Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

There is a growing conversation about undocumented immigration in the United States. This conversation is focused on the costs and benefits of immigration policy enforcement. One such type of enforcement is work-site audits conducted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE raids). During a raid, ICE will visit an establishment and conduct background checks on all employees to determine if anyone is an undocumented immigrant. In 2008, the United States government signed Secure Communities into law with the intention of increasing the efficiency of these ICE raids as well as to streamline the deportation process. Secure Communities require that counties share the fingerprints of arrested individuals with ICE so that ICE can detain, interview, and deport the arrested individuals that are not living legally in the US. We do not actually know if Secure Communities achieved their policy goal due to an, until now, lack of information on the location and productivity of ICE raids. I investigate the effects of Secure Communities on ICE raids by using establishment-level data on ICE raids from 2009-2017 obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request. Specifically, I ask how the establishment of a Secure Community changes the frequency and productivity of ICE raids. I estimate two difference-in-difference models where one outcome is the number of reported ICE raids in a county and another outcome is the number of undocumented workers found during ICE raids in a county. The number of ICE raids is important to quantify in order to understand how ICE is making decisions after Secure Communities have been established. Similarly, knowing the change in the number of undocumented migrants in a raid before and after Secure Community establishment lends a stronger understanding of how the productivity of these raids is changing. Preliminary evidence suggests that the number of ICE raids and the number of undocumented immigrants both decrease after a Secure Community is established.