How did Secure Communities and Priority Enforcement Program differ in operation and effect on local policing?
Executive summary
Secure Communities (S‑Comm) and the Priority Enforcement Program (PEP) shared a technical backbone—FBI fingerprint-sharing that alerted DHS/ICE to arrestees’ immigration status—but diverged in stated priorities, detainer forms and legal justifications; S‑Comm was criticized as a broad dragnet while PEP sought to narrow ICE’s focus to individuals deemed higher‑risk, with both programs sparking debate about local police roles and community trust [1] [2] [3]. Empirical and advocacy reporting finds that PEP made procedural changes and tightened language on who should be targeted, but many local officials and immigrant advocates argued PEP amounted to cosmetic reform that left the fundamental entanglement of local policing and federal immigration enforcement intact, with continuing harms to community policing in practice [4] [5] [6].
1. Operational core: the same fingerprint pipeline, different priorities
Both programs relied on the routine submission of arrestee fingerprints to the FBI and onward sharing with DHS so ICE could identify removable noncitizens; that automated information flow is the technical core inherited by PEP from Secure Communities [7] [1]. The Obama administration framed PEP as a narrower policy that would use the same fingerprint process but prioritize enforcement against those with serious convictions or recidivist misdemeanors, rather than broadly issuing detainers for people arrested on low‑level or civil immigration matters [1] [2] [8].
2. Procedural differences: detainer forms, probable cause and the 48‑hour rule
PEP replaced the Form I‑247 detainer with new requests such as the I‑247D and emphasized higher evidentiary thresholds—requiring “probable cause” of removability rather than the looser “reason to believe” standard used under S‑Comm—and adjusted the counting of the 48‑hour detainer window to include weekends and holidays in some guidance, changes ICE argued would make detaining and transferring removable aliens more legally defensible [9] [3] [1]. Supporters said these changes reduced legal and constitutional defects previously attached to S‑Comm detainers, while critics said the new paperwork and narrow definitions still resulted in similar cooperative behavior by local jails [3] [6] [4].
3. Effect on local policing: trust, reporting and cooperation
Research and advocacy reports tied S‑Comm to declines in immigrant willingness to report crimes and cooperate with police, and PEP was explicitly promoted as a remedy to restore trust by reducing the deportation risk for victims and witnesses; empirical analyses find PEP’s reprioritization reduced the likelihood that noncriminal unauthorized immigrants would be detained and thus lowered the “cost” of reporting to police in some localities [10] [8] [1]. Yet many local law enforcement agencies remained skeptical of PEP’s promise: over 300 jurisdictions had adopted limits on honoring detainers during the S‑Comm era, and several major police departments publicly declined PEP participation, citing the poor S‑Comm track record and constitutional concerns [6] [7].
4. Outcomes and evidence: narrower intent, mixed real‑world impact
Aggregate ICE statistics and independent studies indicate that after the shift from S‑Comm to PEP the share of enforcement actions against noncriminals fell substantially—from a period when more than half of some enforcement actions targeted noncriminal immigrants to later years where such cases accounted for a smaller share—suggesting some change in enforcement composition, but scholars also found S‑Comm did not measurably reduce violent crime and raised civil‑rights concerns that did not vanish under PEP [1] [11] [12]. Immigrant rights groups documented that practice often lagged policy: the FBI’s fingerprint sharing continued to “detect” immigrants in local jails and ICE continued outreach to rebuild local cooperation, fueling claims that PEP was “S‑Comm in new clothes” [4] [2].
5. Politics, legal pressure and competing agendas
PEP was as much a political compromise as a technical fix: the Obama administration presented it as humane prioritization while Congress and some local officials decried it as weakening enforcement, and later administrations explicitly reinstated S‑Comm, demonstrating the programs’ vulnerability to shifting political priorities [13] [14]. Advocacy organizations framed PEP as insufficient because it left the core data‑sharing mechanism intact and therefore preserved incentives for racial profiling and diminished community trust, while ICE and some county associations argued PEP reduced fear and better aligned federal and local public‑safety goals [5] [8] [7].
Conclusion
Operationally, Secure Communities and PEP used the same fingerprint pipeline but differed in legal framing, detainer forms and stated targeting rules; in effect, PEP narrowed ICE’s public priorities and introduced procedural guardrails that reduced some noncriminal transfers, yet many jurisdictions and advocates judged those changes inadequate because the underlying entanglement of local policing with federal immigration enforcement—and its chilling effect on community cooperation—largely persisted in practice [1] [4] [10].