SF drags its feet into the Secure Communities program

The first peek at how the federal Secure Communities initiative will impact San Francisco came at Wednesday night’s Police Commission meeting.

Secure Communities is a program that sends fingerprints from local jails to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to see if those arrested are subject to deportation. It was created in 2008, and states and counties have been trickling into the program since. But San Francisco held out. Sheriff Michael Hennessey originally tried to avoid entering the program, citing its conflict with San Francisco’s status as a sanctuary city for undocumented immigrants. But Attorney General Jerry Brown told the Sheriff that individual counties don’t have a choice: California signed up for the program, and San Francisco will have to participate.

So as of June 1, the city has technically been in. But today’s report by the San Francisco Police Department to the Police Commission is the first real glimpse at what that means: over that period, 59 inmates in the county jail were transferred to ICE custody.

Out of the 1,493 bookings by the Sheriff’s Department in June, 122 came up as matches in ICE’s database. Seventy-three were wanted for what are considered high-level offenses (like homicide); 38 for level 2 offenses (more in the vein of drunk driving); and 11 for level 3 offenses (misdemeanors, like having an open container). It’s unclear what crimes the 59 who were ultimately sent to ICE were wanted for.

Also discussed in the meeting was the impact Secure Communities will have on the San Francisco Police Department’s operations. According to the department’s general orders, San Francisco police officers are not permitted to “enforce immigration laws or assist ICE in the in the enforcement of immigration laws,” except in emergencies (as in, the police can respond if someone’s shooting at an ICE officer). But they are required to arrest a person if they, say, stop him or her for a traffic violation and then discover there’s an outstanding warrant for the individual.

As of now, Captain David Lazar reported to the commission that it does not seem ICE’s warrants for low-level immigration violators are coming up in police officers’ databases and triggering arrests. But it’s unclear how the department will respond if they start to: as Captain Lazar told the commission, police officers are compelled by duty to make an arrest when they come across an outstanding warrant. They do not, and will not, Lazar said, do things like arrest probable immigrants who can’t produce valid identification.

As San Francisco continues to drag its feet into this program, Commissioner Angela Chan noted that the city is one of the few beacons of transparency in the process. Unlike any other city in the country, she said, San Francisco tracking the numbers and making an effort to answer some questions about the intentions of this federal program: whether it’s truly attempting to locate and deport dangerous criminals, or if it’s merely a new way of using local law enforcement to round up undocumented immigrants.