Secure or Insecure Communities?

• Published date: 01 May 2014
• Date: 01 May 2014
• Author: Charis E. Kubrin
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1745-9133.12086

POLICY ESSAY

IMMIGRATION ENFORCEMENT,

POLICING, AND CRIME

Secure or Insecure Communities?

Seven Reasons to Abandon the Secure Communities

Program

Charis E. Kubrin

University of California, Irvine

The study “Immigration Enforcement, Policing, and Crime: Evidencefrom the Se-

cure Communities Program”by Treyger,Chalfin, and Loeffler (2014, this issue) is

a welcome addition to the literature, and one that is timely.Importantly, the study

investigates the effects of the Secure Communities program on local crime rates and on the

arrest behavior of municipal police agencies across the UnitedStates. As described by Treyger

et al., Secure Communities is a program launched by the federal government to improve

the efficiency of interior immigration enforcement and to enhance the capacity for target-

ing deportable individuals with criminal convictions, referred to as “criminal aliens.” In

particular, Secure Communities provides a system that automatically transmits and checks

fingerprints against the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Automated Biometric

Identification System (IDENT), which contains information on known immigration vio-

lators, known and suspected terrorists, and “criminal aliens,” among others. A fingerprint

match prompts Law Enforcement Support Center (LESC) officers from Immigration and

Customs Enforcement (ICE) to investigate, determine the individual’s immigration status,

and forward their conclusion to the relevant ICE field office. If ICE decides to take action, a

detainer is issued to the law enforcement agency requesting that the individual be detained

for up to 48 hours so that ICE can assume custody.

Secure Communities is unprecedented in scope. Since its inception in 2008 with

just 14 jurisdictions, Secure Communities has expanded to all 3,181 jurisdictions within

50 states, the District of Columbia, and five U.S. territories. Full implementation was

I thank Nick Branic for comments on an earlier draft of this essay. Direct correspondence to Charis E. Kubrin,

Department of Criminology, Law and Society, University of California, Irvine, Social Ecology II, Rm. 3379, Irvine,

CA, 92697 (e-mail: ckubrin@uci.edu).

DOI:10.1111/1745-9133.12086 C2014 American Society of Criminology 323

Criminology & Public Policy rVolume 13 rIssue 2

Policy Essay Immigration Enforcement, Policing, and Crime

achieved on January 22, 2013. From the beginning, proponents have maintained that

Secure Communities enables a more efficient system for identifying “criminal aliens,” and

they have predicted that the program will reduce the risk that law enforcement agencies will

release dangerous and deportable “criminal aliens” into the community, thereby enhancing

public safety. Have their predictions borne out?

According to the findings of Treyger et al. (2014), they have not. As the authors

empirically demonstrate, “There are no statistically discernible effects of activation on any

category of crime under analysis . . . the program is associated with reductions in murder,

rape, larceny, and motor vehicle theft that are well less than 1%. Effects on burglary and

aggravated assault are somewhat larger but not significant at conventional levels.” Treyger

et al. further show that the size of the immigrant population in the jurisdiction does not

alter this finding, as jurisdictions with relatively higher shares of foreign-born residents

did not experience statistically discernible reductions in their crime rates after activation

and neither did jurisdictions with medium and low shares of foreign-born residents. They

conclude that “[t]he absence of any detectable influence on these common index crimes

bears on the controversy surrounding Secure Communities because it is these crimes, rather

than other more minor violations, that truly threaten public safety.” Notably, these findings

are consistent with another recent empirical investigation of Secure Communities (Cox and

Miles, 2013) and related studies on the effects of local involvement in immigration law

enforcement more generally (Kirk, Papachristos, Fagan,and Tyler,2012; Koper, Guterbock,

Woods, Taylor, and Carter, 2013).

Collectively,these findings raise serious doubt about whetherSecure Communities can

deliver on its promises. Given a lack of effectiveness, should Secure Communities be aban-

doned? My answer is unequivocally “yes.” Yet the findings of this study alone do not justify

my answer to this question. There are several additional reasons—seven to be precise—

that inform my response. These are as follows: (1) The assumptions upon which Secure

Communities was founded are flawed; (2) Secure Communities is unnecessary; (3) Secure

Communities does not target the right offenders; (4) Local law enforcement officials have

not embraced Secure Communities; (5) Secure Communities creates insecure communities;

(6) Secure Communities may increase instances of racial profiling and pretextual arrests;

and (7) Secure Communities is associated with significant human costs. In the remainder

of this essay, I discuss these reasons but not before first describing the broader context in

which Secure Communities operates—the devolution of immigration enforcement.

Devolution of Immigration Enforcement

Over the last few decades, state and local police have faced increasing demands to become

more involved in enforcing immigration laws in their communities, something to which

they had not been accustomed. Historically,immigration enforcement was left to the federal

government. But starting in the 1990s, legislation was introduced to create closer ties be-

tween local police departments and federal officials tasked with immigration enforcement.

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