Policing and Immigrants
In the majority of U.S. states over last decade the number of foreign-born residents increased by 30 percent or more, with many of these new arrivals settling in suburban areas once virtually untouched by immigration. Local police agencies are challenged to serve sometimes-vulnerable residents whose culture and language don’t match that of their line officers. Meeting obligations related to homeland security adds yet another layer of complexity.
To address these challenges, we pioneered the growing field of language access and led the way in building bridges between police and Arab, Middle Eastern, Muslim, and South Asian communities. We’ve also trained police in using the U-visa, a safety net for immigrant crime victims that cooperate with police, and published guidebooks written by police for police in how to build trusting relationships with diverse communities.
Related Work
Trauma-Informed Policing
Interview with Captain Altovise Love-Craighead
Philadelphia Police Department Captain Altovise Love-Craighead discusses the fundamentals of trauma-informed policing, including how de-escalation can interrupt cycles of violence. The central tenets of trauma-informed policing are introduced and examples are given as to how these principles can be applied in real-world policing situations.
The role of police in suburban immigrant integration
In 2012, the majority of the country’s metropolitan regions saw faster growth in suburbs than in cities. By 2014, it was estimated that more than half the U.S. population lives in suburbs. This incredible growth of suburban America has led to tectonic demographic shifts in these communities, which are struggling to keep up with the influx of immigr...
Blog Post
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Caitlin Gokey
New York Immigrant Family Unity Project lays groundwork for constitutional victory
A recent decision by the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit established that an immigrant is constitutionally entitled to a bond hearing within six months of being detained and must be released on bond unless the government provides compelling evidence that he or she is a flight risk or danger to the community. This important dec...
Blog Post
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Bettina Rodriguez Schlegel
Community policing post-9/11
Rebuilding trust with AMEMSA communities
The events of September 11th, 2001 were a game changer for law enforcement, as homeland security became a shared mission for local and federal agencies. Since then, an extensive array of laws and policies have been enacted at the national and state levels to support that mission, including but not limited to the PATRIOT Act, Foreign Intelligence Su...
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Susan Shah
Police Connecting with Communities of Color
Law enforcement agencies understand that positive relationships with all community members are vital to ensuring safe communities—yet, despite their best efforts, many agencies struggle to build trust and partnerships across communities with different languages, cultures, and customs. The Police Perspectives Guidebook Series was developed to help p...
Project
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Caitlin Gokey
A historic step in access to justice for immigrants facing deportation
In New York City, where more than one-third of residents are foreign-born, approximately 1,800 people per year are detained and sent to county jails without the ability to pay for an attorney as they face deportation in immigration courts in New York and New Jersey. This includes asylum-seekers, lawful permanent residents, and those with American c...
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Amy Connors
Engaging police in immigrant communities not just a big city issue
Storm Lake is a town of 13,000 people in northwestern Iowa. I became the police chief in October 1989 just as our town was reaching a demographic tipping point. At first, change came slowly in the late 1970’s with the arrival of small groups of immigrants from Laos and various Latin American countries. But by the early 1990’s, it just exploded, tra...
Engaging Police in Immigrant Communities
Promising Practices from the Field
Today, approximately 40 million foreign-born people live in the United States, seven million of whom arrived within the past eight years. Because very little is known about how most police agencies nationwide work with immigrant communities, in 2010, Vera’s Center on Immigration and Justice partnered with the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of ...
The U.S. Department of Justice Issues National Standards to Prevent, Detect, and Respond to Prison Rape
Last Thursday, nearly nine years after Congress passed the Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003 (PREA), the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) issued the first set of binding national standards to address sexual abuse in U.S. confinement settings. The promulgation of the standards coincides with the publication of an important new Bureau of Justice St...
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Allison Hastings
Justice Reinvestment Initiative takes root in Delaware
The Vera Institute of Justice helped Delaware reach an important milestone in its Justice Reinvestment Initiative this week, presenting results of the final report of the Delaware Justice Reinvestment Task Force to the Joint Judiciary Committee of the Delaware General Assembly, and meeting—along with several task force members—with Governor Jack Ma...
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Juliene James
Supreme Court: Recognizing plea bargaining as the norm
In two companion cases last week, the U.S. Supreme Court held that criminal defendants have a Sixth Amendment right to effective assistance of counsel during plea negotiations. The impact of this finding is far from clear; however, it is likely to create confusion among lower courts and raise questions about how to fund this newly expanded interpre...
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Ram Subramanian
New Vera report on how unaccompanied children navigate the complex U.S. immigration system
Vera has just released a new report, "The flow of unaccompanied children through the immigration system: a resource for practitioners, policy makers, and researchers." This publication explores the path that several thousand unaccompanied children—those younger than 18 without lawful immigration status and with no parent or legal guardian in the co...
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Elise Miller