Despite Opposition, Immigration Agency to Expand Fingerprint Program
By JULIA PRESTON
Obama administration officials have announced that a contentious fingerprinting program to identify illegal immigrants will be extended across Massachusetts and New York next week, expanding federal enforcement efforts despite opposition from the governors and immigrant groups in those states.
In blunt e-mails sent Tuesday to officials and the police in the two states, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials said the program, Secure Communities, would be activated “in all remaining jurisdictions” this Tuesday.
Last June, Gov. Deval Patrick of Massachusetts declined to sign an agreement with the immigration agency to expand Secure Communities beyond a pilot program in the Boston area since 2006. Gov. Andrew Cuomo of New York said he wanted to suspend the program, which had already been initiated in a number of counties.
Opponents argued that it was an overly wide dragnet that was deporting many illegal immigrants with no criminal histories who were arrested for minor offenses and that it encouraged racial profiling and eroded trust in law enforcement among immigrants.
Governors Patrick and Cuomo are Democrats and close allies of President Obama. They made the uncomfortable choice to challenge him on a centerpiece of his immigration policy because of pressure from immigrant and Latino organizations and some local law enforcement officials. The mayor of Boston, Thomas Menino, also a Democrat, became an especially outspoken critic.
The governors were caught in a tangle of confusion about states’ role in the program that officials from the immigration agency, known as ICE, have since acknowledged they created. After Secure Communities was formally started in 2008, ICE officials gave many states the understanding that participation was voluntary.
Last year, officials at the agency said they had determined that they did not require consent from states to start the program. Citing antiterrorism legislation that Congress passed in 2002, the officials canceled agreements they had signed in 40 states and said they would extend the program nationwide by 2013.
Under Secure Communities, fingerprints of anyone booked by the local or state police are sent through the F.B.I. to be checked in databases of the Department of Homeland Security which include immigration records. If there is a match, officials at the immigration agency decide whether to issue a detainer, asking the police to hold the person to be picked up by federal agents.
ICE officials said that they made changes to respond to state officials’ concerns and to focus the program on deporting serious criminals.
They said they revised the detainers to clarify that suspected illegal immigrants could be held for only 48 hours. They provided civil rights training for the police in places where the program was started, officials said.
A recent change in arrest procedures would decrease detentions of illegal immigrants stopped for speeding or driving without a license, the officials said.
“Secure Communities has proven to be the single most valuable tool in allowing the agency to eliminate the ad hoc approach of the past and focus on criminal aliens and repeat immigration law violators,” Barbara Gonzalez, a spokeswoman for ICE, said Friday.
ICE officials said they had spoken with officials in New York and Massachusetts, but did not consult on when to expand the program.
“At the end of the day, this is a federal program,” a Department of Homeland Security official said. “We have to make our own decisions based on our law enforcement operational needs.”
Both governors had measured reactions to the news that the administration had taken a politically fraught decision off their hands.
In New York, a spokesman for Mr. Cuomo said he remained opposed to the program. “We are monitoring the situation,” the spokesman said.
In Massachusetts, after a young motorcyclist was killed last fall in an accident that the police said was caused by an illegal immigrant driving drunk, Governor Patrick came under fire from county sheriffs and state lawmakers for blocking the program.
On Thursday, Mr. Patrick minimized the practical effect of the program’s expansion, saying the state already shares arrest information with federal authorities. He said changes in the program had addressed some of his concerns.
But, he added, “It is very important to me that people not see this as a license to profile.”
In an interview Friday, Mayor Menino said he remained staunchly opposed. “It’s dangerous to target immigrants when you are trying to build a community,” he said. “The information gets put into a computer and sent to Washington and the wrong person gets deported.
“I want to make this city work,” he said, “and to have the feds come in and tell me you have to do this or to do that is just wrong.”
WHY THE MEXICAN DRUG CARTELS ENDORSE BARACK OBAMA’S LA RAZA
SUPREMACY:
FROM JUDICIAL WATCH – GET ON THEIR E-NEWS!
Mexican Drug
Lord Freed After Pledging To Cooperate, Keep In Touch
Email
Just
when you think you’ve heard it all involving the Obama Administration’s
disastrous Mexican gun-running experiment, new details surface to illustrate a
new level of negligence and incompetence on the part of federal authorities
orchestrating the scandalous program.
Known
as Fast and Furious, the federal experiment allowed Mexican drug traffickers to
obtain U.S.-sold weapons so they could eventually be traced to drug cartels.
Instead federal law enforcement officers lost track of more than 1,700 guns
which are believed to have been used in an unknown number of crimes.
In
the past year lost guns have been linked to violence on both sides of the
border while top administration officials, including Attorney General Eric
Holder, insist they knew nothing about the reckless operation. Among the first
reports to surface; that Fast and Furious weapons were used to murder
a U.S. Border Patrol agent
(Brian Terry) in Peck Canyon Arizona. The assault weapons known as AK-47s were
traced through their serial numbers to an Arizona dealer the feds repeatedly
allowed to smuggle firearms into Mexico, according to a mainstream newspaper.
This
week the same publication published a scathing article that paints a clown-like
portrait of the agency—Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF)—charged
with running the program. It turns out that the ATF stumbled upon a top
drug-cartel suspect targeted by its unscrupulous gun operation but let him go
after he “pledged
to cooperate and keep in touch with investigators.”
It would almost be funny if
it wasn’t so pathetic. Seven months after launching the Fast and Furious
operation, federal agents caught their main suspect in a remote Arizona outpost
on the Mexican side, according to internal documents obtained by the newspaper.
The drug lord, Manuel Fabian Celis-Acosta, had 74 pounds of ammunition and nine
cell phones hidden in his German-made sports car.
So
what did the feds do? The top Fast and Furious investigator, Special Agent Hope
MacAllister, scribbled her phone number on a $10 bill after Celis-Acosta
promised to cooperate and keep in touch with investigators. Then Celis-Acosta
disappeared into Mexico and later slipped back and forth across the border,
illegally buying more American weapons and financing others. It’s all in the
government records. You can’t make this stuff up.
Eventually
Celis-Acosta got arrested, but the damage had been done and the government gun
operation had spiraled out of control. Nearly 2,000 firearms have disappeared
and scores have surfaced in Mexican crime scenes. Not surprisingly, the ATF
refuses to explain why it didn’t arrest this drug lord when it had him the
first time. An ATF spokesman quoted in this week’s story said: “Due to the fact
that the criminal case is still ongoing in the courts, and the inspector
general’s office is still investigating, we cannot comment about this.”
Judicial
Watch is investigating the genesis of the Fast and Furious operation and has sued the Department of Justice
(DOJ) and the ATF to obtain records. Both agencies have refused to provide even
the most basic information about the program and neither has responded by the
statutorily mandated deadline.
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