Reacting to news that the Department of Homeland Security is considering a “fresh look” at the Secure Communities program as a way to reduce deportations, Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions pointed out to Breitbart News Friday that the head of a law enforcement agency cannot bend to the demands of law breakers.
The Secure Communities program allows law enforcement to run the fingerprints of people they arrest through a federal database to see it they have any immigration violations. If such an immigration violation is found, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) can consider deportation.
During an interview on PBS’s News Hour, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson said that he believes the program “will and it should” be changed.
“In my judgment, Secure Communities should be an efficient way to work with state and local law enforcement to reach the removal priorities that we have, those who are convicted of something,” he said.
According to Sessions, whose office earlier in the day dispatched a chronicle of the ways the Obama administration has worked to “dismantle immigration enforcement,” Johnson’s assertion that DHS will change the program “defies all logic.”
“He says he will do so because it’s ‘controversial’ among amnesty and open borders activists. It cannot be the practice of the head of a law enforcement agency to stop sound enforcement practices whenever the violators complain,” Sessions wrote in an email to Breitbart. “Surely he knows no law or legitimate policy is violated when an illegal alien, apprehended in the course of a law enforcement officer’s normal duties, is reported to federal authorities (whether before or after conviction). Whatever enforcement action is taken from there remains in the hands of the Homeland Security.”
Sessions argued that the pushed to alter the Secure Communities program — which ironically is touted on ICE’s webpage — is due to President Obama’s immigration agenda.
“Obviously, Secretary Johnson is following a clear directive from President Obama to further the ongoing collapse of America’s immigration system,” he wrote. “If this threat of action is designed to extort his amnesty bill out of Congress, it is doomed to fail. Americans will not stand for it.”
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