ICE to Address Concerns About Secure Communities Program

Amid growing resistance from state governments across the country, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement recently announced its plans to reform the Secure Communities program — a program that has resulted in hundreds of thousands of deportations in just the last two years.

What Is the Secure Communities Program?

The Secure Communities program checks the fingerprints of every person booked in jails against FBI and Department of Homeland Security databases for criminal and immigration history. The Obama administration initiated the controversial program as a means to protect crime victims and witnesses, and to encourage bipartisan immigration reform legislation. The program has been very successful and has led to a record 800,000 deportations of immigrants in the past two years.

Before Secure Communities was initiated, local jurisdictions could share fingerprints of individuals booked into jails with the FBI to see if they had prior criminal records. With Secure Communities, the FBI automatically sends the fingerprints to ICE to check its databases for immigration violators as well.  If these checks reveal that the individual is an illegal immigrant or otherwise eligible for deportation due to a criminal conviction, ICE will take enforcement action.

Proposed Reforms to the Secure Communities Program

Immigration and Customs Enforcement has announced that it will address the following concerns in the future:

• Refining the program to focus on the most serious criminals

• Ensuring that the civil rights of those who interact with law enforcement are protected

• Creating a new advisory committee composed of law enforcement officials to advise the director of ICE on ways to improve the Secure Communities Program

• Providing more discretion to law enforcement officers to target more serious criminals

• Developing tools to help identify victims and witnesses to crimes so that they will come forward with information without fear of deportation

• Creating a new complaint system and an ongoing quarterly statistical review of the program

Criticisms of the Secure Communities Program

State and federal lawmakers have criticized the program for not accomplishing its goal of deporting convicted criminals, but instead targeting many illegal immigrants who are either innocent or guilty of misdemeanors and lesser crimes. Lawmakers, led by Illinois Governor Pat Quinn, are concerned that the program blurs the line between civil and criminal violations. It is considered to be a civil violation to be unlawfully present in the US, not a criminal violation.

In addition, state and local law enforcement officials are concerned that the program has eroded trust between law enforcement and immigrant communities, since they are being engaged in immigration enforcement.

Rep. Zoe Lofgren of California, claims that local governments were deliberately misled into thinking they could choose to opt out of the program, when in reality, their participation is mandatory.

Immigrant rights groups have complained that the program could potentially silence victims and witnesses from reporting crimes for fear that they too will be tagged for deportation. Others claim that the Secure Communities program has antagonized Latino immigrant communities and has not accomplished the bipartisan reform effort it promised.