Central to all faith traditions are the principles of the common good, human dignity and love for one’s neighbor. In many of our sacred texts the value of welcoming the stranger is an explicit mandate and primary tenet of our faith as in the Abrahamic traditions where it reads as below:
“You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” (Exodus 22:21).
However, U.S. immigration enforcement policies have only become harsher and more inhumane in recent years. Immigrant communities are increasingly targeted, profiled, apprehended, detained and deported, creating an environment of increasing fear. Secure Communities allows ICE to identify, process, and remove immigrants incarcerated in federal, state, and local jails. This leads further criminalization of migrants wherein minor violations, often traffic stops, turns into an investigation of citizenship status where many are therein detained. Furthermore, low-priority non-violent offenders or even citizens are being funneled into this program needlessly separating hundreds of thousands of families. This is done in the face of Department of Homeland Security’s own task force report that concluded that S.Comm sows mistrust of police and makes communities less safe.
In a speech ICE Director John Morton gave to the International Association of Chiefs of Police on October 25, 2011 he boasted of the total 396,960 individuals deported, the largest in the agencies history[1], but what about the 180,208 individuals who had been neither convicted nor arrested for any criminal offense? They are funneled into an unjust deportation system without rights to due process. Tragically, many of those removed in this category were U.S. residents of many years. Many of them are parents, wives and husbands whose families are left broken in the wake of an unmerciful policy.
“They treat you like the worst of criminals when in reality you have done nothing besides drive your car to work in order to survive. You do this without a license because the system does not allow it.[2]”- Fernando, Arizona
Programs such as Secure Communities create an atmosphere of xenophobia that has proven detrimental for the all immigrant and refugee communities, regardless of their documentation status. As people of faith we are called by a moral imperative to take an ethical stance for just policies and speak out against these enforcement practices hurting so many through separation of families, breaking apart whole communities and takes advantage of marginalized communities for political gain.
Our faith now calls us to be part of changing this unjust policy and ask that Secure Communities be permanently halted and recommend the following:
1) The Secure Communities program should be ended.
2) The Department of Justice Office of Inspector General should begin an investigation into the FBI’s role in Secure Communities.
3) Criticism of Secure Communities should be applied to inform changes to other ICE ACCESS programs, and the entanglement of local criminal law enforcement and federal civil immigration functions should be stopped and reversed.
4) States and localities should not be compelled to participate in immigration enforcement programs, including the forwarding of fingerprints and other biometric information to the Department of Homeland Security
We cannot build strong communities if they’re being torn apart. Instead we ask for a more viable solution of working towards a humane comprehensive immigration reform that can provide a pathway to citizenship for so many deserving members of our society.
This blogpost is based on a faith leaders’ letter to the Subcommittee on Immigration Policy and Enforcement, U.S. House of Representatives, Washington, D.C. Click here for the Faith Letter to End S-Comm with signatories.
