Fairfax hands over 1,200 suspected illegal immigrants to feds

Fairfax County delivered more than 1,200 suspected illegal immigrants to federal enforcement officials in the last year, a spike attributed to an increasingly popular criminal records-sharing system.

As part of the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s Secure Communities program — implemented last March — the fingerprints of those arrested are compared with immigration records held by the Department of Homeland Security and FBI criminal records at no cost to the county.