Putting TRAC to Work
Legal and Scholarly
Newsletter of the American Political Science Association’s Organized Section on Migration and Citizenship
July 2017
Migration and Citizenship: Immigration Federalism in the Context of Local Law Enforcement By Dopris Marie Provine, Paul Lews and Scott Decker, Arizona State University and Monica Varsanyi, CUNY
	Under President Obama, the federal government continued to refine its efforts to get more immigration information into local hands and to seek local assistance in de- taining suspected violators of immigration laws, but local governments and activists re- buffed many of these efforts. For example, in 2008 the Obama Administration rolled out the Secure Communities program, which mandated information sharing between local jails and the federal immigration databases. However, resistance to this program was pronounced in localities across the United States. Though the Obama Administration claimed that it was “going after the bad guys,” data collected by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) consistently demonstrated that a significant proportion of immigrants detained as a re- sult of Secure Communities were non - violent offenders; often, they were simply individuals swept up in other law enforcement actions. External Link, PDF file
	Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, Syracuse University Copyright 2017