Immigrant groups criticize fingerprint initiative

Immigrant groups criticize fingerprint initiative

DENVER — The federal government is rapidly expanding a program to identify illegal immigrants using fingerprints from arrests, drawing opposition from local authorities and advocates who argue the initiative amounts to an excessive dragnet.

The program has gotten less attention than Arizona’s new immigration law, but it may end up having a bigger impact because of its potential to round up and deport so many immigrants nationwide.

The San Francisco sheriff wanted nothing to do with the program, and the City Council in Washington, D.C., blocked use of the fingerprint plan in the nation’s capital. Colorado is the latest to debate the program, called Secure Communities, and immigrant groups have begun to speak up, telling the governor in a letter last week that the initiative will make crime victims reluctant to cooperate with police “due to fear of being drawn into the immigration regime.”

Under the program, the fingerprints of everyone who is booked into jail for any crime are run against FBI criminal history records and Department of Homeland Security immigration records to determine who is in the country illegally and whether they’ve been arrested previously. Most jurisdictions are not included in the program, but Immigration and Customs Enforcement has been expanding the initiative.

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Immigrant groups criticize fingerprint initiative

If you’ve ever been in the military, if you’ve ever been a police officer, a security officer, a fire fighter, a government contractor, and many other positions held by LEGAL Americans, you have been fingerprinted. Sometimes, on numerous occasions.

If you have a criminal past, an arrest record, you have been fingerprinted.

Why then, should some *immigrant group*, code words for seekers of amnesty for illegals, be so critical of fingerprinting? It’s a part of American life. Don’t they want to have their immigrants be full fledged Americans? Or do they only want to be Americans as a matter of convenience?

Why do so many of these *immigrant groups* rant and rave about having to show an I.D. card, or a Green Card? A Social Security Card? A drivers license? Any number of forms of pictured I.D. that easily verifies just who is and who isn’t supposed to be here in America?

I can understand why the Sheriff of San Francisco wanted nothing to do with the program, we’re talking sanctuary city and liberal heaven. He has to play to those that elect him if he, she?, wants to remain in office.

The same goes for Washington, D.C. They consider themselves above the law that governs us everyday folks. Didn’t the Congress and Senate exclude themselves from ObamaCare?

It’s is totally ridiculous for the United States to have aliens running around this nation with no I.D., aliens, and their supporters wanting the USA to give the *immigrants* a free pass on the use of legal identification.

I am a “Legal American Citizen”, and I must show my ID when or if I am:

1. Pulled over by the police.
2. Making purchases on my department store credit card.
3. When I show up for a doctor’s appointment.
4. When filling out a credit card or loan application.
5. When applying for or renewing a driver’s license or passport.
6. When applying for any kind of insurance.
7. When filling out college applications.
8. When donating blood.
9. When obtaining certain prescription drugs.
10. When making some debit purchases, especially if I’m out of state.
11. When collecting a boarding pass for airline or train travel.

I’m sure there are more instances, but the point is that we citizens of the USA, are required to prove who we are nearly every day!

So, why should people in this country illegally be exempt? Why shouldn’t we guard our borders as closely as every other country in the world does?

Since everyone arrested would be screened, the program could easily deport more people than Arizona’s new law, said Sunita Patel, an attorney who filed a lawsuit in New York against the federal government on behalf of a group worried about the program. Patel said that because illegal immigrants could be referred to ICE at the point of arrest, even before a conviction, the program can create an incentive for profiling and create a pipeline to deport more people.

“It has the potential to revolutionize immigration enforcement,” said Patel.

That would be the intent OF the law I believe. What part of ILLEGAL is it that these ILLEGALS and their supporters don’t understand?