Last Updated: 5:29 pm | Friday, July 2, 2010
Ohio gets new database to catch criminal aliens
By Erin Kelly • ekelly@gannett.com and Sharon Coolidge • July 2, 2010

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Two Greater Cincinnati sheriff's departments will soon get a new tool to help them find out if anyone they arrest has been deported previously.




Butler County - in just two weeks - and Hamilton County later this year will soon be able to check people they stop for a crime against the federal database, called Secure Communities.

"It is technology at its best," said Butler County Sheriff Rick Jones, who has garnered national attention for his tough stance on immigration enforcement.

It is local law officers who are making the arrests, Jones said, so it only makes sense for local law enforcement agencies to have immediate access to whether somebody has been deported for a crime in the past - and for what crime.

If their name matches a name on the database, the deputies will jail them and alert federal authorities.

Critics say the system could become an incentive for some local police agencies to arrest immigrants on minor offenses simply to run them through the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) database to see if they are in the country illegally and try to have them deported. The result, they say, could be racial profiling in which Latinos and other minority groups are targeted.

Scott Greenwood, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union, said using the database is similar to Arizona's controversial tough new immigration law.

Arizona's law, sparked by anger over a surging population of illegal immigrants in the border state, generally requires officers enforcing another law - like speeding or jaywalking - to question a person's immigration status if there's a reasonable suspicion that the person is in the country illegally.

Greenwood says it will force local law enforcement into asking about immigration status.

"They aren't going to ask people with flat Midwestern accents, they will ask people who don't have an obvious command of English and whose skin is brown," he said.

The rapidly growing federal database is designed to identify criminal aliens. It has helped remove 31,000 convicted criminals from the United States in less than two years and is being aggressively expanded throughout the nation by the Obama administration.

It is already in use in more than 400 jails in 24 states, including Arizona, California, Delaware, Florida, Louisiana, Maryland, Michigan, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah and Virginia.

In Ohio, officials in Cuyahoga and Franklin counties started using the database in January. It'll be deployed to other counties in Ohio and Northern Kentucky in 2011.

The Secure Communities database is designed to let officers use fingerprint matches to help them discover exactly whom they have in custody so that they don't inadvertently let a dangerous criminal back on the streets.

The database, which contains information gathered by the Homeland Security Department, can tell police whether a person under arrest has been deported from the United States before and whether they are wanted for serious crimes in another country.

To date, ICE has not received any complaints of racial profiling, said ICE deputy press secretary Richard Rocha.

He said the database may actually help prevent profiling because every person arrested - regardless of skin color or nationality - has his or her fingerprints run through the system. Police agencies that don't have access to the database use their discretion to decide whether to call ICE to check a person's immigration status.

From late October 2008 through early May, about 240,000 criminal aliens have been identified through the Secure Communities database, Rocha said.

Of the criminals identified by the database, nearly 31,000 have been deported or removed from the United States. The rest are either awaiting trial or still serving time in jail in the U.S., or ICE has determined that they cannot be removed from the country because they have become naturalized citizens or they are in the country legally and their crime was not sufficient to deport them.

Of those already removed, Rocha said, 8,584 were convicted of Level 1 crimes, which include murder, kidnapping, sexual assault, robbery, hit-and-run automobile accidents and terrorist threats. An additional 17,113 were convicted of Level 2 crimes, which include arson, burglary, money laundering, vehicle theft and embezzlement.

The remaining 5,149 were convicted of Level 3 crimes, which include immigration violations, extortion, property damage, gambling, bribery and violation of election laws.

Congress has supported the program by appropriating $550 million for the database from fiscal years 2008 through 2010, Rocha said.


http://news.cincinnati.com/apps/pbcs.dl ... 8/7030336/