The Connecticut State Senate voted unanimously on Friday to substantially limit cooperation between local police departments and federal deportation officials. The House already approved the bill. It will now move to the governor, who has vowed to sign it. The state will be the first in the country to pass a version of the so-called Trust Act, which prohibits local authorities from detaining most non-citizens at the request of Immigration and Customs Enforcement unless the individual has been convicted of a felony or was already ordered deported. The bill comes in response to the Se Communities program, a federal-state data sharing program that sends finger print records from local arrests to the federal government. Though ICE has consistently claimed that it uses the program to target people with criminal convictions, over half of those removed from the country under the program were charged with no crime or a minor violation.
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