Trumpeted ICE Program for Catching Illegal Immigrants May Not Include Some Worrisome Suspects
Federal officials have urged local authorities to participate in a Secure Communities program that calls for them to check arrestees against a computer database for immigration violations before they are released.
But it appears that the database may not be as comprehensive as some have thought, reports the Washingon Post.
In Loudain County, Va., officials sent fingerprints for Salvador Portillo-Saravia to the feds when he was locked up for public intoxication and got a “no match.” So he was released–only to be arrested a month later for allegedly raping an 8-year-old girl.
Reportedly a member of the MS-13 gang, he was deported in 2003 to El Salvador and should have been flagged by the computer as having reentered the United States illegally, which is a felony, the newspaper says.
Officials with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement program say so-called manual checks, apparently involving phone calls to the feds, should routinely be conducted if there is reason to suspect any particular individual of wrongdoing. But frustrated local authorities say they don’t have the manpower to do this and some also express concern that this could implicate racial profiling issues, while simply running an ICE computer check on all arrestees, by contrast, clearly does not involve any discrimination, the Post reports.
“Nobody’s ever heard of calling for a manual check,” says Loudain Sheriff Stephen Simpson, who contends that his office followed all previous instructions from ICE and did what it was supposed to do to look into the background of Portillo-Saravia. “The point of the program was it replaced the need to do what they now say we should have done.”
The ICE checks are controversial, the newspaper notes, because some believe they discourage illegal immigrants from cooperating with police and providing needed information to help prevent and solve crimes.
