Obama’s Amnesty Plan Also Ends Program for Enforcing Immigration Laws

12/17/2014

(CNSNews.com) – Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson issued a series of memorandums on the same day the President Barack Obama announced he would takeexecutive action to protect millions of illegal aliens from being deported, including ending Secure Communities, the partnership between federal, state and local law enforcement to facilitate the enforcement of the nation’s immigration laws.

“The Secure Communities program, as we know it, will be discontinued,” the first line of Johnson’s Nov. 20 memo reads.

The memo is directed to DHS’s Office of Civil Rights and Civil Liberties; Thomas Winkowski, acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE); and Philip McNamara, assistant secretary for intergovernmental affairs.

“The goal of Secure Communities was to more effectively indentify and faciliatate the removal of criminal aliens in the custody of state a local law enforcement agencies,” the memo stated.

“But the reality is the program has attracted a great deal of criticism, is widely misunderstood, and is embroiled in litigation; its very name has become a symbol for general hostility toward the enforcement of our immigration laws," it added.

“Governors, mayors, and state and local law enforcement officials around the country have increasingly refused to cooperate with the program, and many have issued executive orders or signed laws prohibiting such cooperation,” the memo stated.

“A number of federal courts have rejected the authority of state and local law enforcement agencies to detain immigrants pursuant to federal detainers issued under the current Secure Communities program," it stated.

“The overarching goal of Secure Communities remains in my view a valid and important law enforcement objective, but a fresh start and a new program are necessary,” the memo states.

Johnson directs the memo recipients to come up with a program that still allows local, state and federal law enforcement to share biometric data to identify criminals but limits the transfer of detainees to federal custody of only those illegal aliens convicted of certain crimes or one who “poses a danger to national security.”

But according to the ICE website, Secure Communities has proved highly effective.

“More than 283,000 convicted criminal aliens have been removed as a result of Secure Communities interoperability, by which the FBI automatically sends fingerprints of anyone arrested or booked by police for a state or local criminal offense to DHS to check against its immigration and enforcement records so that ICE can determine whether that person is a criminal alien or falls under ICE's civil immigration enforcement priorities,” the website stated.

“Since its inception in 2008 with 14 jurisdictions, Secure Communities has expanded to all 3,181 jurisdictions within 50 states, the District of Columbia, and five (5) U.S. Territories. Full implementation was completed on January 22, 2013,” the website stated.

John Feere, legal policy analyst at the Center for Immigration Studies and author of a recent analysis on the Johnson memos, said they show that the Obama administration is using the executive branch to unilaterally change immigration law.

"These memos are a reminder that one can't think of Obama's lawless amnesty scheme as settled law,” Feere said in a statement issued with the analysis. “Not only are these plans currently a work-in-progress, any provision can change on a whim or be expanded in the future with nothing more than Obama's pen."

The full extent of Obama’s amnesty plan may not be known until it is in place, Feere said.

“It is very possible that Americans will not know how Obama's new immigration scheme will operate until it is already up and running,” Feere said.

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