Wednesday, May 20, 2009
By Penny Starr, Senior Staff Writer
(CNSNews.com) - President Barack Obama has asked Congress for a 30 percent increase in funding for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) “Secure Communities” program – a program launched in March 2008 by the Bush administration to help local jails identify inmates who are in the United States illegally so they can be deported when their prison sentences are completed.
A 2008 fact sheet about the program reported that ICE, which is a part of the Department of Homeland Security, checked the immigration status of “100 percent” of inmates in state and federal prisons, but only 10 percent of the more than 3,000 local jails in the United States were checking to see if criminals in their facilities were in the country illegally.
Obama included in his proposed 2010 budget $200 million for the program, a 30 percent increase from last year’s funding.
Congress allocated $1.4 billion for ICE criminal alien enforcement for fiscal year 2009, according to ICE.
“Secure Communities” allows local law enforcement access to FBI and ICE fingerprint (biometric) databases for use in determining inmates’ immigration status. Inmates who have not been fingerprinted by federal or state agencies will not be identified through the program.
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