Mass. Immigrant Advocates Score a Win in S-Comm Fight

It was nice to see a victory for Massachusetts immigrants this week. Under pressure from a growing coalition of progressive organizations, Gov. Deval Patrick announced his opposition to the controversial Department of Homeland Security Secure Communities plan on Monday. S-Comm, as it was dubbed, would have mandated local police (who are generally not responsible for enforcing federal immigration law) to send the fingerprints of everyone arrested - not convicted, as the Mass. Chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union has been consistently pointing out - for any offense to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. A Mass. ACLU press release on Patrick’s decision goes on to explain that “Although S-Comm is supposed to focus on identifying and removing violent ‘Level 1’ criminals, the latest ICE statistics show that a Boston pilot of the program over the last two years has fed an astounding 45,707 names and fingerprints from everyday Bostonians - presumably mostly U.S. citizens - into ICE's growing database. In Boston, S-Comm has also led to the deportation of twice as many people with no criminal convictions as ‘Level 1’ offenders. People who have never been convicted of any crime represent 52 percent of the total number of those deported under S-Comm, with a further 15 percent committing only minor offenses."

So S-Comm, if unchallenged by Patrick, would have a) made local police responsible for immigration enforcement, b) led to the deportation of lots of non-criminal immigrants whose only offense was entering the country without papers (or overstaying tourist visas or name your minor offense), c) given lots of personal information to the DHS with little or no oversight regarding its future use, and d) not done much to deport more criminal immigrants at all. Meanwhile, S-Comm would have pitted local police against immigrant communities that they have often worked hard to develop relationships with, and made it very difficult for immigrants to consider calling the police for any reason at all - even in dangerous situations like domestic violence.

But immigrant, labor, community, religious and student activists - plus some members of the law enforcement community that disagreed with implementing S-Comm - showed up in numbers to the hearings Patrick set up around the state to “listen” to opinions about the DHS plan, barraged Patrick with letters, emails and phone calls, and pulled together a broad coalition against S-Comm that got the job done. So kudos all around. Not much else to say about this development. But at Open Media Boston, we hope to see the immigrant movement and its allies go from strength to strength in the years to come, and keep fighting until this country has the rational and just immigration system that we deserve.

If you'd like to thank Gov. Patrick for his decision, the Mass. ACLU has set up an easy way to do that here.

Jason Pramas is Editor/Publisher of Open Media Boston