Secure Communities Starts in June

Somehow Secure Communities has been under the radar locally, even for me, and I've written about it a few times.  I just came across an event which is a picket against ICE in San Francisco.  The event info reads:

About S-Com: “Secure Communities”, beginning on June 1st, 2010, is a new police/ICE collaboration program that will automatically investigate the immigration status of anyone, citizen or non-citizen, who is arrested and fingerprinted for any crime, no matter the severity, by electronically crosschecking their fingerprints against an ICE database, then holding them in jail for ICE to detain them.

Considering this is very complimentary to SB1070, you'd think more people would be aware of it and talking about it.  Basically, SB1070 further criminalizes migrants in AZ, thereby creating more "criminal aliens" to which Secure Communities applies.  According to Border Lines blog:

Central to the mission of Secure Communities is the removal of criminal aliens. It is not commonly understood in the immigration debate that ICE’s definition of criminal aliens includes both legal and illegal immigrants who have on at least one occasion become object of the criminal justice system. Since 2005 ICE has been increasingly charging illegal border crossers with criminal violations that result in sentencing and imprisonment in federal prisons.

 Using the term "criminal" seeks to justify the targeting of the migrants caught up in S-Com.  This is part of the strategy.  For example, during ICE's Operation Return to Sender, they purported to target criminals- the violent criminals, but also those involved in identity theft.  But most of the arrests of people were absent of evidence of any crimes committed.