WASHINGTON - Yesterday the House Subcommittee on Immigration Policy and Enforcement held a hearing entitled Is Secure Communities Keeping Our Communities Secure? In a written statement submitted for the hearing, the Asian American Center for Advancing Justice (Advancing Justice) urged the Committee to demand an end to the deeply flawed Secure Communities (S-Comm) Program and asked that Congress eliminate funding for S-Comm and other programs that use state and local law enforcement agencies to conduct immigration enforcement.
"S-Comm is an Immigration and Custom Enforcement (ICE) program that automatically forwards all fingerprints taken by local police to ICE for civil immigration background checks at the point of arrest," said Karen K. Narasaki, president and executive director of the Asian American Justice Center. "ICE is notified upon arrest, no matter how minimal the charge or even if the person is innocent."
S-Comm has become an indiscriminate mass deportation program, rather than one that is focused on identifying and deporting individuals with serious criminal convictions, which was how ICE originally presented the program. According to ICE's own September 2011 statistics, about 74 percent of those deported as a result of S-Comm either did not have any criminal convictions or have convictions for the lowest level offenses, including misdemeanors and minor traffic offenses.
"S-Comm has caused much harm to the Asian American and Pacific Islander community," said Stewart Kwoh, president and executive director of the Asian Pacific American Legal Center. "Many AAPI immigrants come from countries with a history of government corruption, which makes it difficult for these community members to come forward and trust law enforcement. S-Comm compounds this problem by adding potential immigration consequences to contact with local law enforcement."
To date, thousands of AAPI immigrants have been identified for deportation under S-Comm. As a result, this program undercuts community policing strategies that seek to engage AAPI communities.
Titi Liu, executive director of the Asian Law Caucus noted, "S-Comm is fundamentally flawed because it burdens and entangles local police with immigrant enforcement, thereby driving a wedge between immigrant community members and local police. This in turn compromises public safety for all community members."
S-Comm encourages police officers to stop and arrest residents who appear to be foreign-born because any fingerprints taken by police will be sent to ICE upon arrest. Data from ICE confirms that some jurisdictions, which have been notorious for racial profiling, have disproportionately high rates of non-criminal S-Comm deportations.
"Earlier this year, New York, Illinois and Massachusetts chose to opt out of S-Comm," said Tuyet Le, executive director of the Asian American Institute. "This decision was an open acknowledgement of the problems S-Comm presents and the fact that it is unfairly harming people who pose very little or no threat. It is time for S-Comm to end."
# # # The Asian American Center for Advancing Justice (www.advancingjustice.org) works to promote a fair and equitable society for all by working for civil and human rights and empowering Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders and other underserved communities, and is comprised of the Asian American Justice Center (www.advancingequality.org), the Asian American Institute (www.aaichicago.org), the Asian Law Caucus (www.asianlawcaucus.org) and the Asian Pacific American Legal Center (www.apalc.org).
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