Giving Compass' Take:

• Anna Flagg reports that a study found no link between the number of deportations and the crime rate, undercutting the argument for the deportation program, Secure Communities. 

• Secure Communities failed to make communities safer, what programs have successfully improved community safety? 

• Learn how threats of deportation hurt farms in the U.S.

Researchers compared deportations data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University with crime rates from the FBI Uniform Crime Reporting program, finding no relationship between deportations and crime. They also saw no effect of deportations on violent or property crime, regardless of how aggressive deportations were in a given area.

Crime has been declining in many areas across the country for decades, and it continued to do so under Secure Communities. If deportation were an effective crime-prevention method, places that deported the most would display larger decreases in crime than other areas. No trends like that were observed.

But crime data is notoriously noisy, and dependent on a complex range of factors, potentially masking real trends. To counteract some of these possible confounding factors, the authors of the paper took advantage of the program’s staggered rollout to produce data with widely varying conditions. This natural experiment, in conjunction with models controlling for a variety of demographic and socioeconomic factors, was used to help isolate the potential effect of deportation policy from overall factors and trends in the country. It found no link between higher deportation rates and lower crime.

Read the full article about Secure Communities by Anna Flagg at The Marshall Project.