THE BIRMINGHAM NEWS
By Kent Faulk
September 11, 2012
http://blog.al.com/spotnews/2012/09/alabama_immigration_group_pres.html
An immigrant advocacy group says it wants the Department of Homeland Security to halt a program in Alabama that has led to the deportation of a number of illegal immigrants arrested for minor offenses.
Officials with the Alabama Coalition for Immigrant Justice said at a press conference late this afternoon that this evening they were presenting a petition, with more than 10,000 signatures on it, asking that DHS halt its Secure Communities program in the state.
Gwen Ferreti, an organizer with ACIJ, said that members of the group were presenting the petition to DHS ombudsmen in a meeting this evening at St. Paul United Methodist Church in downtown Birmingham. The meeting was not open to reporters.
The group wants the petition delivered to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano.
After tonight's meeting Ferreti said that the DHS officials declined to accept the petition during the meeting. She said the group would mail it to Napolitano.
Secure Communities was designed as a nationwide program to target illegal immigrants who have the most serious criminal histories. The program has been around more than a decade, long before Alabama's legislature last year enacted a stringent state immigration law, most of which is now blocked from implementation by courts while lawsuits challenging it are pending.
According to the DHS website, local law enforcement has shared the fingerprints of the people they arrested with the FBI to see if they have a criminal record. "Under Secure Communities, the FBI automatically sends the fingerprints to DHS to check against its immigration databases. If these checks reveal that an individual is unlawfully present in the United States or otherwise removable due to a criminal conviction, ICE takes enforcement action - prioritizing the removal of individuals who present the most significant threats to public safety as determined by the severity of their crime, their criminal history, and other factors - as well as those who have repeatedly violated immigration laws."
While the program is supposed to catch people with major criminal records, many times it has not worked that way, Ferreti said.
"Instead, what it does is that it ties up local jails, and it ties up local police, and it also ties up even the local immigration officers by having to put into deportation proceedings people with very minor offenses or even someone who was mistakenly arrested for something," Ferreti said. "And it doesn't even matter whether they were guilty or innocent for what they were originally arrested for."
DHS has already halted making any new Secure Communities contracts with local communities in the state, Ferreti said, but the ones already in place continue. "We think that it is insecure communities because what it creates is an environment where a community can not turn to police for fear of being deported," she said.
ACIJ officials also said that the program is costing the state and federal governments a lot of money to detain and deport illegal immigrants, many were arrested for minor crimes, such as a traffic ticket.
"It is costly and unfair and we can do better," said Rosa Calderon, of Madison County, who said that her brother has been in detention in Louisiana for 28 months. He had been arrested in Decatur, but she declined to give details of the charges against him.
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