D.C. Council blocking immigration enforcement program

Last November, city officials announced that the District would join Secure Communities, a national program that matches fingerprints of arrestees against a database of suspected illegal immigrants.

All of the city council members have signed on as co-sponsors of the legislation that would keep D.C. from taking part.

“The Metropolitan Police Department has its hands full dealing with violent crimes in the District, and the issue of immigration is not the MPD’s responsibility,” Mendelson told the Washington Examiner.

He also expressed concern that the Secure Communities program “lends itself to racial profiling” because it allows police to initiate an immigration check on a person before they’ve been convicted of a crime. 

Local Hispanic activists hailed Mendelson’s bill, saying that immigration enforcement was “not the role of the local police.”

But law enforcement officials in Fairfax County, where the Secure Communities initiative has already been implemented, acknowledge that the program has netted results. Recent statistics show that Fairfax has been able to round up a higher percentage of suspected illegal immigrants accused of lesser crimes than D.C. and Alexandria.

The Secure Communities program has police add arrestees’ prints to a database that can be accessed by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. More than 160 jurisdictions have signed on to the program since 2008.

Lt. Nicholas Breul of the D.C. police department, which has been supportive of the Secure Communities program, said the agency had no comment on the bill before the council. “Obviously we’re following it as the legislation moves through,” he said.