VivirLatino has often written about the enforcement first immigration policy that the Obama administration has chosen to take instead of passing comprehensive immigration reform and the DREAM Act. One of the programs that Department of Homeland Security has expanded on and is planning to spread throughout the country is Secure Communities, a program that has local jails sharing with ICE the fingerprints of anyone suspected of being undocumented so that ICE can take further action.

This morning we have some of the first stats on the impact that the fingerprint sharing program has had and who are the immigrants getting caught up in this unholy alliance between the criminal (in)justice system and the civil immigration system.

– Records show that about 47,000 people have been removed or deported from the U.S. after the Homeland Security Department sifted through 3 million sets of fingerprints taken from bookings at local jails.

About one-quarter of those kicked out of the country did not have criminal records, according to government data obtained by immigration advocacy groups that have filed a lawsuit.

Doing the math, 25 percent of 47,000 people is almost 12,000 people. So that’s 12,000 people without criminal records that have been deported under Secure Communities.

Remember this program , like so many other enforcement measures was meant to target the worse of the worse in immigrant communities. This usually is defined as the killers, rapist, child molesters etc. Alot of the rhetoric used to get Secure Communities so widely accepted is based in the assumption that many of these societal monsters are in Latino immigrant communities. Combine this with the fact that policing across the country already racially profiles people of color, and you have a neat little prison/deportation industrial pipeline feeding private jails and local correctional budgets.

And let’s keep it real. While it is easy to blame the hate mongering Republicans with their talk of “anchor babies” it was the Democrats, people like Senator “biometric Chuck” Schumer who were charged with creating a comprehensive immigration reform bill and who opted to instead push their triple D immigration strategy (Detain, Deport, and Disappear) with a $600 million enforcement spending bill.

Can you feel the security in your community?