ICE's Partnership with Local Police Departments Leads to Migrants Quietly Disappearing

On a recent Saturday night in Jackson Heights, a group of men gathered for drinks in a bar that caters to the neighborhood’s international clientele. When they piled out of the door onto Roosevelt Avenue, their loud chatter was interrupted by two NYPD officers.

Those who were undocumented immigrants ran away. Several who didn’t scatter fast enough were left to answer a dreaded question.

“You got any ID?” asked an officer.

That’s when “a simple stop by the police turned into an immigration case,” recalled Adam, an Ecuadorian immigrant who is friends with the men who were stopped. He asked that only his first name be used. Adam said his friends handed over ID cards purchased in the neighborhood, or issued by their consulates. Unsatisfied, the officers arrested them. They were taken to the local precinct and expected to be released the following Monday. Instead, they were transferred into the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), moved to detention center in Texas, then deported to Mexico and Ecuador.

Now the process that led Adam’s friends to be deported could become commonplace in “the city of immigrants.”

New York City — home to more than three million immigrants, more than half a million of them undocumented — is on the verge of joining a program called “Secure Communities,” which allows ICE to access arrest data from all local jails. Despite its name, advocates worry the program will wreak havoc in communities that are already hyper-policed.

Secure Communities is the new face of an enforcement system that has continued to expand even as comprehensive immigration reform languishes. It works by sharing arrest data from local jails with ICE. If agents find a match, they can then issue a hold or a “detainer” asking police to keep an immigrant in custody to be picked up by ICE. Compliance with the request is voluntary, but most police cooperate.

More than 700 counties in 34 states have signed up for Secure Communities since it began in 2008, including all of the states along the U.S.-Mexico border. ICE wants every jail in the nation to participate by 2013.

After California enrolled in the program last year, immigrants in several counties began to quietly disappear. In one case, a single-mother of three in Hayward, across the bay from San Francisco, got into a car accident and met a fate common to undocumented immigrants. She had no driver’s license and faced citation or arrest.

“A police officer told me he needed to take me to the police department where my fingerprints would be taken,” said the woman, who asked to remain anonymous. “He explained the entire process would take half an hour.”

But she was kept in jail until she was visited by immigration officers. She is currently in deportation proceedings.

“Secure Communities makes it hard to know when people are being detained and deported,” said Evelyn Sanchez, outreach director for Somos Mayfair in California’s Santa Clara County. “You can’t point to it as easily as you could during the raids a few years ago.”

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Some states announce their Secure Communities partnership with ICE in press releases, but New York neglected to disclose that it signed up on May 10, 2010. Documents released after an open records request reveal that ICE held a briefing on the program at its Detention and Removal Office in New York City on May 21, 2009. It briefed the New York State Identification Bureau the following month.

After a state signs up for Secure Communities, counties can be added individually or all at once. No jurisdictions have been activated yet in New York. But in a Nov. 9 meeting in San Francisco, ICE officials said they expect the all of New York to be active within several months.