Enrollment in the Secure Communities program reached a new high in June and July proving that the Immigration, Customs and Enforcement agency is picking up its heels to meet its enrollment goal for 2010. Florida and Virginia activated Secure Communities state-wide – 67 and 129 counties respectively – following the way of Delaware, which activated all of its three counties earlier this year. This could hint at more states meeting full enrollment in coming months.

As of July 16, Secure Communities was active in 448  jurisdictions in 25 states.

In March of 2010, ICE head John Morton, assured members of the Homeland Security Appropriations Committee that the immigration agency would meet its goal of adding 270 more jurisdictions by the end of 2010. This was after members expressed concern that the agency had only turned out 20 additional facilities in the first quarter of 2010.

“We are going first and foremost to those places that our mapping suggests we will have the biggest bang for the buck,” Morton told the Committee. “And those last out years, while they’re large in the actual number of implementation that we do, they reach an ever decreasing percentage of jurisdictions with large numbers of criminal offenders because we focused on.”

In an effort to get the biggest bang for their buck, ICE has focused on enrollments in states where there are high concentrations of Hispanics and foreign-born individuals. In the state of Virginia for example, Frederick, Culpeper, Caroline, Fauquier, and Orange counties in Virginia were among the top ten counties in the nation with the fastest growing Latino populations, according to 2008 data collected by Pew Hispanic Center.

It also appears likely that the next states to fully implement Secure Communities state-wide will be California, Arizona, Texas and even North Carolina. So far, Texas (52 percent) has more than half of its 260 counties enrolled, followed by Arizona (47 percent), California (36 percent), and North Carolina (29 percent). California, Arizona, and Texas, in particular, have counties with some of the largest Latino populations in the country. Los Angeles County in California ranked No. 1 with a little over 4.7 million, followed by Harris County in Texas with over 1.5 million, according to the same Pew data.

The agency has also began to set its sights on counties in the Midwest with recent county enrollments in South Dakota, Illinois, Tennessee, and Idaho.