The Obama administration’s efforts to round up and deport illegal immigrants is unfairly targeting Latinos, a new study shows, complicating the president’s efforts to reconnect with the Hispanic community that helped propel him into office in 2008.
More than 93 percent of the people arrested under President Obama’s Secure Communities program are Hispanic — even though Hispanics account for 75 percent of the immigrants now living illegally in the United States, according to the study by the University of California at Berkeley, law school and the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York.
The Secure Communities program, which will be implemented nationwide by 2013, empowers local law enforcement officers to carry out the duties of federal immigration officials in identifying and detaining illegal immigrants.
A massive backlog of immigration cases means that just half of all illegal immigrants detained under the program receive a hearing before a judge, the study showed. And those who do get a hearing have to wait an average of three months in jail or nine months outside of jail before they see a judge.
The study, one of the first comprehensive reports on Secure Communities, represents another setback for a president who is facing election-year backlash from both liberals and conservatives — and especially Hispanics — for his immigration policies.
Obama won 67 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2008, partly on the promise to pass comprehensive immigration reform in his first year in office.
But Obama fell short on that promise, and in 2010, his push to create a pathway to citizenship for some illegal immigrants through the so-called Dream act also failed.
With his approval ratings among Hispanics dropping to an all-time low, Obama in August announced that he would expedite the review of 300,000 deportation cases and suspend deportation proceedings involving children or immigrants who had not committed violent crimes.
Obama has no intention of pumping the brakes on Secure Communities, however. He ordered that the program to be implemented nationwide by 2013.
The administration touts the program as a major success for helping to deport a record 396,000 illegal immigrants in the past year alone. Since Obama took office, the United States has deported more than 1 million illegal immigrants, putting the administration on track to outpace President George W. Bush’s deportation record in just half the time.
Furthermore, administration officials point out, more than half of the immigrants deported last year were criminal convicts.
Immigrant and Hispanic activists have decried the program since its inception in 2008, saying it encourages racial profiling, instills a fear of law enforcement among Hispanics and rips apart immigrant families. Nearly a third of immigrants detained through Secure Communities have a spouse or child who is a U.S. citizen, according to the study.
“The Obama administration should treat this study as the final nail in the coffin of a program that should have been buried long ago,” said Sarahi Uribe, an organizer for the National Day Laborer Organizing Network.
