Ofelia Calderon, a Washington immigration lawyer, told a workshop in July that the Virginia State Police signed an agreement with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in October 2009 to implement Secure Communities (SC). SC is a national immigration program that, in Virginia, allows any state law enforcement agency to target non-citizens. The workshop was organized by Dan Choi of the Legal Aid Justice Program.

Calderon was concerned that people arrested for even minor offenses such as writing bad checks, trespassing, vandalism, or joyriding, would have their fingerprints taken by Virginia SC and forwarded to ICE, even if the charges are dismissed or ruled unlawful.

ICE was established after the 9/11 attacks as part of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to uphold public safety by enforcing immigration and custom laws. It replaced the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS).

However, the attorney explained,”if a victim of domestic violence was arrested with her batterer and charges were dropped or the arrest was unjustified, her fingerprints as well as her biographical information and photograph would already have been transferred to ICE. They will not be retracted.” ICE uses a “detainer” form (Form I-127) to track people within the criminal justice system. It can hold people an extra 48 hours to collect information and also determine whether they are non-citizens, even after their criminal case has been resolved.

Calderon urged people who felt targeted because of their ethnicity or race or who experienced other civil rights abuses by Virginia police in the name of immigration enforcement to call the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia (ACLU-VA).

Racial Profiling

Jorge Figueredo, Master of public Policy, Director of Racial Justice and Immigrants’ Rights of the Virginia ACLU said at the workshop that his non-profit organization’s mission is to protect the constitutionally mandated freedoms that the government tends to erode, and to advance rights clearly intended by the U.S. Constitution but never fully implemented.

Figueredo explained that freedom of expression and association, freedom of religion, equality under the law, due process of law and the right to privacy are a person’s civil liberties. He said that if the police uses interrogations, searches or detention, based not on evidence of criminal activity, but on an individual’s perceived race, ethnicity, nationality or religion, it is “racial profiling.” He described it as a widespread problem across the nation affecting mainly African Americans, Latinos, and, increasingly after 9/11, Arabs, Muslims and South Asians (Indians and Pakistanis).

He continued, “Racial profiling occurs in a variety of public and private spaces, including highways, airports, sidewalks, shopping centers, workplaces, private homes and more.” He said that ACLU of Arizona had found in 2008 that Native Americans were 3.25 times more likely, and African Americans and Hispanics were 2.5 times more likely, to be searched during traffic stops than whites.

He said that the same year, Yale Law School researchers found that black and Hispanic residents were stopped, frisked, searched and arrested by Los Angeles Police Department officers far more frequently than white residents. He stated that research and testimony by the ACLU before Congress had documented the ways in which agreements have facilitated racial profiling by encouraging police officers to stop anyone who looks “foreign.”

“Large-scale round-ups detained hundreds of Arabs, Muslims and South Asians. Many were subjected to harsh conditions, prolonged detention, secret immigration trials and deportation, often for minor immigration violations. Not a single successful terrorism conviction resulted from these post-9/11 sweeps,” he argued.

Figueredo affirmed that the Virginia General Assembly in 2002 passed legislation requiring that every law enforcement officer in the Commonwealth be trained to avoid bias-based policing, and that model policies be made available. Although Virginia’s major law enforcement agencies supported this legislation, one out of five departments still did not provide the training to officers, and 30 percent of all officers surveyed did not even know if their departments had such a policy, according to a 2006 study of the Virginia Department of Criminal Justice.

Half of all U.S. states have enacted implementing legislation for the federal “End Racial Profiling Act,” sponsored by President Obama when he was a senator. However, Arnedo Valero, a human rights lawyer and Executive Director of the Migrant Heritage Commission, noted that the federal government had failed to enact comprehensive immigration reform.

Valero declared, “Today, we are witnessing an alarming trend throughout the U.S. of the discriminatory practice of racial profiling by policemen. Arizona Senate Bill 1070 is a classic example of racial profiling law.” That law allows enforcement officers with a “reasonable suspicion” of an individual to be detained until his or her immigration status is verified.

He described the cases of wrongful detention of a Filipino priest, holding an R-Visa (qualifying him as a religious worker), and a Filipino American naturalized citizen, who were s topped while driving in Gilbert, Arizona. They were obviously chosen to be inspected because of the color of their skin and facial features, he said. Similar cases occurred in Prince William County, Va., and in other states, Valero claimed. It was a myth, he asserted, that most Latinos, Asians and Arabs were criminals; statistics showed, in fact, that immigrants were less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans. He said that even data from the right-leaning Immigration Policy Center showed that incarceration rates among young men are lowest for immigrants.

Valero viewed racial profiling as a blatant violation of the 14^th amendment, which states that no state may “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” Racial profiling, he said, is based on a standard of unequal protection. “Racial profiling is immoral. It debases and destroys human dignity. It promotes the internal segregation of suspects within the minds of law enforcement officers, and it creates a second-class citizenship for minority groups, especially our youth and children who may be U.S. citizens, permanent residents or are in the U.S. legally.”

Finally, Figueredo added that racial profiling diverts police attention from using more effective law enforcement techniques, wasting police resources. It caused resentment in targeted communities and made people less likely to cooperate with the police, even when they were victims of crime or in emergencies. It also created a climate of fear, compromising public safety.

The three speakers and the participants were hopeful that the “End Racial Profiling Act of 2010 (H.R. 5748) introduced on July 15 in Congress would:

“establish a prohibition on racial profiling; mandating training on racial profiling issues and the collection of data as a condition of receiving federal law enforcement funding; authorize the Justice Department to provide grants for the development and implementation of best policing practices that discourage profiling; and require the Attorney General to provide periodic reports to assess the nature of any ongoing discriminatory profiling practices.”