A\nfederal district judge appointed by Barack Obama has shackled a program that\nthe Obama administration used to detain criminal aliens.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Judge Andre Birotte Jr., issued a permanent injunction<\/a> barring U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) from using fingerprint databases when making detainer requests to local police.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Birotte\u2019s ruling blows a hole in the Secure Communities<\/a> program initiated by President George W. Bush and continued under President Obama. Under that program, when persons were arrested and booked into jail, their fingerprints were sent to the FBI and ICE. If the individual was an illegal alien ICE would ask local authorities to hold the suspect until it could take custody. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Previously\nObama\u2019s U.S. Attorney in Los Angeles, Birotte on Friday asserted that the\ndatabases often contained \u201cincomplete data, significant errors, or were not\ndesigned to provide information that would be used to determine a person\u2019s\nremovability.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n John\nMorton, Obama’s first ICE director, called Secure Communities “the future\nof immigration enforcement” because it “focuses our resources on\nidentifying and removing the most serious criminal offenders first and\nforemost.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n A Department of\nJustice spokesman criticized Birotte\u2019s ruling, saying, \u201cDetainers are critical to the Department of\nHomeland Security\u2019s efforts to remove thousands of criminal aliens each year.\nDetainers use one of the best features of our law-enforcement system:\ngood-faith cooperation between federal immigration officers and their local law\nenforcement partners to keep dangerous criminals out of our communities. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cMany\ncourts across the country have correctly concluded that this cooperation is\nlawful and have rejected legal challenges to the use of detainers. This\ndecision wrongly breaks with those many decisions and puts our communities at\nrisk.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n But\nBirotte wasn\u2019t done. He also barred ICE\nfrom issuing detainers in states where there isn\u2019t an explicit statute\nauthorizing civil immigration arrests on detainers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The ruling effectively blocks detainers in the federal court system\u2019s Central District of California. The Los Angeles Times<\/a> called that designation significant because the\u00a0Pacific Enforcement Response Center, located in the Central District, is the ICE hub from which agents send detainer requests to 43 states, Guam, and Washington, D.C. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Overall, ICE lodged more\nthan 160,000 detainers with local law enforcement agencies during fiscal 2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Another point of interest: In 2017, Judge Birotte temporarily halted the Trump administration\u2019s travel ban<\/a> on countries with terrorist connections. The ban was upheld<\/a> on appeal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Americans can only hope\nthat Birotte\u2019s latest spasms of judicial activism will receive similar\ntreatment from higher courts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A federal district judge appointed by Barack Obama has shackled a program that the Obama administration used to detain criminal aliens. Judge Andre Birotte Jr., issued a permanent injunction barring U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) from using fingerprint databases when making detainer requests to local police. Birotte\u2019s ruling blows a hole in the Secure<\/p>\n