Report Challenges Attack on Secure Communities -- Finds No Evidence of Racial Profiling

WASHINGTON, March 7, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- A new report from the Center for Immigration Studies examines the outcomes of Immigration and Custom's Enforcement's (ICE) Secure Communities program and how those outcomes have been misleadingly described in one widely-circulated study published by the Earl Warren Institute at the University of California, Berkeley Law School. The Center's report, second in a three-part series, uses the same database of actual case histories provided by ICE as the Warren Institute report.

The groups that first obtained the ICE records have claimed that they reveal a disturbing pattern of abuse of authority by ICE, including wrongful arrests of thousands of U.S. citizens, a pattern of racial profiling against Latinos, and denial of due process for aliens in removal proceedings. These allegations have been uncritically passed on by major news media outlets and repeated by members of Congress. While the database does provide an interesting and relatively rare snapshot of the ICE caseload, the Center found that the records did not support any of the racial profiling allegations.

The Center's findings are online at http://cis.org/SC-by-the-numbers-critique-part2:

• The Warren Institute report asserts that 93 percent of the individuals apprehended were "Latino." Yet ICE databases do not contain information relating to a person's race or ethnicity. Such judgments of race and ethnicity based solely on nationality are speculative and prone to error.
• The Warren Institute authors claimed there is ethnic bias in the operation of Secure Communities because 93 percent of arrested aliens in the dataset were Latino, while only 77 percent of the illegal-immigrant population nationwide is Latino. This is a faulty analysis because most of cases in the database were drawn from just three southwest border states (Arizona, Texas, and California), where the illegal-immigrant population is disproportionately Latino.
• We found that the presumed ethnic profile of the cases in this database (based on country of nationality) very closely matches the ethnic profile of the actual population of criminal aliens nationwide and also in the states where most of the SC arrests took place. According to a variety of government and independent sources, the population of criminal aliens nationwide and in Texas, California, and Arizona, where most of the arrests in the database took place, is approximately 90 percent Latino, which is nearly identical to the percentage of Latino detainees in the database (93 percent).
• We found that the percentage of presumed Latino arrests in the database (93 percent) was lower than the percentage of Latino DHS arrests and removals nationwide (94-98 percent). If Secure Communities is inviting racial profiling against Latinos, then the percentage should be higher, not lower.
• Neither the information in the database nor in other reputable academic or government studies supports the Warren Institute allegations that the Secure Communities program is having a negative effect on community policing and masking illegal racial-profiling practices.

Part 1 of the Center's look at the Warren Institute report is at http://cis.org/SC-by-the-numbers-critique-part1.

The Center for Immigration Studies is an independent research institute that examines the impact of immigration on the United States.

Contacts: Jessica Vaughan, [email protected], (508) 346-3380
Bryan Griffith, [email protected], (202) 630-6533

SOURCE Center for Immigration Studies