Rearrest After Immigration Detention: Results from a Nine-Year Follow-Up of Criminally-Involved Removable Immigrants

• In Event: Police, Borders, and Immigrants

Abstract

There is a growing body of literature focusing on criminally-involved immigrants who lack current legal status in the United States. To date, a handful of studies have been published looking at their short and longer term recidivism patterns, largely defined in terms of repeat arrest. Within this larger group, comparably little is known about those immigrants taken into custody by immigration authorities subsequent to an arrest for non-immigration related criminal offenses. This current paper focuses on this subgroup of removable immigrants (formerly referred to as “deportable”). It presents the results of an analysis of the immigration custody outcomes and long term criminal rearrest patterns of a group of so-called “removable” immigrants. Using data from the Los Angeles County Jail Foreign Born Inmates Study, the paper aims to explore relationships of criminal history, demographics, and immigration custody outcomes with non-immigration-related criminal rearrest patterns over a nine year follow-up period. Policy implications of the results and future research directions will be discussed.

Authors

• Jennifer Wong, Simon Fraser University

• Laura Hickman, Portland State University