Immigrant advocacy groups today demanded changes in or an end to the agreements that allow local police officers to apply federal immigration laws, in light of a report from the Department of Homeland Security that questions their practices. 

The report published on April 2 evaluates the application of Program 287 (g), which delegates the execution of federal civil and criminal immigration laws to local and state police departments. 

The inquiry, based on interviews with police officers and employees, direct observation, and the study of documents, concludes that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) "has not instituted controls to promote the effectiveness of the operations and to confront the risks involved" with this program.  In concrete terms, the document indicates ICE "does not ensure that resources are directed toward those foreigners who are likely to pose the greatest risk to public and community security;" this is one of the agency's priorities as directed by the White House ever since Barack Obama assumed the presidency. 

Nevertheless, only 9 percent of the group of arrests taken as a sample concerned immigrants with a criminal record classified as highest risk by the public security authorities, that is, those charged with serious crimes such as drug dealing or violence like murder, armed robberies or rape. 

On the contrary, most of the arrests were classified at the two lowest security risk levels, related to minor drug possession offenses, fraud or money laundering, or other types of lesser offenses. 

The report explains cases such as that of one person, the victim of a traffic accident, innocent of any offense and with no charge against him, who was taken to a detention center by local police officers to wait for federal agents to arrive in order to determine his immigration status. 

Other flaws uncovered by the investigation are the lack of periodic supervisory committees, the inconsistency of agent training, and the use by local police of federal authorizations for the detention of undocumented immigrants when the agreements limit them solely to identification. 

The Director of Immigration and National Campaigns at the National Council of La Raza, Clarissa Martínez De Castro, lamented in a communiqué that the report's conclusions corroborate her institution's warnings.  This program is, in her opinion, "inefficient, subject to abuses, and responsible for creating an atmosphere of fear in the [immigrant] communities throughout the country."

The solution proposed by La Raza and other groups is to terminate these agreements, which were first put into effect in 2002, amplified through 2006, and revised in 2009 on account of the criticisms they received because of the way they were implemented. 

The new declaration was intended to clarify the program's objectives by means of written and signed agreements that defined who on a local level could carry out the processes of identification, detention and deportation of undocumented immigrants, and how these tasks were to be done. 

But the report is reinvigorating pro-immigrant groups, who are denouncing the persistent strategic problems that have been a drag on ICE for many years.  "It is time to stop diverting funds, which ought to be dedicated to the fight against crime, from a failed strategy based on the fantasy that we can deport people and in this way to solve a broken immigration system," Martínez emphasized. 

The Executive Director of the Center for Community Change, Deepak Bhargava, lamented that "this is not the first time that an investigation of this agency's practices has found failures in implementation and supervision of the 287 (g) program.

"The list of the agency's deficiencies is alarming; they lead to the separation of families, the detention of people who are seeking asylum and a loss of confidence in the agency whose job it is to keep the country safe," he stated. 

The report sets out 33 recommendations for ICE, which have been accepted by the agency except for the one to provide information on the circumstances, the race or the ethnicity of those arrested during their detentions.