Plan will help to deport Lee County's jailed illegal immigrants (The News-Press)

Plan will help to deport Lee County's jailed illegal immigrants
Already in SW Florida, plan to be in effect here by 2012

By Chris Umpierre • cumpierre@news-press.com • June 14, 2009

Illegal immigrants with criminal records booked into the Lee County Jail could be identified for deportation at a higher rate thanks to a new federal program being expanded by the Obama administration.

The program - which began as a pilot effort in October and operates in 50 U.S. counties, including Collier and Charlotte - will expand to Lee and all U.S. jails by 2012.

The Secure Communities program checks the immigration status of every person booked into local jails by matching inmates' fingerprints to federal immigration databases. While computerized immigration checks are run in federal and state prisons, local jails lack the time and resources to screen all inmates.

Based on the pilot program, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement estimates that if fingerprints from all 14 million bookings in local jails each year were screened, about 1.4 million criminal aliens would be found. That would be about 10 times the 117,000 criminal illegal immigrants ICE deported last year.

"Right now, when we book someone in jail we have no way to determine their immigration status unless they're a self-proclaimed alien," said Lee County Capt. Tom Eberhardt, whose agency recently met with ICE to discuss the Secure Communities program. "What (ICE) is finding out is that this is an extra tool to pick out (criminal illegal immigrants) in a quicker way."

Eberhardt, who oversees Lee's jail operations, said Lee sends ICE biographical information - not fingerprints - if an inmate admits to being foreign born during booking. ICE could take days to reply, by which time some detainees had been released.

Secure Communities' finger-print database, in contrast, notifies local jails of positive immigration matches with the Department of Homeland Security database within an hour, Navas said.

ICE estimates the number of incarcerated criminal aliens in the U.S. at between 300,000 and 450,000 people.

Eberhardt declined to estimate how many illegal immigrants are being housed in Lee's jail, but he did say that ICE typically places detainers on nine to 20 of its inmates each day.

ICE spokesman Richard Rocha said his agency will give priority to deporting the most dangerous offenders: national security risks or those convicted of violent crimes such kidnapping and murder.

"What people need to understand is this program is geared to helping ICE prioritize the most egregious alien criminals so those individuals are prosecuted first and not released back to our communities," Rocha said.

Program positives
Supporters of the program say that Secure Communities would not only make communities safer but that it would save counties thousands of dollars in housing inmates that legally shouldn't be here.

"Anything we can do to get illegal aliens out of jails is for the better," said state Rep. Trudi Williams, a Fort Myers Republican who sponsored a bill similar to the Secure Communities program last year. The bill died in a committee on state affairs.

"Jails are so expensive to begin with. If you fill them with illegals who shouldn't be here in the first place, it gets even more expensive."

According to the Lee County Sheriff's Office, it costs $27,375 a year to house and feed an inmate.

Secure Communities flagged nearly 1,000 illegal immigrants being held by authorities from January to April, ICE said.

The illegal status of those people "would have otherwise remained undetected," ICE said.

Racial profiling?
Victor Valdes, the civil rights commissioner for the League of United Latin American Citizens Florida, is concerned that Secure Communities would lead to racial profiling.

"We are opposed to this because we can see (officers) stopping people riding bicycles or riding in the back of trucks to find if they are legal. They'll use any kind of excuse to arrest them," said Valdes, a Naples resident.

Valdes isn't alone. In April, a coalition of immigrant rights groups wrote to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and told her that the program "creates an incentive for police to arrest people on pretextual or minor crimes so that their immigration status can be checked."

Immigration officials say universal checks will reduce allegations of bias.

"The fingerprints of all persons arrested and booked will be processed through the system, regardless of race, nationality or ethnicity," David Venturella, the executive director for Secure Communities, said.

Collier experience
Collier County Sheriff's Office spokeswoman Michelle Batten said it was too early to say how successful Secure Communities has been for her agency. Collier started running the program in mid-February, Batten said.

Collier is one of nine test agencies in Florida doing the program. The other counties are St. Johns, Clay, Duval, Miami-Dade, Marion, Hillsborough, Charlotte and St. Lucie.

"Secure Communities is something every law enforcement agency should be doing," Batten said. "We're more than happy to be participating."

ICE didn't respond to a request for the number of illegal criminal immigrants who were detained for deportation hearings in Collier since the program began.

Fort Myers immigration attorney Ricardo Skerrett said Secure Communities will work well in Collier and other communities if the program is run like ICE indicates.

"It definitely should be the priority of the government to deport criminal aliens instead of wasting resources to do raids and deporting people who have been here for years who have no criminal record and are no threat to society," Skerrett said.

"But this is only a good idea if it's used in the right purpose and used to deport felons."