Secure Communities

Teresa Gomez, a Salvadoran woman in her 20s, and Margaret Ashong, a grandmother from Ghana, endured regular beatings, threats and insults by the fathers of their children. Like many battered immigrant women in the Washington area, they mostly suffered in silence, fearful that if they went to the police... Continue »

News reports surfaced last week that a fourteen-year-old girl from Dallas, an American citizen who did not speak a word of Spanish, was deported to Colombia. The reports say Jakadrien Turner gave an assumed name -- we don't know why -- that matched a name in a Secure Communities... Continue »

Two years after the Secure Communities immigration enforcement program was implemented, federal officials determined that choices available to local law enforcement agencies that wished to decline or limit their participation would be "streamlined" or "eliminated," making the information-sharing program mandatory, according to a memo recently made public. Continue »

In the latest showdown with the federal government — albeit a more symbolic one — the Board of Supervisors today approved a nonbinding resolution that asks the Sheriff's Department and Juvenile Probation Department to not spend any local money when detaining suspected undocumented immigrants at the request of U.S.... Continue »

Over the past several months, the controversy around DHS' Secure Communities deportation program has grown exponentially as advocates for immigrants and victims of crime, state governors and law enforcement professionals, and even a DHS-appointed task force arrived at a serious conclusion... Continue »