New Secure Communities Program Allows Police to Cross Reference FBI Fingerprint Database
The Department of Homeland Security has developed a new fingerprinting program to help track illegal immigrants in this country who may have previously gotten away with everything from petty larceny to murder. Now, with the ability to compare their fingerprints locally with the national FBI criminal database, more criminals are being sent back to their countries thanks to this new criminal background check.
Though deportation of these criminals has received huge support from law makers, law enforcement, the FBI, and the Border Patrol, some critics have bad things to say about the way that these criminal background searches work. Immigrants’ rights activists claim that the program is unfairly targeting the Latino community. Jerry Gonzalez of the Georgia Association of Elected Officials was quoted in the news as stating that the program was “…open season for Latinos in Georgia.”
He contends that the program removes local law enforcement’s ability to make decisions about which people’s fingerprints to run. What this criminal background check program does is report everyone’s fingerprints to the federal government agencies who handle this program. The end result is that people with minor offenses and infractions, including minor traffic violations, are subject to deportation. Gonzalez closed his press conference statement by saying that the effect of this program is “outside the scope of what [Homeland Security Secretary Janet] Napolitano wants to accomplish.”
However, supporters of these new criminal background searches argue that the program was designed to capture and remove dangerous and violent criminals from society. The Department of Homeland Security believes that just as our own citizens have an ethical and moral code to follow, so should anyone who lives in our country; even immigrants. Should they choose to break the laws of this country, their punishment should be deportation to their home country so our taxpayers don’t have to foot the bill for jail costs.
One example given in a CNN news report dated January 8, 2010 is of a criminal who has already “racked up a lengthy rap sheet during the three years he has lived illegally in the United States.” His convictions include battery on a police officer and cruelty to children. In all, six charges are on his rap sheet, all of them violent and serious in nature. As a result of the launch of the Secure Communities criminal background check program, the convict will be deported to his native country, the Bahamas.
The program was able to catch the criminal and stop him in his tracks thanks to the way the program works. Law enforcement, locally, can now receive feedback from the FBI and the DHS so that local law enforcement is able to see their full list of offenses and not let them back into society. What was once missed due to criminals moving from town to town or even out of state has now become a non-issue; criminals will be caught no matter where they live.
Though this criminal background check program has been launched only in Georgia as a test of how well it will work, the government hopes the program will be a success and can be launched nationwide. This program also offers the hope that eventually fingerprints of US criminals can be entered into the criminal background searches database to help catch criminals on the run within our borders and put them in jail before they are released from local law enforcement’s hand and back on the streets.
