(INCLUDING US CITIZENS) Latinos Said to Bear Weight of a Deportation Program

[alp227]

Source: NY Times

A deportation program that is central to the Obama administration’s immigration enforcement strategy has led disproportionately to the removal of Latino immigrants and to arrests by immigration authorities of hundreds of United States citizens, according to a report by two law schools using new, in-depth official data on deportation cases.

The report also found that about a third of around 226,000 immigrants who have been deported under the program, known as Secure Communities, had spouses or children who were United States citizens, suggesting a broad impact from those removals on Americans in Latino communities.

The report, to be released Wednesday, is the first analysis of deportations under the Secure Communities program based on data about individual cases, which was obtained through the Freedom of Information Act by the University of California, Berkeley, law school and the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York.

(...)

The officials said that some American citizens arrested by local police could be flagged in a Secure Communities match because the department’s fingerprint databases include immigration violations and also positive histories of immigrants who applied for legal status or naturalized to become American citizens. Immigration agents might hold a foreign-born person already arrested by local police while they were verifying the immigrant’s legal status or American citizenship, they said.

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/19/us/latinos-said-to-bear-weight-of-deportation-program.html

---

BTW, naturalized citizens may have their citizenship revoked if they commit treason or perjury to immigration authorities.