ICE Vows More ‘Discretion’ in Deportations. Don’t Hold Your Breath

by Seth Freed Wessler | Print | Comment (0)
Friday, June 24 2011, 10:50 AM EST

The Department of Homeland Security last Friday announced minor changes to the Secure Communities program, the Obama administration’s flagship deportation program that uses local jails as staging grounds for deportation. To calm growing resistance, ICE head John Morton announced shifts, meant to soften the program and bring it in line with its stated priorities of deporting serious criminal. Yet the alterations may be little more than window dressing.

Secure Communities has come under attack from immigrant rights and civil liberties groups and from elected officials for facilitating the mass deportation of tens of thousands of non-citizens. Governors of three states—Illinois, New York and Massachusetts—have announced recently that they refuse to participate in the program. The federal government maintains that it will not allow states or localities to opt-out.

Although Secure Communities is touted as a program to target non-citizens convicted of high level crimes, it has instead functioned in large part to indiscriminately deport most anyone it touches, including undocumented immigrants with no or low-level convictions as well as crime victims.

Secure Communities operates at the federal level by checking the immigration status of anyone whose finger print data is run through a federal crime database when booked into a state or local jail.

Acknowledging that Secure Communities has not focused, as it’s supposed to, on those convicted of high level crimes, Morton said in a recent statement, “We need to do a better job of ensuring that the program is more focused on targeting those that pose the biggest risk to communities.â€