North Carolina County To Implement Immigration Tool
By admin at 27 January, 2009, 5:36 pm
An Orange County, North Carolina sheriff says his police force will be using federal fingerprinting database to weed out illegal immigrants, but says in doing so they are not acting as immigration agents.
The program, called Secure Communities, allows law enforcement to obtain a detainee’s identity by taking information from the FBI and Homeland Security databases and speeds up the process of figuring out a suspect’s immigration status.
If an illegal immigrant is discovered in the system Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is automatically notified and the detainee would be picked up by immigration officials after any criminal case is finished, ICE spokesperson Barbara Gonzalez told the News and Observer.
But opponents say the system may be ripe for abuse and fear some people could be taken advantage of.
A number of North Carolina communities have signed up for the program which ICE says will allow it to build upon the 221,000 illegal immigrants found in the nation’s prisons last year.
“Secure Communities is a new effort to identify and ultimately remove dangerous criminal aliens from our communities,” said executive director for ICE Secure Communities David Venturella. “Our goal with this ICE program is to use technology to prevent criminal aliens from being released back into the community, with little or no additional burden on our local law enforcement partners.”
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