Immigration Surveillance Negative
RIUDL
Novice Division
Immigration Surveillance Negative – Table of Contents
Summary.............................................................................................................................................. 2
Picture Glossary ............................................................................................................................. 3-5
Responses To: The Problem Right Now
Decreasing Deportations Now .............................................................................................................. 6
ICE Re-prioritizing Deportations Now ................................................................................................... 7
Responses To: Human Rights
Reducing Violations – Federal Oversight .............................................................................................. 8
Reducing Violations – Medical Care ..................................................................................................... 9
Security Should Be Prioritized Over Rights ......................................................................................... 10
Responses To: The Plan Solves the Problems
Plan Can’t Solve – Inefficient Systems ............................................................................................... 11
Plan Can’t Solve – States Will Continue to Exclude............................................................................ 12
Plan Causes Increased Smuggling ..................................................................................................... 13
Plan Causes Violent Militias .......................................................................................................... 14-15
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Immigration Surveillance Negative
RIUDL
Novice Division
Summary
The Negative position has some options when it comes to attack the Affirmative case.
First, the Negative can argue that the current problems are already being solved. The Obama
Administration has made it a priority to improve the deportation process so that it is fair and efficient.
New guidelines issued by the federal government call for immigration enforcement agencies to target
individuals who have been convicted of violent crimes and to reduce the amount of non-criminal
individuals being deported. In particular, the administration has indicated it hopes to keep families
together and reduce the amount of parents being taken away from their children.
Second, the Negative can address the human rights issue by analyzing the improvements happening
in the system now. Much of the criticism of U.S deportation policy has been that the detention
centers we use to hold immigrants violate human rights. The ICE has been working to solve these
concerns by providing proper medical care and establishing more stringent federal oversight. In
addition, the Negative can compare how we should evaluate human rights compared to security for
the U.S.
Lastly, the Negative can simply argue that the plan doesn’t actually solve the harms it lists. Ending
surveillance alone won’t address anti-immigrant policies that states have adopted and will make the
ICE more inefficient by forcing them to do their job without surveillance technology. Some have also
argued that lenient immigration policies fuel the immigration crisis because they give smugglers an
incentive to send people across the border illegally. Moreover, states have a right to deport
immigrants and curtailing surveillance could make the immigration court system worse and fuel the
rise of violent anti-immigrant militias.
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Immigration Surveillance Negative
RIUDL
Novice Division
Picture Glossary
Department of Homeland Security (DHS): Is an
agency of the United States federal government that
was formed in 2002 from the combination of 22
departments and agencies. The agency is charge of
various task related to making the United States
homeland safe including customs, border, and
immigration enforcement; emergency response to
natural and manmade disasters; antiterrorism work;
and cyber security.
U.S Immigration and Customs Enforcement
(ICE): is an agency within the Department of
Homeland Security that enforces federal laws
governing border control, customs, trade and
immigration to promote homeland security and
public safety.
U.S Citizenship and Immigration Services
(U.S.C.I.S): The U.S Citizenship and Immigration
Services is responsible for processing immigration
and naturalization applications and establishing
policies regarding immigration services.
U.S. Customs and Border Protection (C.B.P):
Customs and Border Protection prevents people from
entering the country illegally, or bringing anything
harmful or illegal into the United States.
Secure Communities Program: is a program of the
U.S Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)
that uses information shared between the ICE, the
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and local law
enforcement agencies to find whether individuals
who have a criminal record have also violated
immigration law by entering the United States
illegally.
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Immigration Surveillance Negative
RIUDL
Novice Division
Non-governmental organizations (NGO): an
organization that is not a part of the government. For
example, Doctors Without Borders is an NGO.
Undocumented Immigrant: refers to a foreign
nationals residing in the U.S. without legal
immigration status. It includes persons who entered
the U.S without inspection and proper permission
from the U.S government, and those who entered
with a legal visa that is no longer valid.
Undocumented immigrants are also known as
unauthorized or illegal immigrants.
Border Patrol: is the agency in charge of watching
and monitoring the border in order to prevent people
from entering the United States illegally.
Immigrants Detention Center: is a facility used by
the federal government to house undocumented
immigrants who have been detained and subject to
deportation.
Consular Consolidated Database (CCD): is a
database used by U.S consular officials that records
data from visa applications such as photographs and
democratic information of applicants.
Deportation
Deportation is the forceful removal of foreigners or
illegal immigrants from a country. Often times for
example countries like the U.S. will send foreigners
back to the country they originated from, other times
they will send them to any accessible country.
The U.S. deported 438,421 unauthorized immigrants
in 2013.
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Immigration Surveillance Negative
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Novice Division
Immigration Surveillance
The U.S. uses immigration surveillance to detect
which foreigners are crossing the border into the
U.S. Types of immigration surveillance are drones,
radar systems, and the ICE (Immigration and
Customs Enforcement) program which uses
information between ICE and the FBI to find out if
immigrants have also committed crimes.
Human Rights
Human Rights are rights that everyone is born with,
for example the right to privacy. The affirmative
argues that immigration surveillance and the lack of
an effective immigration reform allows more than 11
million people to be in a state of poverty and be
exposed to crime.
Important Laws/ Court Decisions Immigration
Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant
Responsibility Act of 1996: This law outlined the
issues regarding immigrants from giving out visas, to
the administration of border control agents.
Homeland Security Act of 2002: After the Sept 11
attacks the Bush administration established the
Department of Homeland Security which oversees
U.S. Customs and Border Protection, U.S.
Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, and United
States Citizenship and Immigration Services.
Arizona v. United States: In this case the courts
decided that Arizona could not make its own
immigration laws for example make it a crime be in
the state without legal papers. This allows the federal
government greater power in making laws on
immigration.
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Immigration Surveillance Negative
RIUDL
Novice Division
Decreasing Deportations Now
[__]
[__] The federal government is decreasing deportations now by only focusing on deporting
individual’s convicted of a crime.
Washington Post, 2014
(Obama announces immigration overhaul shielding 4 million from deportation,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/obama-immigration-plan-will-shield-37-million-fromdeportation/2014/11/20/3345d672-70dd-11e4-893f-86bd390a3340_story.html)
President Obama sought to convince the American public Thursday that his plans to unilaterally
change immigration laws were well within the precedent set by previous administrations and did not
amount to an amnesty program for illegal immigrants. In a prime-time address from the White House,
Obama argued that a mass deportation of the nation’s more than 11 million undocumented
immigrants “would be both impossible and contrary to our character.” Rather, the president said,
the measures he is enacting to defer the deportations of 4 million immigrants while
simultaneously refocusing federal border control agents on the highest-priority cases, such as
felons, gang members and recent border-crossers, are aimed at “actual threats to our
security.” “Felons, not families,” Obama said of who would be in line for deportations. “Criminals,
not children. Gang members, not a mom who’s working hard to provide for her kids.” Under Obama’s
plan, the undocumented parents of U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents who have lived
in the country for at least five years can apply, starting this spring, for relief from deportations
for a period of three years. About 3.7 million immigrants are expected to qualify under the new
guidelines. The president also is expanding a 2012 program that has provided administrative
relief to nearly 600,000 young people brought to the country illegally as children. Officials said
that expansion, which will remove an age cap, could reach another 287,000 people.
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Immigration Surveillance Negative
RIUDL
Novice Division
ICE Re-prioritizing Deportations Now
[__]
[__] ICE has undergone major changes in order to make sure it prioritizes the deportation of
criminals.
Rosenblum and Kandel, Congressional Research Service, 2012
(Interior Immigration Enforcement: Programs Targeting Criminal Aliens,
fas.org/sgp/crs/homesec/R42057.pdf)
ICE also announced three major changes to the §287(g) program (in July 2009) and Secure
Communities (in June 2011) designed to address each of the specific concerns raised above.146
First, ICE has taken steps to impose agency-wide enforcement priorities on the §287(g)
program and Secure Communities. The 2009 MOAs established a uniform three-level enforcement
priority system for the §287(g) program, which was then superseded by the 2011 agency- and
department- wide memos and letter (see “DHS Enforcement Priorities and Discretion”). The 2011
guidance memos clarify ICE agents’ ability to exercise discretion throughout the immigration
enforcement process, and ICE specifically linked the memos to Secure Communities by releasing
them in the context of the other June 2011 reforms to that program.147 The reforms also included
the creation of a Homeland Security Advisory Council Task Force on Secure Communities
composed of law enforcement professionals, ICE agents, and community and immigrant
advocates. The task force’s goal was to recommend how to focus the program on high-priority
offenders and ensure discretion in Secure Communities jurisdictions, among other issues.148
The task force issued a report with findings and recommendations in September 2011, and ICE
published a formal response to the task force in April 2012.149 Second, ICE has developed new
record-keeping requirements and other tools to attempt to guard against pretextural arrests
and racial profiling. ICE’s ENFORCE tracking system has been modified to track data on the
circumstances leading to aliens’ arrests, information which may improve oversight of ICE’s
partnership programs. ICE and CRCL have reportedly developed new statistical data to be collected
on a quarterly basis to evaluate whether Secure Communities is being implemented in a biased way
or otherwise resulting in racial profiling.150 The new §287(g) MOA also seeks to prevent pretextural
arrests by requiring agencies to pursue all charges for which aliens are initially arrested.
Nonetheless, media reports indicate that statistical monitoring of the Secure Communities program
had been delayed as of November 2012, and that ICE may not be able to implement the statistical
monitoring that had been announced in response to the Secure Communities task force
recommendation.151 Third, ICE and CRCL also have developed new materials and procedures
to further reduce the risk of racial profiling and misuse of these enforcement programs.152
New training materials target ICE agents as well as local law enforcement agents involved in
these programs. ICE and CRCL have also developed new immigration detainer forms clarifying that
individuals should not be detained for more than 48 hours and that law enforcement agencies
must provide detainees with information about how to file a complaint if they believe their civil
rights have been violated.
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Immigration Surveillance Negative
RIUDL
Novice Division
Reducing Violations – Federal Oversight
[__]
[__] ICE is now subject to federal oversight and this is resolving any human rights concerns
Kelly, reporter at the Arizona Republic, 2010
(Erin Kelly, ICE strives to improve migrant-detainee care,
azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/news/articles/2010/01/26/20100126az-ice.html)
The head of U.S. immigration enforcement on Monday announced plans for an overhaul of the
government's controversial detention system for people who face deportation. The moves
described by John T. Morton, assistant secretary of Homeland Security for U.S. Immigration and
Customs Enforcement, address oversight, medical care and tracking of detainees at facilities in
Arizona and across the country. Plans include: Hiring 50 federal employees to oversee the
largest detention facilities, which now are largely run by contractors without much government
oversight, Morton said. Assigning regional case managers to keep tabs on detainees with
significant medical problems to ensure they are getting proper care. Detainees with major
problems will be housed in facilities near hospitals and medical centers, Morton said. In June,
launching an online immigrant-detainee locator so family members can easily find their
relatives when they are in custody awaiting possible deportation.
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Immigration Surveillance Negative
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Novice Division
Reducing Violations – Medical Care
[__]
[__] ICE is reforming now by providing proper medical care
American Civil Liberties Union, 2010
(Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Lawsuit Charged Lack Of Medical And Mental Health
Care Led To Unnecessary Suffering And Death, https://www.aclu.org/news/ice-agrees-improvehealth-care-provided-immigration-detainees-part-settlement-aclu-lawsuit)
Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials have agreed to provide immigration
detainees with constitutionally adequate levels of medical and mental health care as part of an
agreement to settle an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit charging that deficient care at the San
Diego Correctional Facility (SDCF) caused unnecessary suffering and death. As part of the
settlement, ICE has also agreed to change its policy on medical care that had led to the denial
of what ICE deemed to be "non-emergency" care, including heart surgeries and cancer
biopsies. "For the first time, ICE has committed to providing all necessary health care to
immigration detainees beyond just emergency care," said Elizabeth Alexander, former Director of
the ACLU National Prison Project and lead counsel on the case. "For too long, ICE's own policies
allowed it to provide detainees with nothing beyond a narrow definition of emergency. This settlement
is recognition that it is unconstitutional not to provide people in government custody with all necessary
health care." Among the settlement agreement's provisions are requirements that detainees at SDCF
receive health care that meets or exceeds National Commission on Correctional Health Care
standards and that an additional full-time psychiatrist and four full-time psychiatric nurses be hired to
ensure that detainees receive adequate mental health care. The settlement also requires
immigration officials to remove from existing policies all statements suggesting that detainees
will receive only emergency medical services and to include in the same policies explicit
statements mandating that detainees shall be provided medical care whenever it is necessary
to address a serious medical need.
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Immigration Surveillance Negative
Boston Debate League
Varsity Division
Security Should Be Prioritized Over Rights
[__]
[__] Absolute commitments to values like human rights fail when confronted with violence in
the real world – because of this we should prioritize security first.
Isaac, Professor of Political Science at Indiana-Bloomington, 2002
(Director of the Center for the Study of Democracy and Public Life, PhD from Yale, Jeffery C., Dissent
Magazine, Vol. 49, Iss. 2, “Ends, Means, and Politics,” p. Proquest)
What should be done to respond to the violence of a Saddam Hussein, or a Milosevic, or a Taliban
regime? What means are likely to stop violence and bring criminals to justice? Calls for diplomacy
and international law are well intended and important; they implicate a decent and civilized
ethic of global order. But they are also vague and empty, because they are not accompanied
by any account of how diplomacy or international law can work effectively to address the
problem at hand. The campus left offers no such account. To do so would require it to
contemplate tragic choices in which moral goodness is of limited utility. Here what matters is
not purity of intention but the intelligent exercise of power. Power is not a dirty word or an unfortunate
feature of the world. It is the core of politics. Power is the ability to effect outcomes in the world.
Politics, in large part, involves contests over the distribution and use of power. To accomplish
anything in the political world, one must attend to the means that are necessary to bring it
about. And to develop such means is to develop, and to exercise, power. To say this is not to say
that power is beyond morality. It is to say that power is not reducible to morality. As writers
such as Niccolo Machiavelli, Max Weber, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Hannah Arendt have taught, an
unyielding concern with moral goodness undercuts political responsibility. The concern may
be morally laudable, reflecting a kind of personal integrity, but it suffers from three fatal flaws: (1) It
fails to see that the purity of one's intention does not ensure the achievement of what one intends.
Abjuring violence or refusing to make common cause with morally compromised parties may
seem like the right thing; but if such tactics entail impotence, then it is hard to view them as
serving any moral good beyond the clean conscience of their supporters; (2) it fails to see that
in a world of real violence and injustice, moral purity is not simply a form of powerlessness; it
is often a form of complicity in injustice. This is why, from the standpoint of politics--as
opposed to religion--pacifism is always a potentially immoral stand. In categorically
repudiating violence, it refuses in principle to oppose certain violent injustices with any effect;
and (3) it fails to see that politics is as much about unintended consequences as it is about
intentions; it is the effects of action, rather than the motives of action, that is most significant.
Just as the alignment with "good" may engender impotence, it is often the pursuit of "good" that
generates evil. This is the lesson of communism in the twentieth century: it is not enough that one's
goals be sincere or idealistic; it is equally important, always, to ask about the effects of pursuing
these goals and to judge these effects in pragmatic and historically contextualized ways.
Moral absolutism inhibits this judgment. It alienates those who are not true believers. It
promotes arrogance. And it undermines political effectiveness.
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Immigration Surveillance Negative
Boston Debate League
Varsity Division
Plan Can’t Solve – Inefficient Systems
[__]
[__] Dismantling surveillance programs causes ICE to revert to enforcement policies that are
extremely inefficient.
Cadman, researcher at Center for Immigration Studies, 2015
(Dan Cadman February 2015 Interior Immigration Enforcement Legislation,
http://cis.org/Testimony/Cadman-House-Judiciary-Committee-Hearing-021115)
But it is not just in the area of worksite enforcement that interior immigration enforcement has
suffered. In her testimony a week ago, Ms. Vaughan spoke eloquently and in detail to the dangers
to public safety that have been engendered by misuse of prosecutorial discretion, which has
been turned on its head from an occasional act of ministerial grace accorded to those few with
significant mitigating circumstances, to one of requiring officers to justify, at length and in detail to
their superiors, taking enforcement action in lieu of said "discretion". What is more, a key public
safety program that takes advantage of modern electronic technologies and connectivity —
the same kind of technologies routinely used by citizens today in their multiplicity of
computers, smart phones, tablets, and other devices — to quickly and effectively identify alien
criminals in a cost-efficient and work-saving way, has been dismantled. I am speaking of course
of the Secure Communities program. This dismantling pushes the efforts of ICE agents back to
pre-electronics days, in which they have to rely on paper and faxes to obtain and exchange
information in a laborious and time consuming manner.
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Immigration Surveillance Negative
Boston Debate League
Varsity Division
Plan Can’t Solve – States Will Continue to Exclude
[__]
[__] Ending surveillance fails because states will seek other ways to exclude immigrants.
Vaughan, Director of Policy Studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, 2006
(Attrition Through Enforcement, http://cis.org/Enforcement-IllegalPopulation)
Frustrated with the federal government’s failure to make progress in reducing illegal immigration, and
under pressure from impatient voters, many state and local jurisdictions are taking matters into
their own hands by enacting laws and ordinances to discourage illegal settlement and by
taking advantage of federal services, such as the database used for Basic Pilot, to verify
immigration status. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, lawmakers in 42
states are considering 380 bills related to immigration; 70 of these bills deal with
employment.58 Many of these measures, such as laws to restrict access to driver’s licenses,
are intended primarily to enhance security and minimize identity fraud; nevertheless they have
provided a powerful incentive for illegal immigrants to voluntarily return home. In other cases,
legislatures have considered more direct approaches, such as mandatory work authorization
verification. Because these laws can have such a positive effect on compliance, and require little in
the way or federal resources, they must be more actively supported by federal immigration
authorities.
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Immigration Surveillance Negative
Boston Debate League
Varsity Division
Plan Causes Increased Smuggling
[__]
[__] Ending surveillance leads to parents paying for their children to be smuggled to the
United States this leads to suffering during the border crossing.
Cadman, researcher at Center for Immigration Studies, 2015
(Dan Cadman February 2015 Interior Immigration Enforcement Legislation,
http://cis.org/Testimony/Cadman-House-Judiciary-Committee-Hearing-021115)
This bill confronts the reprehensible fact that, through its policies and practices, the federal
government has become a major facilitator in the business of smuggling minors. In a scenario
repeated thousands of times, it goes something like this: Central American parents living and
working illegally in the United States send remittances back to their home country for the
express purpose of having their children smuggled northward. Smugglers move them through
the perilous journey and, if nothing untoward happens, deliver them on the U.S. side to be united with
relatives. If the children are apprehended, then the government itself moves the children onward to be
united with relatives, no questions asked. This has become so well known that, for their part,
smugglers are just as likely to deposit their loads of minors or families at crossroads
proximate to the border so that they can be found by Border Patrol agents, thus conveniently
relieving the smugglers from the burden of transporting the children on American highways, with the
concomitant chance of exposure and arrest such ventures carry. And, because the illegal parents
face no consequence for their part in having initiated the enterprise, word spreads and others
do the same, at great risk to the children.5 How many perish in the jungle lowlands and
highlands in Central America, or in the heat of the Mexican desert because they can't keep up?
We don't know. How many die from illness, dehydration, hypothermia, accidents, or murder? We
don't know. In the shadowy world of commerce in human beings, there is a thin line between
smuggling and trafficking: how many children whose smuggling is arranged by parents end up
being diverted into lives of abuse in the sex or drug trades? We don't know. On this side of the
border, we don't always even know with certainty who the children are being tendered to. The
bill requires an inquiry into the status of those persons, and initiation of proceedings if they are
unlawfully in the United States. Critics will say this will deter parents from coming forward. Perhaps.
But the alternative is for the United States to continue facilitating the movement of human
beings as cargo, even while we lecture the rest of the world as to their obligations to halt
human smuggling and trafficking. The moral imperative is clear: Our government should
undertake no policy or practice that puts more children at risk.
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Immigration Surveillance Negative
Boston Debate League
Varsity Division
Plan Causes Violent Militias (1/2)
1. Refusing to enforce immigration law leads to a rise in violent militias
Bever, reporter at Washington Post, 2014
(Lindsey Bever, Texas ‘militia’ says it’s heading out to help ‘secure’ border,
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/07/08/local-lawmakers-law-enforcementand-residents-take-on-the-immigration-crisis/)
The group, called Operation Secure Our Border-Laredo, was identified to the San Antonio
Express-News as “Patriots,” “Oathkeepers” and “Three Percenters,” a reference to the 3 percent of
colonists who took up arms against England during the Revolutionary War. Organizers are using
social media and a 24-hour hotline to recruit and mobilize armed volunteers to send to Laredo,
Tex., within the coming weeks. It’s uncertain how many people belong to the group or how many
might actually show up. “We’re here to supplement and be where law enforcement is not and
help them support the border,” Chris Davis, the 37-year-old listed leader, told the Los Angeles
Times. “There’s nothing malicious, there’s no malicious intent — every person is vetted. We’re just
here to serve freedom, liberty and national sovereignty.” Davis said once the group has enough
manpower, it will do its duty in a “legal and lawful manner.” It’s quite a different tactic than the one
Davis announced via a YouTube video in which he allegedly said: “You see an illegal. You
point your gun dead at him, right between his eyes, and you say, ‘Get back across the border
or you will be shot,'” the McAllen Monitor reported last week. Davis told the Express-News he
removed the video after it was taken out of context “by a newspaper that supports amnesty.”
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Immigration Surveillance Negative
Boston Debate League
Varsity Division
Plan Causes Violent Militias (2/2)
2. A rise in militia groups leads to the violent murder of undocumented immigrants and
Latinos.
Lenz, Southern Poverty Law Center, 2012
(Investigating Deaths of Undocumented Immigrants on the Border, Intelligence Report, Fall 2012,
Issue Number: 147, http://www.splcenter.org/get-informed/intelligence-report/browse-allissues/2012/fall/death-in-the-desert)
For years, the area has been crisscrossed by “civilian border patrols” — the “Minutemen”
groups that President George W. Bush characterized as “vigilantes” and that were enraged by what
they saw as a purposeful invasion. A neo-Nazi leader who led fellow armed radicals to the
border spoke of laying mines to prevent non-whites from entering — and later reportedly
asked a witness to help him surveill homes where he hoped to murder Latinos. Law
enforcement has found at least one pipe bomb planted on a smuggling trail, and last year a neo-Nazi
was arrested with other bombs he was taking to the border. Still other neo-Nazis told the Intelligence
Report several years earlier that they were scouting sniper positions at the border. The recent
shootings near Eloy, coupled with the murders in January and February of 2007, have raised
these worries again. An internal Department of Homeland Security (DHS) report from the
earlier period, obtained by the Report, said the 2007 shootings were likely connected to each
other. And in the second incident that year, police found two men with non-Hispanic names
“concealed in the brush” nearby watching the police response — a “curious” fact, the DHS report
said. Through it all, most Arizona authorities have dismissed virtually all the non-weather-related
deaths as the result of attacks by drug and human smugglers — and there is little doubt that that is
behind some of the mayhem. But many activists and at least some in law enforcement fear that
a small but committed cadre of hard-core extremists on the border may actually be engaging
in murder. Matt Browning, a retired Mesa police detective who spent years undercover infiltrating
racist border and neo-Nazi skinhead groups, is one of them. “In Arizona, we might not have
Hammerskins or Volksfront or the Klan,” Browning said, referencing some of the more prominent
contemporary white supremacist groups. “What we do have is a lot of angry, militant white men on
the border sitting like hunters waiting for these people to come across.”
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