Driving While Immigrant

On June 17, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) announced a slate of reforms to its Secure Communities program that director John Morton said are about prioritizing its limited resources and “making sure we focus on those people it makes the most sense to remove.” In reality they amount to a political attempt to salvage Obama’s flagship immigration program, which despite a multimillion-dollar mandate to target “dangerous criminal aliens,” has been undermined by ICE’s own data, which show that the majority of those it deports have no criminal record or were charged with minor offenses like traffic tickets. Critics argue that the program has re-established racial profiling as a legitimate policing practice. If the 1990s catchphrase was “Driving While Black,” now it could be “Driving While Immigrant.”

Take the example of Salvador Licea. Last August he was returning to his construction job in McGregor, Texas, after a lunch break when a routine traffic stop turned into a check of his immigration status. A local police officer noticed Licea’s expired inspection sticker and pulled him over, then checked to see whether his driver’s license was also expired. It was. Recent changes in Texas law make it impossible for undocumented immigrants to renew their once valid licenses. So instead of getting a ticket, Licea was arrested and booked into a McLennan County jail that participates in Secure Communities. His fingerprints were automatically shared with federal immigration agents and he was marked eligible for deportation.

“What crime did I commit?” Licea asks. “I was just doing my thing, just trying to get to work.” He says he often felt nervous when he saw a police officer while driving, even when he had a valid license. “Is he going to stop me for breaking the law?” Licea says he would ask himself. “Or is he just going to stop me for the color of my skin?”

Mr. Licea’s charge was driving with an invalid license. He was among 80 percent of the 118 immigrants McLennan County has transferred into ICE custody since January 2010 who were noncriminals or accused of low-level traffic or misdemeanor offenses. This scenario has played out across the 1,417 jurisdictions that have enrolled in Secure Communities since it started in 2008 and report similar statistics. It has been cited by the three Democratic governors who backed out of the program this year—Pat Quinn of Illinois, Andrew Cuomo of New York and Deval Patrick of Massachusetts.

These governors wanted to opt out of Secure Communities—just like Arlington County, Virginia, which voted 5-0 to opt out last September—but have found themselves similarly powerless to block the controversial program. Instead, in an attempt to address state and local concerns, Morton says he will grant more discretionary powers to federal attorneys handling deportation cases. Special consideration will now be given to veterans, victims of domestic abuse, women who are pregnant or nursing and single parents like Licea, who is the sole provider for his two US-born daughters.

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Source: The Nation