In his recent guest column ("Secure Communities will protect all communities," April 19), Attorney General Peter Kilmartin informed us that "it is not and has never been our mission to crack down on illegal immigration." He justifies this statement by stating, "That role is limited to federal officials, not the Office of the Attorney General."
Since most of Kilmartin's column is dedicated to an unduly verbose, dogmatic and painfully one-sided description of how exactly the Secure Communities program operates, it is important to first clarify this jumbled mess.
In actuality, Secure Communities allows for one basic process to occur — whenever someone is arrested, their fingerprints will be run not only through the national FBI database, but also through the records of the Department of Homeland Security. After this, if the person who was arrested is found to be here illegally, his or her case is forwarded to Immigration Control and Enforcement for a deportation recommendation.
When removed from Kilmartin's rhetoric, the purpose of Secure Communities is completely transparent. It is about identifying undocumented people after they are arrested and very obviously has no effect on documented U.S. citizens. Furthermore, on ICE's website it clearly states that the purpose of Secure Communities is to "quickly and accurately identify aliens who are arrested for a crime and booked into local law enforcement custody."
Though it seems as if Kilmartin assumed his citizenry is incapable of performing a Google search, I'm going to go ahead and give him the benefit of the doubt. Hell, I'm going to throw the guy a bone and even assume that he both read and understood the purpose of Secure Communities. But the implications of trusting his intelligence lead directly to a lack of trust in his integrity. If Kilmartin is a competent public official, it means he tried to obscure the truth by appealing to his community's fear of crime.
By going on to say the power to enforce immigration law will continue to be restricted to ICE, Kilmartin uses an utterly semantic difference to try and bolster his previous untruth. Though in the end, ICE will technically have the final say as to whether or not an undocumented person is deported, they would have no input at all if normal law enforcement officers did not have the ability or right to check on someone's immigration status. This is, once again, a dishonest and disingenuous representation of the situation at hand.
This rhetoric fails to stand up to any sort of critical analysis and only holds weight in the purview of hysteria. But Kilmartin is not alone in using and supporting arguments framed in this way.
At the root of Secure Communities is the assumption that illegal immigrants are, above all, the single greatest threat to the safety of the American people. In fact, the document on ICE's website entitled "How does Secure Communities benefit law enforcement?" states explicitly that it "prioritizes enforcement action toward the greatest threats to public safety." As this program only makes changes which pertain specifically to undocumented immigrants, the assumption of that sentence is fairly implicit.
As is usual for issues involving undocumented immigrants, this one breaks down to the same core component — xenophobia. Sure enough, Kilmartin's greatest defenders as he introduced Secure Communities were the local champions of anti-Hispanic hysteria and bigotry, the Rhode Island far right and specifically the Tea Party.
The question we must ask, then, is this — how did Democrat Peter Kilmartin get himself tangled up in the far right ideology of xenophobic immigration policy? Or possibly, if a staunch Democrat can be aligned with this sort of bigotry, are the two parties really as different as we often like to think they are?
I would like to finish with a final header from the document about how Secure Communities benefits law enforcement — Secure Communities "reduces opportunities for allegations of racial profiling." Notice the language here, specifically that the issue is not racial profiling but rather those nagging allegations of it happening. By this logic, the real problem is finding a way to reduce the credibility of racial profiling allegations against law enforcement officers.
Whereas xenophobia provides the cultural logic for this program, this gives us a glimpse into the ways in which it will practically serve to protect racist behaviors on the part of law enforcement officers.
This law is dangerously close to Arizona SB 1070 in that it gives, albeit indirectly, the power of ICE officers to every law enforcement officer where it is enacted. Former Gov. Donald Carcieri '65 got voted out for a reason, and one of Governor Lincoln Chafee's '75 P'14 largest campaign promises was to change the way the Rhode Island government was dealing with undocumented immigrants. Chafee — please keep your promise. And to Kilmartin — next time you want to address your public, remember that we are not mindless children ready to accept any ideology, even if it is made more palatable by rhetoric.
Chris Norris-LeBlanc '13 is from Rhode Island. He can be contacted at chris.norris.leblanc@gmail.com.
