Secure or Insecure Communities? Seven Reasons to Abandon the Secure Communities Program

Thestudy “Immigration Enforcement, Policing, and Crime: Evidence from the Secure Communities Program” by Treyger, Chalfin, and Loeffler (2014, this issue) is a welcome addition to the literature, and one that is timely. Importantly, the study investigates the effects of the Secure Communities program on local crime rates and on the arrest behavior of municipal police agencies across the United States. As described by Treyger et al., Secure Communities is a program launched by the federal government to improve the efficiency of interior immigration enforcement and to enhance the capacity for targeting deportable individuals with criminal convictions, referred to as “criminal aliens.” In particular, Secure Communities provides a system that automatically transmits and checks fingerprints against the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Automated Biometric Identification System (IDENT), which contains information on known immigration violators, known and suspected terrorists, and “criminal aliens,” among others. A fingerprint match prompts Law Enforcement Support Center (LESC) officers from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to investigate, determine the individual’s immigration status, and forward their conclusion to the relevant ICE field office. If ICE decides to take action, a detainer is issued to the law enforcement agency requesting that the individual be detained for up to 48 hours so that ICE can assume custody. Secure Communities is unprecedented in scope. Since its inception in 2008 with just 14 jurisdictions, Secure Communities has expanded to all 3,181 jurisdictions within 50 states, the District of Columbia, and five U.S. territories. Full implementation was