Secure Communities

‘TRUST Act 2.0′ would limit local cops’ cooperation with Secure Communities

Photo by Chad Miller/Flickr (Creative Commons)

In August, after the federal government rescinded state contracts related to the Secure Communities immigration enforcement program, those states that at the time were trying to opt out of the controversial fingerprint-sharing program seemed to have little choice but to comply.

But there’s another option, at least according to a California state legislator who is retooling a bill from last year to allow for another kind of out: Restricting how law enforcement agencies hold immigrants for deportation at the request of federal immigration officials.

The yet-to-be-introduced California bill is a retooled version of the TRUST Act, a measure approved last May by the state Assembly that would have allowed the state to renegotiate its contract with the feds and allowed local jurisdictions to opt out of Secure Communities if they wanted to. It had begun moving through the Senate when U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement director John Morton sent a letter to state governors terminating the contracts, whose language did not suggest the program was mandatory.

Here’s how Quintin Mecke, a spokesman for bill sponsor and Assembly member Tom Ammiano, described the retooled legislation in an email:

We are in the midst of finalizing the exact language, but right now it will likely create thresholds and standards for local jurisdictions around ICE detainers. The bill will likely create a baseline for local governments not to expend resources on responding to ICE holds and detaining people for deportation, unless the individual had a serious or violent felony conviction.

Jurisdictions that do choose to detain people on the basis of immigration status will need to come up with common-sense plans to guard against profiling and wrongful detentions of citizens.

In a recent story the Los Angeles Times quoted Ammiano, a Democrat from San Francisco:

“States have their own ways of fighting back,” Ammiano said. “We can’t stand by and let innocent people, food vendors, etc., be caught up in sweeps, assume they’re guilty of some violent offense and then deport them and separate them from their families.”

The bill would be better met in some jurisdictions than others, such as in San Francisco, where Sheriff Michael Hennessey announced last spring that he would not hold arrestees for ICE. Some state, local and law enforcement officials have spoken out against Secure Communities, saying it alienates immigrant communities and thus impedes policing. But other jurisdictions have been supportive of the program, and the proposed additional regulations for those who do choose to hold prisoners for immigration officials are not bound to go over well in some local agencies.

Los Angeles’ law enforcement principals have been split over Secure Communities: Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck has voiced misgivings, but county Sheriff Lee Baca is a supporter.

Mecke said the timeline for reintroducing what’s being called “TRUST Act 2.0″ is still fluid, but that it will be sometime this spring.

FILED UNDER: ICE, Secure Communities, Tom Ammiano, Trust Act, Trust Act 2.0, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement

January 9, 2012 | 3:59 PM | By Leslie Berestein Rojas

A legal basis for mandatory S-Comm? Read the federal memo

Photo by olongapowoodcraft/Flickr (Creative Commons)

An October 2, 2010 federal internal memo made public today shows that immigration officials were long ago bracing itself for legal challenges to their position, recently affirmed, that states’ participation in the Secure Communities immigration enforcement program is mandatory. And that they were doing so even as confusion continued among states and local jurisdictions, several of which believed that participation was voluntary and could be discontinued.

The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement memo was released today on an immigration advocacy website, obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request. The memo lists and analyzes legal statutes as to whether the agency’s plans to roll the program out nationwide by 2013, with mandatory participation, violates the Tenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

The conclusion in the memo is no, though that could be up for interpretation in court. An excerpt:

Our analysis of case law concentrates on Printz v. United States, 521 U.S. 898, 925 (1997), the seminal case on unconstitutional state participation in mandatory government programs. Significantly, Printz holds that “federal laws which require only a provision of information to the Federal Government” do not raise the Tenth Amendment prohibition of “the forced participation of the States’ executive in the actual administration of a federal program.”

…We examine several potential legal challenges and arguments that law enforcement agencies may make to avoid the reach of Secure Communities in 2013, and conclude that each seems rather weak in the face of Printz and its progeny.

The case cited is a landmark decision involving state-federal collaboration and gun purchasing background checks. The ICE memo goes on to paint various challenge scenarios to Secure Communities. It notes that there are statutes relating to immigration information collected by states that “do not provide a legal basis for characterizing participation in Secure Communities as mandatory,” but that these are “essentially irrelevant given other statutory support.”

The memo was released last fall just as Homeland Security officials were finally asserting, after months of back-and-forth, that jurisdictions could not opt out of Secure Communities. The program, which allows the fingerprints of people taken at local jails to be shared with immigration officials, began rolling out in late 2008. Many local and state officials had believed that as with an older federal-local partnership program called 287(g), Secure Communities was optional.

It initially appeared so by the Memorandums of Agreement, or MOAs, signed between federal and state/local officials around the country allowing Secure Communities to be implemented. Here is part of the contract with the California Department of Justice, dated January 23, 2009:

This MOA may be modified at any time by mutual written consent of both parties.

This MOA may remain in effect from the date of signing until it is terminated by either party. Either party, upon written or oral notice to the other party, may terminate the MOA at any time. A termination notice shall be delivered personally or by certified or registered mail and termination shall take effect 30 days after receipt of such notice.

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FILED UNDER: 287(g), Secure Communities

December 30, 2011 | 12:34 PM | By Leslie Berestein Rojas

The top five immigration stories of 2011

Photo by Victoria Bernal/Flickr (Creative Commons)

During the past week, Multi-American has been counting down the biggest and most influential immigration stories of 2011. That’s not to say there were only five: It’s been a major year for stories related to the immigration debate, especially as the battleground has shifted to the states, record deportations have continued, and the Obama administration’s expansion of federal-local partnerships such as the Secure Communities fingerprint sharing program continues to draw controversy.

Stories that didn’t make the list are also worth mentioning, among them the passage of state tuition-aid bills for undocumented students like the California Dream Act and the continued steep drop in illegal border crossings – even as illegal immigration remains a popular talking point for candidates seeking the presidency in 2012. Here are M-A’s choices for top stories of the year.

1) The states as immigration battleground: When counting down last year’s top stories, choosing Arizona’s game-changing SB 1070 to top the list was a no-brainer. Not necessarily because news of the stringent 2010 anti-illegal immigration law dominated immigration coverage last year, but because of the lasting impact the law was bound to have on other states.

A year later, SB 1070-inspired immigration enforcement bills have made their way through statehouses around the country. Similarly strict laws have taken effect in states like Alabama, Georgia, Utah, Indiana and South Carolina.

Like the Arizona measure that inspired them, headed to the U.S. Supreme Court on a state appeal, all of these face their own court challenges. Federal judges have blocked several of these laws’ most stringent provisions, including a controversial provision in Alabama that would require public schools to check the immigration status of students, which when the law first took effect prompted a rash of school absences. Agricultural states like Georgia and Alabama, meanwhile, have experienced severe labor shortages as immigrant farm workers have fled their fields for more welcoming climes.

The new laws enacted are but one small aspect of what’s been happening in the states. The National Conference of State Legislatures reported recently that in 2011, there were 1,607 bills and resolutions relating to immigrants and refugees introduced in all 50 states and Puerto Rico, significantly up from a little more than 1,400 in 2010. Bolstered by the relative success of SB 1070, even as parts of the law remain hung up in court, immigration restriction-minded legislators in many states banded together, working with the same legal teams to draft crackdown bills.

Where does it go from here? The Supreme Court decision on SB 1070 could well hold the answer, either encouraging or putting the brakes on state bills. The high court will weigh the merits of a lower court judge’s decision to block some of the more controversial provisions of the law, including one empowering local police to check for immigration status. The case is expected to be heard in the spring.

The high court set a state-law precedent earlier this year when it ruled in favor of a previous Arizona anti-illegal immigration law, a 2007 measure mandating employers to use a federal program called E-Verify to check workers’s immigration status and punishing those who don’t comply. Many of the state laws that have followed SB 1070 have had similar employer provisions, an enforcement tactic that is becoming more popular as states find ways to crack down.

Photo by John Moore/Getty Images

A man is prepared for a deportation flight bound for San Salvador in Mesa, Arizona, December 2010

2) Another year of record deportations: In fiscal year 2011, the Obama administration broke its deportation record for the second straight year, deporting close to 400,000 people in the year that ended last Sept. 30.

It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that news of another record-breaking year was pretty much expected, with the continued expansion of federal immigration enforcement programs like Secure Communities and 287(g), both of which have fed the deportation pipeline in recent years with a steady flow of cases stemming from local law enforcement. The number of people deported annually has crept upward steadily for years now, from 291,060 in fiscal year 2007 to 396,906 in fiscal year 2011, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement records.

These deportations have raised several questions, among them questions about just who is being deported as the Obama administration stresses an emphasis on criminal deportees, and whether the programs being used are working as intended. An October press release from ICE read that “nearly 55 percent or 216,698 of the people removed were convicted of felonies or misdemeanors — an 89 percent increase in the removal of criminals since FY 2008.” But analyses of deportation stats have pointed out gray areas.

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FILED UNDER: Birthright citizenship, Coming out undocumented, Prosecutorial discretion, Record deportations, SB 1070, Secure Communities, Top five immigration stories of 2011

December 29, 2011 | 12:53 PM | By Leslie Berestein Rojas

Report: Secure Communities affects U.S. citizens, too

Art by José Luís Agapito/Flickr (Creative Commons)

A new report examining Secure Communities, the immigration enforcement program partly responsible for the Obama administration’s record number of deportations, reveals some of the demographics, immigration status, and other key details about who has been arrested and deported under the program since it began rolling out in 2008.

Secure Communities allows for the fingerprints of people booked into local jails to be shared with immigration officials, who are notified when prints match immigration records. The idea is to net undocumented immigrants and deportable legal residents with criminal records, a stated goal of the Obama administration.

But as noted in the report by the UC Berkeley Law School, U.S. citizens are affected by the program in more ways than one might think. Citizens have been arrested, and to a much larger degree, have had family members deported. According to the report, nearly 40 percent of the people arrested by immigration authorities under Secure Communities have been the spouses or parents of U.S. citizens.

From a list of key findings:

• Approximately 3,600 United States citizens have been arrested by ICE through the Secure Communities program.

• More than one-third (39%) of individuals arrested through Secure Communities report that they have a U.S. citizen spouse or child, meaning that approximately 88,000 families with U.S. citizen members have been impacted by Secure Communities.

Among the other key findings: As reported in the New York Times, Latinos are disproportionately affected, with a greater percentage of Latinos arrested through Secure Communities than there are Latino undocumented immigrants (though it’s worth noting that legal U.S. residents with criminal offenses may also be arrested and deported). From the report:

• Latinos comprise 93% of individuals arrested through Secure Communities though they only comprise 77% of the undocumented population in the United States.

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FILED UNDER: ICE, Record deportations, Secure Communities, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement

October 18, 2011 | 11:53 AM | By Leslie Berestein Rojas

ICE announces another record year for deportations

Photo by olongapowoodcraft/Flickr (Creative Commons)

Federal deportation numbers are out for fiscal year 2011, which ended Sept. 30.

And once again, the Obama administration is announcing that a record number of people have been deported during the past year, surpassing the record that was set during fiscal year 2010.

From the news release from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement:

Overall, in FY 2011 ICE’s Office of Enforcement and Removal Operations removed 396,906 individuals — the largest number in the agency’s history.

Of these, nearly 55 percent or 216,698 of the people removed were convicted of felonies or misdemeanors — an 89 percent increase in the removal of criminals since FY 2008. This includes 1,119 aliens convicted of homicide; 5,848 aliens convicted of sexual offenses; 44,653 aliens convicted of drug related crimes; and 35,927 aliens convicted of driving under the influence.

ICE achieved similar results with regard to other categories prioritized for removal. Ninety percent of all ICE’s removals fell into a priority category and more than two-thirds of the other removals in 2011 were either recent border crossers or repeat immigration violators.

In October of last year, ICE reported there had been 392,862 deportations in fiscal year 2010, setting a record for deportations then. About half those deported had criminal records, some less serious than others.

This year’s announcement comes on the heels of the Obama administration announcing in August that it would review the cases of “low priority” immigrants in deportation proceedings who didn’t have a criminal record, although some of these cases continue moving through the system.

The administration has stood by its position that it will focus on people convicted of criminal offenses for deportation, defending its use of programs like Secure Communities, which allows the fingerprints of people booked into local jails to be shared with immigration officials. Critics of the program say it doesn’t work as intended, landing too many non-offenders or people with low-level offenses, such as traffic offenses, in the deportation net.

FILED UNDER: Deportation policy, ICE, Record deportations, Secure Communities

August 26, 2011 | 11:34 AM | By Leslie Berestein Rojas

The scene at an LA immigration protest this week (Video)

Videographer Mae Ryan was at an immigration rally earlier this week outside the federal building in downtown Los Angeles that led to several arrests. The protesters were calling for an end to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s controversial Secure Communities enforcement program, to which there has been growing opposition since the federal government canceled state agreements to the program earlier this month, insisting it is mandatory.

Secure Communities allows for the fingerprints of people booked into local jails to be shared with immigration authorities. The federal government has defended the practice as a necessary law enforcement tool, while opponents say it alienates immigrant communities from police by casting too wide of a net.

The arrests were made after protesters, among them undocumented college students, allegedly blocked traffic; some blocked a ramp used by immigration buses. Ryan interviewed protesters and counter-protesters, who rallied nearby.