Last month, the Migration Policy Institute (MPI) released its report “Immigration Enforcement in the United States.” This report looked at how much the federal government's spending and programming for immigration enforcement since the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) has increased. The amount of money the United States has spent on immigration and border enforcement has skyrocketed in recent years as a result of the U.S.'s “enforcement first” approach to immigration. The report's findings are shocking. The U.S. government now spends more on immigration enforcement than on all other major federal criminal law enforcement agencies combined and immigration enforcement is the federal government's highest criminal law enforcement priority. Surprisingly, at a time when our government must be fiscally conservative and unauthorized immigration has abated, the call to increase spending on border enforcement is as loud as ever.

What does unprecedented enforcement spending actually mean for a vulnerable migrant seeking protection in the United States?

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