Crics complain that ICE is finding too many illegals in jail

Houston Chronicle:

A little after 3 a.m. Dec. 12, Carlos Garcia-Hernandez was booked into Harris County Jail on an aggravated assault charge, accused of slicing a man's nose down to the bone after a disagreement at a birthday party.

At the jail, the first in the country with full access to a Department of Homeland Security database that contains millions of immigration records, a Harris County detention officer ran Garcia-Hernandez's fingerprints.

Within minutes the system found a hit. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents had deported Garcia-Hernandez in November 2007 after a string of convictions including marijuana possession and escaping from law enforcement custody, the system showed.

The DHS system also showed Garcia-Hernandez had two outstanding murder warrants in Mexico. “A year ago, we wouldn't have gotten that,” said Lt. M. Lindsay, the point man for the Harris County Sheriff's Office's efforts to identify suspected illegal immigrants in the jails.

The database is part of an ICE program dubbed “Secure Communities,” which aims to identify and deport the most dangerous illegal immigrants in U.S. jails and prisons. Since Harris County started using the database in October, participation in the program has grown to 70 sites in the U.S., including 39 in Texas.

In the program's first six months, more than 266,000 fingerprint submissions were run through the system nationally, generating more than 32,000 “matches” for suspects with both an immigration history and record of a prior conviction or charge. That includes 5,369 matches in Harris County.

But critics see a troubling trend in the data.

Nationally, only 15 percent of the 6,130 suspects that authorities filed paperwork to detain after finding a match in the system were classified as “aggravated felons” — the agency's primary target group. The percentage was even lower in Harris County, with fewer that one in 10 suspects falling into that category, according to ICE statistics from late October to the end of April, the most recent available.

Supporters of the program point to cases like Garcia-Hernandez's as a sign that the system is working. But critics say ICE's data indicates that, so far, the agency is casting a broad net for suspected illegal immigrants in the jails, and is sweeping up some offenders who do not pose a danger to the public along with more hardened criminals.

Many of the Harris County offenders eventually end up in an immigration detention center in Polk County, where they wear uniforms color-coded to show the level of crime they were convicted of committing.

On a Thursday in June, a handful of the offenders in the detention center courtroom were dressed in red jumpsuits, denoting a higher risk level. But most wore uniforms for low-risk detainees,including a few identified through the immigration database in Harris County Jail after being stopped for traffic violations.

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It appears to me that the critics are the people who are not serious about enforcing immigration laws. As a law enforcement tool the program seems excellent. It is telling those who are here illegally that they better not commit any crime whatsoever. What is wrong with that?

What the critics appear to be asking is that we take the chance of not getting the really bad guys by limiting the data base used to look for them. The families of their victims would have a different point of view. That is certainly also the case for Houston police officers who have seen two of their own killed by these criminal immigrants.

I see this as another tool to discourage illegal immigration. I am not anti immigrant. I welcome all legal immigrants and we should encourage people to follow the immigration laws. Allowing them to ignore the law only encourages more illegal conduct.