Fingerprint database obscures histories of illegal immigrants
Posted on Monday, September 28 @ 10:40:35 EDT
Topic: immigration and customs enforcement
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 He is an illegal immigrant with at least eight
aliases and an arrest record in California that includes attempted
murder, robbery, theft, drugs and exhibiting a firearm.
Yet if Andres Maldonado Nava was booked into a local jail on a
minor charge — any Class C misdemeanor — before he became infamous for
his alleged role in the death of Houston Police officer Henry Canales
in June, the fingerprint check system would not have shown any of his
criminal or immigration history.
Subjects: illegal immigration, illegal alien, immigrant, Houston, Texas, DHS, fingerprint, ICE, enforcement, 287(g), Henry Canales, biometric identification
By Susan Carroll
HOUSTON CHRONICLE
Sept. 27, 2009, 12:19AM
In Houston's city and county jails, offenders
booked on Class C offenses are fingerprinted but are checked only
against HPD and Harris County databases — not state or national
databases that contain millions of criminal history records and
warrants.
And because Nava had no rap sheet locally, jailers here would have no
way of quickly and accurately determining who they had in custody.
State and local officials are working to close that gap in the
state's biometric identification system and run checks on all offenders
booked into Texas jails, even for the most minor offenses.
On Sept. 8, the Texas Department of Public Safety for the first
time started accepting the fingerprints for suspects charged with Class
C misdemeanors, which can range from traffic offenses to disorderly
conduct to domestic violence.
To send or not to send
The decision about whether or not to send prints to the state is
left up to local law enforcement agencies. So far, only the Fort Worth,
Denton and Orange police departments have submitted fingerprints from
Class C arrests, said Tela Mange, a DPS spokeswoman.
Because HPD cannot send prints directly to DPS, it transmits those of
suspects charged with more serious crimes to the Harris County
Sheriff's Office, which forwards them to DPS, said HPD Lt. Mike Barrow.
DPS sends the prints on to the FBI, which conducts a national criminal
history and warrant search and sends the results back to local
agencies.
The sheriff's office also has technical impediments — involving
data formatting and tracking — to sending Class C prints to the state,
said Pete Schroedter, with the sheriff's fingerprint ID division.
Manual checks inaccurate
Neither agency has a set timeline for when it will start sending Class C prints to the state.
The city's technical difficulties with its fingerprint system may
also complicate its proposed partnership with Immigration and Customs
Enforcement. So far, said city officials, HPD's computer system cannot
interface with the Homeland Security Department's massive immigration
database, which would give jailers access to suspects' immigration
history.
Until the city and county resolve their technical issues,jailers
are forced to run only the local criminal history checks on people
charged with Class C offenses.
They also can perform a manual check for outstanding warrants using a
suspect's name, date of birth and race, but that method often is
imprecise and foiled by the use of aliases, Barrow said.
He said getting an accurate hit on a warrant using that method is infrequent.
HPD exploring options
“The biometrics is what is going to nail them,” Barrow said. “And that is what we're working hard to change.”
Until recently, the sheer volume of statewide arrests made it
impractical for DPS to transmit all prints of Class C offenders to the
FBI for checks and transmit the results to local jurisdictions, Mange
said.
“There are literally millions of Class C arrests that are made every
year” in Texas, the DPS spokeswoman said. “When this was a manual
process, it was just going to be very easy to get overwhelmed with the
number of physical records. Now that it's computerized and has been for
a while, we're able to cope with the volume.”
Even with the state accepting the Class C charges, DPS is aware
that the logistics of transmitting fingerprints to DPS may be
complicated for some agencies, Mange said. Several agencies will have
to reprogram their fingerprinting devices and software to be able to
send them directly to DPS, she added.
Barrow said HPD is committed to exploring options to transmit the Class
C prints, and to getting a better picture of who is coming through the
city's jails.
“We just want to get dangerous criminals off the street,” he said.
“That's our whole goal. And we want people to be held accountable for
their criminal actions.”
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