Vol. 73/No. 22      June 8, 2009

In his 2010 budget, Obama proposes a 30 percent funding increase for “Secure Communities,” a program that screens fingerprints of prisoners in local jails. A pilot effort began in October under George W. Bush and now operates in 48 counties across the United States. The project includes Los Angeles, Dallas, Houston, Miami, Boston, and Phoenix and will check 1 million prints this year.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials hope to expand the program to nearly all 3,100 local jails nationwide by the end of 2012. The matching of fingerprints is already done at the roughly 1,200 federal and state prisons in the United States.

The fingerprints or “biometrics,” as ICE likes to call them, will be entered into the system. They will include everyone picked up and jailed for anything from traffic violations to drunk driving.

“By checking all people who are booked,” notes the Washington Post, the program avoids charges of “racial profiling.” If the goal is met, 14 million bookings in local jails each year would be screened against federal records. ICE deported some 117,000 immigrants accused of nonimmigration crimes last year.

ICE has also been rapidly expanding E-Verify, which allows employers to check on the immigration status of job applicants. In 2008, 63,592 companies joined the program. ICE official Michael Aytes told a congressional committee in April that more than 117,000 companies now use E-Verify. Fourteen percent of all non-agricultural new hires in the United States are checked with the program, he said.

Last year, ICE deported 369,049 people, the highest number in U.S. history. The agency held an average of 30,429 people in immigration jails every day, also the highest ever.

Homeland Security secretary Janet Napolitano announced one change from Bush administration policies: she claims that workplace raids will now focus on prosecuting employers who hire undocumented immigrants and arrest workers only after bosses are indicted.

In 2008, 6,287 immigrant workers were arrested in factory raids. Even though this is the largest number since the Department of Homeland Security was created it is less than 2 percent of all those deported.

On May 8, construction of a “virtual fence” resumed on the U.S.-Mexico border. Seventeen camera and radio towers are being placed on a 23-mile stretch near Tucson, Arizona, and another 36 others are planned for 30 miles near Ajo.

Designed to catch immigrants entering the United States from Mexico, the $6.7 billion project is planned to cover all but 200 miles of the 2,000-mile border by 2014.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home