A smarter deportation policy uses common sense

Few Americans favor mass deportations, and with good reason — a large majority of the estimated 10.5 million undocumented immigrants in the United States have been here for at least a decade, including more than 4 in 5 Mexican migrants. Many are fixtures in their community, with U.S. citizen spouses and children; the vast majority are employed, and some own their homes and businesses.

So it was not a radical idea when Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas issued new enforcement guidelines last fall that urged deportation agents to focus their efforts on actual threats to public and national safety, as well as border security. As for long-term migrants, the bulk of whom are law-abiding, Mr. Mayorkas urged Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials to use some common sense. “The fact that an individual is a removable noncitizen should not alone be the basis of an enforcement action against them,” he said.

The new rules remain the subject of legal challenges by Republican attorneys general and pushback from some ICE agents. The guidelines represent a potential sea change from the Trump years, when the agency’s leadership seemed as focused on making their numbers — by means of detention sweeps and other random arrests — as Wall Street bond traders.

Despite the resistance, however, they appear to be having a preliminary and positive effect of tailoring enforcement to unauthorized immigrants who are dangerous. In the first 13 months of the Biden administration, 44% of deported migrants had been convicted of felonies or aggravated felonies, compared with just 18% during the Trump administration, according to internal ICE figures. For the same period, there was also a sharp jump, compared with under the Trump administration, in the number of arrests of migrants who had earlier convictions for aggravated felonies.

The Trump mantra, as described by Thomas Homan, who led ICE during his administration, was to take “the handcuffs off law enforcement.” But Mr. Mayorkas is right that virtually every law enforcement agency exercises prosecutorial discretion: They prioritize violators according to rational criteria. Immigration enforcement under Trump, animated by nativism, was robotically indiscriminate.

Many migrant advocates continue to cite enforcement actions they say are overzealous as proof that ICE’s rank-and-file officers are dragging their heels on the Biden administration’s priorities; some worry that deportation agents retain too much discretion and are free to flout the new guidelines.

But Mr. Mayorkas, a former prosecutor who has evangelized his priorities in meetings with deportation agents across the country, is right to stress a case-by-case approach. It’s not lax enforcement to refrain from arresting very old or very young migrants, or to think twice about a deportation that would tear apart a family. It’s an intelligent application of the law.