Secure Communities Task Force Report (PDF | 1.0 MB)
Activated Jurisdictions (PDF | 2.9 MB)
Law Enforcement Agency Request for Secure Communities Presentation
Training/Briefing Materials for Local and State Law Enforcement
What Others Are Saying (PDF | 2 MB)
Overview of Quarterly Statistical Monitoring (PDF | 73 KB)
The highest priority of any law enforcement agency is to protect the communities it serves. When it comes to enforcing our nation's immigration laws, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) focuses its limited resources on those who have been arrested for breaking criminal laws.
ICE prioritizes the removal of criminal aliens, those who pose a threat to public safety, and repeat immigration violators.
Secure Communities is a simple and common sense way to carry out ICE's priorities. It uses an already-existing federal information-sharing partnership between ICE and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) that helps to identify criminal aliens without imposing new or additional requirements on state and local law enforcement. For decades, local jurisdictions have shared the fingerprints of individuals who are arrested or booked into custody with the FBI to see if they have a criminal record. Under Secure Communities, the FBI automatically sends the fingerprints to DHS to check against its immigration databases. If these checks reveal that an individual is unlawfully present in the United States or otherwise removable due to a criminal conviction, ICE takes enforcement action – prioritizing the removal of individuals who present the most significant threats to public safety as determined by the severity of their crime, their criminal history, and other factors – as well as those who have repeatedly violated immigration laws.
Secure Communities imposes no new or additional requirements on state and local law enforcement. The federal government, not the state or local law enforcement agency, determines what immigration enforcement action, if any, is appropriate.
Only federal DHS officers make immigration enforcement decisions, and they do so only after an individual is arrested for a criminal violation of local, state, or federal law, separate and apart from any violations of immigration law.
DHS has expanded Secure Communities from 14 jurisdictions in 2008 to more than 3,000 today, including all jurisdictions along the southwest border. DHS is on track to expand Secure Communities to all law enforcement jurisdictions nationwide during fiscal year 2013.
Through Aug. 31, 2012, more than 166,000 immigrants convicted of crimes were removed from the United States after identification through Secure Communities. Of the more than 166,000, more than 61,000 immigrants were convicted of aggravated felony (level 1) offenses, including murder, rape and the sexual abuse of children.
How does Secure Communities work?
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) receives annual appropriations from Congress sufficient to remove a limited number of the more than 10 million individuals estimated to be in the U.S. who lack lawful status or are removable because of a criminal conviction. Given this reality, ICE must set sensible priorities.
Under the Obama administration, ICE has set clear and common-sense priorities for immigration enforcement focused on identifying and removing those aliens with criminal convictions. In addition to criminal aliens, ICE focuses on recent illegal entrants, repeat violators who game the immigration system, those who fail to appear at immigration hearings, and fugitives who have already been ordered removed by an immigration judge.
These priorities have led to significant results. Between fiscal years 2008 and 2011, ICE removed more convicted criminal aliens from our country than ever before, with the number of convicted criminals that ICE removed from the United States increasing by 89 percent, while the number of non-criminals removed dropped by 29 percent.
Secure Communities has proven to be a critical tool for carrying out ICE's enforcement priorities. To continue to improve Secure Communities, DHS and ICE are committed to addressing concerns that have been raised about its operation including:
These additional safeguards will further protect Secure Communities from those who may undermine ICE's enforcement priorities or engage in racial or ethnic profiling:
Secure Communities: From Arrest to Release or Removal
When state and local law enforcement arrest or book someone into custody for a violation of a criminal offense, they generally fingerprint the person. After fingerprints are taken at the jail, the state and local authorities electronically submit the fingerprints to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). This data is then stored in the FBI's criminal databases. After running the fingerprints against those databases, the FBI sends the state and local authorities a record of the person's criminal history.
With Secure Communities, once the FBI checks the fingerprints, the FBI automatically sends them to DHS, so that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) can determine if that person is also subject to removal (deportation). This change, whereby the fingerprints are sent to DHS in addition to the FBI, fulfills a 2002 Congressional mandate for the FBI to share information with ICE, and is consistent with a 2008 federal law that instructs ICE to identify criminal aliens for removal. Secure Communities does not require any changes in the procedures of local law enforcement agencies or jails.
If the person has been previously encountered and fingerprinted by an immigration official and there is a digitized record, then the immigration database will register a “match.” ICE then reviews other databases to determine whether the person is here illegally or is otherwise removable.
In cases where the person appears from these checks to be removable, ICE generally issues a detainer on the person, requesting that the state or local jail facility hold the individual up to an extra 48 hours (excluding weekends) to allow for an interview of the person. Following the interview, ICE decides whether to seek the person's removal.
In making these decisions, ICE considers a number of factors, including the person's criminal history, immigration history (such as whether the person was previously deported or has an outstanding removal order from an immigration judge), family ties, duration of stay in the U.S., significant medical issues, and other circumstances. In many instances involving lower-level criminals or people who are not convicts, re-entrants, or fugitives, ICE offers the person the option of voluntary return. A voluntary return allows the person to enter the U.S. lawfully in the future.
When someone goes into immigration proceedings, the court process is run independent of the state criminal justice system. As a result, illegal immigrants can be removed before the criminal case is complete. There are a variety of reasons that the local arrest may not result in a criminal conviction. However, all of those removed are guilty of an immigration violation, and removed pursuant to the Immigration and Nationality Act.
Enforcing America's immigration laws is a federal responsibility. Under the Homeland Security Act of 2002, this responsibility falls to DHS, specifically U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
Since 2008, Congress has expanded ICE's immigration enforcement obligations – directing ICE to create a strategy to identify criminal aliens and prioritize them for removal.
In light of this direction and the fact that ICE receives limited resources, ICE must prioritize which of the estimated 10 million illegal immigrants in the United States and other removable aliens to pursue. In a memo issued by ICE Director John Morton in June 2010, ICE outlined the way it prioritizes removals. Specifically, ICE prioritizes the removal of those who pose a danger to national security or public safety, repeat violators who game the immigration system, those who fail to appear at immigration hearings, and fugitives who have already been ordered removed by an immigration judge. Because the administration is committed to using immigration enforcement resources in the way most beneficial to public safety, the primary focus is on convicted criminals, with a priority on aggravated felons.
As a result, record numbers of criminal aliens have been removed, with Secure Communities playing a key role in ICE's ability to fulfill this public safety priority. Between October 2008 and October 2011, the number of convicted criminals that ICE removed from the United States increased 89 percent, while the number of aliens removed without criminal convictions dropped by 29 percent. These trends are due in significant part to the implementation and expansion of Secure Communities. While Secure Communities is only responsible for a limited percentage of ICE's total removals and returns, it has helped ICE identify a more significant percentage of the convicted criminals that ICE removes or returns.
Over time, the percentage of serious offenders removed through Secure Communities will continue to increase, as those convicted of misdemeanors will decrease. This reflects the fact that people who commit more serious crimes serve longer sentences and consequently take longer to come into ICE custody. Since Secure Communities was first activated in October 2008, the percentage of misdemeanant removals has decreased from 40 percent of all removals in fiscal year 2009 to 29 percent of all removals following identification through Secure Communities in fiscal year 2011.
Learn more about ICE's removal statistics and the methodology used for calculating those statistics.
Secure Communities reduces opportunities for racial or ethnic profiling because all people booked into jails are fingerprinted. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and DHS' Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties (CRCL) are currently implementing additional safeguards to further protect Secure Communities from those who may seek to use it improperly.
Several initiatives to achieve these goals are underway:
To contact the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, please email crcl@dhs.gov, or call 1-866-644-8360 (toll free) or 1-866-644-8361 (toll free TTY).
To report allegations of racial profiling, due process violations, or other possible violations of civil rights or civil liberties related to Secure Communities, all complaints should be filed with the DHS Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties complaint intake website.
Concerns about the civil rights and civil liberties of individuals in communities where there is significant immigration enforcement activity are not unique to Secure Communities. The Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties (CRCL) and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) are creating a series of training/awareness briefings designed primarily for use by front line state and local law enforcement agency personnel during daily muster/roll call briefings. The videos and other tools will address eight categories of civil rights and civil liberties issues and topics of importance.
Project Goals:
The training/briefing materials are offered as a series of short videos, discussion guides with references to web-based resources for additional information (when available), and job aids.
Gregory Archambeault
Assistant Director for Secure Communities and Enforcement
Gregory J. Archambeault is the assistant director for the Secure Communities and Enforcement Division of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), in Washington, D.C. He is responsible for several major ICE programs and initiatives, including the Criminal Alien Program, the National Fugitive Operations Program, the 287(g) Program and the deployment of Secure Communities interoperability.
Mr. Archambeault has more than 25 years of law enforcement experience. In 1987, he began his federal law enforcement career in San Diego, with the former U.S. Immigration & Naturalization Service (INS), as part of the cooperative education program. In 1988, he was hired as a special agent where he conducted investigations of criminal aliens and street gangs, alien smugglers, counterfeit document manufacturers and employers who knowingly hired illegal aliens. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Mr. Archambeault was posted to the INS attaché offices in Greece and India, where he served as a regional liaison to foreign government officials and law enforcement, as well as U.S. government agencies.
Prior to joining the ICE Office of Enforcement & Removal Operations (ERO), Mr. Archambeault served with the ICE Office of Investigations as a supervisory special agent and resident agent in charge. He was responsible for the management and oversight of investigations related to violations of immigration and customs laws, including alien smuggling, worksite enforcement, criminal alien fugitives, child exploitation and arms and strategic technologies. He also served as the liaison to the Joint Terrorism Task Force.
In 2008, Mr. Archambeault joined ERO as the unit chief for the National Fugitive Operations Program, providing leadership and programmatic oversight to 104 teams nationwide. He was subsequently appointed to the Senior Executive Service as the deputy assistant director for the Criminal Alien Division, where he was responsible for strategic planning, policy development, budgetary oversight and the deployment of resources to effectively investigate, identify, arrest and remove criminal aliens found at-large in the United States and incarcerated in federal, state and local jails and prisons.
Mr. Archambeault received a Bachelor of Science degree in criminal justice administration from San Diego State University. He is a member of the Senior Executive Service.
To contact the Secure Communities office, please call (202) 732-3900. For media inquiries about Secure Communities, contact ICE's Office of Public Affairs at (202) 732-4242.
To report allegations of racial profiling, due process violations, or other possible violations of civil rights or civil liberties related to Secure Communities, all complaints should be filed with the DHS Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties complaint intake website.