American Civil Liberties Union

Where would you expect to find half-a-dozen patrol cars on New Year's Eve? In Bakersfield, California, ranked in the highest ten percent of the most violent cities in America, you'd hope they'd be responding to incidents of violence and preventing murder, rape, and other violent crime. At the very least, you'd expect them to be patrolling for drunk drivers.

Not so. At least not when it comes to prioritizing such matters as "barking dogs." On December 31, 2012, the Kern County Sheriff's Department deployed six police cars and numerous officers at the behest of a resident who called for help from, well, the sounds of two small barking dogs. Her neighbor, Ruth Montaño, a Latina farm-worker, and her three American children owned the dogs.

Today, Roll Call published an op-ed we wrote on how curtailing immigration prisons is an easy way for Congress to begin to reduce the deficit, cut government spending, and reform our flawed immigration system.

In addition, there are several steps the Obama Administration can and should take now, without waiting for Congress, to reduce its unnecessary and expensive reliance on immigration prisons.  Here are four:

Change in our communities takes courage. Many times, that courage does not come from the politicians, but from ordinary people standing up for what is right.

DREAMers continue to stand up for human and civil rights every day. We are standing up against anti-immigrant policies. We are standing up for education & integration. We are standing up for equality. Let the voices of our oppressed youth be heard in the courts, which is exactly what will be taking place. DREAMers have collaborated with the ACLU and a civil rights coalition to file a lawsuit against Brewer’s executive order denying driver’s license to deferred action applicants. But this is much more than a legal battle; the fight we fight today is a moral fight.

This week and next, the House and Senate will hold hearings (including this one today) to address the reported release of between several hundred and several thousand immigration detainees from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement ("ICE") custody. Although complete information about the releases is not yet available, ICE's justification that it had determined these individuals could be "placed on an appropriate, more cost-effective form of supervised release" raises a fundamental question, posed among others by Secretary Janet Napolitano herself: why were these individuals detained in the first place?