Thread: ICE gains access to R.I. arrest records

ICE gains access to R.I. arrest records

01:00 AM EDT on Wednesday, April 6, 2011
By Gregory Smith
Journal Staff Writer

PROVIDENCE — The controversial Secure Communities program has been activated for Rhode Island law enforcement agencies, Attorney General Peter F. Kilmartin has acknowledged. And a reluctant City of Providence is included.

Secure Communities is a program of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in which the FBI takes information about all people arrested and booked by the police, and checks a Homeland Security database to see if they are subject to deportation.

They can be subject to deportation either because they are in the United States illegally and/or because they have committed a crime or another civil immigration violation.

A key aspect of the program is the use of fingerprints to foil people who lie about who they are.

The FBI quietly began seeking to match information about individuals arrested and booked in Rhode Island with information about those individuals in the so-called IDENT database of the U.S. Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, on March 22, according to Kilmartin spokeswoman Amy Kempe. ICE is part of Homeland Security.

Kilmartin and law-enforcement agencies were notified privately of the activation. Although Secure Communities has been a subject of dispute by advocates for immigrants and officials as high-ranking as Governor Chafee, there was no public announcement in Rhode Island.

Kilmartin, who enlisted Rhode Island in Secure Communities, wanted to make sure there were no technical problems before he disclosed it, Kempe said Tuesday.

The fingerprints and other identifying information of those arrested and booked are routed electronically and automatically to the FBI through the attorney general’s Bureau of Criminal Identification. In the process, the BCI checks Rhode Island’s own criminal history database to see if the arrestee has been arrested before.

The BCI is still working on automating the return of information about any match from ICE to the police department where the arrest was made, Kempe acknowledged. There would be a financial cost to the state for arranging automation, she said.

In the meantime, she said, if ICE wants to act against an individual arrestee, it must contact that police department directly.

“It’s not a hurdle at all,â€

The state of Rhode Island has one of the highest rates of unemployment anywhere in the United States. It is high time the illegal aliens left.

Advocates for immigrants complain that Secure Communities leads to the deportation of people who have committed only minor crimes or civil infractions of federal immigration law and unjustifiably disrupts the established, productive lives in the U.S. of individuals and families.

Established productive lives... oh please! Established yes, productive that's questionable. Productive of stealing jobs? Yes. Productive in stealing Social Services? Yes. That productivity comes at the expense of Americans and LEGAL citizens. I will never understand those OBL'ers!

You ever notice how when they talk about this program they say illegals that are victims are afraid to come forward but these same victims don't seem to have a problem marching down the street telling us how we're raciest and we owe them!

I'm in Rhode Island. See what I have had to put up with? They are more concerned about the illegals and to hell with the citizens. And you wonder why there are some jobs that require us to be bilingual and speak spanish!