I first heard about this program in the article posted below. It's an interesting concept. It looks like police departments are being asked to participate in a voluntary program to fingerprint every arrested person in order for those fingerprints to be cross-referenced with the ICE database. Immigration advocates are of course outraged and the intermingling of federal immigration duties and those of local law enforcement. This intermingling of federal and local enformcement is becoming quite the hot topic.
Oppose Secure Communities Program
In the wake of Arizona's misguided SB1070, the California Department of Justice has called on San Francisco to participate in a new collaboration between local police and Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE), known as "Secure Communities" beginning on June 8, 2010. This new police/ICE collaboration program will automatically investigate the immigration status of anyone, citizen or non‐citizen, who is arrested and fingerprinted for any crime, no matter the severity, by electronically crosschecking their fingerprints against an ICE database.
The new, voluntary "Secure Communities" program is extremely worrisome for the community. Like SB 1070, "Secure Communities" compromises public safety by eroding the hard‐earned trust built over the past decades between community members and local law enforcement. "S-Comm" also promotes racial profiling because the police can use pre‐textual arrests such as a minor traffic violation to investigate the immigration status of individuals they encounter.
CAA opposes the implementation of "Secure Communities." Both S-Comm and Arizona's disastrous SB1070 are outgrowths of a disturbing trend of police-ICE entanglements. These misguided efforts to put immigration enforcement into local hands are sabotaging trust between immigrant communities and local law enforcement. Like SB1070, S-Comm gives dangerous discretion to individual police officers to falsely arrest or overcharge innocent immigrant residents based on their appearance and thereby cause their deportation.
On June 1, the day that S-Comm was originally planned to go into effect, CAA joined Latino, Labor, and fellow Asian American allies of the San Francisco Immigrant Rights Defense Committee to launch a picket outside ICE's San Francisco office. San Francisco Sheriff Michael Hennessey has also requested to opt-out of S-Comm, but Attorney General Jerry Brown has denied his request. Meanwhile, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors approved a non-binding resolution on June 8 calling for local law enforcement to opt-out of S-Comm, and community and legal advocates continue to explore other options.
As one community, we need to stop this disturbing trend of police-ICE cooperation and ensure that community members are not targeted based on their perceived immigration status. Please take a look at the list of actions you can take and work with us to act now.
http://lawprofessors.typepad.com/immigration/
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Was the support by Jerry Brown merely a bone thrown to more conservative elements of the democratic party? He's coming up for the general election and needs to shed the "soft on crime" label.
ReplyDeleteThat's how it always goes with general elections. The candidates have to start coming back to the middle in order to win.
ReplyDeleteI think this is a pretty safe measure for him to support, though. All it's doing is letting ICE have legal access to fingerprinting information taken by police. As I understand it, the police don't have to do anything if someone is undocumented. It's up to ICE to take action, if it so desires. I just see Secure Communities as an information-sharing measure on its face.
I think the fear immigration advocates have is that some police officers will go out of their way to arrest those they suspect are undocumented just so that those individuals get put in the system and exposed to the possibility of removal proceedings.