Thread: FL-Central Florida jails join immigration-enforcement effort

Central Florida jails join immigration-enforcement effort
Inmates’ fingerprints will be checked against federal records in Orange, Osceola, Polk and Volusia

By Victor Manuel Ramos

6:26 p.m. EDT, April 26, 2010


Four Central Florida counties are joining a growing list of law enforcement jails on a federal push to identify and deport illegal immigrants already behind bars, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency announced Monday.

Orange, Osceola, Polk and Volusia counties will join Lake in the "Secure Communities Initiative," which gives jails access to combined FBI and Homeland Security databases of criminal and immigration violations. The arrangement comes through an agreement between ICE and the state and allows jails to submit fingerprint data for their inmates to be checked against federal records.

Activists are complaining about the partnerships, saying they don't want Florida to enforce immigration offenses like Arizona, where a controversial new law making illegal immigration a state crime has stirred fears of racial profiling and civil-rights violations.

However, ICE officials said the program is a public-safety initiative and not just a dragnet.

"All of these individuals had to have been arrested for a criminal charge and have to be in jail," said David Bradley, deputy director for ICE's Office of Detention and Removal in Miami, which oversees enforcement throughout Florida. "It allows us to stop recidivist offenders" from being released.

ICE said 24 Florida counties, including Escambia, Leon, Palm Beach and Sarasota, and 20 states are participating. But immigrant activists are wary of any local effort to enforce federal immigration law and continue to call for national immigration reform that would balance enforcement with legalization.

The Florida Immigrant Coalition, a Miami organization that unites dozens of immigrant advocacy groups, hopes that Florida doesn't follow Arizona's path.

"The whole fiasco in Arizona started with one local county thinking it was OK to develop this unholy alliance with ICE and criminalizing its own people," said Subhash Kateel, a community organizer. "The biggest problem is people are flagged for deportation at the point of arrest and not of conviction, and so they never get the benefit of being presumed innocent."

ICE spokeswoman Nicole Navas said the county jails have found repeat offenders, including murderers and rapists, and have not targeted anyone not already slated for deportation.

"These are fingerprinting databases," she said, "and it's a colorblind system."

VÃ*ctor Manuel Ramos can be reached at vramos@orlandosentinel.com.


http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/loc ... 3185.story

Good. I wish that they would give out stats on how many illegals are being arrested at national, state and county levels. The Broward County Jail actually show people with immigration holds for the month. I would love to see how high it is in Miami Dade.