Thursday, August 18, 2011

Resistance Widens to Obama Initiative on Criminal Immigrants

By Julia Preston, New York Times
August 13, 2011

BOSTON — Mayor Thomas Menino, who often invokes his heritage as the grandson of an Italian immigrant, was one of the first local leaders in the country to embrace a federal program intended to improve community safety by deporting dangerous immigrant criminals.

But five years after Boston became a testing ground for the fingerprinting program, known as Secure Communities, Mr. Menino is one of the latest local officials to sour on it and seek to withdraw. He found that many immigrants the program deported from Boston, though here illegally, had committed no crimes. The mayor believed it was eroding hard-earned ties between Boston’s police force and its melting-pot mix of ethnic neighborhoods.

Read the full article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/13/us/politics/13secure.html

No comments: