By Chris Rickerd, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 3:32pm
It’s long past time for the Department of Justice (DOJ) to stop passing the buck on Secure Communities (S-Comm) and take responsibility for the controversial immigration enforcement program. S-Comm has caused unprecedented harms to public safety and community trust in the police: DOJ must urgently take action to end this disastrous initiative.
S-Comm has been implemented by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in 1,659 jurisdictions across the country, disregarding the opposition of numerous states and localities. Under S-Comm, the FBI shares the fingerprints of every arrested person with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) — despite the fact that sharing these prints contravenes agreements made between the states and the FBI.
By Chris Rickerd, ACLU Washington Legislative Office & Joanne Lin, Washington Legislative Office at 3:22pm
As we remember the victims and heroes of 9/11, we're reminded that people of all colors and creeds died on that horrific day, including more than 100 undocumented immigrants. We also remember the courage of survivors, emergency responders, family members, and soldiers — who, like the victims, reflect the diversity of America. Their sacrifice enabled our country to move forward in a spirit of healing and unity.
By Chris Rickerd, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 1:49pm
Last night in Arlington, Virginia, a community spoke to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) by bearing witness to fear and hardship sown by the immigration enforcement program misleadingly called Secure Communities. Hundreds of people were turned away from this field meeting of the Homeland Security Advisory Council's Task Force on S-Comm, but those 300 who crowded into a university auditorium – including students, clergy, nongovernmental organization activists, U.S. citizens and immigrants – conveyed eloquently-told stories of S-Comm's irreparable flaws. The community's message about S-Comm was "End It, Don't Amend It."
By Chris Rickerd, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 10:51am
In El Paso last month, President Obama gave a speech on immigration reform in which he said: "I know that the increase in deportations has been a source of controversy. But I want to emphasize: we are not doing this haphazardly; we are focusing our limited resources on violent offenders and people convicted of crimes; not families, not folks who are just looking to scrape together an income."
By Chris Rickerd, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 11:23am
Zero for 93,000. That was the government's terrorism conviction record resulting from several preventive immigration measures that targeted citizens of principally Arab- and Muslim-majority nations. At the heart of these efforts stood the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System or NSEERS.
Last Thursday, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) made a long-overdue announcement indefinitely suspending NSEERS, which singled out immigrant men and boys from designated countries for extraordinary registration requirements with DHS, ranging from an extra half-hour of screening on arrival, through tracking of whereabouts while in the United States, to limitations on points of departure. Repeatedly condemned by the United Nations' Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination, NSEERS mandated ethnic profiling on a scale not seen in the United States since Japanese-American internment during World War II and the "Operation Wetback" deportations to Mexico of 1954. Former Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) Commissioner James Ziglar was right in his appraisal of NSEERS, which the ACLU opposed from day one. Ziglar described NSEERS as a "disruption in our relationships with immigrant communities and countries that we needed help from" after 9/11, and lamented that it "caused us to use resources in the field that could have been much better deployed."
