RogerRabbit
Master Chief Petty Officer
Joined: 05 Sep 2004
Posts: 748
Location: Oregon
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 Posted: Mon Apr 25, 2005 2:36 am Post subject: Local police agencies moving to enforce federal immigration |
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http://www.newsday.com/news/local/wire/connecticut/ny-bc-ct--immigrationchecks0424apr24,0,3946098.story?coll=ny-region-apconnecticut
| Quote: | SANTA ANA, Calif. -- Frustrated by illegal immigrant criminals who slip their grasp, a growing number of state and county police agencies nationwide are moving to join a federal program that enlists local officers to enforce immigration laws.
The U.S. government has already granted that authority in Florida and Alabama, and the program is under consideration in Connecticut, Oklahoma and Arkansas.
To the dismay of immigrant advocates, it's also in the works in Southern California _ one of the nation's most ethnically diverse regions, where it would reverse a long-standing policy of avoiding questions about immigration status during local criminal investigations.
Immigrant rights groups insist the move will discourage people from reporting domestic violence or other crimes for fear of deportation and lead to racial profiling and other abuses.
"We're 100 percent against it," said Amin David, president of Los Amigos of Orange County. "It will have a chilling effect on our community."
In Orange County, Sheriff Mike Carona is proposing the largest use of the program in the country. He wants to train as many as 500 deputies to catch illegal immigrants with criminal convictions.
Under the plan, he said, officers would only check someone's status when they are in jail or while investigating them for other serious crimes. They would not conduct sweeps.
"We're just taking advantage of another law enforcement tool to take bad guys off the street," Carona said.
Despite its limited scope, the proposal drew overwhelming opposition when Carona presented it to leaders of community groups.
"If he embarks on this, we fear it will spread to other local agencies and then we'll have chaos," David said.
In neighboring Los Angeles County, the sheriff's department already has approval to train seven civilian employees this summer for a six-month pilot program to identify inmates in the overcrowded jail who are eligible for deportation.
Supporters of such programs said it's a common-sense way to help badly outnumbered federal authorities find criminals who hide among immigrants.
An estimated 465,000 people in this country have gone into hiding after receiving deportation orders. That includes as many as 85,000 immigrants who have been convicted of a crime, said Manny Van Pelt, a spokesman for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The agency, however, has 4,000 detention and removal officers and 6,000 special agents to find them and handle other crimes.
"Even if we doubled the number of ICE agents, there wouldn't be enough," said Kris Kobach, a law professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City who helped set up the program in Alabama while serving as counsel to former Attorney General John Ashcroft.
Using local authorities to enforce immigration law has been allowed since 1996, when it was included as part of a broad immigration bill. But no local agencies participated until 2002, when 35 state and local officers in Florida completed the training and were authorized to take action on immigration violations in domestic terrorism investigations.
Alabama trained its first 21 officers in 2003 to deal with what officials called a lack of attention by the federal government to illegal immigration in that state.
State troopers have used the expanded enforcement powers to arrest more than 100 people, including a Mexican man wanted for murder in his country who was captured during a traffic stop and a Nigerian woman using a fraudulent passport to get a driver's license, said Haran Lowe, a lawyer for the state Department of Public Safety.
Danbury, Conn., Mayor Mark Boughton recently urged his state to join the effort, citing the strain on government services caused by the growing illegal immigrant population in the suburb of New York City.
"The federal government has an inability to do its job as it relates to immigration," Boughton said. "The fact of the matter is that this is out of control."
Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal said he would evaluate the request.
In Los Angeles County, interest in the program is in large part financial.
About 30 percent of the 18,000 jail inmates are foreign-born, but there are only two federal agents assigned to determine who should be deported.
Meanwhile, overcrowding has forced the county to release 200,000 inmates in the past three years before their sentences were completed.
"Our goal is to get them off the street and out of the country so local resources aren't spent on these individuals," said sheriff's Lt. Margarito Robles.
Separately, the Los Angeles Police Department recently said it was reconsidering a rule imposed in 1979 that prohibits officers from checking the immigration status of crime victims and witnesses. The rule was intended to encourage cooperation with police.
Under the new proposal, LAPD officers could seek a federal warrant against an illegal immigrant who was previously deported for a criminal defense. The measure is primarily meant for use against violent gang members and other serious offenders.
The change, which requires approval by the Police Commission, may not happen without a fight.
Nativo Lopez, president of the Mexican-American Political Association, said his group and others plan to protest by urging people not to cooperate with law enforcement except in the most extreme cases.
"They are throwing 30 years of cooperation between police and the Latino community out the window," Lopez said. "It's a tremendous loss to the public." |
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