| ICE's Implementation of Secure Communities Proves Ineffective |
| (08 Nov 2017)
Since President Trump assumed office, the Secure Communities program has been promoted as essential to implement this administration's agenda for ramped up deportations.
The agency contends that "Secure Communities has proven to be one of ICE's most important tools for identifying and removing criminal aliens as well as repeat immigration violators."
However, analyses of the agency's own internal records document that the use of detainers under this program is not living up to these claims. For example, according to the latest available ICE data only about 2.5 percent of so-called Secure Communities removals were connected to the use of detainers sent to local law enforcement agencies. When compared with ICE removals from all sources, this component made up an even smaller proportion - less than 1 percent of all ICE removals. Furthermore, the number of convicted criminals that ICE claims to have deported through this program under the Trump administration is four times higher than what the evidence shows has actually happened. The results of stepped up enforcement appear quite small so far. By July 2017 there were only 529 additional Secure Communities removals of individuals convicted of crimes as compared with removals under President Obama. For those convicted of serious crimes, the average monthly change was just 128 more individuals. And few of these appear to have involved the use of ICE detainers. These statistics current through July 2017 were compiled from ICE internal records obtained by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University in response to a series of Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, following lawsuits that TRAC's co-directors filed against the agency. To read the full report go to: http://trac.syr.edu/immigration/reports/489/ A new online query tool provides public access to the data TRAC has compiled tracking all Secure Communities removals month-by-month for each state and county in the country. Go to: http://trac.syr.edu/phptools/immigration/secure/ Additional tools are also available that track ICE detainers (updated through July 2017) and all ICE removals (updated through June 2017). For an index to the full list of TRAC's immigration tools go to: http://trac.syr.edu/imm/tools/ If you want to be sure to receive notifications whenever updated data become available, sign up at: http://tracfed.syr.edu/cgi-bin/tracuser.pl?pub=1&list=imm or follow us on Twitter @tracreports or like us on Facebook: http://facebook.com/tracreports TRAC is self-supporting and depends on foundation grants, individual contributions and subscription fees for the funding needed to obtain, analyze and publish the data we collect on the activities of the U.S. federal government. To help support TRAC's ongoing efforts, go to: http://trac.syr.edu/cgi-bin/sponsor/sponsor.pl |
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Copyright 2017