Raids targeted illegal immigrants with no criminal record

Nina Bernstein of The New York Times reports that, despite the Immigration and Customs Enforcement's January 2004 statement that its officers would focus their efforts on detaining illegal immigrants with criminal records, the agency changed its quotas to facilitate the capture of non-criminal illegal immigrants as well. By 2006, only 9 percent of those detained by the ICE were fugitives with criminal records, compared to the 40 percent who were nonfugitives picked up by chance. Bernstein obtained the information from a professor and students at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law who filed a Freedom of Information lawsuit for ICE's internal directives.