ICE apparatus for matching fingerprints used in the Secure Communities program.

Lawyers that examined thousands of documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) revealed that the FBI's Secure Communities program is part of a larger plan to identify people under the name of "Next Generation Identification" or NGI.

Attorney Jessica Karp, who represents the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON), one of the organizations that requested the documents, explained that NGI has a "Big Brother" agenda that puts personal privacy at risk for citizens and non-citizens alike.

"For the FBI, Secure Communities is the first step in building a database with everyone's biometric information, with the aim of providing this information to all federal agencies and the Department of Defense. Everyone feels the consequences because personal privacy is at risk," said Karp.

NDLON, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and the Cardozo Law School Immigration Justice Clinic petitioned the FBI for access to the documents that have to do with the FBI's participation in the controversial Secure Communities program, also known as S-Comm. The advocacy groups discovered that the FBI is still driving S-Comm forward and wants to make participation compulsory.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is in charge of S-Comm, whereby ICE obtains the immigration status of inmates at local prisons and is able to deport them.

S-Comm is supposed to center on immigrants with criminal records. However, results have shown that many undocumented people have been deported for misdemeanors, such as traffic violations or illegally selling goods on the street. Activists believe that S-Comm jeopardizes the immigrant community's trust in and co-operation with law enforcement authorities when they are trying to solve crimes.

After months of investigating the documents, NDLON, the CCR, and the Cardozo Law School Immigration Justice Clinic discovered that the FBI considers S-Comm to be the first stage in an overall surveillance project, where the goal is to obtain information about all citizens, from their fingerprints to retina scans and the recognition of facial features.

La Opinión contacted the local FBI office, which said that the Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS), a division of the FBI, would release official comments with headquarters in West Virginia. La Opinión still has not received a response.

The FBI began to integrate information from IAFIS (the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System) into its database 12 years ago. But as technology improved, they started to develop NGI.

On their website, the FBI says they will continue to develop NGI for many years and that it will eventually replace IAFIS.

The FBI ensures that this technological update will allow them to process information more quickly and to share it with local, state, federal, and international agencies.

"When the government builds a database with such a vast amount of information about people, there is a lot of danger that someone will use this information for the wrong reasons," warned Karp.

Although the FBI is not very concerned with the topic of immigration, said Karp, the FBI envisions participation in Secure Communities becoming mandatory, so that they can share the information from their database in the future.

The lawyers that reviewed the documents secured through the FOIA asserted that the FBI played a key role behind the scenes to push S-Comm forward.

"NGI is the future Big Brother," said Karp. In this way, she explained, people will not be identified by their identification cards, but by their bodies.

"And that is a fundamental violation of the right to privacy," she concluded.

For Bridget Kessler, of the Cardozo Law School Immigration Justice Clinic, the FBI intends to pave the way for the rest of NGI with Secure Communities.

Pablo Alvarado, Coordinator for NDLON, said there is an invisible fear in the immigrant community that any interaction with the police could get a person deported.

"If they are deporting 400,000 people a year and if they expand S-Comm, many more people will be deported. This is in complete violation of the right to privacy and is another way of excluding immigrants," said Alvarado. "They use the term 'national security' to make the lives of ordinary people even more difficult."