August 13, 2009

Secure Communities

Secure Communities: Mission

Secure Communities: A Comprehensive Plan to Identify and Remove Criminal Aliens is a Department of Homeland Security initiative that improves public safety by implementing a comprehensive, integrated approach to identify and remove criminal aliens from the United States. The Secure Communities Program Management Office coordinates all ICE planning, operational, technical, and fiscal activities devoted to transforming, modernizing, and optimizing the criminal alien enforcement process. ICE plans to spend $1.4 billion of Congressional appropriations for criminal alien enforcement efforts in FY 2009.

Secure Communities: A Comprehensive plan to Identify and Remove Criminal Aliens is built on three pillars that address specific challenges.

The Challenge: Identify

Determining the identity, criminal history, and immigration status of suspected criminal aliens before they have been released from local law enforcement custody has been a long-standing challenge for ICE. Traditional document-based methods of identification are:

• Labor-intensive and time-consuming
• Limited by the accuracy of biographic information obtained from suspects who may use aliases and other false data
• Complicated by the fact that criminal history records and immigration records reside in different, non-integrated systems

The Solution: Modernize Criminal Alien Identification

The Secure Communities strategy responds to the identification challenge by combining biometric identification technologies currently in use by the FBI and other parts of DHS in a new, powerful way.

The technology enables local Law Enforcement Agencies (LEAs) to initiate an integrated records check of criminal history and immigration status for individuals in their custody.

A single submission of fingerprints as part of the normal criminal arrest / booking process will automatically check both the Integrated Automatic Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS) of the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) Division and the Automated Biometric Identification System (IDENT) of the Department of Homeland Security’s US-VISIT Program.

The LEA continues to be notified when there is a positive identification within IAFIS. Now, both ICE and the LEA are automatically notified in parallel when a match occurs in IDENT.

ICE evaluates each case to determine the individual’s immigration status and provides a timely response to local law enforcement partners—usually within a few hours.

The Challenge: Prioritize

Information about the total size, location, and characteristics of the criminal alien population is based on estimates. A lack of reliable data complicates planning and scaling operations to meet the challenge with limited resources.

The Solution: Prioritize Enforcement Actions

The Secure Communities strategy has adopted a risk-based approach to prioritizing enforcement actions in order to maximize the impact on public safety. By assessing the risk each criminal alien poses to the public, ICE focuses immigration enforcement on the most dangerous criminal aliens first.

The most dangerous criminal aliens are individuals who have been previously convicted of or who are currently charged with a Level 1 offense—national security, homicide, kidnapping, assault, robbery, sex offenses and narcotics crimes that carry a sentence of greater than one year.

By prioritizing immigration enforcement actions on the most dangerous criminals, ICE uses its resources judiciously. The Secure Communities plan enables ICE to strengthen public safety while reducing disruption to law-abiding immigrant families and communities.

The Challenge: Transform

Biometric identification is deploying to the approximately 30,000 local jails and booking locations throughout the nation. Even with prioritized deployment and enforcement actions focusing on the highest threats to community safety, the number of dangerous criminal aliens taken into ICE custody is increasing dramatically. Enhanced identification activity creates a commensurate need to accommodate criminal aliens via apprehension, processing, detention, and ultimately, removal from the United States.

The Solution: Transform ICE Business Processes and Systems

To accommodate the increased number of identified criminal aliens, ICE is working to optimize capacity by expanding detention bed space, augmenting transportation resources, and supplementing staff. Automated systems and a renewed focus on process efficiency will reduce the amount of time criminal aliens spend in ICE custody and increase the speed with which they are removed from the United States. ICE is investing in::

• Video teleconferencing equipment to facilitate interviews and immigration hearings
• Sophisticated computer systems to manage bed space and transportation reservations and utilization
• Integrated case and detainee management systems that track an individual throughout the immigration enforcement lifecycle

These investments plus state-of-the-art tools that provide an integrated end-to-end picture of the criminal alien enforcement process strengthen ICE capabilities to:

• Perform scenario-based needs analysis for detention beds, transportation, and staffing
• Measure investment decisions and understand the risks, trade-offs, and system-wide impacts of specific actions
• Optimize overall capacity and operating efficiency

Deployment Strategy

Beginning in October 2008, ICE prioritized deployment of biometric identification capability to high risk jurisdictions. Continued deployment plans project nationwide coverage by 2013. For current status and recent successes please visit the Secure Communities web page.