Thread: The Assault on ‘Secure Communities’

The pro-illegal-alien lobby does its best to obscure the fact that illegal aliens are illegal.
Heather Mac Donald- June 20, 2011 4:00 A.M. It is hard not to feel deeply pessimistic about the country’s chances of reining in illegal immigration, in the light of the increasingly successful battle against the Secure Communities program.

To be sure, there have been a few positive developments recently regarding immigration and rule of law: On May 26, the Supreme Court upheld a 2007 Arizona law requiring employers to verify the legal status of their workers. The Court rejected the charge that the Arizona law, the Legal Arizona Workers Act, was an improper state interference in federal immigration authority. The failed argument that states have no authority to add their enforcement power to existing federal immigration rules is central also to the assault on Arizona’s much-maligned SB-1070, which calls on local police officers and sheriff’s deputies to inquire into a person’s immigration status if there are reasonable grounds for believing that he is in the country illegally. The Supreme Court’s affirmation of Arizona’s worker-verification law gives some hope that the Court will also uphold SB-1070.
Also on the positive side of the ledger: In early June, Alabama passed what is viewed as the toughest immigration-enforcement bill in the nation. Alabama’s HB-56 incorporates the local-law-enforcement provisions of Arizona’s SB-1070 and the mandatory employment checks of the Legal Arizona Workers Act. It requires schools to publish the costs of educating illegal aliens, prohibits landlords from knowingly renting to illegal aliens, and bars illegal aliens from enrolling in public colleges. In May, Georgia also enacted a bill strengthening local immigration-enforcement powers.

But these state-level developments seem marginal compared to the growing attack on the very premises of national immigration law. Last Friday, the Obama administration finally caved in to mounting pressure from immigration activists, Democratic politicians, big-city police chiefs, and newspaper editorial boards to gut the Secure Communities program, which runs the fingerprints of arrestees booked into local jails against federal immigration data bases. Secure Communities does not mandate that immigration agents actually do anything with the resulting information; it merely provides them with information, which they may or may not act upon. Much of the time, they do nothing.

[b]For years, open-borders advocates have howled that Secure Communities was flagging for possible deportation “mereâ€

I suspect this attack on Secure Communities was planned in the secret meetings Obama has held with the Open Borders crowd recently.

Obama could not pass CIR so he is doing the next best thing by having the OB's start a relentless campaign against Secure Communities.