How Immigration and Customs Enforcement has co-opted local law enforcement to find their targets for them
It was the unusual number of calls that led the Portland Human Rights Commission to check out Secure Communities. The calls were coming from members of the immigrant community who were concerned about the increase in deportations, and asking for help for family members who had been stopped by police and ended up being deported, said Maria Lisa Johnson, director of the Portland Human Rights Commission.
The calls initiated research by the Human Rights Commission on the local police involvement with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. This past spring, the commission began a process involving the Portland Police Bureau, the Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office, the American Civil Liberties Union, and an array of immigrant and cultural organizations, all to determine how local police interact with the federal immigration agents. The commission released its report in December.
Secure Communities, or S-Comm, as its critics call it, is an information-sharing program of ICE that collects fingerprint information from immigrants arrested and held in local jails, regardless of charges or convictions. The fingerprints are then entered into the Department of Homeland Security databases. If there is a match and the person is identified as illegally in the United States, ICE can request that the local jailer detain that person for up to 48 hours while it considers enforcement action, including deportation.
In the mere 10 months it’s been enforced in the Portland metro area, the program has drummed up a host of human rights concerns, including fostering a bias against immigrants, undermining community policing, and turning local jails into immigration extension offices. The program and ICE are also criticized nationally for claiming that Secure Communities is about deporting serious criminals, when many of those deported had only minor criminal records, such as traffic violations, or none at all.
“There is an absolute fear,” Johnson said. “As an undocumented individual whose family relies on your income to be able to succeed, then you’re pulled out of that community. That’s a huge fear and risk.”
“Our biggest concern is that when someone is arrested and booked, they have not yet been convicted but they’re being caught up in the immigration system immediately, and often they disappear, in most cases up to Tacoma,” says Andrea Meyer, Legislative Director of the ACLU Oregon, referring to ICE’s detention and removal center in Washington. “We are talking about people who may have extremely low-level crimes, or are not guilty of anything. The result is to create significant fear in the community about safe interaction with the police in general.”
Meanwhile, the South Portland Neighborhood Association is appealing the city process that has allowed ICE to relocate its detention facilities to a 65,000-square-foot project among the South Waterfront high-rises on Macadam Avenue.
Business is booming. In fiscal year 2010, which ended in October, ICE set a record for overall removals of illegal immigrants — more than 392,000 nationwide. Half of those removed, more than 195,000, were convicted criminals, according to ICE. The fiscal year 2010 statistics represent increases of more than 23,000 removals overall and 81,000 criminal removals compared with fiscal year 2008, due in part because of Secure Communities.
This month, Oregon State Rep. Kim Thatcher (R-Kaizer), introduced a package of bills to further overlap local police responsibilities with enforcement of federal immigration laws, and to restrict government services to only those citizens who can prove legal status. The package includes limiting driver’s licenses and voting rights to only legal citizens, measures that failed to pass in 2009.
Secure Communities is active in 969 jurisdictions in 37 states including California and Idaho, where state police signed agreements to deliver fingerprints to ICE. In Oregon, four counties are “activated,” on the system through the agreement between ICE and the Oregon State Police. Clackamas County was the first to be activated in April 2010, followed by Marion, Multnomah and Washington counties. Since April, ICE reports 381 convicted “criminal aliens” arrested or booked into ICE custody through those four counties in the program. Nearly 40 percent of them, or 142 people, were deported.
The Department of Homeland Security says it intends to have the program activated in all states and jurisdictions by 2013.
In fact, when it comes to signing on to the program, there is some confusion as to whether local agencies really have any choice in the matter. Early in the program, ICE said local jurisdictions could opt out, but more recently it said they could not.
“We’ve heard mixed signals from DHS: First ‘yes, you could’ and then ‘no, you can’t,’” said Andrea Meyer. “We had hoped there would be some counties that would call to question and request to be deactivated.”
Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office did not formally sign an agreement with ICE to join Secure Communities but does provide the information and data necessary to participate. The sheriff’s office also records the birthplace of all detainees before booking them into jail, information that is compiled hourly and sent to ICE.
“We’re following federal law. We have to follow the law because that’s what we do,” said Lt. Mary Lindstrand, public-information officer for the Multnomah County Sheriff’s Office. The Human Rights Commission is calling for the sheriff’s office to stop distributing lists of foreign-born individuals to ICE, saying that it’s ICE’s job to collect the information.
Lorie Dankers, spokeswoman for ICE for the Pacific Northwest, said participation in Secure Communities is not optional. “It was what was called for in the 9/11 Commission,” Dankers said. “The program is mandated by Congress. They wanted us to identify and remove criminal aliens.”
However, who they’re removing is also an argument from opponents.
ICE Promotes Secure Communities as a tool to identify, detain and remove immigrants who have been convicted of a serious criminal offense. It classifies charges into three levels, with Level 1 and Level 2 categorized as the most serious offenses, and Level 3, being “individuals who have been convicted of other offenses.”
“We want to remove the most egregious violators and the most egregious criminals to the benefit of public safety,” Dankers said. “It’s like a virtual ICE presence in every jail and allows us to identify and remove those criminal aliens who pose the greatest threat to our community.”
However, reviews of the program have found that a significant portion of the people turned over to ICE lack a criminal record. ICE itself puts the national figure at 28 percent, and multiple reports have that figure much higher depending on the jurisdiction.
“What in fact was happening was other types of crimes where people were also being deported,” Johnson said.
Because everyone arrested has his or her prints sent to ICE, immigration rights advocates are concerned that the program allows for racial profiling and unnecessary detention. If a person is arrested on a significant charge, they argue, that person would already be detained for the crime, not his or her immigration status.
“We’re really talking about sweeping up people who haven’t been adjudicated,” Meyer said.
Dankers said that serious criminals always take precedent over minor ones, but that multiple arrests or deportations, regardless of criminal convictions, also factor into ICE’s decision on how to process an individual.
“We look at the totality of someone’s criminal history and the totality of someone’s immigration history, and we prioritize based on that information,” Dankers said.
In November, Washington State Patrol announced that it would not sign the agreement with ICE to join Secure Communities. Bob Calkins, a spokesman with the WSP, said the decision was in deference to the county sheriff departments and jails that technically “own” the fingerprint property, and therefore retain the authority to make the call. Calkin said if a local sheriff or jail requested that prints be sent to ICE, they would do so. Calkins said that to his knowledge, no one has made that request since Secure Communities has been on the table.
“We have a very full plate and we will leave enforcement of federal laws to the federal government,” Calkins said.
This past spring, San Francisco’s sheriff requested to opt out of the program but was denied by the state attorney general, who said it was mandatory. The sheriff there said it violated the city’s sanctuary policy. Other California jurisdictions have requested information on opting out of the program as well, to no avail. In New York, a campaign is being spearheaded by the Center for Constitutional Rights to rescind the state’s agreement with Secure Communities.
Secure Communities works in tandem with ICE’s Criminal Alien Program, which stations ICE agents in all jails throughout Oregon and Washington to interview immigrants who are detained.
The Portland Human Rights Commission took issue with the ICE presence in the jails.
“The presence of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the jail without signage and without any kind of notice to people about their rights were was confusing. And that was where the intersect was happening,” Johnson said.
The commission wants people who are booked to be notified that ICE may conduct interviews for purposes unrelated to a person’s charges. It also calls for people to be notified of their right to remain silent and refuse to answer quesions.
Secure Communities is the next evolution of ICE’s 287 (g) program, which deputized local law enforcement officers as immigration agents, with arrest and detention capacities if they suspect a person is undocumented. In that regard, 287 (g) for ICE is similar to the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force,or JTTF, which would recruit Portland police officers to operate, essentially, as federal agents. The city pulled out of the JTTF in 2005 over complaints regarding oversight and concerns of local police becoming federal operatives, but it is now considering rejoining the JTTF, following a bomb scare at Pioneer Courthouse Square that was part of an FBI sting.
Likewise, the 287(g) program has drawn intense fire from immigration rights advocates and even the General Accounting Office, including that officers were using their immigration authority to arrest, detain and deport people for minor offenses, even though it was promoted as a means to catch serious criminals. Rhode Island recently pulled its state police out of the program. In Nashville, Tenn., a lawsuit was filed to rescind similar participation by a county sheriff’s department. (That complaint stems from a man who was arrested, listed by police as being born in Mexico, and processed through ICE, even though he was born here in Portland.)
The 287(g) program is illegal in Oregon under an Oregon law that prohibits state or local law enforcement from collecting information about individuals simply based on their suspected immigration or other non-crime-related status, which is also an argument used by opponents of the JTTF membership.
As a result of its research, the Portland Human Rights Commission concluded that the Portland Police Bureau does not enforce immigration law and does not intend to do so. The sheriff’s office, however, is “indirectly involved in immigration law enforcement,” according to the commission’s final report, and the office’s “collection and reporting practices result in the sheriff’s unintended collaboration with the detention and deportation of immigrant community members.”
When interactions with law enforcement for low-level misdemeanors or violations can turn into to possible ICE detainers, “the ripple effect on the community is to remove the trust with law enforcement and diminish the engagement they would otherwise have. It has a way of undermining trust,” Meyer said.
Francisco Lopez, executive director with CAUSA, the state’s largest immigrant rights group, says the relationship between local law enforcement and ICE will deter cooperation among immigrants in police investigations.
“There are so many issues — domestic violence, drug trafficking — that they will not be reporting to the police because the police have developed an alliance with ICE,” Lopez says.
According to Lopez, 32 percent of Latinos in Oregon are undocumented, and many live in families where members of multiple status. Even if one or more members are in the United States legally, a family may have other members who would be at risk.
“It’s sad,” Lopez said. “We have good police officers that have great relationship with their community. But now, little by little, they’re losing trust because of that relationship. They don’t even want to call the police.
“Nobody is doubting that ICE should be doing its job, but who is doing it here?” Lopez said. “ICE doesn’t care about the community relationship, the trust developed over the years. They don’t look at the economic or familial relationship impact. They’re just doing their job. Why does the sheriff’s deputy have to do the work for ICE? That’s what I don’t think is fair.”
“This is a population who lives in the shadows and they live in fear all of the time, and they’re constantly living in a state of stress and trauma, and always looking over their shoulder,” said Beth Poteet with the Oregon New Sanctuary Movement. “So with the advent of increased collaboration between ICE and local law enforcement, of course people are going to be reticent to call police to help them out, because they’re afraid they’re going to be detained for not having proper documentation.”
Johnson said that the Human Rights Commission and the sheriff will conduct ongoing meetings to sort out what is possible in terms of the recommendations, what can be done immediately and what needs more thought, she said. “Acknowledging too, that corrections and law enforcement collaborate, that is the nature of their work. What does it mean for an institution to collaborate with one and not the other?”
Among the recommendations is to make sure that individuals are informed of their rights before being questioned by an immigration officer, discontinue spending local resources to compile hourly reports to ICE, and formalize a request to the Oregon State Police to opt out of Secure Communities.
In the end, it is a civil offense, not a criminal offense, to be in the United States without proper documentation, said Poteet. And without money, a particular type of relative, or an employer already backing you, there are few options to live here legally, she said.
“This is a public safety issue, and it’s really scary for folks, and they’re not being protected in the way that they need to be,” Poteet said. “They still have rights, even if they don’t have proper documentation.”
