Centro Presente invites you to a:
Community Forum about the Secure Communities Program

The Forum will be conducted in Spanish

As part of Centro Presente's informative campaign we are organizing a Community Forum about the Secure Communities Program.

When: Sunday,October 24th at 3:00 p.m.
Where: Casa de La Cultura
202 Maverick Street
East Boston, MA 02128

Do you want to know what is the Secure Communities Program that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is implementing?

Do you want to know how this Program is affecting immigrant communities?

Do you want to take action and support a campaign that seeks to educate people abut the effects of this Program on the immigrant community?

Come learn and participate in an informative session about the Secure Communities Program.

This federal program, under the direction of ICE, requires local law enforcement to cross-check digital fingerprints of anyone they arrest against a federal database to evaluate the arrested person's immigration status. If ICE determines the arrested person to be undocumented, that person will be detained by ICE and processed for deportation.

ICE claims that Secure Communities targets undocumented immigrants who have been arrested for felony offenses, but the program doesn't explicitly say that non-felony arrests are exempt from the program. This opens the door for local law enforcement to arrest people they suspect of being undocumented to cross-check fingerprints against the ICE database.

The program will help the Obama administration reach its goal of deporting 400,000 immigrants this year.

For more information please contact:
Patricia Montes- Centro Presente- 617 959 3108
Patrick McDermott- Centro Presente- 617 629 4731
Labels: Community , Education , Events , ICE , Immigration

Somerville, MA- Late Thursday evening Centro Presente received a panicked phone call from one of our youth members informing us that ICE agents were at his house. The agents had come for an individual who no longer lived at the apartment building. Although the person they were looking for was not in the building and they showed no search warrant, the ICE agents had gained entry and were now going to each apartment and asking for people's names and identification, which the understandably scared tenants were providing to them. When Centro Presente staff arrived shortly after the agents' departure, we found a family terrorized by this experience and worried about their future.

This story is all too common for the immigrants of Massachusetts. The immigrant community is frequently unaware of their rights and the limits of the power of ICE. No one needs to open a door for any law enforcement officer if they do not have a search warrant. You do not have to speak to any officer without your lawyer present. What ICE does with alarming frequency is abuse the fact that people are unaware of their rights. Late night knocks at the door by groups of men dressed in black are intimidating to anyone, but even more so to the vulnerable families of neighborhoods like East Somerville.

Centro Presente demands that the agents of ICE respect the rights of all people and stop these outrageous abuses of power. We will step up our existing efforts to ensure that our members and the entire Latino immigrant community are aware of their rights and are trained in the proper response to a visit by ICE agents.

Centro Presente is a state-wide, membership-based Latino immigrant organization that advocates for immigrant rights and for economic and social justice through the integration of community organizing, leadership development and basic services.

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Labels: ICE , Immigration