US immigration to target criminals

United States, 30th August: The US immigration officials have started targeting illegal immigrants having a criminal record to deport them from the US.

This latest enforcement drive in the US has been initiated by USICE(US Immigration and Customs Enforcement) for stopping deportation of immigrants who might be eligible for a US Green Card and who don’t have any record of involvement in a criminal act in the US.

The latest USICE policy is going to affect almost tens of thousands of immigrants living in the US after marriage to a US citizen or being related to a legal resident of the US or a US citizen.

The change in the policy was intimidated by the Assistant Secretary of ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), John Morton in a memo dated August 20, 2010 to the principal legal adviser of the agency and the head of enforcement and removal operations.

The main motive of this changed rules by US immigration and customs enforcement is decrease the huge backlog of piled up cases.

So now, the focus will be on deportation of only those immigrants who have earlier records of involvement in crimes in the past.

The new move by UK immigration department is being welcomed by several immigration advocates.

Notifications have been issued to US immigration officials to cancel all deportations of immigrants who are not criminals and also to grant them a right to live in the US as a legal citizen of the nation.

The total number of cases to be removed from the list of pending deportations is going to be around 17,000, the official figures revealed by US immigration courts maintain. These include illegal immigrants living in the US without appropriate US visas including immigrant spouses of US citizens or those having children who are US citizens due to being born in the US.

Immigration officers in Georgia stated that due to limited available resources and several other responsibilities like handling criminals including transnational gangs to child pornographers. So, the utmost responsibility for them is to handle those involved in murder, robbery and rape and also the employers exploiting immigrant workforce since these pose a big threat to the nation and the public of the US.