Attorney

PLANTATION — Marc Jeffrey Moore is accustomed to working in hot spots. He was once a Border Patrol agent on the long, sweltering boundary between the U.S. and Mexico.

Now, after rising through the ranks, first in Texas and then in Washington, he has been named regional field director for Florida, in charge of apprehensions and removals of illegal immigrants for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

That puts him in charge of 585 officers and special agents and more than 500 other contract employees in Florida, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. He oversees seven detention facilities and 1,900 “detention beds.”

Moore, a 49-year-old father of five, arrives in an election year in which immigration is a hot-button issue marked by emotional debate. Florida is home to hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants, many of whom work in key state industries such as agriculture, construction and hospitality.

Moore says neither he nor his officers make policy; they simply carry it out. But they are increasingly busy doing so.

Although most people detained and deported by ICE are undocumented workers without serious criminal records, the agency’s emphasis is changing, Moore said. In an Aug. 20 memo, John Morton, national ICE director, affirmed that the agency is putting a priority on the capture of undocumented immigrants convicted of crimes.

“In fiscal year 2008-2009, we arrested and removed 136,000 convicted criminal aliens,” Moore said of ICE officers nationwide. “This year, we have one month left in the fiscal year and we’re at 170,000.”

More than 4,000 of those were captured in Florida.

The term “convicted criminal alien” is key for Moore. He emphasizes that ICE officers under his command do not conduct “sweeps,” casting nets and picking up anyone in a specific locale solely because they are in the country illegally.

Violent gangs a priority

ICE places a priority on pursuing illegal immigrants guilty of violent crimes: homicide, kidnapping, rape and other sex offenses, and serious drug crimes. Those “Level I” criminals can include members of violent gangs.

Next the agency moves to “Level II” offenses, including burglary, low-level drug offenses or people guilty of repeated misdemeanors. Some of those criminals may have been deported previously.

“The largest impact ICE can have on national security and public safety is to ensure that those convicted criminal aliens do not return back to the streets of our communities,” Moore said.

To find those individuals, he said, ICE officers use “intelligence-driven analysis and the development of leads about where they might be residing, where they might be working,” not sweeps. “In a world with limited resources, we want to be smart, effective and we want to be responsible in how we apply those resources to make our streets safe.”

Moore said ICE has improved its deportation numbers by including local and state police authorities in immigration enforcement, which has become controversial.

The 287(g) program includes training for local officers who work in jails and authorizes them to investigate the immigration status of people incarcerated, identify those in the country illegally and detain them for possible removal by ICE.

That program, which is active in Collier and Duval counties, has come under attack by immigrant rights activists, who say it fosters racial profiling by local law enforcement.

A report issued this year by the Office of the Inspector General of the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, also criticized 287(g). The program is supposed to target serious criminals, the report said, but fewer than 10 percent of those detained through 287(g) fell into that category.

ICE spokeswoman Nicole Navas said that even before the report was issued, the agency had changed the 287(g) program to respond to criticism. New guidelines emphasize the need to target offenders who are “a threat to public safety” and tighten ICE oversight of local law enforcement, she said.

Moore also praised the Secure Communities program, which operates in all 67 Florida counties and allows local officials to tap into Department of Homeland Security and FBI fingerprint databases to identify possible criminal aliens. Because many illegal immigrants use assumed names, local law enforcement agencies often have no way of knowing their real identities or the possible criminal records of people held in their jails.

“It’s been tremendous in terms of ease and the increased number of convicted criminal aliens that we are able to identify,” Moore said.

But that program also has come under attack for leading to the detention of many illegal immigrants not guilty of serious crimes and clogging the immigration courts.

Rights advocates object

Immigrant rights activists say some counties, including St. Lucie, Miami-Dade and Hillsborough, use Secure Communities technology to detain immigrants convicted of no crimes or low-level offenses, including misdemeanors.

The Center for Constitutional Rights, based in Washington, said the program “serves as a smokescreen for racial profiling.”

“ICE’s own records show that the vast majority of people deported due to (Secure Communities) are not criminals or were picked up for lower-level offenses,” the organization said.

ICE disputes those claims.

“Racial profiling is simply not something that will be tolerated, and any indication of racial profiling will be treated with the utmost scrutiny and fully investigated,” Navas said. “If any proof of racial profiling is uncovered, that specific officer or department could have their agreement rescinded.”

The 287(g) training includes “course work on multicultural communication and the avoidance of racial profiling,” Navas said.

Criminal deportees rising

In the Florida region, most of the people who were deported or who left voluntarily after being detained through Secure Communities – 1,881 of 3,520 – had been convicted of Level I or Level II crimes, according to agency records.

ICE officials also say the percentage of people deported from the Florida sector who are convicted criminals has risen sharply in recent years, from about 22 percent in 2008 to 36 percent in 2010.

The crackdown on serious criminals, Moore said, doesn’t mean that others in the country illegally who are encountered by ICE officers will be ignored.

“We didn’t say we were going to ignore any particular population,” he said. “We want to make sure that the immigration system has integrity, that we don’t turn our heads away from people gaming the system, who came in here fraudulently. We want to send a strong message that we are not going to allow that. …

“Nobody gets a free pass.