the most benefited from an increase, but legislators refused to finance new hiring of immigration agents.
However, organizations that defend undocumented immigrants have warned that the new options that ICE plans for immigrants could be too “invasive” , even if they are alternatives to prison detention, since they should even have a kind of “curfew”.
Congresswoman Lucille Roybal-Allard (California), Chair of the Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee, noted that several of those funds will be directed to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) user advocacy offices), but also confirmed the allocation for the Alternatives to Detention (ATD).
“I fought to ensure that the Department of Homeland Security funding bill includes $443 million for alternatives to detention (ATD) for immigrants and $15 million for an ATD case management pilot program,” he said.
He defended that part of these funds will be allocated to non-profit organizations.
“Through which non-profit organizations will connect migrants with services in their communities during the period of their immigration court proceedings,” said the congresswoman.
The Transactional Records Access and Information Center (TRAC) of the University of Syracuse, New York revealed that currently more immigrants are released under ADT, which allows non-citizens to remain on conditional release, while they await a solution in court.
The TRAC investigator, Austin Kocher, highlighted that when President Joe Biden took office there was 90,000 immigrants under that program, but now there is more of 182,000.
“We’re witnessing a profound change in the geographical forms of surveillance and control of migrants“, Kocher wrote. “ATD represents the geographical extension of the prison logic in the daily life of people outside the walls of the prison. prison/detention, which manifests itself in new forms of digital walls around home and work”.