secure communities nationwide by 2013

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/18/us...tion.html?_r=1

After months of internal wrangling and confusion over an ambitious nationwide program allowing the state and local police to identify immigrants with a criminal record, Obama administration immigration officials have decided to take a hard line against communities that try to delay or cancel their participation in the program, according to documents made public late Wednesday.
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Crackdown in Virginia Strips a Legal Immigrant of His Livelihood (February 18, 2011)
The program, known as Secure Communities, was initiated in late 2008 and is a centerpiece of the Obama administration’s strategy for enforcing immigration laws. The documents include e-mails and other materials showing internal deliberations among officials of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the federal agency that runs the program.

The documents show that well into the second year of the program, as officials were moving forcefully to extend it to hundreds of law enforcement agencies across the country, the officials remained deeply confused over whether state and local governments could decline to join it. The internal discussions intensified as some cities and states — including Arlington County, Va.; San Francisco and Santa Clara, Calif.; Washington, D.C.; and the states of Colorado, New York, Oregon, and Washington — were considering whether to opt out of the program.

But late last year, the documents show, officials from ICE, as the federal agency is known, clarified its policy, saying that every state in the country would be required to join the program by 2013. They developed a plan to isolate and pressure communities that did not want to participate.

One recent document suggested a “tactical approach to sensitive jurisdictions” for local ICE officers working to expand the program. It recommends, for example, that the officers bring surrounding communities into the program, to create a “ring” around the “resistant site.”

Groups that advocate for immigrants strongly oppose the Secure Communities program, saying it has led to deportations of thousands of illegal immigrants who had no criminal records — in many cases separating long-established families.

The Secure Communities program connects state and local police agencies to Department of Homeland Security databases, allowing them to check the immigration history, as well as the criminal records, of anyone they book after arrest. If the check shows that the suspect is subject to deportation, both Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the local police are notified. As of this week, the program had been activated in 1,049 local law enforcement agencies in 39 states.

About 15,000 pages of ICE documents were released through a Freedom of Information Act request by the National Day Laborers Organizing Network, the Center for Constitutional Rights and immigration lawyers at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York. The Associated Press obtained the documents separately and reported on them on Wednesday.

Selected documents were culled for release by the groups, which oppose the Secure Communities program. There was no way to judge what light other internal documents might have cast on ICE’s discussions about the program.

In a statement, Sarahi Uribe of the day laborers’ group accused the agency of misleading local communities by insisting that they could not opt out of the program. “The amount of dishonesty revealed in this process would make anyone question whether ICE recognizes it’s operating in a democracy,” Ms. Uribe said.

Agency officials said they could not respond to those charges because a court case over the release of the documents was still open.

Brian Hale, an agency spokesman, cautioned in a statement that “deliberative, internal correspondence should not be confused for final policy.”

He said that states and communities could not opt out of the Secure Communities program, which he said would be extended nationwide by 2013. However, Mr. Hale said, the local police can choose not to receive the results of immigration checks performed when suspects are booked.

This is bullshit. Everyone knows borders can't be secured no matter what they try. They're delaying DA with securing border bs

they want to make a great wall of America....but it's going to be an okay wall of america...the alright wall of china...lol

Show me a 50 foot wall, I'll show you a 51 foot ladder. Simply, you can't secure the border by building fences and adding more grunts. They need to build a giant dome over US....

Ha Ha Ha Ha