Last week, the Department of Homeland Security and Immigration Customs Enforcement launched a new program aimed at identifying undocumented immigrants held in county and city jails, Congress Daily reports. The program will allow local law enforcement agencies to automatically compare the fingerprints of their prisoners against FBI criminal databases and DHS immigration databases. When law enforcement officials run a check on fingerprints against the FBI’s Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System, a check will automatically be done against DHS’ own Automated Biometric Identification System.
ICE plans on having the program operation first with county jails and then with city jails. An ICE spokesperson said that the program will “be measured and careful in our rollout, but we’re going to do it as aggressively as possible” and said that full implementation will take three and a half years. The operation will also require substantially more funding from Congress to cover additional costs, such as increased detention capacity and transport services. ICE estimates the total cost could be $3 billion a year, which is more than half of the current total annual budget of the entire agency.
While immigration advocates agree that undocumented immigrants who have committed serious crimes should be deported, many fear that the program would not allow some noncitizens to be given proper legal protections. “Our concern is making sure that people have access to counsel or are advised of their rights,” said Kerri Talbot, associate director of advocacy for the American Immigration Lawyers Association. “Sometimes people are pressured into signing away their rights by basically stipulating that they are removable from the United States,” she said.
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One of the heaviest-traversed section of US-Mexico border has seen the number of border crossings of undocumented immigrants dip significantly in the past year. The Arizona Daily Star reports that the 262-mile Tucson sector has seen substantial decreases in this fiscal year in apprehensions, border deaths, and pounds of marijuana seized—three key indicators of establishing the intensity of border activity.
“It’s a sign that we’re on the right path,” said sector Chief Robert Gilbert. “We had success in ’08 and I think our numbers prove that out, but we are long ways from saying we are where we want to be with border control.” Despite many immigration experts attributing the decrease in border crossings to the economic slowdown in the US, Gilbert believes it has only played a minor role in the decreases. “The service industry, where the majority of the people that are trying to come illegally work, has not suffered a downturn,” Gilbert said.
The Tucson Sector accounts for 13% of the US-Mexico border. In fiscal year 2008, the sector accounted for 50% of marijuana seized, 45% of apprehensions, and 43% of border deaths. Each has seen a slight decrease from fiscal year 2007.
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While the numbers of arrests of undocumented immigrants has decreased among the US-Mexico border, new ICE figures reveal that a number of US cities have posted record high numbers of arrests for immigrants with criminal backgrounds. The Daily News of Boston reports that that city saw the largest ever number of immigrant violator arrests with 162 arrests. Also reporting record-breaking numbers were Houston, Tex.; Newark, NJ; and Washington DC.
ICE insists that the rise in immigrant arrests in urban areas is the result of the agency’s Operation Community Shield, a program introduced in 2005, which targets violent transnational street gangs, many members of whom are foreigners with criminal histories and are here illegally. Nationwide, the operation has netted a total of 11,106 undocumented immigrants that are members of street gangs.
While both immigrant advocates and those who favor harsher restrictions on immigration have praised ICE’s program as a good way to get rid of criminal activities, some immigration advocates worry the raids often target any undocumented immigrants. “Sometimes, they end up getting people who are not criminals,” said Laura Medrano, director of the Northeast chapter of LULAC. “ICE has to go after criminals and deport them.”
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State labor authorities for Iowa recently levied nearly $10 million in fines against Agriprocessors Inc., a recently-raided meatpacking plant where nearly 400 undocumented immigrants were arrested in a May 2008 raid, The New York Times reports. The fines were issued for illegal paycheck deductions the company made for protective jackets and other uniforms that packinghouse workers were required to wear. Iowa inspectors found 96,436 deductions for uniforms from the paychecks of 2,001 workers, which brought fines of $100 per incident. Aggriprocessors was fined an additional $339,700 for illegally deducting over $72,000 from the paychecks of 1,073 workers for “sales tax.” The number and amount of fines have caused the plant to file for bankruptcy court protection.
The fines are the latest in a series of punitive actions against the meatpacking plant. Last month, the Iowa Attorney General’s office brought criminal charges against Agriprocessors for over 9,300 misdemeanor child labor violations, involving 32 underage workers. According to these charges, the company hired workers as young as 13 and put them to work using saws, knives and other equipment prohibited for young workers.
Also last week, a human resources manager from the Postville, Iowa meatpacking plant pled guilty in federal court to harboring undocumented immigrants and identity theft. Manager Laura Althouse, according to her plea, helped undocumented immigrant employees obtain false resident visa numbers so they could be hired at the plant. Mrs. Althouse is the first Agriprocessors manager to be convicted on the identity theft charge, which was also brought against many of the plant’s workers. In plea bargains, over 200 immigrants pled guilty to lesser charges of documented fraud. Most finished serving their sentences of five months in prison earlier this month, and were deported.
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Two managers at a New Bedford, Mass., leather-goods factory raided last year by ICE agents last month pled guilty to charges that they knowingly employed undocumented immigrants, The Associated Press reports. 56-year-old Dilia Costa, co-manager of Michael Bianco Inc., pled guilty to charges including harboring undocumented immigrants. The other manager, 42-year old Gloria Melo pled guilty to charges of knowingly allowing undocumented immigrants to work at their factory.
Neither Costa nor Melo will serve prison time of a federal judge were to approve their tentative plea deals. If approved, the deal would sentence Costa to two years probation, including six months home confinement. Melo would only have to pay a $500 fine. Both are scheduled to be sentenced in January.
The factory for Michael Bianco Inc. was raided by ICE agents in March 2007 and netted 361 detained immigrants who were allegedly present illegally. The raid, like many other ICE raids in recent months, have come under criticism from immigration advocates who argue that the raids have separated families and placed the safety of detainees’ children at risk and without proper care.
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Last month, researchers studying security measures of the newly-introduced US border-crossing cards discovered that the cards are subject to security weaknesses, particularly ease of duplication as well as accessing or disabling the cardholder’s information. The Wall Street Journal reports that the study, conducted by RSA Laboratories at the University of Washington, examined state and federal ID cards issued for the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative, and are scheduled to be distributed this June.
According to the study, researchers were easily able to clone an existing card, creating a duplicate the card’s publicly readable data. The study indicates that reproduction for this card would be easy in part because DHS’s travel cards don’t call for any anticopying features that are commonly used in other official US documentations and currency. The study indicates, however, that the replication was only based on the card’s aesthetics. While the duplicates RSA produced appear identical, they were not created with the original cards’ transmission chip or their scannable smartcard strips.
The study also found that the cards’ private information—which is stored on a small chip embedded in the card—can be remotely extracted with relatively cheap computer equipment, and that tests conducted showed that the information can be extracted from the card using this equipment from as far as 30 yards away.
RSA’s study showed that information vulnerability issues exist not just from obtaining a card’s data, but disabling its use. Research on the radio-enabled travel cards, requested by some states in an effort to make identification checks less time-consuming, revealed that malicious transmission frequencies can act as a killswitch for the cards’ radio chips, disabling or erasing the data stored on the chips.
RSA Laboratories, a leader in the field of research in computer-security solutions, suggests that DHS take steps to address the card’s flaws. “There is a critical infrastructure evolving around RFID (Radio Frequency Identification),” warns RSA researcher Ari Juels. “If we don’t build in protections now, it will be much harder to build them in later.”
RSA’s published results of the study can be found on their website.
