The Federal Government's Secure Communities program will soon be in every community by 2013.

Secure Communities is a program between U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Department of Justice that automatically sends name and fingerprint information submitted through a federal file-sharing system, where it’s checked against both the FBI criminal history records and biometrics-based immigration records in the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Automated Biometric Identification System.

Deportation programs like the Department of Homeland Security’s misnamed “Secure Communities” program are set to be in every U.S jail by 2013 without the public, elected officials, and sometimes police chiefs themselves knowing. Indeed, the program has been advanced in secrecy despite significant public attention paid to the devastating consequences to communities where police enforcement of immigration law has been piloted.

Internal e-mails obtained by the National Day Laborer Organizing Network show how ICE spokespersons rehearsed phrases that would frame Secure Communities as targeting the most violent illegal immigrants, even as evidence mounted that the majority of those deported through Secure Communities were arrested for a non-violent crime or detained despite having no criminal record.

Among documents released is an undated internal memo titled “Guidance for Handling Sensitive Jurisdictions.” The memo coaches ICE staff to say Secure Communities “focuses ICE enforcement on the worst of the worst,” emphasizing that the program “does not focus on undocumented aliens who are victims of, or innocent witnesses, to crime.”

Across the country, communities have raised concerns about the impact on community-police relations, the high number of those deported under the program with no conviction record, and the evidence of crime victims being swept up in its dragnet. Advocates continue to call for a moratorium on the program’s implementation due to the extent of disinformation and the questions raised by these new documents.

Links:
http://uncoverthetruth.org/

http://uncoverthetruth.org/internal-documents-prove-ice-misled-public-about-secure-communities

http://www.ice.gov/secure_communities/