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<a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/quigley04302010.html" eudora="autourl">
http://www.counterpunch.org/quigley04302010.html<br><br>
</a></font><font face="Verdana" size=2 color="#990000">April 30 - May 2,
2010<br><br>
</font><h1><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=4><b>Immigration
Enforcement is Out of Control at the Federal Level <br><br>
<br>
</i></font><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=5 color="#990000">
It's Not Just Arizona
</b></font></h1><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=4>By BILL
QUIGLEY <br><br>
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hile 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. <br><br>
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. <br>
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. <br><br>
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. <br><br>
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.” <br>
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. <br><br>
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. <br>
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.<br><br>
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
<a href="http://uncoverthetruth.org/">http://uncoverthetruth.org</a>
<br><br>
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. <br><br>
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.<br><br>
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. <br><br>
<b>Bill Quigley</b> is legal director of the Center for Constitutional
Rights and a law professor at Loyola University New Orleans. His
email is
<a href="mailto:quigley77@gmail.com">quigley77@gmail.com</a><br><br>
<br><br>
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