Houston Chronicle
July 13, 2009

ICE program is casting a wide net

A little after 3 a.m. Dec. 12, Carlos Garcia-Hernandez was booked into Harris County Jail on an aggravated assault charge, accused of slicing a man’s nose down to the bone after a disagreement at a birthday party.

At the jail, the first in the country with full access to a Department of Homeland Security database that contains millions of immigration records, a Harris County detention officer ran Garcia-Hernandez’s fingerprints.

Within minutes the system found a hit. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents had deported Garcia-Hernandez in November 2007 after a string of convictions including marijuana possession and escaping from law enforcement custody, the system showed.

The DHS system also showed Garcia-Hernandez had two outstanding murder warrants in Mexico. “A year ago, we wouldn’t have gotten that,” said Lt. M. Lindsay, the point man for the Harris County Sheriff’s Office’s efforts to identify suspected illegal immigrants in the jails.

The database is part of an ICE program dubbed “Secure Communities,” which aims to identify and deport the most dangerous illegal immigrants in U.S. jails and prisons. Since Harris County started using the database in October, participation in the program has grown to 70 sites in the U.S., including 39 in Texas.

In the program’s first six months, more than 266,000 fingerprint submissions were run through the system nationally, generating more than 32,000 “matches” for suspects with both an immigration history and record of a prior conviction or charge. That includes 5,369 matches in Harris County. ..

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