Last night, Judge Shira Scheindlin ordered the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency to publicly disclose by November 1 a previously withheld internal memorandum that advocates believe will shed light on the agency’s legal justification for turning Secure Communities into a mandatory immigration enforcement program.

You can read the order here (PDF)

The decision follows motions for summary judgment filed by all parties in NDLON v. ICE about the memorandum. The government claimed the memorandum was exempt from disclosure under the attorney-client and deliberative process privileges. Plaintiffs the National Day Laborers Organizing Network, Center for Constitutional Rights, and Cardozo School of Law Kathryn O. Greenberg Immigration Justice Clinic argued the memo was improperly kept secret from the public in the midst of important policy decisions related to Secure Communities. Indeed, this summer, opposition to Secure Communities reached new levels with the Governors of Illinois, Massachusetts, and New York formally rejecting the program. In response, ICE announced that all of its Memorandum of Agreements with States were dissolved and that the program would be imposed unilaterally. Despite serious questions from States, local jurisdictions, and advocates about ICE’s legal authority to make the program mandatory, the agency continued to withhold information about its legal reasoning and sought to keep the legal authority memorandum secret.

I’m hoping some of the legal heads from VivirLatino would offer up what the impact could be were it revealed that ICE explicitly meant this policy to be mandatory from inception but chose to deceive states and counties into signing on by implying that participation was optional.

In the end, I am not sure if it even matters. The fact remains that as it stands now, Secure Communities is one part of an overall national immigration policy that is focused on keeping deportation numbers up, while keeping immigrant communities, especially people of color immigrant communities down.