Communities may opt out of ICE's Secure Communities program


ICE is the federal agency responsible for enforcing our nation's immigration laws. (Photo: Wikimedia)

September 04, 2013
Brooks Hays

The Secure Communities program calls for cooperation between U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and local law enforcement in the effort to detain and deport undocumented immigrants. When an individual is arrested, his or her scanned fingerprints are automatically passed on to the FBI, and then to ICE to be compared with fingerprints in a national immigration database. If a match occurs, ICE then asks for local law enforcement to detain the immigrant for an extra 48 hours, allowing time for ICE to assume custody of the individual and proceed with the enforcement of immigration laws.
But a recent report by Color Lines alleges that more than 1,000 legal U.S. citizens have been mistakenly flagged in the system and held unnecessarily. Others, critics say, are held for much longer than 48 hours, and some are picked up on trumped-up charges or minor offenses, despite the program’s declared intention of targeting dangerous or violent immigrants.
“We’ve had members who have been falsely charged,” says Jacinta Gonzalez, lead organizer for the Congress of Day Laborers, a New Orleans-based organization which fights for the rights of people who stand on street corners and in home improvement store parking lots looking for work. These workers, Gonzalez told Color Lines, have helped rebuild New Orleans in the years following Hurricane Katrina’s devastating destruction. The majority of the members of the Congress of Day Laborers are immigrants; some are guest workers; and still others are here illegally. Gonzalez, her organization, and other activists in the New Orleans community have been pressuring their parish sheriff, Marlin Gusman, to stop cooperating with ICE.
Several other communities around the country are considering opting out of the program, which would mean a decision not to share arrest and fingerprint data with ICE. Council members in King County (home to Seattle), are considering a local ordinance to define how local police are allowed to respond to detainment requests from ICE. Putting the focus on violent and dangerous crimes, the ordinance would require ICE to prove that a requested detainee was convicted of a homicide or a violent, serious or sex offense in the past decade. A similar law has been proposed in California by state assemblyman Tom Ammiano of San Francisco.
According to the Yakima Herald, a recent meeting concerning the King County ordinance was attended by a local ICE official and a spokesperson, Nathalie Asher. Asher warned council members that local law enforcement may not be aware of an illegal immigrant’s previous criminal record, and that ICE requests for information should take precedent because ICE often has knowledge of a “more significant” criminal background and immigration violations, using Homeland Security and FBI databases. Releasing non-violent aliens prematurely could put communities at risk, Asher said.
A letter to King County’s councilmembers from Jenny A. Durkan, the U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Washington, claimed that ICE has already successfully prosecuted 13 immigrants with violent criminal pasts in Washington state who, under the circumstances of the proposed ordinance, would not have been detained.
King County and California wouldn’t be the first places to attempt to opt out of ICE’s detainment program. As Understanding Government reported in 2011, Illinois, Massachusetts, and New York, each planned to opt out of the Secure Communities program, arguing that the program was not being used to target serious criminals. At present it is not clear that localities can, under the law, opt out — the federal government has since said the program is mandatory, and as long as finger prints are passed on to the FBI (an apparently routine practice), those fingerprints will be forwarded to ICE. The question is how local authorities then respond to ICE requests to detain suspects and hand them over to federal authorities.
Earlier this summer, Newark, New Jersey’s police department became the first in the country to begin rejecting ICE detainment requests for those accused of minor or non-violent crimes such as shoplifting or vandalism. Supporters of the new policy say it will encourage a more trusting relationship between police and immigrant communities, which can prove helpful when police need assistance in solving more serious crimes.
Secure Communities began as a pilot program under the Bush administration in 2008, operational in only 14 jurisdictions. It has since been fully expanded to include all 3,181 jurisdictions in the country under the Obama administration.

http://gimby.org/blogs/gimby-news-focus/20130904/communities-opting-out-ices-secure-communities-program