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As part of the executive actions reforms announced by the administration yesterday, the administration has redefined the enforcement priorities for Immigration & Customs Enforcement. Briefly, any law enforcement agency with limited resources can not realistically enforce the law against everyone who may have broken it. Law enforcement agencies must pick and choose how to allocate their limited resources and where to expend their efforts. The new enforcement priorities memo provides very clear guidance to ICE as to who their efforts ought to be focused upon. Groups of people have been classified into three priorities for enforcement, in declining orders of priority. Individuals not within this memo are, presumably, not priorities, and should be eligible for benefits and not subjected to enforcement actions like detention and removal. The three classes of priority are as follows:
Priority 1 (Most serious)
Priority 2 (Medium serious)
Priority 3 (Less serious)
Once again, presumably, an individual not on any of these lists should not be considered a priority for removal and ICE is directed not to expend resources of seeking their detention and removal. We will be watching ICE to see how the agents in the field respond to these revised priorities.
Benach Collopy
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