Zealous Administration: The Deportation Bureaucracy

Federal executive agencies enjoy a high degree of autonomy when it comes to constructing their administrative cultures and customary practices. Some agencies are more zealous than others in carrying out their missions, and their practices can sometimes influence other agencies within the same regulatory stratosphere. Calling this phenomenon “zealous administration,” the authors of this paper argue that U.S. immigration agencies, particularly the deportation bureaucracy, have evolved into zealous government agencies. The authors contend that agencies like Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Patrol have engaged, since the times of the now defunct Immigration and Naturalization Service, in the “hyper-regulation” of immigration, and have been able to “infect” other agencies within the larger immigration bureaucracy with their enforcement priorities and ethos. According to the authors, their overreach is made possible because many zealous agencies are largely impervious to influence from the President, pressure from other government entities, public disapproval and internal dissent. Using public choice theory, the authors find that the broader the definition of an agency’s mission, the higher the likelihood for that agency to engage in zealous administration to enhance the agency’s autonomy and maximize its reputational payoff. The authors recommend ways to limit zealous administration including agency realignment, strengthened judicial review and restrictions on private contractors. (Jaisang Sun for The Immigrant Learning Center’s Public Education Institute)