For nearly three years, the Obama administration has advertised the Se Communities program as a targeted enforcement tool that identifies “dangerous criminal aliens” for deportation. Over and over, federal officials have insisted that the program’s focus would be chiefly limited to those immigrants whose criminal convictions show that they pose a danger to public safety. But that’s not the case. In practice, Se Communities is a dragnet that fails to distinguish between felons convicted of serious crimes and nonviolent arrestees facing civil immigration violations. In California alone, more than half of the 75,000 people deported under the program since it began in 2009 had no criminal history or had only misdemeanor convictions. Under the program, local law enforcement agencies are required to send the fingerprints of everyone booked into local jails to the FBI, which checks them against criminal databases….
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