Secure Communities: California sheriffs split over illegal immigration deportation program

6:00 a.m. | Kitty Felde | KPCC

Over the past few months, sheriffs in California have begun participating in a federal program known as Secure Communities. It requires them to share jail inmate fingerprints with immigration officials. Anyone in the country illegally is targeted for deportation. Sheriffs in Southern California support Secure Communities, but not the sheriff of San Francisco. In the second report in a two-part series, we examine the split.

Under Secure Communities, fingerprint data on everyone arrested is sent to a statewide database and then shared with federal officials. John Morton, the director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, says illegal immigrants are removed and put on a pathway to deportation.

"Many of the individuals that we identify through Secure Communities are not only here unlawfully for a first time," he says, "they are here unlawfully for a second or third time. They’d previously been deported. They’ve re-entered the country unlawfully. They’ve committed an offense for which they’ve been arrested now and we’ve come across them and this is their second or third time in the United States."

Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca supports Secure Communities. He compares it to another collaboration with ICE called 287g, which trains deputies to identify possible undocumented inmates.

The sheriff says 287g has identified 20,000 criminal illegal immigrants in L.A. County over the past five years. Baca says 287g works because it focuses on criminal activity first.

"They have to be not only arrested for behavior, not ethnicity, or not status, and then the crime itself results in a trial and then a conviction," says Baca. "After the conviction, they have to serve their time. And it’s at that point they are entered into the system."

“Entered into the systemâ€