ICE has received funding specifically designated for removing criminal aliens. For example, the fiscal year 2008 DHS appropriations act made $200 million of ICE’s salaries and expenses appropriation available through the end of fiscal year 2009 to “improve and modernize efforts to identify aliens convicted of a crime, sentenced to imprisonment, and who may be deportable, and remove them from the United States, once they are judged deportable.” In response, ICE initiated Secure Communities and issued a plan that detailed how ICE would implement policies and modernize technologies to accomplish its overall goal of identifying and ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations removing criminal aliens. (ERO) is responsible for identifying and apprehending removable aliens, detaining these individuals when it deems it necessary, and removing them from the United States. ERO manages the Secure Communities program and has 24 field offices nationwide. Under Secure Communities, when an individual is arrested by a state or local law enforcement agency, the individual’s fingerprints are taken and automatically checked against the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System (IAFIS), a national fingerprint and criminal history system maintained by the FBI, and DHS’s Automated Biometric Identification System (IDENT) to identify a fingerprint match. IDENT contains fingerprint and other biometric information on immigration violators, known or suspected terrorists, criminal aliens, and foreign nationals who are enrolled in DHS’s United States Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology program, among others. When a law enforcement agency (LEA) arrests and books an individual on suspicion of committing a crime, the person’s fingerprints are routinely sent to the FBI for a criminal background check. FBI electronically forwards the fingerprints to DHS for a check against IDENT records. If there is a fingerprint match, ICE is to then determine whether the individual is subject to removal. On the basis of the match, the FBI is to send an Immigration Alien Query to ICE’s LESC. Using the Alien Criminal Response Information Management (ACRIMe) system, LESC specialists are to search multiple databases, such as the FBI’s National Crime Information Center (NCIC) and the Student and Exchange Visitor Information System for information on the individual’s criminal history and immigration status. LESC is to then send an Immigration Alien Response to the LEA and relevant ICE ERO field office or Interoperability Response Center (IRC)—offices established in the Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami, and Buffalo, New York, field offices to expand ICE’s ability to respond to Secure Communities matches. The ICE field office or response center is to then determine whether to send an immigration detainer (Form I-247) to the LEA that has custody of the individual. A detainer is an ICE request that the law enforcement agency maintain custody of the individual for up to 48 hours after that person would otherwise be released, excluding weekends and holidays, to allow ICE time to administratively arrest (i.e., assume custody of) the person. The decision whether to issue a detainer for a particular alien is based on whether the alien falls within ICE’s priorities for removal and other factors, such as whether ICE detention resources are available, and whether the individual is still in the custody of the arresting local or state law enforcement agency (under some circumstances a person may be held for only a few hours). If the individual is convicted and serves a criminal sentence, ICE is to wait until the sentence is completed to take the person into custody. Figure 1 describes the Secure Communities process. According to ICE, Secure Communities helps carry out ICE’s civil immigration enforcement priorities. In a March 2011 memorandum, ICE’s Director provided guidance to all ICE employees on ICE’s civil immigration enforcement priorities as they relate to the apprehension, detention, and removal of aliens across all ICE programs. The types of crimes included under the different priority classifications are described in table 1. In a June 2011 memorandum, ICE’s Director provided guidance to ICE officers, agents, and attorneys on the exercise of “prosecutorial discretion” to ensure that the agency’s immigration enforcement resources are focused on its enforcement priorities. As noted in the memorandum, because the agency is confronted with more administrative violations than its resources can address, the agency must regularly exercise prosecutorial discretion to prioritize its efforts. The memorandum provides a list of criteria for ICE personnel to use when assessing whether an individual case is appropriate for an exercise of prosecutorial discretion. In a second memorandum, also issued in June 2011, ICE provided additional guidance on the use of prosecutorial discretion for victims, witnesses, and plaintiffs. Specifically, the additional guidance stated that ICE is to exercise discretion on a case-by- case basis when making detention and enforcement decisions in the cases of (1) victims of domestic violence, human trafficking, or other serious crimes; (2) witnesses involved in pending criminal investigations, plaintiffs in nonfrivolous lawsuits regarding civil rights or civil liberties violations; and (3) individuals engaging in a protected activity related to civil or other rights, such as union organizing. In August 2011, DHS began to review all incoming cases in immigration court to identify the cases most clearly eligible and ineligible for exercising discretion to not pursue removal of the individual. DHS and DOJ launched pilot programs in which an intra-agency team of attorneys from ICE, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, and U.S. Customs and Border Protection applied the June 2011 memorandums to its review of existing cases in the Denver and Baltimore immigration courts.announced that in the next phase of its pilot, beginning in April 2012, it would extend its case reviews to immigration courts in Seattle, Detroit, New Orleans, Orlando, New York City, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. On March 30, 2012, DHS ICE has followed an incremental approach to activating Secure Communities interoperability in jurisdictions nationwide. 2011, ICE has been simultaneously activating all jurisdictions within a given state into Secure Communities. From October 2008 to August 2011, ICE activated 1,508 jurisdictions after signing individual memorandums of agreement with their respective state governments. In August 2011, ICE terminated all existing memorandums of agreement, stating that they were not required because once a law enforcement agency voluntarily submits fingerprint data to the federal government, no agreement with the state is legally necessary for one part of the federal government to share it with another part. As of June 5, 2012, ICE had fully activated Secure Communities in all jurisdictions in 48 states, the District of Columbia, and four United States territories. Additionally, the program has been partially activated in 2 states. The 50 states where Secure Communities has been fully or partially activated cover 97 percent of jurisdictions nationwide. ICE plans to have all jurisdictions in all 50 states and U.S. territories activated by March 2013. Figure 2 depicts the states activated under Secure Communities as of June 5, 2012. A jurisdiction is activated when interoperability between IAFIS and IDENT becomes functional for that location. For purposes of this report, jurisdiction is synonymous with county or a county-equivalent. ICE data show that from October 2008 through March 2012, Secure Communities led to the removal of about 183,000 aliens, of which approximately 74 percent had a criminal conviction and 26 percent did not have a criminal conviction known to ICE. All four ICE field offices we visited were using agency policies to help determine which aliens identified by Secure Communities should be selected for detention and removal. Additionally, ICE did not have a record of the state or local arrest charges for about 56 percent of the aliens that Secure Communities identified and ICE removed during fiscal year 2011 and the first half of fiscal year 2012, so we were unable to determine the most frequent arrest charges of aliens removed under the program. Of the data that ICE collected, traffic offenses were the most frequent arrest charges, of which over half were arrests for driving under the influence of alcohol. ICE data indicate that the percentage of removals attributable to Secure Communities has increased from fiscal year 2009 through the first 6 months of fiscal year 2012 and that nearly three-fourths of aliens removed under the program during this time frame had a criminal conviction. As shown in table 2, Secure Communities was responsible for identifying about 20 percent of the approximately 400,000 aliens that ICE removed in fiscal year 2011, up from approximately 4 percent of the aliens that ICE removed in fiscal year 2009. Other ICE enforcement programs such as CAP and 287(g) were responsible for identifying the majority of aliens that ICE removed in each year since fiscal year 2009. From October 2008 through March 2012, ICE removed 182,896 aliens identified by Secure Communities, as indicated by ICE’s data. According to ICE, all aliens removed committed an immigration violation and were removable on that basis. About 74 percent had been convicted of a criminal offense; that is, they were either convicted of the offense that led to their identification under Secure Communities or had a record of conviction for a previous offense. For these individuals, the current or prior criminal conviction served as the basis for ICE’s prioritization for removal. Twenty-one percent of aliens removed did not have a criminal conviction known to ICE prior to their removal, but were identified as one of ICE’s other removal priorities, including aliens who were fugitives or who reentered the country illegally after removal. The remaining 5 percent of aliens removed also did not have a known criminal conviction prior to their removal but were nonetheless removable because, for example, they entered the United States without inspection or violated the terms of their admission. ICE reports its removal data for aliens without a criminal conviction under three categories: ICE fugitives; prior removals and returns; and entries without inspection (EWI) and visa violators. Figure 3 provides information on the overall composition of Secure Communities removals by category and figure 4 provides this information for each activated state.