The Informant

Courtesy of ICE

Immigration and Customs Enforcement

It’s official: San Francisco will not be allowed to opt out of Secure Communities, a federal fingerprint-sharing program that targets undocumented immigrants. Sheriff Mike Hennessey met with officials from Immigration and Customs Enforcement this morning for about an hour and a half. Eileen Hirst, the sheriff’s chief of staff, says that the head of Secure Communities, David Venturella, told them that if a state signs up for the program, cities and counties don’t have a choice. That means San Francisco, Santa Clara, and Arlington, Virginia will continue to have their jailhouse fingerprints sent to an ICE database. The only locality that’s been able to get out of the program is Washington DC, which isn’t under the jurisdiction of any state.

Hirst says that San Francisco will now examine its options. The sheriff, along with the Board of Supervisors, has been hesitant about the Secure Communities program since its inception. On its face, county officials have said, the program interferes with San Francisco’s Sanctuary City ordinance, which says that city and county resources and employees should not be used to enforce federal immigration laws. Further criticisms levied at the program include the charge that it doesn’t do what it claims: Secure Communities was born as a program that would make it easy to identify and deport immigrants (mostly undocumented) who commit serious crimes. Instead, critics say, it casts a wide net, pulling in criminals and non-criminals alike.

San Francisco actually worked with ICE to detain immigrants accused of serious crimes before Secure Communities was implemented in June. But the finger-print sharing program, the sheriff’s office has said, takes the collaboration further, bringing not only those accused of serious crimes to the attention of ICE, but also those arrested for misdemeanors and sometimes even victims of traffic accidents and domestic violence.

There is still one way San Francisco could maintain some control over who does and doesn’t get caught up in the program. Hirst said that in their meeting today, ICE’s Venturella confirmed that when ICE asks the jail to hold a person in custody, it’s the sheriff’s prerogative to comply with the request. In other words, if someone is arrested, their fingerprints pop up in ICE’s computer, and ICE determines that the person is subject to deportation, someone still needs to make sure that the person is kept in custody until ICE gets there to pick them up. Typically, the sheriff allows ICE 48 hours to pick someone up before they’re allowed out on bail or released because charges have been dropped. The sheriff could simply decide to not honor certain requests, if the person at issue is not accused of a serious crime.

Hirst says the office is looking into that strategy, but that its tricky–not to mention labor-intensive. “We’d have to be sure we could apply that policy fairly,” she says. The sheriff’s office may not always know why an ICE hold has been issued, or how many times a person has already been deported and come back. “We don’t want to be in a position of making a value judgment,” Hirst says.

For more on how Secure Communities fits into a more general move towards involving local law enforcement in policing immigration, check out our interview with the Angela Chan of the Asian Law Caucus.