Immigration Crackdown: How ICE misleads on the Secure Communities program

Letter to the editor of the Washington Post by Lena Graber, a policy associate at the National Immigration Forum.

How ICE misleads on the Secure Communities program - The Washington Post: "ICE continues to spread misinformation about Secure Communities, even in its statement to The Post: “When the program was activated in any given area, ICE spokeswoman Barbara Gonzalez said, it tended to first identify ‘lower-level criminals as they are first to complete their criminal sentence and come into ICE custody.’ But over time, she said the program usually identified an increasing number of undocumented immigrants with links to violent crimes and a decreasing number who had committed less-serious crimes.”

This is patently incorrect. First, Secure Communities identifies individuals as they are booked — long before they are serving a criminal sentence, if any. Second, according to ICE’s own statistics, the proportion of high-level offenders that ICE has taken into custody via Secure Communities has not increased over time. It has stayed almost exactly the same: about 32 percent of all apprehensions in the program. Meanwhile, the proportion of arrests of individuals who have no criminal history has doubled since the program’s initiation.

Across the board, the Secure Communities program has failed to meet its stated priorities (to focus on “high-level offenders”), while the Department of Homeland Security has danced around community concerns regarding the program’s design and operations."