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Immigrants renew fight with Nutter amid increasingly weird national controversy
Activists ratchet up pressure on the city: stop giving immigration agents access to the police computer system.
Immigrants renew fight with Nutter amid increasingly weird national controversy
Philadelphia participates in a controversial immigrant deportation program called Secure Communities because then-Governor Rendell signed an agreement because local officials signed an agreement with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) saying we would (in most states, the governor signed). Or, that was the story until last week, when ICE said that they were canceling the agreements with states, called Memorandums of Understanding.
We are canceling the agreements, they said. And we will continue the program.
“Once a state or local law enforcement agency voluntarily submits fingerprint data to the federal government, no agreement with the state is legally necessary for one part of the federal government to share it with another part. For this reason, ICE has decided to terminate all existing Secure Communities MOAs,” ICE Director John Morton wrote in a letter to governors.
(More from activists here.)
Secure Communities gives ICE access to the fingerprints of arrestees that states have long already shared with the FBI. But the program is controversial: it is ostensibly focused on dangerous criminal aliens but has resulted in the deportation of large numbers of non-criminal or low-level criminal immigrants.
As I discussed at the Guardian, ICE had long promoted Secure Communities as a voluntary program. But then local, state and congressional officials began to protest. New York, Massachusetts and Illinois pulled out. And then ICE said: well, I know you thought that this agreement was a prerequisite to implementing the program that we agreed to together, but it’s actually not voluntary.
As long as states were happy with the program, it was voluntary. Now that states are protesting Secure Communities, the federal government has the authority to implement the program unilaterally. The thing that we agreed to do together is no longer an agreement now that you don’t like it: we are imposing it.
Sorry for the confusion.
Though Secure Communities is not subject to local control, Philadelphia does voluntarily participate in a separate ICE program: the city gives ICE real-time access to the police’s computerized arraignment system (called PARS)--sort of like a Secure Communities-plus.
The Philadelphia City Council unanimously passed a resolution condemning Secure Communities and calling for the city to deny ICE access to PARS. Daily News columnist Stu Bykofsky was, of course, grouchy. But Mayor Michael Nutter barely responded.
The PARS contract expires on August 31, and activists are ramping up pressure on Mayor Nutter. Yesterday the story got picked up in the Huffington Post, which reports that Tea Party activists are lobbying the Mayor to stay in the program.
The conflict pits immigrants, who made it possible for Philly to grow for the first time in half a century, against the Tea Party, which has almost no presence here. But when it comes to immigration, Mayor Nutter appears to be more attuned to White House pressure than to the demands of any local constituency.
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