Immigrant rights advocates on October 7, 2010, sent a Letter to Inspector General Richard Skinner, Requesting for Audits of Department of Homeland Security programs, Secure Communities and the Criminal Alien Program
"The specific grounds for audits of these programs [include]:
"I. Concerns with program’s vulnerability to abuse and lack of oversight
Secure Communities and CAP overwhelmingly result in identification and referral to ICE of persons arrested on minor or less serious charges. Both programs are susceptible to abuse because there are no safeguards to ensure that racial profiling or related abuses do not result or are not implicitly encouraged. An individual’s immigration history can be checked regardless of the severity of the arresting crime or whether the arrest ever results in a conviction or even a formal charge. Thus, mere arrest is sufficient to lead to detention and deportation in many cases. As a result, these programs provide perverse incentives to state and local police to arrest individuals who look or sound “foreign” so that their immigration status can be checked.
"Indeed, studies have shown that jail screening programs for immigration violations lead to increased rates of arrests of Latinos for petty offenses. For example, a report on the CAP program by the Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute on Race, Ethnicity and Diversity at Berkeley School of Law found that implementation of the CAP program in Irving, Texas coincided with a spike in the arrests of Latinos for petty crimes.5 The report concluded that there is compelling evidence that the CAP program “tacitly encourages local police to arrest Hispanics for petty offenses.”6 It further noted that ICE is not following the program’s congressional mandate to focus resources on the deportation of immigrants with serious criminal histories.
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"ICE maintains a hands-off policy regarding the nature and circumstances of arrests, a kind of willful blindness that precludes systematic examination of the program’s operation. To our knowledge, ICE has not put into place any mechanisms to ensure that the program’s purported focus on noncitizens convicted of serious offenses is achieved. If such mechanisms do exist, they are not functioning to keep the program on course for alignment with its stated goals and priorities. ICE also does not monitor or supervise the local agencies partnering in these programs to ensure that civil rights and programmatic violations do not occur. Moreover, the way these programs are currently deployed does not ensure that local agencies with proven problematic civil rights records don’t operate the program, or at minimum are specifically monitored.
Lack of agency transparency and information accessible to the public."
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