Washington, U.S.A. – The Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency announced that it will no longer initiate enforcement actions against deportable aliens identified by the Secure Communities program who have committed “minor” criminal offenses.

This represents the Obama administration’s latest assault on immigration enforcement, charges the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). The new policy is the next step in the Administration’s effort to ensure that only aliens who have been convicted of violent crimes will be subject to deportation.

Secure Communities cross-checks the fingerprints of every person arrested by state and local police against a variety of federal databases, including a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) database of immigration law violators. Deportable aliens who are identified through the Secure Communities program are turned over to ICE, rather than released on bail. The new policy will dramatically limit the number of deportable aliens in state and local jails who ICE takes action against.

“Today’s action is clear evidence that this administration will not quit until most immigration enforcement apparatus in the U.S. is shut down and should be a clear signal that this administration believes the violation of immigration laws is entirely inconsequential. The removal of violent criminal aliens only has been the lone factor in the Administration’s ability to maintain the pretense that it is enforcing our immigration laws,” noted Dan Stein, president of FAIR.

“Programs which rely on local law enforcement, like Secure Communities and 287(g) – a congressionally established program that trains local police to identify and detain illegal aliens – have provided ICE with a pipeline to identify deportable aliens,” continued Stein. “The Administration is phasing out 287(g) entirely, and now they are limiting the use of Secure Communities so that non-criminal aliens are ultimately released back onto the street.”

The latest ICE announcement is part of the Administration’s effort to prevent state and local authorities from playing a role in immigration enforcement. The Administration has made it abundantly clear through lawsuits and other actions that it does not want to enforce most U.S. immigration laws and it will not tolerate state and local policies that get in the way of their political objectives.

“We are rapidly approaching the point where violent criminal aliens will be the only people who will be subject to immigration enforcement,” Stein concluded.

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Immigrants have often been discriminated against in the United States.  Never more clearly seen is this than in immigration court.

Immigration court in the United States, unfortunately, is no different.  Locking up “undocumented” aliens for months, treating them as untouchables, and not helping them understand the legal system is all just part of the game.  Americans may claim equality while really endorsing an ancient caste-like system where immigrants and people that are poor make up the bottom two rungs.  Many immigrants sit in jail or are required to put their lives on hold for 11 months or more while awaiting deportation.  The judges that work immigration court are protected by an obscure agency.  As long as adjudicators process a high volume of cases, the agency will ignore and even cover up serious misconduct, including deportations of US citizens or people who have other avenues of relief.  Due process is not a concern for immigration court.  Often times, immigrants are present at hearings without a lawyer or a translator.  They are confused about the process as most of us would be.

The national backlog has grown by 40 percent since 2008.  The number of immigration cases awaiting resolution reached an all-time national high of 261,083 in fiscal year 2010, which ended on September 30. Partly to blame is the Secure Communities, a new federal program that requires local law enforcement officers to send fingerprints of everyone booked into jail to the Department of Homeland Security, which then compares the fingerprints to others  in its databases. If officials find that the suspect is in the country illegally, or is a noncitizen with a criminal record, they may pursue deportation.  Federal officials say the program will protect the public and streamline enforcement efforts. But critics protest that it will sweep up immigrants who have not been convicted of or even charged with serious crimes, and will discourage immigrants from going to the police as victims or witnesses, for fear of deportation.

According to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) records obtained by the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and the National Day Laborer Organizing Network through a Freedom of Information Act request, 79 percent of individuals deported through the Secure Communities program from October 2008 through June 2010 had no criminal record or were arrested for minor offenses like traffic violations.  “The Department of Homeland Security can inform the local enforcement agency that they should not release that person, even if there are no charges or the charges have been dropped, so that they can start deportation proceedings,” said Angela Fernandez, executive director of the Northern Manhattan Coalition for Immigrant Rights.

Undocumented immigrants may be a convenient scapegoat, but we need to exercise caution.  The United States still operates as being some champion for human rights.  Deporting our own citizens is not a way to demonstrate any type of great civil rights.  Despite how the United States tries to dehumanize immigrants, they are still people.  And, whether they are here illegally or not, deportation is a very traumatic event, causing disruption in the life of the deported, their families, and their friends.  We have to make sure that deportation is warranted and that the immigrant can understand what is happening.

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Since the late 2008,when the program Secure Communities initiated,there has been confusion about its enforcement and its interpretations.

Documents containing hundreds of messages, mostly copies of emails sent between officials of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and public relations advisers from early 2009 and the present time,show all the uncertainty and the misunderstanding created by this obscure and vague program.

“I’m totally confused now. I’ve got so many versions of the opt-out language I don’t know what’s current and what’s not. It seems like we have different language for different purposes and it’s confusing. Can we put this on today’s agenda to talk about?”

This is one of the emails,written on June 2010 by a member of the ICE staff who expressed his perplexity on the question,and it is just one of the many collected by the National Day Labourers Organizing Network with the help of the Center for Constitutional Rights and the Cardozo School of Law.

Secure Communities is a program wanted by the Obama administration to enforce the laws of immigration and crime and,by 2013 it should be spread to all local jurisdictions in any states. It consists of a collaboration between the state and the local police. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) databases are put at their disposal to check either the criminal records and the immigration history of those immigrants who are arrested.

Since the program started in 2008 has led to the deportation of about 58.300 immigrants with criminal convictions but, groups of immigrants advocacy opposing to the program say that in reality it has led to the unjust deportation of thousands of illegal immigrants with no criminal records or of people arrested just for minor traffic infractions, tearing established families apart.

According to ICE are 39 the states where Secure Communities is at the present time. Still many states are opposing the enforcement of the program. New Jersey, the state with the nation’s sixth largest immigrant population, is one of those refusing to join it and also supporting the protest against the inefficiency of Secure Communities.

The confusion is mostly related to the fact that it’s not clear whether the program is voluntary or mandatory. Can the local law enforcement agencies opt out of it or not?

Over these years the responses of ICE have been different and conflicting, changing every time. There isn’t any legal and official mandate that indicates the program enforcement is mandatory, but DHS decided in October 2010 that local jurisdictions could not opt out of Secure Communities, giving no clear explanations about the legality of this imposition. Thus the doubts about the constitutionality of making the program mandatory are still strong.

Moreover even at the technical level it is totally confusing how exactly should the criminal identification process work. The FBI databases are shared with the DHS databases now,so apparently there is no way, technically, to limit the ICE’s filtering by the local jurisdiction, even if those refuse to participate to the program.

Highlighting all these problems due to the conflict and the obscurity of the program,the immigration advocates oppose strongly Secure Communities, pointing the question that immigration is a federal problem and any state should enforce specific federal laws and, especially should be free to opt out of the program.

So can a state law so vague and confusing be enforced obligatory by every local jurisdiction?

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