How did Secure Communities and later DHS prioritization memos change ICE arrest practices between 2009 and 2016?

1. Secure Communities turned arrest fingerprints into an ICE intake pipeline

Secure Communities made fingerprint collection at local booking the trigger for federal immigration screening by automatically sending fingerprints to FBI and DHS databases; a “hit” notified ICE and could prompt immigration action even when the underlying arrest was for a minor offense ^{[1] [5]}. That automated interoperability expanded ICE’s reach without creating new policing duties for local agencies but shifted the point of immigration identification out of ICE’s direct control and into the hands of local arrest patterns and booking practices ^{[1] [6]}.

2. The effect: surges in criminal-alien identification and CAP’s growth

Federal funding and institutional emphasis on CAP amplified the volume of referrals coming from Secure Communities, with CAP becoming a central mechanism for screening incarcerated people for removability and coordinating arrests and removals across jails and at-large operations ^{[2] [7]}. Congress and DHS funding increases through the late 2000s and into 2009 underwrote large CAP expansion, producing far higher identification and removal numbers tied to local arrests ^[2].

3. Legal and policy pushback exposed unintended consequences

Scholars, public-health advocates, and the DHS Task Force documented that automatic fingerprint-sharing and detainers led to the detention and deportation of people with minor charges, damaged community policing, and risked racial profiling—criticisms that forced DHS to reexamine program design and transparency ^{[8] [9] [10]}. Task force members and civil-society critics argued that state and local partners did not share ICE’s stated priorities, meaning Secure Communities’ mechanics undermined the agency’s stated focus on serious threats ^{[9] [8]}.

4. Prosecutorial-discretion memos began to reframe enforcement in 2011 and beyond

Starting with memoranda such as the June 17, 2011 prosecutorial-discretion guidance and continuing in internal ICE briefings, DHS emphasized exercising discretion to protect victims, witnesses, and focus on serious offenders—training and materials were added to try to temper Secure Communities’ blunt outputs ^[3]. These memos acknowledged the mismatch between automated identification and prioritization and attempted to steer ICE officers toward prioritizing serious public-safety risks ^[3].

5. Jeh Johnson’s 2014 priorities memo and creation of PEP materially changed arrest practice

Jeh Johnson’s November 20, 2014 memorandum narrowed DHS enforcement priorities to focus on enumerated crimes and public-safety or national-security threats, and directed that ICE replace broad detainer requests with notification or probable-cause detainers in most cases; that reform led to the Priority Enforcement Program (PEP) which began implementation in late 2014–2015 ^{[4] [2]}. PEP continued to use fingerprints from local arrests to identify priorities but constrained ICE’s default practice of seeking custody by requiring the individual meet the narrower priority criteria and, when applicable, probable cause of removability before issuing a detainer ^{[4] [2]}.

6. Persistence of aggressive enforcement and institutional tensions

Despite PEP’s narrower definitions, ICE retained tools—CAP expansions, Fugitive Operations, and a “Threats to the Community” at-large initiative—to pursue at-large or jail-identified individuals considered high risk, and public ICE statistics for FY2016 show removals overwhelmingly met DHS’s stated priorities by that fiscal year, reflecting both policy shifts and operational focus ^{[2] [7]}. Critics point out that automated fingerprint-sharing and local policing practices continued to shape who entered ICE’s pipeline and that detainer compliance variations among jurisdictions complicated consistent prioritization, revealing an institutional tension between centralized DHS priorities and decentralized arrest practices ^{[6] [11]}.