Terri Burke, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas, responds to a Houston Chronicle editorial supporting a "sharper focus" to improve the Secure Communities program. Her response provides a history of Immigration and Customs Enforcement duplicity about the program and a thorough-going critique.
Houston Chronicle: "The track record of the agency in charge, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), is one of deceit and overreaching. ICE can't be trusted to tell the truth or to keep its promises when it comes to S-Comm.
ICE has consistently misrepresented the program as targeting dangerous "criminal aliens." Yet here in Texas, according to ICE's own data, only 25 percent of the people removed under S-Comm meet that standard. Because ICE screening is done at the time of booking, not after conviction, a great many of the people are removed under S-Comm before ever having been judged guilty of anything, much less a violent crime.
Since S-Comm's inception in 2008, law enforcement and community leaders, as well as state and local government officials, have been raising the alarm about the harm to public safety that results when local police get mixed up with enforcing federal immigration law. At a task force hearing in Dallas on Tuesday, speaker after speaker testified about the fear and intimidation that have taken hold in immigrant communities across our state because of S-Comm. It doesn't take an expert in community policing to recognize that all of us are less safe when victims and witnesses are afraid to cooperate with the police.
Trust between immigrant communities and local law enforcement cannot be restored so long as interaction with the cop on a neighborhood beat can trigger immigration proceedings, as is necessarily the case under S-Comm.
There are many who say that our immigration system is broken. As the negative effects of S-Comm demonstrate, merging federal immigration enforcement and the criminal justice system does not fix immigration; it only creates new problems for the criminal justice system. That is why the ACLU of Texas has urged the federal task force studying S-Comm to recommend that the Secure Communities program be abolished."
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