How did Secure Communities change interior immigration arrests and what led to its suspension and revival?

1. How Secure Communities rewired interior arrest processing

Secure Communities changed practice by making the submission of arrestees’ fingerprints to DHS automatic: fingerprints that historically went to the FBI for criminal checks were also routed to DHS’s immigration systems, enabling ICE to be notified of potential noncitizens held in local jails and then evaluate whether to issue detainers or assume custody ^{[1] [2]}. The program’s technical design—interoperability between the FBI and DHS biometrics systems—meant identification became near-universal for those booked into custody in participating counties, producing millions of fingerprint matches and hundreds of thousands of subsequent ICE actions during its rollout ^{[6] [7]}.

2. The measurable expansion of interior enforcement

By instituting automatic data-sharing, Secure Communities drove a sharp rise in interior removals: studies and policy analyses attribute tens of thousands of interior deportations each year to the program, with estimates that Secure Communities accounted for about three-quarters of interior deportations in some years and contributed to hundreds of thousands of detentions over its life ^{[6] [7]}. Empirical work exploiting the program’s county-by-county rollout links Secure Communities to large increases in detentions and transfers from local custody to federal immigration custody, making it “the largest cooperative immigration enforcement program in American history” ^{[8] [9]}.

3. Critiques, community effects, and why suspension came

Legal advocates, civil‑rights researchers, and a DHS-appointed task force raised persistent concerns that Secure Communities swept in low‑level arrestees, reproduced racial disparities from local policing into immigration enforcement, and eroded trust between immigrant communities and police—arguments that fed calls for suspension and reform ^{[3] [10] [11]}. The accumulation of these critiques and policy recommendations contributed to DHS abandoning the program’s initial architecture in favor of PEP, a policy that aimed to narrow enforcement priorities and constrain the use of ICE detainers ^{[3] [4]}.

4. Revival under a tougher enforcement posture and its effects

The Trump administration immediately rescinded PEP and re‑instituted Secure Communities’ data sharing by executive order in January 2017, broadening enforcement priorities and signaling penalties for jurisdictions that would not comply—moves that analysts linked to an uptick in interior arrests tied to fingerprint‑triggered ICE referrals and to renewed political conflict over sanctuary jurisdictions ^{[5] [4]}. Research and reporting since show the revival restored the technological pathways that allowed ICE to locate arrestees nationwide and contributed to higher interior arrest and removal counts in the period after reinstatement ^{[1] [6]}.

5. Assessment, evidence gaps, and the debate that remains

Quantitative studies document Secure Communities’ large effect on detentions and removals and suggest mixed public‑safety impacts—some research finds little crime‑reduction benefit and others show community harms, including chilling effects on service use and worsened health and educational outcomes for immigrants and their families—while advocates and ICE present competing narratives about public‑safety gains versus civil‑liberties costs ^{[12] [7] [11] [6]}. Public records and academic work make clear that the program’s core mechanic—automatic biometric sharing—directly expanded ICE’s reach ^{[1] [8]}, but sources differ on how to weigh benefits against disparate harms, and reporting does not resolve normative questions about the proper balance between local policing and federal immigration priorities ^{[3] [13]}.