[News] It's Not Just Arizona - Immigration Enforcement is Out of Control at the Federal Level

[Anti-Imperialist News]

http://www.counterpunch.org/quigley04302010.html

April 30 - May 2, 2010


Immigration Enforcement is Out of Control at the Federal Level


It's Not Just Arizona

By BILL QUIGLEY

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, the 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 programs 
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 at 
<http://uncoverthetruth.org/>http://uncoverthetruth.org

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.

Bill Quigley is legal director of the Center for 
Constitutional Rights and a law professor at 
Loyola University New Orleans.  His email is 
<mailto:quigley77 at gmail.com>quigley77 at gmail.com




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