“Secure Communities” or excuse for deportation?

Arizona’s law is not the only controversial effort under way to ramp up immigration enforcement. Here in the Bay Area, four counties recently joined a national program called Secure Communities. The program uses fingerprint records to identify and deport undocumented immigrants if they are in local jails. The stated goal is to deport serious criminals in favor of public safety.

Jude Joffe-Block has this report about the Secure Communities program and its recent launch in four Bay Area counties.    

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JUDE JOFFE-BLOCK: If you’re arrested in Alameda County, you could wind up in the bowels of the Santa Rita jail. One of the first things you have to do is get your fingerprints taken. There are three kiosks set up for this, and each one has a scanner that looks like what you’d see in a grocery store check out line. Deputy Rogelio Matedne explains that inmates put their fingers on the scanner one at a time.

ROGELIO MATEDNE: …index, middle, pinky and then the last one would be a thumbprint and then a palm print. And you would do it on both hands.

The state then forwards these prints to an FBI database to check each inmate’s criminal history. But as of April 20th of this year, fingerprints taken in any Alameda County jail are also forwarded to a second database, one that checks every inmate’s immigration history.

CRAIG MEYER: So once a match is done and we are notified, then we’ll run the person through the system, make sure everything matches up, and at that point a hold would be placed with the jail.

That’s Craig Meyer, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Assistant Field director in San Francisco. He says his agency, also known as ICE, will receive an alert in real time -- 24 hours a day, 7 days a week -- whenever someone fingerprinted in a local jail matches a record in their database.

CRAIG MEYER: Once a person is done serving their local time, then we would pick that person up and they would come here for processing.

“Here” is ICE’s field office in downtown San Francisco. The program is called Secure Communities, and it’s slowly being rolled out across the country. So far in the Bay Area, Alameda, Contra Costa, Solano and Sonoma counties are all participating. Fingerprints from anyone booked in those county jails are crosschecked with over 110 million records that are in the immigration database.

MEYER: You have people that have been encountered at the border who maybe were sent back, you have people who have been here before and have been deported once before...

The database also includes files for visa holders and legal permanent residents. If ICE determines that an inmate at the county jail is here illegally, the agency can immediately request the jail to place a hold on that inmate. Once the inmate is ready for release, ICE has 48 hours to take them into custody. Meyer explains how the new system is supposed to work.

MEYER: An example would be, let’s say someone who has had a couple of DUI’s, and for whatever reason that arresting agency, we were never notified, or our agents didn’t get to him. And he has been through the process a couple times, and then that third time, and then with this system we find out that he is here illegally and we catch him. And what our hopes are is that maybe we’ve caught him before that time he goes out and kills a family on the road.

In fact, last month, a drunk driver named Juan Ruelas was booked in a Martinez jail for his alleged role in a hit and run accident that left a motorcyclist dead. His fingerprints revealed that he had previous convictions for driving under the influence. And because the jail participates in Secure Communities, his prints also showed that he was in the country illegally and had already been deported numerous times. ICE has placed a hold on Ruelas. Once he completes his criminal case, Ruelas will be transferred to ICE custody and ultimately deported.

MEYER: So our goal is to effectively remove criminal aliens from the community, especially criminals, Level 1 offenders, which are the higher crimes, rapes, murders, robberies, and so forth. Our goal is to take them out of the community and make it safer.  

And for critics, that’s what’s in question: does this program make the community safer? Only about 12% of the 33,000 immigrants deported so far under Secure Communities have been the Level 1, serious and violent offenders that ICE says are their priority. Most of the immigrants who have been deported were charged with Level 2 crimes, like property crimes or minor drug offenses, or Level 3, which includes misdemeanors. And what’s more, not everyone who gets fingerprinted at a jail is guilty of an offense.

AARTI KOHLI: The vast majority of people who are captured under these programs are low-level offenders…

That’s Aarti Kohli with Berkeley Law School’s Earl Warren Institute. She says that when ICE casts such a wide net, it might snare minor traffic violators for deportation, even though that’s not the stated goal.

KOHLI: No one is arguing that if you have an offense, a low level offense, that law enforcement shouldn’t use the appropriate sanction. But does it mean that you should be deported? That is another question.

Kohli researched this topic in Irving, Texas in a report that came out last Fall. She found that once ICE began looking for undocumented immigrants at the local jail, police started arresting Latinos at a higher rate for low-level crimes. Kohli fears that the Secure Communities could lead to similar cases of racial profiling.

KOHLI: We feel like these programs are having an impact on policing. And immigrant communities as a result are becoming increasingly distrustful of police, and that is not a good phenomenon in terms of creating a safer community for everyone. If an immigrant is not willing to be a witness because they are afraid to interact with police, that doesn’t create a safer community.

But Craig Meyer of ICE says Secure Communities doesn’t ask local law enforcement to do anything differently.

MEYER: We haven’t told them to go and look for illegal aliens. That is our job. Our job is to identify illegal criminal aliens and to get them into the process and remove them if that is the case.

Back at the Santa Rita jail, Sergeant JD Nelson says that Alameda County didn’t have a choice about whether to join Secure Communities. But he says his department’s protocols will be the same:

JD NELSON: We have been sending fingerprints to the state for as long as anybody can remember. The only difference for us is that those fingerprints are being forwarded to another agency. As far as the law officers on the street, we still don’t have any law saying that we can stop anyone simply for looking like an illegal alien. So that is not going to happen here in California.

Nelson explains that even before the new program, ICE officers would visit the jail almost every day to interview any foreign-born inmates who lacked social security numbers. But the new technology used by Secure Communities promises to identify more undocumented immigrants than ever before. Congress has allocated more than 500 million dollars to expand the program and by 2013, every single person who is booked in a U.S. jail will have their immigration history checked by ICE.

Immigrant and civil rights advocates are already protesting the Secure Communities program and are seeking government records to learn more about the program’s ramifications. Three organizations filed a lawsuit last week against ICE after the agency failed to respond to their Freedom of Information Act request for documents related to the program.

For Crosscurrents, I'm Jude Joffe-Block.

Jude Joffe Block is a reporter with the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.

This post has been corrected to reflect that Congress has appropriated $550 million to Secure Communities, not over a billion dollars. Congress appropriated a total of $1.4 billion on various efforts to remove immigrants with criminal records from the country.