Did You Know...

{Guest post by See-Dubya}

Are the Feds catching a clue?

The recently announced ICE effort, known as “Secure Communities,” will upgrade computer technology in jails and allow local jailers to access ICE’s fingerprint database to quickly identify prisoners with immigration violations as they are booked. The $200 million in funding already allocated for the program this year would also add an unspecified number of ICE detention and removal officers, Counts confirmed.

The program would also:

• Prioritize removal of criminal immigrants based on their danger to the community.

• Expand an early parole program for non-violent immigrants who agree to deportation.

Sounds good to me. There’s some discussion of the cost of the initiative (a billion) and also a secure-borders guy claiming that hardened criminals should serve out their sentences before they’re deported. There’s a point there, because without a secure border, they can come right back over and will have effectively enjoyed a “criminal illegal alien early-release program”. I hope the “prioritizing” of these deportations focuses on, for example, murderers who are arrested for a misdemeanor and would be back on the street in a matter of days if they’re not deported immediately. As for convicted felons already serving time in prison, well, the damage is done. Make a note, let them serve out most of their sentence and then have a plane waiting to take them home the day of their release.

Unless the state decides differently. States may be tired of paying for the incarceration of illegal immigrant criminals and want to send them on home. If states want to do that, it’s their business.

I look at the cost issue this way: illegal alien criminals are in state jails because the Federal government failed in its obligation to secure and defend the border. Especially these repeat offenders who should have been thrown out and kept out. The burden should be on the Feds to pay the bill if someone gets back through and commits a crime, and the state has to arrest them.

(Hat tip to DRJ for that one.)