A recent Washington Post article highlights how Virginia police are frustrated that Secure Communities has targeted non-criminal immigrants for deportation while letting dangerous offenders go free. The solution, they argue, is even more involvement of local police in immigration enforcement. Police dissatisfaction in Loudoun County, VA, focuses on the federal fingerprint database at the heart of Secure Communities, which allows police to run fingerprints of any suspect booked into jail against an ICE and FBI database. It automatically alerts ICE when it finds an undocumented immigrant. According to the Post, ICE’s immigration database failed to detect Salvador Portillo-Saravia, a suspect in a rape case who re-entered the country after he was deported in 2003. Portillo-Saravia, an MS-13 gang member, was arrested weeks before in Loudoun County for pubic intoxication but then released when the Secure Communities database did not identify him undocumented or as a gang member. A frustrated Loudoun Sheriff Stephen Simpson told the Post that ICE:
“…advertised the program as a way to electronically check all people arrested as soon as they are fingerprinted, eliminating the need for additional investigation… We had no reason to believe he was a gang member. There was no other reason for him to be on our radar screen.”
ICE’s solution? An agency spokesman told the Post that Loudoun County should have performed a manual record check and contacted ICE if they felt a person warrants further concern. He also said people deported before 2005 may not be in the electronic database because their prints were taken on paper. In a letter to ICE, Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.) picked up the call for “state and local law enforcement officers [to] pursue additional inquiries about immigration status beyond Secure Communities before release.” But one local police official said manual checks would be a drain on already busy personnel, while another said that continuing to investigate a person even if there is no “hit” could implicate them in racial profiling. Wolf’s letter to ICE Assistant Secretary John Morton also asks him to “promptly provide a report to the Congress on how the program could be improved and expanded to address pre-2005 detentions.” One of ICE’s most recent reports to Congress came in its FY 2011 appropriations justification for Secure Communities/A Comprehensive Plan to Identify and Remove Criminal Aliens (SC/CIRCA), which noted that:
SC/CIRCA is working to revolutionize immigration enforcement by using technology to share information between law enforcement agencies and by applying risk-based methodologies to focus resources on assisting local communities in the removal of those criminal aliens representing the greatest threat to community safety.
Currently, 998 jurisdictions in 37 states are enrolled in Secure Communities, and ICE expects the program to be fully implemented nationwide by 2013.
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