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Think of it as a jobs program for highly paid ICE agents to deport dishwashers, bus boys, waiters, gardeners, maids and hamburger flippers who are mostly honest law abiding workers who's only crime is sneaking into the USA looking for a better job.

Source

Federal immigration program mainly nets low-level criminals, analysis says

by Daniel González - Mar. 9, 2011 12:00 AM

The Arizona Republic

Of the hundreds of counties in the U.S. participating in a rapidly expanding federal program designed to catch and deport dangerous criminal immigrants, Maricopa County leads the nation in both the number of immigrants arrested and the number deported, federal records show.

But the majority of the immigrants, 66 percent, caught in the county and deported through the Secure Communities program are either low-level criminals or have no criminal record at all, according to an Arizona Republic analysis of the 2-year-old program. Nationwide, 60 percent of those deported had been convicted of either low-level crimes or none at all, The Republic found.

Those findings run counter to claims by Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano that President Barack Obama's administration is focusing law-enforcement resources on illegal immigrants who pose the greatest threat to public safety.

The program runs the fingerprints of every person arrested and booked into a participating local jail through a national immigration database in order to identify immigrants, both legal and illegal, to determine whether they should be deported.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials say the $147 million program has been effective at rooting out dangerous criminal immigrants. It has resulted in the deportation of more than 21,500 immigrants convicted of major crimes, including 3,097 from Arizona. Those deported include both illegal immigrants and legal immigrants who committed serious crimes that resulted in the loss of their immigration status.

Officials say that although the program's priority is to deport dangerous criminals, the government cannot turn a blind eye to others caught through the program.

"ICE is focused on sensible, effective immigration enforcement that prioritizes efforts to identify and remove criminal aliens who pose a potential threat to public safety," said Vincent Picard, an ICE spokesman in Phoenix. "In making determinations about enforcement actions in individual cases, ICE looks at the totality of the person's criminal and immigration history."

Advocates of stricter immigration enforcement praise the program for helping ensure that immigrants arrested for crimes are not released into the community without first being screened by ICE for possible deportation.

But the program has come under increasing criticism from immigrant advocates who say it also encourages police to engage in unconstitutional racial profiling and discriminatory arrests so they can run fingerprints through the immigration databases as part of Secure Communities.

They say the program's dragnet approach is tearing apart families and destroying immigrant communities.

"ICE has been saying all along that this is a program for catching the most dangerous people. But if you look at the numbers, that doesn't seem to be the way it's playing out," said Bridget Kessler, an immigration lawyer at Yeshiva University's Cardozo Law School in New York.

The Law School's immigration clinic filed a federal lawsuit in 2010 on behalf of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network seeking arrest and deportation data for the Secure Communities program. As a result, ICE posted the data on its website.

Program expands

As of Dec. 31, 2010, at least 877 counties in 34 states were participating in the Secure Communities program.

Arizona is one of eight states where the program has been implemented statewide.

Since it was launched in October 2008, the fingerprints of 601,844 people in Arizona - the vast majority of them in Maricopa County - have been run through the system.

That has resulted in 12,089 immigrants in the county being deported through the program, records show. Of those, 3,097, or about 25 percent, had been convicted of major crimes such as murder, rape and drug trafficking, the figures show.

Nationwide, 5.6 million people have been screened, resulting in the deportation of more than 21,500 immigrants convicted of major crimes, or about 26 percent of the 81,489 immigrants deported overall.

The program is voluntary, but the government is pushing to have every jurisdiction in the country using the program by 2013. Several cities, counties and states have resisted participating amid concerns that immigration enforcement is a federal responsibility and that participating in the program could make immigrants afraid to report crimes to local police.

How it works is relatively simple. In the past, the fingerprints of every person booked into jail were run through an FBI database to check for criminal records. In the nearly 900 counties nationwide, including all 15 in Arizona, that are participating in Secure Communities, fingerprints are run through a second database maintained by the Department of Homeland Security. The database can't identify illegal immigrants who have never been fingerprinted. But it contains the records of more than 100 million legal and illegal immigrants who have been caught and returned to their home countries and people from other countries who applied to come to the United States but were turned down.

ICE officials gave this recent example of how the system works:

In December, Mesa police arrested Roberto Gonzalez-Corona, 42, a Mexican immigrant, on a disorderly-conduct charge. He was booked into the Mesa jail, where his fingerprints were run through the criminal and immigration databases.

The checks showed that Gonzalez-Corona had been removed from the United States nine times. Gonzalez-Corona also had numerous misdemeanor and felony convictions in California on charges related to drug possession and grand-theft auto.

After being verified by an ICE center in Vermont, which can take several hours, the information was sent electronically through a secure law-enforcement network to ICE's field office in Phoenix. By then, Mesa police had released Gonzalez-Corona after charging him with disorderly conduct.

But ICE agents tracked him down with information received from Mesa police. ICE agents arrested him on Jan. 27. Gonzalez-Corona is now being held in federal custody facing felony charges of illegally re-entering the United States.

Jon Gurule, ICE's deputy field director of detention-and-removal operations in Phoenix, praised the program's effectiveness at identifying potentially deportable immigrants who have been booked into jails.

Because of the high number of agents assigned to Arizona, ICE is able to respond almost every time an immigrant is identified through the program to determine whether that person should be deported.

ICE also follows up with immigrants booked into jails who aren't identified in the database to determine if the suspects are in the country illegally, he said.

"We are at the point now that if they are here and they are deportable, we are going to know about them," Gurule said.

Gurule said the program is non-discriminatory because the fingerprints of everyone arrested are run through the database, regardless of race or ethnic background. Racial profiling?

Critics say the program opens the door to discrimination by creating an incentive for police to target people based on their appearance or accent and book them into jail for petty crimes, knowing their fingerprints will be run through the immigration database.

Many of the immigrants being caught and deported through the Secure Communities program are undocumented immigrants stopped by police and booked into jail for driving without a license, said Carlos Garcia, an organizer with Puente, a Phoenix organization that advocates for immigrants.

"It makes every single officer in any of the over 20 jurisdictions in the (Maricopa) county an ICE agent," he said. "So, we have the risk of any officer with any sort of agenda that might want to racially profile or detain someone, all they have to do is find an excuse to book someone knowing that they would then get checked through immigration."

Picard, the ICE spokesman, said the agency's priority is to remove criminal immigrants who pose a potential threat to public safety. But, in many cases, non-criminals are still a priority for removal because they may have one or more immigration violations such as overstaying a visa, illegally entering the country or illegally re-entering the country after removal. Some remained in the country after being ordered to leave, and others are affiliated with gangs, he said.

Jessica Vaughan, a senior policy analyst at the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington, D.C., think tank that supports tighter immigration controls, praised the program for helping crack down on illegal immigrants.

"One of the major pros is it makes it less likely that people who have been arrested for crimes, who are here illegally, especially those who have committed other crimes, will slip through the cracks and be released back into the community when they should be removed," she said. "It cuts through all the aliases and all the other things that criminal aliens might use to try and deceive local law-enforcement agencies because it is based on a fingerprint check. And everyone who gets booked gets the fingerprint check, even U.S. citizens or people claiming to be U.S. citizens."

She said the program still has some shortcomings. It can only detect foreign nationals who actually have a record with ICE, so immigrants who have never been fingerprinted could still "potentially slip through the cracks."

The program is also expanding faster than ICE's ability to process and detain the hundreds of thousands of immigrants identified though the fingerprint checks.

"It runs the risk of becoming a high-tech catch-and-release program," she said. "In that kind of situation, ICE agents are put in the position of playing Russian roulette with public safety in having to decide who they hold on to and who they let go."

Reporter Ronald J. Hansen contributed to this article.

More on this topic

Deportation numbers

Of the 877 counties participating in the Secure Communities program, Maricopa County has more total arrests - 30,052 - and more deportations - 12,089 - than any other county, according to data from Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Los Angeles County is second, with 21,764 arrests and 11,040 deportations.

Los Angeles averages 44 arrests and 22 deportations daily and Maricopa, which has been in the program longer, averages 42 arrests and 17 deportations a day.

About 25 percent of the 12,089 immigrants deported through the program in Maricopa County were classified as "Level 1." Nationally, about 26 percent of those deported were classified as Level 1.

Level 1 represents individuals deemed the highest risk, such as those convicted of major drug offenses, national-security crimes and violent crimes such as murder, rape and kidnapping, among others. Level 2 includes individuals convicted of minor drug and property offenses such as burglary, larceny and fraud. Level 3 consists of people convicted of minor crimes or traffic offenses.

About 9 percent of those deported in Maricopa County were classified as Level 2 Nationwide, about 13 percent of those deported fell into this category.

About 38 percent of the immigrants deported through the program in Maricopa County were classified as Level 3. About 28 percent had committed no crime at all. Nationally, 32 percent of the total immigrants deported were classified as Level 3 and 28 percent as non-criminals.