Palm Beach Sheriff's Office and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement sharing information
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April 26, 2010 5:31 PM

PALM BEACH COUNTY- Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office has now teamed up with ICE Secure Communities initiatives to up the ante on the removal of illegal aliens. From now on the criminal and immigration records of those arrested in Palm Beach County will be cross referenced.

Twenty-three other Florida Counties already recieve immigration information about inmates through this same initiative. Prior to this program local arrestees' fingerprints were used to check criminal history information in the Department of Justice's Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System maintained by the FBI. Now fingerprints will be checked against both the FBI and ICE's information.

If fingerprints match records and information in ICE's database ICE steps in to ensure illegal aliens are not released back into communities.

"The Secure Communities strategy provides local law enforcement with an effective tool to identify criminal aliens," said Secure Communities Executive Director David Venturella. "Enhancing public safety is at the core of ICE's mission. Our goal is to use biometric information sharing to prevent criminal aliens from being released back into the community, with little or no additional burden on our law enforcement partners."

Palm Beach County Sheriff Ric L. Bradshaw said, "Our partnership with ICE is part of the Sheriff's Office continuing effort to insure the community's safety, keeping dangerous criminals off the streets. ICE continues to assist local law enforcement not only in this endeavor, but also working with our on-going Gang Task Force to curtail gang activity."

Secure Communities is now being used by 168 jurisdictions in 20 states across the country. ICE expects this capability to be available nationwide by 2013. Since ICE began using this information sharing capability in October 2008, it has identified more than 21,700 aliens charged with or convicted of Level 1 crimes, such as murder, rape and kidnapping-more than 4,900 of whom have already been removed from the United States

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