News and insight into biometric identification and authentication

Florida activates ICE’s Secure Communities program

Wednesday, June 30, 2010

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement (FDLE) have announced that ICE’s Secure Communities program has begun in Florida. Secure Communities is set-up to help state officials identify criminal foreigners, both legally and illegally in the United States, already in police custody.

The program identifies the aliens via biometrics such as fingerprints that were registered when they enter prison compared with the biometrics registered with ICE and entered into the Department of Homeland Security’s database when they entered the country.

The point behind the program is to stop the release of illegal aliens back into the U.S. once their sentence is complete. Florida’s entry into the program brings Secure Communities’ involvement up to 392 jurisdictions in 23 states and is expected to help push the number of illegal aliens with level 1, 2 or 3 crimes in their past removed from the U.S. beyond its current number of 30,700 as 1,800 illegal aliens have already been removed from Florida under the system. [end] 

Related Articles
Organization files suit against ICE over new program

Lawyers have filed suit seeking records from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) about their Secure Communities program, according to an El Paso Times article. The suit was filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights, a New York-based organization that intends to help guarantee rights promised by the U.S. Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in conjunction with the National Day Laborer Organizing Network in Los Angeles and the Immigration Justice Clinic of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York

read more »
SIA defends biometrics from Alaskan bill

The Security Industry Association (SIA), a member-based group that advocates on behalf of the security industry in the U.S., has publicly opposed a Bill in Alaska that restricts biometric technology in the state, according to a Security Info Watch article.

read more »
New fingerprint solution created through BIO-key MorphoTrak partnership

BIO-key International has announced a new contract that requires a biometric solution built off a combination between its and fellow biometric developer MorphoTrak’s matching algorithms, according to a UPI article.

read more »
ICE program success sees expansion in Texas

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) with U.S. Representative Henry Cueller have announced that success with ICE’s biometric-enabled Secure Communities program will see an expansion of the initiative to an additional twelve counties in South Texas. The Secure Communities program is designed to remove illegal citizens living in the U.S. if they have been convicted of a crime by tracking biometric information of those entering the country.

read more »
San Francisco police may add handheld biometrics

The San Francisco Police Department could be the recipient of technology that would enable them to collect fingerprint and DNA data at crime scenes rather than waiting for processing thanks to a proposed city budget that would allocate $3 million for the upgrade, according to a San Francisco Examiner article.

read more »
Military using biometrics to categorize Afghans

U.S. soldiers stationed in Afghanistan are depending on various biometric devices and the enrollment of Afghani citizens into their databases to better tell civilians from militants and other criminals in the area, according to a CJTF-101 article.

read more »

Copyright © 2010, AVISIAN, Inc. All rights reserved.