ImmigrationICE: Secure Communities program not optional

The immigration enforcement program known as Secure Communities (SC) has come under fire by cities refusing to participate in the voluntary submission of criminal suspects’ fingerprints. The Obama administration has made it so that cities no longer have a choice but to concede to the program’s new guidelines.

In the rewritten program’s participation rules, the administration declared that federal funding and FBI information would be withheld from resisters. Case law was eventually used to justify the requiring cooperation, according to DHS documents.

Top officials were aware that this immigration measure would be met by resistance and were advised in late 2009 that the fingerprints could be checked against the immigration database without local buy-in.

In an e-mail to top officials and other redacted recipients, Randi Greenberg, the communications and outreach chief of the Secure Communities program, wrote: “The SC 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.”

According to the DHS documents, the pushback came in the form of questions and attempts to avoid participating from Washington, D.C.; Cook County, Illinois; Santa Clara, California; Arlington, Virginiaa; San Francisco; Philadelphia; and the states of Oregon, Washington, Minnesota, and Colorado.

These communities were only a small percentage of more than 1,000 that willingly became part of the program or did not oppose the state signing them up with ICE. By fall of last year, ICE decided that local officials could not stop immigration officials from gathering fingerprints and that locals could only refuse to receive the information from the federal government on the immigration status of the people they had incarcerated. Local officials, however, still had to hold non-citizens for ICE if asked to.

The documents were released as a result of a Freedom of Information lawsuit filed by the Benjamin Cardozo School of Law in New York, the National Day Labor Organizing Network, and the Center for Constitutional Rights, which oppose Secure Communities. The AP obtained the documents from DHS after a New York federal district court judge overseeing the lawsuit ordered them made public.

Fingerprints of all criminal suspects collected by local law officers have always been forwarded to state agencies, which then send them to the FBI to check against its criminal histories and fingerprint database.

Under the Secure Communities program, the fingerprints also are run through DHS’s immigration database, and authorities can determine