President Obama’s executive action allowing 5 million illegal immigrants to stay in the US contains a controversial new approach to dealing with aliens who are suspected of committing crimes.
The Secure Communities program, which made it easier for local police to tag suspected criminals as illegal immigrants, is being scrapped. This will have immediate national security consequences, critics and supporters agree.
The president’s defenders say limited government resources will now be spent catching the most dangerous criminals. But conservatives argue that Obama is caving in to political pressure to soft-pedal when it comes to illegal immigrants who commit crimes.
Scrapping Secure Communities is a major rethink of how the federal government handles the arrests of illegal immigrants.
“We’ll keep focusing enforcement resources on actual threats to our security,” Obama said in Las Vegas Friday. “But that means felons, not families.”
Many Latinos hate Secure Communities, seeing it as the main reason Obama earned the sobriquet “deporter-in-chief.” But local police departments say it’s a common-sense way to catch immigrants who should be deported.
Under the program, fingerprints of all inmates in local prisons were shared with the federal government. Once the prints were identified, Immigration and Customs Enforcement would ask local police to keep the illegal immigrants in custody for transfer to federal prison.
Secure Communities started as a pilot program during George W. Bush’s presidency but expanded dramatically under Obama, who touted it as proof that he was tough on crime. But his left-liberal base criticized it and he has softened his stance on it.
Under his new directive, ICE agents must show that there is a removal warrant for any prisoner who they want detained. Or that prison must have committed a crime so serious that he or she must be deported.
Critics say this will undermine safety. “This is the culmination of this administration’s approach to immigration enforcement, to turn immigration violations into a secondary offense,” said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies. “If you violate immigration law, it’s more like jaywalking. It creates a climate of impunity.”
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson released guidance that such offenses as drunk driving, burglary and drug possession no longer lead to deportation.
Johnson called Secure Communities “a symbol of hostility toward the enforcement of our immigration laws.”
Administration officials are scrambling to defend the president’s decision.
“We’re being smarter about this,” a senior administration official told the Washington Examiner. “This makes us safer. Now we can devote more resources to those who are actually security threats. Isn’t that an idea Republicans should support?”
The program has been hit by many lawsuits, and hundreds of local law enforcement agencies refuse to cooperate with it.
Pablo Alvarado, executive director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, called Secure Communities “a catastrophic failure that caused the Arizonification of the country.”
Arizona passed the nation’s strictest immigration laws, including the state’s so-called “show me your papers” provision.
Alvarado and others contend that Secure Communities led to many deportations for minor offenses.
Obama will call the new enforcement measures the Priority Enforcement Program. Critics say he is appeasing his Democratic base rather than governing in the best security interest of the nation.
“I can’t recall such a massive alteration of the classical understanding of what laws mean in America being wiped out,” Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., said during a speech Friday at the Heritage Foundation. “[Obama] undermined, in my view, the moral integrity of immigration law and basically even the constitutional separation of powers.”
“This is a big deal,” Krikorian added. “There’s a real potential here for complete disaster when somebody who was arrested multiple times — and released — does something much worse.”
