Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis

by Jonathan Blitzer

2006, under pressure from Congress, ICE instituted the annual arrest quotas, and, unsurprisingly, agents started arresting far fewer people with criminal records and far more of what they called “ordinary status violators.” Previously, if Mechkowski had been pursuing one person and encountered other undocumented immigrants along the way, he would ignore them, sticking to his original target. But because the arrest numbers were the key to unlocking more money for the agency, he and the other agents began making “collateral arrests.” They rounded up anyone they could. By the end of 2006, only 17 percent of all arrests made by fugitive operations involved immigrants with criminal records. The percentage was roughly half that the following year.