NEW YORK (AP) — Diminished local cooperation is putting federal immigration officers in dangerous situations as they track down foreign-born criminals, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials say.

They say that more of their officers are out on the streets, eating up resources, because cities and states have passed legislation that limits many of the detention requests issued by immigration authorities.

For years, ICE issued the detainers to local and state law enforcement agencies, asking them to hold immigrants for up to 48 hours after they were scheduled for release from jail. Most detainees were then either taken into federal custody to face an immigration judge or be deported.

But more than 300 counties and cities, plus California, Connecticut, Illinois, Rhode Island and the District of Columbia, have chosen to release immigrants, claiming too many people who have committed low-level offenses or no crime at all were being deported and unnecessarily separated from their families. Courts have said that honoring detainers without probable cause could result in a civil rights offense.

ICE insists that its priorities have changed and it is only focused on foreign-born criminals who are a threat to society. It deported nearly 316,000 people in fiscal year 2014.

In the first eight months of 2014, immigration officers filed roughly 105,000 requests for local enforcement agencies to hold immigrants but local agencies declined 8,800 of the requests, according to data provided by immigration authorities.

Officers now face more danger because they can’t just pick up foreign-born criminals in a safe environment like Rikers Island, said Christopher Shanahan, field office director for Enforcement and Removal Operations in New York.

“We are in a situation in which we have to provide more men, more workers, more manpower in the streets, where it is more dangerous to take custody of somebody,” said Shanahan. “On the street, when you go into a house, a place of employment, when you are arresting somebody, you don’t know if they have weapons, you don’t know the surroundings.”

Last week, an Associated Press reporter and photographer accompanied officers as they conducted a series of early-morning arrests in the Bronx and Manhattan, part of a nationally-coordinated operation that netted 2,059 people.

A half-dozen ICE officers met at 5:30 a.m. in the parking lot of a Bronx coffee shop, put on black bulletproof vests and reviewed the three people they would try to arrest that morning. After driving quickly to each location in unmarked cars with sirens blaring, they made two arrests: a Mexican man and a Dominican man accused of illegally re-entering into the country, which is considered a high priority for ICE.

The Mexican man had been arrested 10 times by local police for driving without a license and then deported. The man, who was not identified per the Department of Homeland Security’s privacy policy, re-entered the U.S. illegally and then was accused of menacing a neighbor with a machete. ICE said it had issued a detainer for the man that was not honored by the city.

Mayor Bill de Blasio signed the legislation that limited cooperation with ICE in November. The new law bars cooperation with detainers unless there’s a federal warrant and the person is on the terrorist watch list or committed a serious crime in the past five years.

From October 2013 through September 2014, the New York City Police Department received 2,635 immigration detainers. Of those, it held 196 individuals. The city says no ICE detainers have been honored this year.

New York City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito, who proposed the limitations, said ICE officials for years “cast a dragnet at Rikers Island” that resulted in unnecessary deportations.

“In addition to being unfair, ICE’s policies were an offense to the rule of law and yet another symptom of our broken immigration system,” Mark-Viverito said in a statement.

In California, only immigrants illegally in the United States who have been convicted of a serious offense are eligible for the 48-hour hold.

David Marin, deputy field office director for Enforcement and Removal Operations in Los Angeles, said that of the seven counties that form the Los Angeles area of operation only two honor detainers that meet those standards.

More than one-fourth of the people arrested by ICE in the Los Angeles area last week had recently been released onto the street by local authorities despite ICE detainer requests. Fifty-nine of the 218 individuals detained by ICE during the enforcement action had been the subject of immigration detainers, said ICE spokesperson Virginia Kice.

The issue is not black-and-white, says Muzaffar Chishti, New York director of the Migration Policy Institute.

“My feeling is that, at some level, both (sides) are right”, said Chishti. “This is a classic case of where you stand on issues depends on where you sit. The concerns and the priorities of the city and police are very different from the concerns and priorities of the federal government.”

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Associated Press writer Amy Taxin contributed to this report.

• Immigration Issues
• Politics & Government

HOUSTON–(BUSINESS WIRE)–

Foster LLP, a leading immigration law firm delivering the full spectrum of U.S. and global immigration solutions, announces the expansion of its family-based immigration practice to accommodate the increased demand for immigration legal services resulting from President Barack Obama’s executive action. As part of the executive action, the president announced the expansion of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and the new Deferred Action for Parental Accountability (DAPA).

“In light of the recent presidential executive actions, our team is ramping up its efforts to provide immigration representation to increasing numbers of families and individuals,” said José R. Pérez, a Texas Immigration and Nationality Law Board Certified attorney and partner, Foster. “While a federal judge has temporarily halted the expansion of DACA and DAPA, families still need assistance and Foster is expanding to help meet their immigration needs. We will continue directly reaching out to our communities to ensure that we are providing our services where they are needed most.”

Pérez, a 27-year veteran immigration law practitioner, is leading the firm’s family practice expansion. The practice is highly experienced in handling the full range of family-based immigration matters, complex litigation cases and difficult naturalization issues. His team includes attorneys, Andrea Penedo and Alexandra Vickery; highly experienced litigator and Texas Board Certified Immigration and Nationality Law senior attorney, Olsa Alikaj-Cano; and litigator, John Lasseigne. Attorneys, James Larsen and Jeff Thomas, have recently joined the firm’s Austin office and serve as part of the expanded Foster team preparing to meet the additional demand for DACA and DAPA representation.

“Foster’s continued growth allows us to assemble the very best team of experts to meet the emerging need for immigration legal services in our communities, and to help qualifying individuals apply for DACA and DAPA, as well as potential relief in court,” said Alikaj-Cano.

About Foster LLP

Foster LLP is a leading immigration law firm delivering the full spectrum of U.S. and global immigration solutions. Renowned for responsive, individualized service, Foster works on behalf of the largest employers worldwide, as well as top emerging and midmarket companies, investors, and individuals and families. Through experience, leadership and technology, Foster’s team solves the most complex immigration problems, while never forgetting that behind every case are people and their families.

Learn more at www.FosterGlobal.com.

• Business
• Immigration Issues

SAN ANTONIO (AP) — A federal judge’s ruling last month blocking President Barack Obama’s immigration executive action lays bare a pervasive practice in federal district courts: venue shopping.

It is a game of odds in which lawyers pick a court to file their case where a judge or case law is likely to be more favorable. Law experts say venue shopping is commonplace in politically-sensitive cases as a way to advance a case toward the ultimate goal of a hearing before the U.S. Supreme Court.

“Everybody does this to the extent they can,” said Stephen Yale-Loehr, an immigration professor at Cornell Law School in Ithaca, New York.

When lawyers for Texas filed suit in Brownsville to block the president’s executive action on immigration, they knew they had a 50 percent chance the case would be given to U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen, an appointee of George W. Bush who had previously spoken scathingly of Obama’s immigration policies.

Hanen, who was assigned the case through an automated system, is one of only two judges in that division of the Southern District of Texas, so he hears half of all civil cases. The other is U.S. District Judge Hilda Tagle, an appointee of Democratic President Bill Clinton. Not all district courts have just two judges.

“They knew they would strike gold if they got in front of Judge Hanen,” said Kica Matos, spokeswoman for Fair Immigration Reform Movement, a national advocacy organization for immigrants. “This is a judge who has gone out of his way to express his anti-immigrant sentiments.”

On Feb. 16, Texas Governor Greg Abbott and 25 other states opposed to Obama’s action got exactly what they wanted. Hanen issued a preliminary injunction halting the orders, which would have spared as many as 5 million people who are in the U.S. illegally from deportation.

Venue selection has long been used by the American Civil Liberties Union and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People in cases seeking wide-ranging reforms, said Georgene Vairo, a professor of law at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles. More recently the tactic has been adopted by conservative groups, she said.

It was probably a factor in the mammoth job discrimination suit filed against Wal-Mart by 1.5 million women claiming unfair pay and promotion practices, Vairo said. That case was pursued in the California courts, where it would be heard by the liberal-leaning 9th Circuit on appeal. The 9th Circuit ruled in favor of the women, though the Supreme Court in 2011 did not.

“We are not supposed to talk about judges being political,” Vairo said. “But in a close case it’s likely to make a difference, so they head count, they look at the decisions, they think about all these things before they decide where to file.”

Ahmed Taha, a professor of law at Pepperdine University in California, said he has documented venue shopping.

In a 2010 paper, Taha said he found that when the portion of judges appointed by Republican presidents increases by 25 percent in courts, prisoners’ rights filings and job discrimination suits drop by about 11 percent, and product-related injury cases by 23 percent, on average. This shows that lawyers in these cases feel their chances are worse with courts leaning conservative, he said.

When filing a case, lawyers must show that a venue is “proper,” or that the case has some relationship to where it has been filed. President Obama’s wide-ranging actions on immigration meant that any suit attempting to block them could be filed wherever immigrants who stood to benefit lived. Almost any court in Texas would have sufficed.

Abbott, who was Texas attorney general before being elected governor in November, led the lawsuit. His spokeswoman Amelia Chasse said in a statement that the suit was “appropriately filed” in Brownsville, calling the city the “epicenter” of the recent immigration crises.

The Justice Department is appealing Hanen’s decision to the 5th U.S. Circuit Court in New Orleans. The 5th Circuit also is considered conservative-leaning, and it hears all Texas appeals. There are currently 15 judges and 8 senior judges in the 5th circuit, and a panel of three will be selected through an automated system to hear the case .

It is impossible to predict the outcome of the appeal just based on the general leaning of the court, said Yale-Loehr, the immigration law professor.

“It really depends on which particular judges in the 5th circuit would get, for example, the stay request,” Yale-Loehr said.

Lance Wells, an immigration and criminal attorney in Phoenix, Arizona, said he doesn’t view venue shopping as manipulating the system or that the lawyers for Texas did anything wrong in filing in Brownsville.

“I don’t like the outcome from my personal perspective,” he said. “But I think it was a smart move.”

• Politics & Government
• Business
• President Barack Obama
• Supreme Court