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When people are booked into jail, their fingerprints are taken.
Local law enforcement agencies then send fingerprints to the FBI to check on outstanding warrants or a person’s criminal history. But the fingerprints don’t stop there, either. Under a program called Secure Communities, the FBI automatically sends the fingerprints it receives to the Department of Homeland Security, which checks for hits in an immigration database.
And that program has been associated with at least 15,800 deportations in North Carolina over the last decade, including more than 3,000 in Mecklenburg County, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse — or TRAC — at Syracuse University.
TRAC Director Susan Long says the report, which is updated when new information is available, is based on data obtained directly from ICE through the Freedom of Information Act. The people reflected in the finding are anonymous, but there's still information about the types of cases involved.
"We don't know who these persons are – just things about them in terms of nationality and criminal history or absence thereof," Long said.
In the last year, the number of deportations associated with the program has gone down. In general, North Carolina reflects that trend, Long said. In Mecklenburg, deportations associated with the program involved people from 67 countries. The vast majority – nearly 2,000 of the roughly 3,200 cases recorded – involved people with Mexican citizenship.
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