Will the Priority Enforcement Program be an Improvement over Secure Communities?
The Obama administration’s dismantling of the Secure Communities program in November 2014 was overshadowed by the new expanded deferred action programs that made their way to the Supreme Court. The hope was that the new Priority Enforcement Program (PEP) would focus on convicted serious criminal offenders in removal efforts, not simply immigrants arrested for any crime.
Sara Rathod in Mother Jones offers some reasons for concern with the new PEP program based on an ACLU study.
For years, advocates had argued that Secure Communities, which among other things required police to share arrestees’ fingerprints with federal immigration officials, trampled immigrants’ civil liberties and instilled a deep fear of law enforcement in immigrant communities. Now, civil liberties groups have turned their focus to a pilot program at a county jail in Fresno, California, that allows Immigration Customs and Enforcement (ICE) unprecedented access to inmates and their records at the time they’re locked up. If left unchecked, they say, the program could be almost as bad for immigrants as was Secure Communities. Lack of transparency, lack of oversight, surprise interrogations, and uncertainty about who is deported are a few of the problems. Read the article for more.
KJ