is Secure Communities for your town or city?

Secure Communities:

Identifying and Removing Criminal Aliens to Keep our Communities Safe


Secure Communities is ICE's comprehensive strategy to improve and modernize the identification and removal of criminal aliens from the United States. It helps ICE transform criminal alien immigration enforcement agency wide, while satisfying a congressional mandate to increase information sharing between federal agencies.

Strategic Goals
Identify aliens in law enforcement custody, through modernized technology, continual data analysis and timely information sharing;
Prioritize enforcement action to apprehend and remove criminal aliens who pose the greatest threat to public safety; and
Transform criminal alien immigration enforcement to efficiently identify, process and remove criminal aliens from the United States.


see more info on the secure communities program at ICE

Secure Communities for your town ?

Colorado officials became interested in the program after an illegal immigrant from Guatemala with a long criminal record was accused of causing a car crash at a suburban Denver ice-cream shop, killing two women in a truck and a 3-year-old inside the store. Authorities say the illegal immigrant, Francis M. Hernandez, stayed off ICE's radar because he conned police with 12 aliases and two different dates of birth.

A task-force assembled after the crash recommended Secure Communities as a solution.



Under the program, the fingerprints of everyone who is booked into jail for any crime are run against FBI criminal history records and Department of Homeland Security immigration records to determine who is in the country illegally and whether they've been arrested previously. Most jurisdictions are not included in the program, but Immigration and Customs Enforcement has been expanding the initiative.

Since 2007, 467 jurisdictions in 26 states have joined. ICE has said it plans to have it in every jail in the country by 2013. Secure Communities is currently being phased into the places where the government sees as having the greatest need for it based on population estimates of illegal immigrants and crime statistics.