Six years after the federal government opened an immigration enforcement program intended to improve public safety, deporting hundreds of thousands of people, many of them convicted criminals, a new study has concluded that the program has had “no observable effect on the overall crime rate.”

The finding “calls into question the longstanding assumption that deporting noncitizens who commit crimes is an effective crime-control strategy,” said the study, conducted by two law professors at the University of Chicago and New York University.

The analysis, scheduled for publication in the November issue of The Journal of Law and Economics, a journal for peer-review research, coincides with the Obama administration’s internal review of the program, known as Secure Communities. Jeh Johnson, the homeland security secretary, has suggested that he might overhaul the program, saying it needs “a fresh start.”

Secure Communities, which began in 2008 under President George W. Bush, became a cornerstone of the Obama administration’s immigration enforcement strategy, allowing officials in the Department of Homeland Security to more easily compare the fingerprints of suspects booked at local jails with those in its files. If the authorities find that a suspect is a noncitizen who is in the country illegally or has a criminal record, they may seek custody of that suspect and begin deportation proceedings.

Yet the program has been plagued with trouble since it began.

Immigrants’ advocates, joined by some officials, have long questioned the crime-fighting impact of the program, complaining that it sweeps up many immigrants who have committed minor infractions, like traffic violations, or are guilty of no crimes at all but are in the country illegally.

The new study – by Adam B. Cox, a professor at New York University’s School of Law, and Thomas J. Miles, a professor at the Law School at the University of Chicago – is the first comprehensive, independent analysis of the program’s efficacy in lowering crime rates, the authors said.

Read more at The New York Times