The administration also expanded a Bush-era program called Secure Communities, which automatically shared data with ICE anytime someone was booked in jail. If one problem was that law enforcement officers had inconsistent criteria for contacting ICE, Secure Communities swung in the opposite direction: the fingerprints of arrestees went straight to ICE databases, and detainers were immediately issued if there was a match. In principle, this was supposed to make immigration arrests more targeted, by homing in on jails. But in practice large numbers of people were swept up in an expanding
...more

