Dilanian notes that this arrangement stands in contrast to a more active federal-local effort known as the 287(g) program, under which ICE signs agreements that allow local police to arrest and detain people under immigration laws. Few big cities participate in that program.

 

Still, out of political sensitivity, ICE currently is not matching fingerprints from counties, such as Illinois’s Cook County, which object to the Secure Communities program, he said.

Secure Communities is operating in 193 counties, including Los Angeles County, and ICE has checked 2.2 million sets of fingerprints submitted by local law enforcement agencies, spokeswoman Randi Greenberg said. Through 30 April, there were 216,000 hits against a database of people who previously had been fingerprinted by ICE, she said.

Of that number, 24,000 had been charged with or convicted of what ICE classifies as the most serious offenses, including rape, murder and kidnapping. The remainder involved lesser offenses, ranging from bribery and fraud to petty violations, such as gambling.

ICE deported 6,100 of those charged with or convicted of the most serious offenses, and 14,300 who were charged with or convicted of lesser offenses, she said. The goal is to expand the program nationwide by the end of 2012.

Despite Venturella’s assertion that ICE will not focus on people charged with lesser offenses, immigration rights activists aren’t so sure. “We think it’s an ill-conceived, ill-functioning program,” said Joan Friedland, a senior attorney with the National Immigration Law Center. “Regardless of how or why a person got into police custody, whether it was based on racial profiling, whether it was a minor offense, whether the person is found not guilty, they are subject to deportation.”

Friedland said she would be more comfortable with referrals based on convictions, not arrests.

In Cook County authorities can do neither. While the policies in Los Angeles and other cities allow police to notify immigration authorities about felons they suspect are illegal immigrants, Cook County forbids that, said Steve Patterson, a spokesman for the Sheriff’s Office.

Asked why, Chicago Alderman Roberto Maldonado argued that the law does allow the reporting of felons to immigration authorities. “We’re not protecting criminals,” he said.

The text of the law, however, contains no such provision.

 

Asked about the case of the Kenyan gang leader, Maldonado told Dilanian that ICE, the immigration enforcement agency, routinely peruses county arrest reports. “If ICE didn’t have their eyes open, that is not our fault,” he said.

In Los Angeles, a case in 2008 reenergized a long-standing debate about the city’s policy toward police questioning of immigrants. Jamiel Shaw II, a 17-year-old football star who had been recruited by Stanford and Rutgers universities, was gunned down in March 2008, allegedly by gang member Pedro Espinoza. Espinoza, a 19-year-old illegal immigrant, had been released from the Los Angeles County jail a day before the shooting after serving time on a gun charge.

Although Espinoza had been in the custody of the sheriff, not the Los Angeles Police Department, activists unsuccessfully sought to use the case to overturn Special Order 40, the LAPD rule that limits the circumstances in which officers may inquire into a person’s immigration status. An effort to repeal the policy by referendum failed last year when backers could not muster enough signatures to put the measure on the ballot.

Dilanian notes that unlike in Chicago, nothing prohibits Los Angeles police officers from referring people they arrest to immigration authorities, said Jorge Villegas, commander of the LAPD operations office. If police arrest a gang member who has already been deported, for example, officers notify ICE, he said