The D.C. police department is joining a federal program that allows law enforcement agencies to check the immigration status of every person booked into jail, the Department of Homeland Security said Thursday.
The move brings an end to the District’s long-standing practice of not checking the immigration status of prisoners as they were processed. Called Secure Communities, the program is run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
“Secure Communities provides our local partners with an effective tool to identify and remove dangerous criminal aliens who pose a threat to public safety,” Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said in a news release.
Since its debut in October 2008 by the outgoing Bush administration, the program has identified more than 111,000 illegal immigrants held by 95 jurisdictions in 11 states, officials said. Of those, 11,000 were charged or convicted of murder, rape or kidnapping. One thousand nine hundred of them have already been deported. The other 100,000 were charged or convicted of burglary and other property crimes. Secure Communities differs from Prince William County’s policy, which empowers local police officers to enforce federal immigration laws. It’s also not the same as Montgomery County’s recently adopted policy of checking against immigration databases the names of anyone arrested for certain violent crimes, but officers there have specifically been instructed not to send any other names to ICE. Instead, the Secure Communities program checks digital images of all inmates’ fingerprints against federal immigration databases, “allowing ICE to take appropriate action to ensure that dangerous criminal aliens are not released back into communities,” the release said. D.C. police will now join Fairfax County police in using the program. Expanding Secure Communities has been a key component of the Obama administration’s crackdown on illegal immigrants who break other laws. Napolitano projected it would have a presence in every state by 2011, and it’s expected to be available to every law enforcement agency in the U.S. by 2013. “We will continue to expand these partnerships to provide a force multiplier for ICE’s immigration enforcement efforts across the country,” Napolitano said.
