ImmigrationMexicans in U.S. Routinely Confront Legal Abuse, Racial Profiling, ICE Targeting and Other Civil Rights Violations

By David FitzGerald, Angela Y. McClean, and Gustavo López

Published 3 July 2019

Officially, the Constitution of the United States gives everyone on U.S. soil equal protection under the law – regardless of nationality or legal status. But, as recent stories of the neglectful treatment of migrant children in government detention centers demonstrate, these civil rights are not always granted to immigrants.

Officially, the Constitution of the United States gives everyone on U.S. soil equal protection under the law – regardless of nationality or legal status.

But, as recent stories of the neglectful treatment of migrant children in government detention centers demonstrate, these civil rights are not always granted to immigrants.

We are scholars focused on U.S.-Mexico migration. Our report on the enforcement of U.S. immigration law under presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump, presented in February to Mexico’s National Human Rights Commission, documented pervasive and systematic civil rights violations against Mexicans living in the United States.

Some of the abuses we documented – which include racial profiling, discriminatory treatment and due process violations – result from the Trump administration’s anti-immigration policies. Others began much earlier, under Obama or well before.

All paint a troubling picture about the rule of law in the United States and the challenges facing America’s largest immigrant group.

Discrimination and deportation
An estimated 11.3 million people born in Mexico now live in the United States – 3% of the total U.S. population.

About 5 million of them are unauthorized immigrants, meaning Mexicans make up just under half of the 10.5 million undocumented immigrants in the country. The other 6.3 million Mexicans in the U.S. are either lawful permanent residents or dual nationals who are naturalized U.S. citizens.

Based on these figures, we found, Immigration and Customs Enforcement – or ICE, the agency that carries out the nation’s immigration laws – arrests Mexican immigrants at levels that are disproportionate to their share of the unauthorized immigrant population.

Roughly 70% of immigrants deported from the U.S. interior in 2015 were Mexican, the most recent year that such detailed deportation data are available.

Another 550,000 young Mexican American “Dreamers” – immigrants who were brought to the U.S. unlawfully as children – became subject to deportation when Trump in September 2017 rescinded the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which gave them temporary protection from deportation.

Not all deportations violate immigrants’ civil rights. The Immigration and Nationality Act says immigrants may be deported for violating a long list of criminal and administrative laws.

But evidence suggests that Mexicans and other Latinos are sometimes targeted for arrest based on their race or ethnicity.