William Finnegan: Trapped in the Deportation Machine: The New Yorker You get arrested. The authorities run a background check. They need to know if you have outstanding warrants or unpaid tickets, if you jumped bail somewhere, if you're driving a stolen vehicle. To obtain your criminal history, they routinely send your fingerprints to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which keeps a database of more than a hundred million prints. The F.B.I., under a federal program known as Secure Communities, will share your fingerprints with the Department of Homeland Security. Homeland Security's core job - the reason it was created - is to prevent terrorist attacks on the United States. Your prints might reveal that you're a suspected terrorist. D.H.S. is also charged with border security. Its Immigration and Customs Enforcement arm, ICE, will run your prints through the D.H.S. database - specifically, its U.S. Visitor and Immigrant Status Indicator Technology Program (U.S.-VISIT) and Automated Biometric Identification System (IDENT), which also contain more than a hundred million prints - searching for a match with people wanted for immigration violations. If a match occurs, ICE can issue a "detainer." Now the local authorities, before they release you, may notify ICE, which may elect to transfer you to federal custody in order to begin deportation proceedings. When Mark Lyttle, a U.S. citizen, was booked into Neuse Correctional Institution, a minimum-security state facility in Goldsboro, North Carolina, in August, 2008, much of the data exchanged between agencies, including the biometrics, appear to have been ignored. Lyttle, who is thirty-five, has had a difficult life. He was born in Rowan County, North Carolina, which is about two hundred miles west of Goldsboro, and he spent his early childhood in foster homes. He was adopted at the age of seven, along with two younger brothers and a sister, by Thomas and Jeanne Lyttle, who had one child of their own. Thomas Lyttle died a year later. Jeanne, an occupational-therapy assistant, reared five children. Mark is bipolar and diabetic. He has cognitive problems. He can read, but writes with difficulty. He has spent much of his time since adolescence in mental institutions, jails, and group homes. Before he went to Neuse, he was a patient at Cherry Hospital, a state psychiatric facility a few doors up the street. Earlier that year, he had been convicted of inappropriately touching a female employee at another facility. He was sentenced to a hundred days for misdemeanor assault. This is a fair time to mention that the North Carolina director of prisons, J. Boyd Bennett, had, in 2007, signed an agreement that required facilities under his control, including Neuse, to coöperate with ICE enforcement agents by identifying inmates "believed to be foreign born and non-US citizens." There are many types of overlapping agreements between local law enforcement and federal immigration authorities. Operation Secure Streets, one of Secure Communities" pilot programs, was up and running in North Carolina by 2006. Secure Streets relied on raids to find deportable aliens. Secure Communities, like ICE's agreement with J. Boyd Bennett, relies on combing the jails. This is not a new practice. ICE's Criminal Alien Program, which also does "jail status check," has been around, under one name or another, since 1988. In the past decade, however, deportations have soared, increasing every year since 2001. Last year, the United States deported more than four hundred thousand people - a new record. . . .