Mission creep

U.S. Department of Homeland Security
5:56 p.m. CDT, April 1, 2011

The Department of Homeland Security has not made much of a dent in the illegal immigrant population in the U.S., now estimated to be 11 million people. So the feds have turned to local police and county sheriff's departments as partners. This relatively new tactic for enforcing immigration law is known as Secure Communities.

Here is how it works: When people are arrested and booked by a participating city or county, their fingerprints are shared with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Immigration authorities check for hits in their database, perhaps a deportation order that had been ignored. If there is a match, federal authorities can proceed with deportation after the criminal case is resolved.

Most local and county authorities do not want to be immigration cops. Many have cooperated with Secure Communities because the Obama administration touted it as a way to remove violent criminals from U.S. soil.

More than 1,100 jurisdictions in 40 states participate, including the sheriff's departments in DuPage, Kane, Lake, McHenry and Will counties. But some of those police chiefs and sheriffs are complaining of mission creep.

Since it launched in 2008, Secure Communities has helped to identify nearly 38,000 immigrants who were deported and who had convictions for a felony or multiple misdemeanors. That's a good example of federal/local cooperation.

The real sticking point comes with another group that has been snared: people who entered the U.S. illegally, were then booked for often minor offenses but have no previous criminal record.

No, they don't have a legal right to be in the country. But those folks were not the focus when Secure Communities was unveiled. In Kane and Lake counties, nearly 40 percent of those deported through Secure Communities had no previous criminal record, according to Homeland Security data.

Kane County Sheriff Pat Perez says this is not what he signed up for. Many Hispanics in his community are already wary of working with law enforcement. Perez worries that Secure Communities does more to hamper law enforcement than help it.

"We want to focus on the guys running guns or bringing kilos of cocaine into our community," Perez said. "But that's not what the program became."

This is reaching a critical moment because Homeland Security wants to expand Secure Communities nationwide by 2013, and essentially compel cities and counties to cooperate. Some law enforcement agencies are resisting this, including those in Cook County and Chicago.

Secure Communities should be a cooperative, not compulsory effort, and it should be focused on identifying and deporting criminals. That's a worthwhile mission.

All of this shows the need for a broad federal solution to illegal immigration. The politicians who felt singed when immigration reform negotiations collapsed during the Bush administration have had time to lick their wounds. It's time to revive that effort.

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