Racist Immigration Programs Are In Operation In 494 Jurisdictions

New York, August 15th: At least 494 jurisdiction in the United States operate programs similar to the criticized law, SB 1070, of Arizona, which violates civil rights by promoting the detention of individuals through racial profiling.

Secure Communities—a program created by the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE)—escapes public scrutiny due to the fact that it operates at a local level, and in that it officially states that it cannot detain anyone based on appearance.

Nevertheless, official documents obtained by non-governmental organizations in the US, such as the National Day Laborer Organization Network (NDLON), the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), and the Kathryn O. Greenberg Immigration Justice Clinic of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law of New York University, suggest that the program “facilitates and conceals racial profiling.”

The objective of the program is to identify among immigrants those that represent a “high threat” to national security and to deport them to their countries of origin. To do this it requires that affiliated jurisdictions send the fingerprints of the detained to ICE offices, which will ratify their migrant status and, in the case that they have committed a crime, deport them. However, official documents from ICE suggest that many deported immigrants do not have criminal records and are detained solely for their racial profile.

“Although ICE presents Secure Communities as an innocuous information sharing program, it seems designed to function as a dragnet to funnel even more people into the already mismanaged ICE detention and removal system,” the organizations conclude after reviewing the obtained documents. “The numbers tell another story,” they said.

The intentions of the administration of president Barack Obama, who every month deports more immigrants than former president George Bush, is that Secure Communities be a program that covers the entire country by the year 2013.

Spokesmen for the Detention Watch Network, one of the principal civilian watch groups for the detention system in the US, confirmed to Notimex that Secure Communities functions under the premise of “racial profiling.”