Through Freedom of Information Act requests, the researchers obtained all of the “performance data” that Homeland Security collected about the program from 2008 to early 2013, Professor Cox said. In addition, they gathered Census Bureau data as well as crime reports and other municipal policing information from the F.B.I.

They concluded that there was no “empirical evidence” that Secure Communities caused “a meaningful reduction” in the rates of serious crimes.

“This is important because Secure Communities specifically, and criminal deportation policies more generally, have long been publicly justified primarily on grounds that they keep communities safer from violent crime,” the authors said in the study.

The study allowed that the program might have led to small reductions in the rates of motor vehicle theft and burglary. This result, the authors said, suggests that the people who are least likely to be deterred by the threat of deportation are the most serious criminals — the very people the Obama administration says the program is intended to catch.

Though the authors did not send the study to the immigration authorities for review, officials at Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, an arm of Homeland Security, defended the program. They said it had helped lead to the deportation of more than 288,000 convicted criminals from October 2008 to May 2014, including more than 113,000 immigrants convicted of major violent offenses, such as murder, rape and sexual abuse of children.

“Secure Communities, by leaps and bounds, has allowed us to get the most egregious violators of our local statutes out of our communities and remove them from the country,” a senior agency official who was not authorized to speak on the record said in an interview. With criminal recidivism rates just below 50 percent, he added, the program most likely prevented more than 100,000 people from going out and committing another crime.

“I don’t know how you can say that does not have an impact on community safety,” he added.

Professor Cox and Professor Miles countered that while the program might have reduced “in absolute terms” the number of crimes being committed, it had not necessarily made communities safer. A more important measure of safety is the crime rate — the number of crimes per population — which measures the likelihood that someone will become a victim of crime, they said.