• by William Fisher (new york)
• Monday, November 01, 2010
• Inter Press Service

Will U.S. local law enforcement be forced to participate in a programme that critics say will put city police in the position of enforcing federal immigration law and, in the process, divert scarce resources from essential community policing, discourage immigrants from working with police to solve crimes and increase racial profiling?

Or is it a voluntary programme?

Those are the questions being raised by civil rights advocacy groups in a federal court filing seeking an injunction requiring the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency to turn over critical documents concerning the ability of communities to opt out of what they label 'the massive deportation dragnet', the Secure Communities - S- Comm - programme.

The groups seek to clarify ICE's statements, which they say have been 'inconsistent and confusing'. In August, ICE released a memo entitled 'Setting the Record Straight' setting forth an opt-out policy, which involves submitting a request in writing and meeting with ICE officials.

Janet Napolitano, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, later confirmed that process to be accurate.

But subsequent communications to and from ICE have muddied the waters, making it less clear that there is any opt-out policy at all.

The Washington Post claims that opting out of Secure Communities 'is not a realistic possibility, and never was'. This question takes on significance because a number of municipal and country law enforcement agencies have made it clear that they do not wish to participate in S-Comm.

Sunita Patel, an attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), told IPS, 'The misnamed Secure Communities programme is the Department of Homeland Security's current scheme to rope local cops into immigration enforcement. Though branded as a race-blind way to arrest certain people, the numbers show it's actually a trap.'

And Francis Boyle, a law professor at the University of Illinois, told IPS, 'This is simply an exercise in racial profiling against Latinos.'

On Aug. 10, the groups filing the new freedom of information suit — CCR, the National Day Laborer Organising Network and the Kathryn O. Greenberg Immigration Justice Clinic of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law - released internal government documents newly obtained through a lawsuit filed in a New York federal court in April.

According to advocates who have reviewed the documents, they reveal a pattern of dishonesty regarding the S-Comm programme.

S-Comm, which currently operates in approximately 600 jurisdictions across the country, functions like the controversial 287(g) programme and Arizona's SB1070, making state and local police central to the enforcement of federal immigration law.

The programme automatically runs fingerprints through immigration databases for all people arrested and targets them for detention and deportation even if their criminal charges are minor, eventually dismissed, or the result of an unlawful arrest. The programme links FBI criminal databases with civil immigration databases.

Several local jurisdictions have already asked to opt out, and were given a variety of responses. In May 2010, Sheriff Michael Hennessey of San Francisco requested an opt-out from ICE, but ICE directed him to California state officials. The California attorney general denied the sheriff's request and claimed that there was no opt-out option.

Arlington County, Virginia held a community forum in July to discuss opting out of the programme, at which the chief of police stated that ICE had told him that there was no opt- out - Secure Communities was federally mandated.

Others, including Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren, a Democrat from California, the Santa Clara Board, and the San Mateo County Board of Supervisors, all contacted ICE asking for information about the opt-out policies. None received an immediate response.

In the meantime, in response to legislation before the Council of the District of Columbia to terminate Secure Communities, the Washington DC chief of police terminated the city's Secure Communities programme with ICE.

So now at least two counties, plus Washington, DC have decided not to participate in the programme. Why?

The groups bringing the lawsuit claim that 'People are concerned that, similar to the 287(g) programme, there is no oversight of Secure Communities. The data provided by ICE thus far has shown that contrary to ICE's intention to focus on immigrants with serious criminal convictions, the majority of people identified by Secure Communities have minor criminal convictions or have no criminal convictions.'

They add that, in some cases, 'U.S. citizens have been wrongly identified by the programme. There are also concerns that the programme leads to racial profiling and pretextual arrests. Furthermore, local law enforcement agencies that suspect that persons in their jails may be deportable immigrants already have the ability to contact ICE directly.'

The Secure Communities programme, launched in 2008, is currently active in 658 jurisdictions in 32 states, according to ICE, which plans to activate the programme in every jurisdiction in every state by 2013.

Secure Communities, 287(g), and the Criminal Alien Programme — the Barack Obama administration's signature immigration enforcement programmes — all rely on heavy involvement from and cooperation with local law enforcement to siphon immigrants into the immigration enforcement and detention system and, ultimately, through deportation proceedings.

Meanwhile, in a related development, the Department of Justice will be in federal appellate court in San Francisco on Monday, Nov. 1, urging the court to keep in place an injunction blocking the core provisions of SB 1070, Arizona's racial profiling law.

The American Civil Liberties Union and a coalition of civil rights groups will also be present. They filed a friend-of- the-court brief in the case in September, supporting the injunction and illustrating the serious harm that SB 1070 would cause.

© Inter Press Service (2010) — All Rights Reserved. Original source: Inter Press Service

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