Carrying signs reading “Stop ripping families apart,” 300 people packed a forum in Los Angeles on Aug. 15 to demand the Department of Homeland Security end a program that uses local police departments to enforce immigration laws.
The purpose of the meeting, one of several being held by DHS around the country, was to let a task force hear from the public in order to recommend possible changes to the program, called “Secure Communities.” However, immigrant rights groups had only one recommendation: End the program.
The DHS task force was formed in response to growing opposition to Secure Communities, which shares fingerprints collected by state and local police to allow immigration authorities identify and deport tens of thousands of people each year. Allegedly set up to target serious offenders, the program checks everyone arrested for immigration status. Most of those deported only committed minor offenses or were never convicted. Even victims and witnesses to crimes are at risk.
Isaura Garcia, 20, pleaded with the task force to help end the program.
The mother of a one-year-old daughter, Garcia said she called police for help after an episode of domestic violence, but instead wound up detained and was put into deportation proceedings.
“Calling 911 was the worst nightmare I could suffer in my life,” she said in Spanish.
DHS forums in other cities, like Chicago, also sparked major protests.
As one speaker told the task force in Los Angeles, “This program has been repudiated by governors in Illinois, New York and Massachusetts. It’s been repudiated by police chiefs and it’s largely repudiated by the Latino community, so why is President Obama out there making it worse by expanding this program?”
ICE announced on Aug. 5 that it was unilaterally revoking the agreements it signed with states, which said Secure Communities was voluntary and that cities and counties could opt out. The Obama administration has now made the program mandatory and plans to expand it to the whole country by 2013.
In a statement published Aug. 16, White House official Cecilia Munoz said the program is central to Obama’s strategy of prioritizing the removal of convicted criminals. Secure Communities, she wrote, “is a powerful tool to keep the government’s immigration enforcement resources focused where they belong.”
This argument lays bare the divide-and-conquer tactic the administration is using to win consent for its aggressive deportation policies. Immigration and Customs Enforcement reported in June that 1,026,517 immigrants had been deported since the beginning of fiscal year 2009. The number of immigrants deported under the Obama administration is higher than any preceding administration, including the Bush regime.
Saying that the Obama administration is prioritizing the removal of “criminals” is an attempt to divert attention from its record numbers of deportations by painting the deportees as “undesirable.” However, even within the group of immigrants deported under Secure Communities, most had committed only minor offenses or had not been convicted of any crime.
Social problems like crime and unemployment are the results of the failed capitalist system, not immigration. At the same time, the Obama administration tries to divert attention from the system’s failures by blaming immigrants, it does nothing to promote immigration reform that would legalize all undocumented workers.
Moreover, it aggressively intervenes in Latin America to keep neoliberal governments in power, driving people to leave their homes and come to the United States just to survive.
We must defend the rights of all immigrant workers in the United States and struggle to stop the deportations.
