A Secure Communities protest in L.A. (AP)

By Liz Goodwin | The Lookout

Thousands of  American citizens flagged for deportation since 2008 have been U.S. citizens, a new report says.

Secure Communities is a federal program that scours fingerprint logs from local jails for illegal immigrants to deport. A report from the Berkeley Law Center in California finds that 1.6 percent of Secure Communities apprehensions, in a random sample of arrests, were American citizens.

“If we extrapolate” that percentage to the more than 225,000 arrests or bookings into Immigration and Customs Enforcement from Secure Communities since 2008, “then we find that approximately 3,600 US citizens have been apprehended by ICE from the inception of the program through April 2011,” the authors write.

None of the citizens who were questioned by immigration officials were placed in detention centers or deported, and it’s unclear for how long they were in custody.

Immigration authorities have admitted that the fingerprint system can wrongly identify someone as an illegal immigrant, but the agency doesn’t keep detailed records of incidents when that occurs.

The report found that 93 percent of people arrested through Secure Communities are Latinos, even though Latinos comprise only 77 percent of the illegal immigrant population, according to estimates.

The Secure Communities program helped the Obama administration deport nearly 400,000 people last fiscal year–a new record.

President Barack Obama touts the program as a way to get rid of dangerous criminals, but immigrant rights advocates say it encourages racial profiling and breaks apart families. Nearly half of those deported under Secure Communities were never convicted of a crime. (The government treats most immigration violations as civil, not criminal, offenses.)

The program will be mandatory in every state by 2014. Three Democratic governors have so far refused to implement it.

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