Homeland Security secretary defends new immigration enforcement policy

WASHINGTON -- Facing critics on all sides, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano on Wednesday defended the Obama administration's new policy of deciding which illegal immigrants to send home first.

The government is deporting record numbers of illegal immigrants, she said, but putting at the top of the line those who pose a public safety or national security threat. That's a shift from the Bush administration's enforcement strategy, Napolitano said in a speech at American University, the latest public push to promote the new approach.

Republicans say making it a priority to deport those immigrants amounts to a back-door way of granting amnesty to other people who are living in the U.S. illegally but haven't committed crimes. Yet to immigration advocates, the administration is still deporting such illegal immigrants.

She said policies inherited from the Bush administration "allowed as many resources, if not more, to be spent tracking down and deporting the college student as were spent on apprehending criminal aliens and gang members."

Authorities would conduct large raids at companies without consistently punishing the employer or targeting individuals who posed a threat.

"Public safety wasn't enhanced by these raids, and they sometimes required hundreds of agents and thousands of hours to complete," Napolitano said.

Now, she said, the Department of Homeland Security is using fingerprints collected from those held in local jails to identify and deport criminals and repeat immigration violators

Advocates for an immigration overhaul say this program, known as Secure Communities, has resulted in the deportation of people accused of traffic violations or other misdemeanors. Several states have said they don't want to participate, arguing that immigration is a federal, not state, responsibility.