Outside the fictional realm of conservative hysteria on immigration, the Obama administration has adopted a strict set of immigration policies, which includes the SB 1070-like "Secure Communities" program, which the administration has deployed along the entire Southwest border. Under the program, local law enforcement forwards the identifying information of anyone they arrest to ICE, which then checks their immigration status. The program has led to more than 47,000 deportations, at least a quarter involving people who didn't commit a crime and most either aren't criminal or their arrests involved low-level offenses. Renee Feltz and Stokely Baksh report:
Because of the program's failure to focus on high-level offenders, critics say it's causing fewer immigrants to share information with police that can help solve cases or prevent future crimes.
“This is creating a huge distrust, a huge void in our community-police relations,” said Cesar Espinosa, who works for the Central American Resource Center in Houston. Both the city and the county here are enrolled in Secure Communities. “We have a lot of folks who ask us, if I report a crime, will I be asked for my paperwork?”
Aside from the incentive it creates for undocumented immigrants not to talk to the police when crimes occur, which the Obama administration put forth as a reason to oppose Arizona's SB 1070, civil-rights advocates argue that Secure Communities has similar built-in incentives for racial profiling as well:
Civil rights advocates say Secure Communities encourages police to arrest people who have not committed a crime simply to check their immigration status, which is a form of racial profiling. For example, in Travis County — home to Austin, Texas — non-criminals accounted for 82 percent of the deportations resulting from Secure Communities.
“This indicates police officers are picking up people on pretext, the criminal charges are getting dropped or dismissed, and they're getting shuttled into deportation,” said Bridget Kessler, a fellow with the Immigration Justice Clinic of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law.
Look, the DoJ doesn't oppose Arizona's SB 1070 because they don't want to deport anyone. They oppose it because it's an unconstitutional preemption of the federal government's power to set immigration policy. The Obama administration isn't the slightest bit squeamish about deporting large numbers of people.
In case you're wondering if a local sheriff more concerned about violent crime than illegal immigration can opt out, you can't.
