Index/Topics/Secure Communities program

Secure Communities program

The Secure Communities program was an initiative by the Department of Homeland Security to identify and deport undocumented immigrants. It was launched in 2008 and was replaced by the Priority Enforcement Program in 2014, but was reinstated in 2017 by the Trump administration.

Fact-Checks

19 results
Jan 16, 2026
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How did ice arrest people during the Clinton and Obama years

During the Clinton years ICE’s predecessor systems and enforcement tools produced some of the highest deportation counts in modern history, and during the Obama administration ICE shifted toward “prio...

Jan 15, 2026
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How did the Obama administration define sanctuary cities?

The Obama administration never produced a single, formal legal definition of “sanctuary cities”; instead it moved federal practice away from blanket local collaboration with immigration detainers towa...

Jan 17, 2026
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how many illegal immigrants have been deported under Obama admin

Official counting methods matter: on the narrow, formal “removals” metric used by DHS and cited by analysts, the Obama administration carried out roughly 2.7–3.0 million formal removals over eight yea...

Jan 13, 2026

Which years under Obama had the highest deportations and what policy changes explain the spikes?

The highest annual deportation totals under President Obama occurred in the early 2010s, with fiscal-year peaks around 2012 and 2013—DHS-era tallies show roughly 409,849 removals in FY2012 and a recor...

Jan 12, 2026

Historical timeline of ICE detention policy shifts since 2003

Since the creation of the Department of Homeland Security in 2003, responsibility for immigration detention has moved into a distinct federal agency and evolved from a framework of national standards ...

Jan 17, 2026

What were the Obama-era ICE prioritization memos and how did they change interior enforcement outcomes?

The Obama-era ICE prioritization memos—chiefly the Morton memos of 2011 and Secretary Jeh Johnson’s DHS/ICE guidance culminating in the November 2014 Priority Enforcement Program (PEP)—sought to conce...

Jan 15, 2026

Did the Obama administration provide funding to sanctuary cities for immigration enforcement?

The Obama administration did not adopt a policy of broadly withholding federal funds from jurisdictions labeled “sanctuary” and continued to fund local governments through routine federal grant progra...

Jan 19, 2026

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

Secure Communities automated a long-standing practice—sending arrestees’ fingerprints to the FBI—so that fingerprints would also be checked against DHS immigration databases, dramatically increasing i...

Jan 19, 2026

What were annual trends in removal classifications (expedited, reinstatement, formal removal) across the Obama administration fiscal years?

Across President Obama’s fiscal years, total deportation figures—driven largely by “removals” rather than informal “returns”—showed a high sustained volume with shifts in how removals were carried out...

Jan 18, 2026

How do fingerprint-based federal databases bypass state sanctuary policies and what laws govern that sharing?

Federal fingerprint flows bypass sanctuary policies because biometric submissions are routed through national interoperable systems and federal mandates that operate above state or local prohibitions,...

Jan 17, 2026

How did the Obama administration prioritize deportation cases?

The Obama administration shifted from broad, volume-driven removals toward a tiered enforcement model that formally prioritized national-security threats, serious criminals, and recent border crossers...

Jan 17, 2026

How did Obama administration enforcement priorities (Secure Communities, PEP, DACA) affect who was targeted for removal and the number of returns?

The Obama administration shifted enforcement toward biometric-driven identification of criminal and recent entrants under Secure Communities and later PEP, while DACA created a protected class of long...

Jan 17, 2026

What internal DHS oversight mechanisms existed during the Obama administration for immigration enforcement and how were they later changed?

The Obama administration built internal oversight around agency-wide enforcement priorities, new inspection offices and modified detainer practice to channel limited DHS resources toward national-secu...

Jan 16, 2026

How did immigration policy, enforcement practices, or data matching contribute to wrongful deportations between 2009 and 2017?

Between 2009 and 2017, a mix of aggressive enforcement priorities, automated data-sharing programs and uneven agency practices created conditions that resulted in wrongful arrests and at least some de...

Jan 15, 2026

Which methodological changes in immigration statistics reporting since 2000 make cross-president deportation comparisons difficult?

Comparing presidential-era deportation totals since 2000 is fraught because the federal data have shifted what is counted, where counts come from, and how entries are classified—changes that mix borde...

Jan 14, 2026

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

Secure Communities fundamentally rewired how ICE identified potential deportees by automating fingerprint-sharing from local arrests to federal immigration databases starting in 2008–09, dramatically ...

Jan 11, 2026

What was ICE's annual budget each year from 2009 to 2016 during the Obama administration?

The clearest, source-backed figures in the provided reporting cover ICE’s total enacted budgets for FY2009 and FY2010: roughly $5.928 billion in FY2009 and about $5.741 billion in FY2010, consistent w...

Jan 10, 2026

How many deportations occurred under President Barack Obama (2009–2017)?

The answer depends on which statistic is used: officially recorded DHS "formal removals" during the Obama administration (fiscal years 2009–2016) total more than 3 million, while many policy analyses ...

Jan 8, 2026

Were there formal MOUs between ICE and sanctuary cities under the Obama administration?

There is no evidence in the provided reporting that the Obama administration entered into formal memoranda of understanding (MOUs) with jurisdictions that identified as "sanctuary" cities to cooperate...