The Obama administration’s highest ranking immigration official last week attempted to walk back remarks intoning she supports a controversial enforcement policy that blurs lines between local police forces and the federal government.
But her efforts to clarify her position did not impress one immigrants’ rights group working to uncover more information about an emerging Department of Homeland Security immigration program.
“The fact that the President has ostensibly offered relief to some immigrants does not excuse his policies which criminalize other immigrants,” Pablo Alvarado, executive director of the National Day Laborer Organization Network (NDLON) said Friday. “The president’s pledge to target ‘felons not families’ is offensive to all those seeking to reform a criminal justice system that is plagued by a legacy of white supremacy,” he added.
The spat flared up on Thusrsday, after a House Oversight Committee hearing in which Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Director Sarah Saldaña said she supported proposals to force local governments to work with ICE.
“Thank. You. Yes. Amen,” she told Rep. Mick Mulvaney (R-S.C.). Mulvaney had asked if it would “help you if we clarified the law to make it clear that it was mandatory that those local communities cooperate with you.”
In November, however, DHS announced plans to scrap a local-federal cooperation program called Secure Communities. Through the initiative, ICE would ask local authorities to detain undocumented immigrants until they could be remanded to the custody of immigration enforcement agents.
As The Huffington Post explained, some local communities had resisted this program, citing questions about abuses of civil liberties, fears about additional pressures on the prison system, and concerns that federal-local collaboration on immigration engenders mistrust “that could harm public safety.”
In a statement released Friday, Saldaña attempted to explain that her “amen” moment was in no way meant to be an endorsement of Secure Communities. She distanced ICE from “mandatory federal requirements” and said her and DHS Secretary Jeh Johnson “have now embarked upon an aggressive plan” to promote the successor to Secure Communities, the Priority Enforcement Program (PEP).
Saldaña claimed that DHS and ICE are working through PEP to gain “the trust of all elements of the community in working with law enforcement,” and that the two organizations “are also in the process of engaging local communities and stakeholders” about the program.
But the NDLON claims to have been stonewalled, thus far, in its efforts to find out more about PEP. The group–in tandem with like-minded immigrants rights organizations from all over the country–is pressuring ICE, through a Freedom of Information Act request and public demonstrations, to reveal how much it intends to work with local law enforcement through PEP.
That request, which was lodged earlier this month with ICE, claims that according to a November memo on the nascent program, “the public may still face all of the same abuses it faced under” Secure Communities, noting concerns about jurisdiction, immigration enforcement, and racial profiling.
NDLON litigation director Jessica Karp Bansal said that PEP “continues to entangle ICE with local police, leaving us with more questions than answers.”
“At a bare minimum, DHS is obligated by law to be transparent with the public about what PEP means for immigrants and their families,” she added.
NDLON officials are concerned that PEP could still lead to automatic local-federal information sharing at the point of arrest–a key aspect of Secure Communities that enabled ICE to carry out deportations en masse.
The Huffington Post noted that PEP “has not yet been fully implemented,” and that it would likely lead to fewer detentions by local law enforcement on behalf of federal officials. But under the program, in addition to the initial information sharing, ICE agents would likely request advance notice if local authorities were “set to release someone who fit deportation priorities,” the online paper reported.
Given the remaining questions it has, NDLON was furious after Thursday’s hearing.
“Director Saldaña’s recent remarks are exactly the kind of doublespeak that plagued the Secure Communities legacy for years,” Alvarado said. “Indeed, we have yet to hear anyone clarify why [Secure Communities] failed dragnet is still intact or operational, which is why we have demanded answers compelled by the Freedom of Information Act.”
