Border Lines: The Criminal Alien Problem of Secure Communities
The Secure Communities program represents furthering linking of the criminal justice and immigration systems. This merger of criminal and immigration law has been in process since the mid-1990s but has speeded up in the past several years with the deepening focus on criminal aliens by DHS and its immigration and border control agencies. Criminal justice scholars refer to this merger as “crimmigration.”Rather than further institutionalize crimmigration with the Secure Communities program, Congress should take steps to rollback the criminalization of immigration law and the new administration at DHS should rein in the agency’s campaign to remove criminal aliens.
