More counties join Secure Communities – Homeland Security Newswire
On Tuesday, law enforcement agencies in Union, Brunswick, Columbus, Dare, Halifax, Jackson, Lee and Transylvania counties in North Carolina began employing a new information-sharing capability that modernizes the process used accurately to identify criminal aliens in the community.
Developed by the Departments of Justice (DOJ) and DHS, the information-sharing capability is the cornerstone of Secure Communities, a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) initiative to enhance efforts to identify and remove criminal aliens from the United States.
Previously, local arrestees’ fingerprints were taken and checked for criminal history information against the DOJ biometric system maintained by the FBI. With this new information-sharing capability, that fingerprint information will now be simultaneously checked against both FBI criminal history records and the biometrics-based immigration records maintained by DHS.
