Last week, the county became one of six counties in the state and one of 108 jurisdictions across the country to participate in the Secure Communities program. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials said they expect to have the program operating throughout the nation by 2013.
The new technology upgrade will allow county officials in the main jail identify criminal aliens through the use of national, fingerprint-based software, which checks immigration records maintained by the Department of Homeland Security.
“This new screening system will take as much of the human error out of the process as possible,” said Ray Kovacic, assistant field office director ICE in Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo and Ventura counties. “The goal is to get as many violent criminals off the streets as possible.”
Kovacic said he has seen success in nearby Ventura County in terms of the number of dangerous illegal aliens who have been deported and the amount of staff time freed up so officers can attend to other duties.
Formerly, arrestees were booked into the main county jail and had their fingerprints checked for criminal history in the Department of Justice biometric system, which is maintained by the FBI, said Sheriff’s Department spokesman Drew Sugars. “Before, ICE representatives would come to the jail three times a week and check our list of foreign-born inmates,” he explained. “If they believed there was a need to deport the inmate, we’d hold them until ICE could interview them.”
Kovacic said Secure Communities will speed up the process by automatically starting the preliminary checks for inmates who meet certain criteria for possible deportation. He said priority will be given to illegal immigrants who pose the greatest threat to public safety, such as those previously charged or convicted for major drug offenses, murder, rape, robbery and kidnapping.
The main jail has 950 inmates. Of those, 285 are foreign born, and nine are eligible for removal, meaning they’re either illegal immigrants or legal immigrants who have committed certain crimes that warrant deportation.Roughly 1,057 foreign-born inmates have been in custody since January 2009. Because the new technology will help identify a larger number of foreign-born inmates, the number of removable inmates in the jail system seems likely to rise. However, Sugars said it was too early to tell.
Sugars said the new program wouldn’t change how police operate. He also stressed that that new program is not about targeting illegal immigrants.
“It’s not our rule to arrest people for being illegal immigrants,” he said. “We arrest people who commit crimes in our community.” Grecia Lima, a community organizer with PUEBLO, said she supports the stated purpose of the new program: to get violent criminals off the streets. PUEBLO is a 501(c)4 non-profit organization “dedicated to building the political power and leadership of low-income residents throughout Santa Barbara County,” says its website.
The organization is on board with any program that curbs violence, which adversely affects low-income communities, she said. But she worried that the new technology would target illegal immigrants who haven’t committed serious crimes.
“We know that we are also working a broken national immigration system that relies too much on enforcement only programs,” she added. “We hope that the program was started with the purpose of taking people that are committing violent crimes, that it’s kept that way and that it’s not used in other forms to deport people that are innocent.”About Secure Communities
The pilot projects created in Anaheim and Ventura County to screen arrestees at the jails for illegal immigration status came out of a Congressional Task Force on Immigration Reform that Santa Barbara County’s own 24th District Rep. Elton Gallegly chaired in 1995 and became law in 1996.
Gallegly subsequently introduced the law to expand and make the program permanent in 1997, as well as additional bills to further expand the program, which also became law. The Secure Communities project is an outgrowth of that program, tying in new technologies and better communications across agency lines in the wake of 9/11, which Gallegly — along with other members of Congress — has championed as a senior member of the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and Judiciary and Foreign Affairs committees.
“The reason the program has been so successful is because it is a point-of-entry system,” Gallegly told the Journal. “It identifies 100 percent of the deportable criminal illegal immigrants who are booked, not just those serving long prison sentences. After being booked, or serving their sentence, criminal illegal immigrants are turned over to the INS for detention and deportation, eliminating their release back into the community.”