By N.C. AizenmanWashington Post Staff WriterFriday, November 13, 2009
D.C. police will be the next department to take part in a federal program whose ultimate aim is to check the immigration status of every person booked into a local jail, homeland security officials announced Thursday.
The program, known as Secure Communities, matches inmates' fingerprints against a federal database so that federal authorities can identify and possibly remove deportable illegal immigrants before they are released from custody.
Similar checks are done at all 1,200 federal and state prisons. But authorities have lacked the ability to do them across the nation's 3,100 local jails.
The Bush administration launched the program as a pilot project in October 2008, and it is being expanded under President Obama as part of an effort to focus enforcement on illegal immigrants who commit crimes, rather than those who otherwise obey the law.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/12/AR2009111209444_pf.html
posted by: Verenice Andrade
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