Reversals by immigration officials are sowing mistrust

Weeks after quelling a growing furor on the right by announcing an investigation into why an illegal immigrant who was driving drunk when he killed a nun in Prince William County had not been deported after two previous convictions, officials said they would not make the investigation's results public.

And hours after a senior official, who was publicly challenged last week by a Maryland woman facing deportation, assured the woman that she had not been picked up under a controversial immigration program, officials said the woman had indeed been identified via the program, known as Secure Communities.

Advocates on both the right and the left say these and other incidents have created a climate of mistrust in which immigration officials initially tell people want they want to hear, only to antagonize them later when reality kicks in.

Defenders of the administration say the problem is that officials have been placed in the impossible position of enforcing laws that they themselves believe are unfair and outdated.

"We have made a very high priority of transparency and candor," said Beth Gibson, assistant deputy director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). "We have posted all our policies online . . . we are operating openly and forthrightly."

But months after assuring Congress that local jurisdictions could opt out of Secure Communities - which runs fingerprints obtained by local police through a national database to see whether they belong to illegal immigrants - officials backtracked.

The letter Napolitano sent to Congress said, "a local law enforcement agency that does not wish to participate in the Secure Communities deployment plan must formally notify the Assistant Director for the Secure Communities program."

But what they meant, officials said, was only that communities could temporarily postpone when they signed up for the program.

"If I were writing the sentence now, it would say, 'Jurisdictions cannot opt out of Secure Communities, but we will work with you to mitigate your concerns,' " Gibson said.

Walter Tejada, an Arlington County Board member who spearheaded a resolution for the county to opt out of the program only to learn that it was impossible, said: "If that had been the case why didn't they tell us in May? Why did we have to go through all this hoopla?"

Similarly, after a public outcry in August over why officials had not deported drunk driver Carlos Martinelly-Montano, officials at the Department of Homeland Security promised an investigation.