While people protest the terrible Arizona state law that uses local law enforcement to target immigrants, the federal government is expanding its efforts to use local law enforcement in immigration enforcement and has launched a major PR campaign to defend it.
One example of the out of control federal program occurred last week in Maryland. Florinda Lorenzo-Desimilian, a 26 year old married mother of three, lives in Prince George's County Maryland. Last week she was arrested in her home by local police on a misdemeanor charge of selling $2 phone cards out of her apartment window without a license.
Ms. Lorenzo-Desimilian was booked at the county jail. During booking, she was fingerprinted. Local police sent her prints to the FBI who in turn notified ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) that she had overstayed her work visa. Even though her three children are U.S. citizens, ICE kept her in jail for two days and is now trying to deport her.
This is the result of a federal ICE and Homeland Security program called "Secure Communities" which is supposed to be targeting violent criminals. Instead, this program is really operating a dragnet scooping up and deporting tens of thousands of immigrants, like Ms. Lorenzo-Desimilian, who are no security risk to anyone.
Congress provided funding to ICE and the Department of Homeland Security in 2008 to "identify aliens convicted of a crime, sentenced to imprisonment, who may be deportable, and remove them from the US once they are judged deportable."
ICE says this program "supports public safety by strengthening efforts to identify and remove the most dangerous criminal aliens from the United States."
However, ICE is not actually targeting convicted criminal aliens, dangerous aliens, or even violent aliens. They are targeting everyone.
ICE, through Secure Communities contracts with local law enforcement offices, runs every accused person's fingerprints through multiple databases, regardless how minor the charges. Thus, people like Ms. Lorenzo-Desimilian are subject to ICE investigation, detention and deportation.
Monday, forty-five people protested with the human rights organization CASA Maryland against the ICE actions aimed at Ms. Lorenzo-Desimilian. Maryland State Representative Del Victor Ramirez challenged the Secure Communities sweeps in a statement to the Maryland Gazette. "She's not a threat. Should you really be deporting a nonviolent mother of three? There are much bigger problems we could be using our resources for."
This ICE program is now operating in 165 jurisdictions in 20 states and aims to be in partnership with every local law enforcement office in the country in a few years. ICE admits that in its first one-year period almost one million people were fingerprinted under this program. About one percent, or 11,000 people, were identified as immigrants arrested -- arrested not convicted -- for major crimes. Most of the people deported by ICE were picked up for minor or traffic charges and not violent crimes. As the Washington Post revealed in March, ICE has explicit internal goals to remove 150,000 immigrants through the "criminal alien removals" and to deport 250,000 others this year.
Basic information about the ICE Secure Communities program has never seen the light of day. Questions like what are the error rates, what is the cost, how is oversight done, what about accountability for racial profiling and other questions have not been publicly disclosed. That is why the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, the Center for Constitutional Rights and the Immigration Justice Clinic of Benjamin Cardozo School of Law filed a federal Freedom of Information Act case against ICE and others this week.
Protests aimed at the Secure Communities program have occurred this week in Houston, Washington DC, New York, Miami, Atlanta, Raleigh, San Bernardino, and Maryland. Critics say the program makes the public less safe not more because it effectively blurs the role between local law enforcement and ICE agents seeking to deport immigrants. Protestors challenge the program deports people before they are even found guilty of committing a crime or even if the arrest was illegal or later dropped. They seek a moratorium on all ICE-local law enforcement partnerships until basic facts about the program are disclosed, debated and evaluated. They created a website of information
ICE responded to these protests with a six-page internal media plan which included targeted op-eds in "major newspapers in the right cities where protests are planned." The ICE media memo indicated it also arranged ICE interviews with the New York Times, the Associated Press, La Opinion, Telemundo and the BBC.
Regional ICE offices were directed to "reach out to English and Spanish language reporters initially in the eight cities where protests are planned Monday, April 23, to discuss the program and highlight its successes in that local area." The ICE memo listed sound bites and talking points including "Secure Communities is not about immigration. It's about information sharing with local law enforcement..."
The ICE media plan also states incredibly, on page five, "To date, ICE has not received any complaints of racial profiling." That would be real news to people across the country including Ms. Lorenzo-Similian and CASA Maryland.
As the Arizona experience shows us, combining local law enforcement and federal immigration can prove to be quite toxic. Perhaps if ICE would stop spending money on PR to defend its lack of transparency and spend it instead on sharing information about the program so it could be fairly evaluated, the public would be better served.
By Bill Quigley. Bill is legal director of the Center for Constitutional Rights and a law professor at Loyola University New Orleans. His email is quigley77@gmail.com
The illegal lawbreakers break 2 laws: being here illegally; loitering on the street.
My friend in Arizona, told me a few days ago, that cop was murdered there by an illegal.
And in some schools by the Mexican border, some schools in the U.S. are accepting lawbreakers if they have athletic abilities.
Criminals come from all over the world to America because most states are soft on crime.
Even if you are imprisoned in liberal states, if one goes to prison, one gets 3 meals, recreation, hospitilzation, education, visitation, and sex with a married partner!
Better than living freely in the countries the criminals come from.
When it gets to the point that the average working class Mexican citizen can no longer provide food, housing and medical care for his children, he wishes he could come to the U.S. legally. However, the process set up by the federal government and the policy of the Mexican government make legal immigration next to impossible and cost prohibitive. These immigrants may be illegal, but really they are refugees from a country that the United States has capitalized on and oppressed for generations. It is stunning to me how few Americans are aware of the great harm their great nation has done throughout Central and South America. I think a bit more responsibility and compassion is required of all American citizens.
Finally, the drug cartels (since so many say this is a part of the problem) are in power because Americans buy their products and because the US government has too many alcohol lobbyists keeping pot from become legal.
In the case of Immigration the Republicans AND the Democrats talk all the talk in regards to immigration to get votes but then don't enforce it. Arizona acted because IT's politicians are afraid of their voters.
We could be a little more fair in other ways as we go about this also. At one point my state had around 200,000 illegal Hispanics and 20 illegal East Euros.
The 20 East Euros are now gone.
Why build fences and blame smugglers for this?
Break the law, pay the price. I am bound by the law so is she. The law does not say this only applies to terrorists, now does it?
You mean the government is actually looking to deport someone who is here illegally? The shame!
So she was able to breed a few anchor babies. Now you whine about her being deported because she was able to pop out a few kids (at taxpayer expense no doubt who get $15,000 a year public school educations). I'll bet you say that anchor babies don't really anchor people here huh?
Shortly after high school, I was convicted of misdemeanor receipt of stolen goods (a $50 8track tape deck,). I wasn't guilty, but I refused to rat on a friend. The judge fined me $500 dollars (a lot of money in 1978) gave me three years of probation and a 365 day suspended sentence. I stayed out of trouble, served no jail time and had the case expunged 5 in 1983.
And now, today, because of the 365 day suspended sentence from a 1978 misdemeanor that was expunged in 1983, reopened and vacated in 2005 on the advice of my immigration judge, I am being deported. I spent a miserable month at the Lancaster Detention Facility. I was lucky. I got out (for now). Many of the people there had been detained for years with no bail, no court date, no charges, and no idea of when they were going to get out, if ever.
In the past nine years I’ve written thousands of pages of motions and petitions; I’ve held off 4 Attorneys General and countless government lawyers. It’s not life or death to them as it is to me. They go home and think of other things, secure in the knowledge that the awesome force that is the Federal Government will not be used against them.
@Mike_Burrows
With the expiration of one-third of the President's first term he has literally done nothing to advance the cause of comprehensive immigration reform, except give lip-service to the issue in order to placate immigration reform activists.
Obviously the President doesn't write the laws. That is the job of Congress, who has proven utterly useless. That being said, Obama's increasingly aggressive stance on immigration enforcement, which is 100% under his jurisdiction, represents a complete 180 to his campaign rhetoric to fix our broken immigration laws and to put an end to the destruction of families in this country.
It is incumbent upon those of us who are in the front lines of the war against immigrants to identify the enemy. Make no mistake about it this, President Obama is no ally to immigrants, and he must be removed in 2012.