By Laura DeKoven Waxman
July 4, 2011

“Secure Communities is a good program which makes a lot of sense,” U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Director John Morton told the Conference’s Comprehensive Immigration Reform Task Force during its June 19 meeting in Baltimore. The Task Force session was chaired by Laredo Mayor Raul Salinas and focused primarily on border issues, including illegal immigration, drug trafficking and gun trafficking, and efforts to reduce them.

Secure Communities is intended to help identify dangerous criminals through an information sharing process, according to ICE materials posted on the Department of Homeland Security Web site. When individuals are arrested, they are fingerprinted and booked into jail, and their fingerprints are conveyed to the FBI and checked against the FBI criminal database. Through Secure Communities, that fingerprint data is then also shared with ICE and checked against immigration databases, thus enabling ICE to identify those individuals who may not have legal immigration status.

Morton described a series of program reforms which were announced June 17 in response to concerns about civil rights and other problems that have emerged relating to the program, including:

• Limited Removal Resources: To do a better job of ensuring that the program targets those who pose the biggest risk to communities, ICE will focus its limited resources on the nation’s most serious criminals.

• Community Policing: Some law enforcement agencies have expressed concern that Secure Communities discourages witnesses and victims of crimes from coming forward to report criminal activities in their communities. Given the importance of community policing, ICE is instituting additional training to ensure that law enforcement officers understand the goals and priorities of the program.

• Civil Rights: As Secure Communities expands nationwide, ICE is taking additional steps to ensure that it can execute its mission while continuing to respond to any potential civil rights concerns.

Morton was accompanied by the Department of Homeland Security’s Officer for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Margo Schlanger, who emphasized that while Secure Communities is not a program through which state and local law officials are required to enforce immigration laws, sharing arrestees’ fingerprints with DHS raises a set of civil rights issues about the relationship between state and local law enforcement and DHS. Schlanger indicated that as part of the recently announced reforms, the Department is institution a more robust process to resolve civil rights problems that emerge and make sure that ICE responds to those problems.

Also addressing the Task Force was White House Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP) Deputy Director of State, Local and Tribal Affairs Ben Tucker, who described a series of ONDCP initiatives including several along the Southwest border. These include the Southwest Border High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area, which covers the entire length of the border, and 18 drug-free community coalitions located in border communities. He indicated that prevention activities are being emphasized, both by local police in border communities and in the nation’s work in Mexico.

Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence President Paul Helmke, who is a former Mayor of Fort Wayne (IN) and past President of the Conference of Mayors, told the mayors while drugs are going north, guns are going south because U.S. gun laws are so weak. He suggested that unless gun laws are strengthened, such as closing the gun show loophole, it’s going to be hard to lessen the problem. He also discussed the difficulty of reducing the number of guns that get into the illegal market through straw purchases unless straw purchase laws are strengthened.