Thread: CA-All O.C. jails to start checking immigration status of in

All O.C. jails to start checking immigration status of inmates

ORANGE COUNTY REGISTER
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
By Cindy Carcamo

All inmates booked into Orange County jails will have their immigration status checked starting Tuesday morning, part of a national effort to identify and deport people who are in the country illegally and suspected of or convicted of committing crimes.

Officials at jails throughout Orange County will now automatically check whether inmates have had prior contact with immigration officials during fingerprinting in the booking process.

Orange County follows 119 other counties that already have the system in place.

The program, called Secure Communities, determines whether inmates have had any contact with the immigration system.

It flags immigration officials, who put a hold on those who are believed to be in the country illegally. Those inmates are detained for 48 hours to give immigration authorities a chance to pick them up.

"It's a tool that allows us to do our jobs more effectively," said David Venturella, executive director of the Secure Communities initiative within Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

"It’s one piece of an overall comprehensive strategy to help local law enforcement … allowing us to better identify illegal alien criminals and remove them from the United States.

It’s a monumental improvement in the way we do business."

Orange County joins 119 other counties in the nation already using the system, which has sparked controversy and praise from both sides of the immigration debate. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials hope to launch the program in all counties by 2013.

The program is provided at no cost to local agencies.

Locally, immigration officers already work at the Costa Mesa city jail; at the county jail, deputies already screen inmates’ immigration status under a partnership with the federal government.

At both jails, inmates who say they are foreign-born receive additional screening to check legal status.

The new program is more accurate because all inmates – not just those who say they are foreign-born – are now screened for immigration status, Venturella said.

"This is more automatic," Orange County Sheriff's Cmdr. Dave Wilson said. "Currently, people come in off the street and folks interview if they don't self-proclaim residency or legal status outside of the United States. We don't have a real way of confirming unless they trip up or something like that."

While deputies who received immigration cross-training could tap into federal databases before the program’s launch, Wilson said it didn’t work as quickly as it does now and some inmates may have slipped through the cracks.

The new system still misses people who are in the country illegally but never had contact with the immigration system.

That’s where the cross-trained screeners step in and ask more questions to find an inmate’s true legal status, Wilson said.

HOW IT WORKS

Instead of allowing only state and local law enforcement agencies to check the FBI database for criminal history during a fingerprint scan, the program is now also linked to federal immigration databases to screen a person's immigration record.

The FBI and federal immigration checks happens simultaneously.

When there is a fingerprint match, the system automatically flags immigration officials.

In most cases, inmates will finish serving their sentences before they are transferred to immigration custody for deportation.

Still, federal officials said they don’t have enough resources to pick up everyone in the system identified as an illegal immigrant.

"We have a limited amount of resources," Venturella said. "Our objective would be to identify and remove all criminal aliens from the United States.

Like any governmental agency or business, you have a limited amount of dollars coming in."

He said the agency is currently focusing on the “worstâ€

Too bad they did not do this in 1985 PRIOR to the amnesty bill!

They should have been doing this for the past 25 years~!

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http://www.alipac.us/article5020.html

At the source link there are 93 comments so far.

Illegal immigration has been prevalent in Orange Co. for decades.

Doesn't matter. With wide open borders most are back in the country and in their old haunts before dinner time committing more crimes against Americans.

Originally Posted by jean

At the source link there are 93 comments so far.

Illegal immigration has been prevalent in Orange Co. for decades.

Isn't that the truth! As a life long resident of OC, I can vouch for that! In the last twenty years, this part of OC has gone down the tubes because of mass illegal immigration. It's really hard to believe the transformation that has taken place in just my life time.

Doesn't matter unless your sticking them on a bus.

While immigration officials have enough funding to identify people, the funding for infrastructure to house and ultimately deport them is unsustainable and lacks funding, she added.

Venturella acknowledges that for now, the program has enough funding to process the most serious offenders.

Still, he said the program is in its early stages and that the resources and funding will ultimately be determined by Congress.

Incomplete and broken links. Congress had better realize that in order to enforce the immigration laws in this country they will have to fund deportation. And these are just the jailed criminals.