The United States Department of Homeland Security launched Secure Communities in 2009, expanding Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) jurisdiction and establishing partnerships between federal immigration officers and municipal law enforcement agencies (LEAs) across the country. The effects of Secure Communities have been numerous. While rates of deportations had been rising annually for decades, the program granted ICE with even more power to detain and deport undocumented immigrants and dramatically increased federal collaboration with LEAs. Secure Communities was terminated by then Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson in 2014; replaced by the comparable, but lesser known, Priority Enforcement Program (PEP); and reinstated in January of 2017 immediately following the inauguration of Donald Trump. This thesis focuses on the greater implications Secure Communities has on immigrant sense of safety and more generally on public health. As anti-immigrant rhetoric and fear of deportations are on the rise, there have been noticeable disengagements of immigrant populations from public services. I investigate the impacts of Trump’s anti-immigrant platform in 2016 and reinstatement of Secure Communities in 2017 on how immigrant communities in South Central Los Angeles make use of health clinics.

This thesis examines the federal government’s progression in implementing the Secure Communities program. The Secure Communities program was initiated by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in 2008 as a pilot program in only fourteen jurisdictions nation-wide. As of the writing of this thesis, four years following the initiation of the program, S-Comm. has been implemented in over 1700 jurisdictions nation-wide and it is set to be implemented in all local jurisdictions nationally by the end of 2013 (Immigration and Customs Enforcement, 2012). Although local law enforcement agencies had long shared the fingerprints of those they arrested with the FBI, the FBI now forwards this information to the DHS through S-Comm. who then checks the fingerprints against the Automated Biometric Identification System known as IDENT—a fingerprint database containing information on over 91 million individuals, including travelers, applicants for immigration benefits, and immigrants who have previously violated immigration laws. ICE then supposedly reviews their records to see if the person arrested is deportable. If they believe they are, or want to further interrogate them, ICE will issue a detainer. The detainer is a request to the local police to inform federal immigration authorities when the arrestee will be released from custody and to hold the individual for up to two days for transfer to ICE (The Chief Justice, 2011). This process is considered to be the most advanced form of file sharing between local authorities and federal immigration authorities yet. The focus of this endeavor is to evaluate whether this program has been effective in doing as its title maintains. If this program is one that the American people, documented or not, have to endure then it is important that we ask: has Secure Communities made American communities safer? Recent data collected on the program, reports of mass opposition to the initiative by local law enforcement officials throughout the country, and numerous personal accounts of discriminatory harassment of mostly Spanish-speaking Americans by federal immigration agents and state and local law enforcement officials participating in Secure Communities collectively demonstrate that this program has failed in making American communities more secure. / text

abstract: This study analyzes how current U.S. immigration enforcement policy has been carried out, specifically under the implementation of the Secure Communities (S-Comm) program. Paying special attention to the enforcement-only policy hysteria and immigration patchwork trend since the 2000s, this study has the following research questions: (1) whether S-Comm has faithfully implemented enforcement actions for removing "dangerous" criminal noncitizens; (2) how counties with different immigration perspectives have responded to such an immigration enforcement program; and (3) whether the implementation of S-Comm has really made local communities safer as in the program goal. For analysis, 541 counties were selected, and their noncitizen enforcement results under S-Comm were analyzed with 5 time points, covering a 13-month period (Dec. 2011 - Jan. 2013) with longitudinal data analyses. In spite of the rosy advertisement of this program, analysis of S-Comm showed a very different picture. Unlike the federal immigration agency's promise of targeting dangerous criminal noncitizens, 1 in 4 noncitizen removals were for noncriminal violations, and more than half of noncitizen deportations were for misdemeanor charges and immigration violations in the name of "criminal aliens." Based on latent class analysis, three distinct subgroups of counties having different immigration enforcement policy perspectives were extracted, and there have been huge local variations over time on two key intergovernmental enforcement actions under the implementation of S-Comm: immigration detainer issuances and noncitizen deportations. Finally, unlike the federal immigration agency's "immigrant-crime nexus" assumption for legitimating the implementation of S-Comm, no significant and meaningful associations between these two factors were found. With serious conflicts and debates among policy actors on the implementation of S-Comm, this program was finally terminated in November 2014; although, the essence of the policy continues under a different name. A series of results from this study indicate that the current enforcement-only policy approach has been wrongfully implemented, and fundamental reconsideration of immigration policy should be made. Enforcement-focused immigration policy could not solve fundamental immigration-related problems, including why noncitizens immigrate and how they should be dealt with as humans. More rational and humane approaches to dealing with immigration should be discussed at the national and local levels. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Public Administration 2015

Multilayered immigration enforcement regimes comprising state and federal statutes and local police practices demand research on their social and health-related consequences. This dissertation explores the multiple impacts of immigrant policing: sets of laws and police activities that make undocumented immigrants more visible to authorities and increase their risk of deportation. Examining immigrant policing through a multi-sited framework and drawing from principles of engaged anthropology, findings from this dissertation suggest how immigrant policing impacts undocumented immigrants' overall wellbeing, health providers' professional practice, and reveals troubles with safety net medical care. Interviews and participant observation experiences suggest how immigrant policing perpetuates a type of fear-based governance that shapes where undocumented immigrants seek health services, the types of services they seek, and exacerbates intimate partner violence. Moreover, research findings point to how immigrant rights organizations and health providers resist biopolitical efforts to control undocumented immigrants, especially in situations of life or death when institutional authority may limit how undocumented immigrants receive life-sustaining care. Findings from this research respond to calls to examine state immigration laws and their impact on health, and demonstrate the lived experiences of undocumented immigrants in Atlanta who confront an increasingly hostile immigration system.