Secure Communities

Secure Communities is a data-sharing program that relies on coordination between federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies. The program was designed to "check the immigration status of every single person arrested by local police anywhere in the country". As part of the program, fingerprints that are taken upon arrest, which are traditionally forwarded to the FBI, are then also forwarded to the Department of Homeland Security . If these finger prints match the DHS's Automated Biometric Identification System, then the ICE district office decides whether or not to issue a detainer request which can include requesting that the person be detained for up to 48 hours, or a request for ICE to be notified upon their release.
Between July 2015 and January 2017, Secure Communities was replaced by the Priority Enforcement Program. The goal of PEP was to "target resources toward detaining and deporting individuals convicted of significant criminal offenses."
On January 25, 2017, President Donald Trump signed Executive Order 13768 re-instituting Secure Communities, indicating that it would penalize jurisdictions that did not comply with the program, and re-expanded immigration enforcement priorities to include even those not convicted of serious criminal offenses.
On January 20, 2021, President Joe Biden revoked EO 13768.
Currently the ICE indicates that the web page ice.gov/secure-communities is "archived and not reflective of current practice"

Overview

Secure Communities relied on integrated databases and partnerships with local and state jailers to build domestic deportation capacity. The goals, as outlined in a 2009 report to Congress, are to: "1. IDENTIFY criminal aliens through modernized information sharing; 2. PRIORITIZE enforcement actions to ensure apprehension and removal of dangerous criminal aliens; and 3. TRANSFORM criminal alien enforcement processes and systems to achieve lasting results."
John Morton of Immigration and Customs Enforcement ICE called Secure Communities "the future of immigration enforcement" because it "focuses our resources on identifying and removing the most serious criminal offenders first and foremost."
Concerns were raised for misrepresenting who was being targeted and what was expected of law enforcement partners. Secure Communities was created administratively, not by congressional mandate and, throughout its implementation, no regulations were promulgated to govern the program's implementation.

History

Secure Communities was piloted in 2008. Under the administration of George W. Bush, ICE recruited a total of 14 jurisdictions. The first program partner was Harris County Sheriff's Office.
By March 2011, under President Barack Obama, the program was expanded to over 1,210 jurisdictions. ICE sought to have all 3,141 jurisdictions participating by 2013.
From Secure Communities' activation through March 2011, 140,396 convicted criminal aliens were booked into ICE custody resulting in 72,445 deportations. Each year, law enforcement officers arrest approximately one million noncitizens accused of crimes.

Operation

Biometric database

Secure Communities relied on partnerships and biometric technology to build deportation capacity. "ICE and the FBI are working together to take advantage of the strong relationships already forged between the FBI and state and local law enforcement necessary to assist ICE in achieving their goals," said FBI Criminal Justice Information Services Assistant Director Tom Bush in 2009.
For every person arrested and booked, state or local authorities ran fingerprints against federal immigration and criminal databases. IDENT is an DHS-owned database that keeps biometric records of immigration applicants, certain criminals, and those suspected of or known to be terrorists. IAFIS is an FBI-owned database of biometric criminal records. Ordinarily, the fingerprints of county and state arrestees are submitted to the FBI only. Under Secure Communities, the prints were also submitted to ICE. If an individual's fingerprints matched those of a non U.S. citizen, an automated process notifies the Law Enforcement Support Center of ICE. Officials then evaluate the case, based on immigration status and criminal history.
The net effect, according to former ICE Secretary Julie L. Myers, was to "create a virtual ICE presence at every local jail."

Year	Total Submissions to ICE
2009	828,119
2010	3,376,753
2011	2,414,079

Request

When there was a match, ICE could choose to place a "detainer" on the individual. This is a request for the jail to hold that person for up to 48 hours beyond the scheduled release date, so that ICE can take custody and initiate deportation proceedings. Legal immigrants convicted of certain crimes are subject to deportation. Undocumented immigrants can be deported even if they have committed no crime. ICE officials told the New York Times that, because of flaws in the database system, about 5,880 people identified through Secure Communities turned out to be United States citizens by 2009. The New Mexico Sentencing Commission is preparing to survey the costs to jails of holding prisoners under ICE detainers.

Offense levels

During the program, ICE divided immigrant prisoners into three risk levels:

Level 1: those convicted of serious crimes, such as homicide, kidnapping, robbery, major drug offenses with sentences greater than one year, and offenses involving threats to national security.
Level 2: all other felonies; and
Level 3: misdemeanors and lesser crimes.

Secure Communities Executive Director David Venturella testified to Congress: "We have adopted a risk-based strategy that focuses, first, on criminal aliens who pose the greatest threat to our communities. To manage this increased workload and prudently scale the system capabilities, we are classifying all criminal aliens based on the severity of the crimes they have been convicted of." According to the agency, Secure Communities prioritizes illegal immigrants who have been accused or convicted of "crimes involving national security, homicide, kidnapping, assault, robbery, sex offenses, and narcotics violations carrying sentences of more than one year."
Immigrant activist organizations noted that most unauthorized immigrants deported by ICE had not committed serious criminal offenses.
Others asserted that the number of non-criminal detainees was overstated for political reasons. In June 2010, the AFL-CIO office that represents 7,000 ICE officers issued a no-confidence vote for the current ICE director alleging, among other things, that the number of non-criminal ICE deportees is over-stated due to the fact that many offenders have agreed to be deported if all charges against them are dropped and are being re-categorized as non-criminal. The report cites as proof that although ICE internally reports that 90% of all ICE detainees in its custody were arrested by local authorities, it publicly publishes otherwise.

Costs and impacts

The implementation of the program was criticized for not sticking to its original goals of deporting serious criminals, instead using the program as a general deportation facilitation tool. The Obama administration, increasingly aware of the negative impact of its deportation policies on the administration's prospects in the presidential election, moved toward mollifying some aspects of the Secure Communities enforcement policies.
The authors of a 2011 study released by the Chief Justice Earl Warren Institute on Law and Social Policy at UC Berkeley School of Law highlighted several findings:

Only 52% of Secure Communities arrestees were scheduled to have a hearing before a judge.
Approximately 88,000 families that included U.S. citizens had a family member arrested under the Secure Communities program.
Among Secure Communities arrestees who had an immigration hearing, only 24% had an attorney.
ICE arrested roughly 3,600 United States citizens through the program.

The costs of the program were unclear. The Houston Chronicle reported in 2008 that, according to ICE officials, "cost between $930 million and $1 billion. Congress dedicated $200 million for the program in 2008 and set aside $150 million for fiscal year 2009." Currently Secure Communities does not provide for reimbursement to states and localities for the costs of participation.
A New York Times editorial called Secure Communities "misguided," in part for how it " local resources." Meanwhile, a Washington Post editorial praised the program, asserting that it "has neither inclination nor resources to deport suspects with otherwise clean records who have been arrested for low-level infractions."
Two 2014 studies found that the Secure Communities program did not significantly affect the crime rate. A 2018 paper found that undocumented immigrants in localities participating in Secure Communities experienced a 14.7% increase in mental health distress and a significant reduction in their perceived health status. The authors attribute this to the fear and stress caused by heightened risk of deportation. Another 2018 paper found that, due to Secure Communities, legal Hispanic immigrants were less likely to use federal means-tested programs, except in jurisdictions with sanctuary policies in place. A 2022 study found that the program reduced the labor supply of college-educated U.S.-born mothers with young children by increasing the cost of outsourcing household production. A 2024 study highlights that Secure Communities leads to an elevated occurrence of adverse birth outcomes among infants born to foreign-born Hispanic mothers.

Lawsuit

Significant data disclosures on Secure Communities' performance became publicly available after non-profit advocacy groups sued for disclosure.
In July 2009, DHS issued new regulations that asserted all information regarding a Secure Communities sister program "shall not be considered public records." New contracts prohibited local officials from communicating with media or constituents about the program without ICE approval.
Citing transparency concerns, the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, the Center for Constitutional Rights and the Immigration Justice Clinic of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law filed a request under the Freedom of Information Act for information on Secure Communities.
The groups charged in a press release: "Although ICE presents Secure Communities as an innocuous information sharing program, it seems designed to function as a dragnet to funnel even more people into the already mismanaged ICE detention and removal system... no regulations have been promulgated and little information is available about the program in the public domain. The limited information that has been released is vague and seems to indicate that ICE is not executing its stated enforcement priorities."
Federal authorities released an initial batch of 15,000 internal documents in February 2011. The non-profits started a blog entitled "Uncover the Truth" to catalogue the newly obtained government documents and media coverage of the program.