February 16, 2011 | 8:57 AM | By

Secure Communities: ICE documents show policy change, push back

FILED UNDER: Police, Department of Homeland Security, Immigration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Secure Communities
ICE

Courtesy of ICE.

According to documents obtained by the Associated Press, the Obama administration changed its policy on communities’ participation in a controversial program targeting undocumented immigrants based on its popularity–as communities attempted to opt out of Secure Communities, the program switched from being voluntary to mandatory.

San Francisco and Santa Clara were among the handful of communities that actively tried to stay out of the program, which shares fingerprints from the county jail with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. And that push-back was apparently anticipated by Department of Homeland Security officials:

The administration rewrote the program’s participation rules, the documents show, considered withholding federal funding and FBI information from resisters and eventually dug up case law to justify requiring cooperation.

Throughout the turmoil, according to the documents, top officials knew they would get local resistance and were advised in late 2009 that the fingerprints could be checked against the immigration database without local buy-in.

“The SC (Secure Communities) initiative will remain voluntary at the state and local level. . Until such time as localities begin to push back on participation, we will continue with this current line of thinking,” says an e-mail written by Randi Greenberg, the communications and outreach chief of the program. It was sent to several people whose names DHS blacked out before releasing the documents.

The documents were released as part of a lawsuit by the Benjamin Cardozo School of Law, the National Day Labor Organizing Network, and the Center for Constitutional Rights. Those groups have been working to end the Secure Communities program, which they say works as a dragnet for rounding up undocumented immigrants, under the auspices of finding and deporting dangerous criminals. They point particularly to the idea that crime victims will be reluctant to call the police if they fear deportation.

DHS meanwhile, maintains that there’s no reason jails shouldn’t share fingerprints of those arrested at county jails–and that Secure Communities is doing what it was designed to do, remove criminals from the country. In a statement to the AP, ICE said that the program “has already resulted in the arrest of more than 59,000 convicted criminal aliens, including more than 21,000 convicted of major violent offenses like murder, rape and the sexual abuse of children.”

  • Anonymous

    Just like the Great Land Rush of the 19th century, hundreds of thousands even millions of illegal aliens will be fleeing different States enacting policing laws. Idaho, Florida Utah, Missouri, Texas, North Carolina, Maryland, Tennessee, Minnesota and of course the great State of Arizona, who is battling for survival in the biased-oriented court system.,In swarms they will be loading their trucks, packing their families and leaving less hospitable locations. They are heading they think to other States with easy welfare pickings, with brought and sold legislators where the laws are not enforced. Even the cash strapped, Sanctuary State of California has numerous counties ready to embark with E-Verify, as a mandatory verification warning to foreign nationals you better not apply for a job here, as the business owner is unlikely to take the risk of losing his business license. Other States are introducing laws including the federal 287 (g) law to train local police in arrest and detain suspicious individuals on hold for ICE agents.

    Secure Communities a program that expedites fingerprints gathered by local law enforcement agencies to the FBI and then through a federal (ICE) immigration database to identify undocumented immigrants. Over a thousand jurisdictions in 40 States and others ready to participate. All these enforcement programs cost millions of dollars, but it touches nowhere near the hundreds of billions of dollars extracted from your taxes to support illegal aliens. The border remains frighteningly open and their is no program to guarantee that foreign airline passengers will leave after their entry visa expires? American immigration laws have been mocked since the 1986 amnesty law by both the US Government and the businesses that hire discount labor. If their was a real effort by any administration to halt the illegal alien invasion, any illegal invader would be facing a felony, not a stupid minor infraction.

    I joined the Tea PARTY as more and more taxes are being taken, to support the education, health care and other social welfare programs in pandering to the illegal immigrants. I am also an activist of the million plus membership of NumbersUSA pro-sovereignty organization, that allows free faxes to your resident State Representative or even the leadership in Washington. You can also contact your politicians through the Switchboard in DC at 202-224-3121. Their is a Pdf file “Illegal Aliens and American Medicine.”that every American should assimilate. It will probably give you heartburn and the billions of dollars we are paying to support health care for illegal aliens, that should be going in the pensions of old American warriors, OUR senior citizens, OUR homeless, Our blind, our sick, handicapped and those citizens living in poverty. This is just part of the deception and collusion of our legislators, who have been corrupted by special interests. We should bring our military home from Afghanistan, Iraq and other support bases, and place them fully armed along the US border, Canadian border fully armed with orders to fire.

    Illegal immigrant states like Texas New York State and Illinois’s, specially in California and Nevada, has no real ID verification where there was massive voter fraud through absentee ballots use I truly believe.

  • Rollie Fingers

    Crawl back under your rock you nativist worm

  • Anonymous

    I am thankful to Long Beach, California for being part of the Secure Communities program.

    I received a phone call from LBPD notifying me that they had arrested a man and when booked into the jail, they received an ICE-hold. When they received the hold — they went through his belonging and found a Social Security card with his name. The police entered the SS# into the system and my name came up. It was determined that the man had been using my SS# for employment for at least 2 years — probably longer.

    With the help of ICE, it was found that the man had four different aliases and had already been deported back to Mexico three times!

    He ended up pleading guilty to using false documents and identity theft and was sentenced to 18 months in a California jail.

    For those that say participating in the program would overburden police budgets and pull officers from the streets — according to the detective in Long Beach, when someone is booked into the jail the information is automatically transmitted to ICE with the final keystroke of hitting ENTER. No additional man hours are needed to share the information.