The Department of Homeland Security announced Thursday that it would be terminating Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s Office 287(g) agreement and restricting its access to the Secure Communities program after a scathing Justice Department report found that the department had been routinely practicing unconstitutional policing.

On the heels of the Obama administration’s announcement of its latest record-high number of deportations, two TV documentaries and a study reveal persistent problems with the nation’s immigration detention and enforcement systems. Meanwhile, Santa Clara passed new guidelines for civil immigration detainers and a Washington D.C. now plans to prohibit local police from inquiring about a person’s immigrant status. On Thursday, the American Civil Liberties Union released documents containing nearly 200 allegations of sexual abuse against female immigration detainees in federal detention centers since 2007.

A task force charged with making recommendations to improve the controversial Secure Communities program, released a critical draft report last week, saying that the Administration continued to create confusion about its enforcement priorities and underestimated the negative impact the program…

This week the Obama Administration announced new guidelines to unclog the immigration courts by allowing low-priority immigrant offenders to remain in the country and apply for a work permit. The announcement was made during a series of heated Secure Communities hearings where advocates are calling for the termination of the program. A NY judge also forced ICE to re-release hundreds of documents unredacted. Here’s your look at last week’s top immigration news.

ICE says it has decided to “terminate” contracts with states for its increasingly unpopular Secure Communities program. But that doesn’t mean the data-sharing enforcement program will stop.

A New York judge has ordered the Immigration Customs and Enforcement agency to produce withheld information on how localities may “opt-out” or limit participation in the Secure Communities — even if it may be embarrassing to the agency.

New documents released Wednesday assert that ICE’s controversial Secure Communities program is just a small part of a bigger effort by the Federal Bureau of Investigation to create the “world’s largest crime-fighting computer database of biometric information, including fingerprints, palm prints, iris patterns and face images” called Next Generation Identification (NGI) project.

In a conference call with reporters, ICE unveiled a list of reforms to its controversial “Secure Communities” program. But immigrant rights advocates called the changes “lipstick” and continued to call for a moratorium. We summarize the new developments and link to the reforms ICE has posted online.

Deportation Nation has launched a new interactive timeline that monitors Secure Communities from when it began in 2008, to the present, when it faces increasing resistance.