Friday - April 14, 2006

Local Law Enforcement Cracks Down On Illegals

I read this and thought to myself that this has been brewing for a long time. I have several relatives who are in law enforcement and quite a few friends who are cops. I’ve been hearing about their frustration with the Feds, and particularly the INS, for many years. One of my friends in the Birmingham, Alabama police department and I were chatting on the phone two years ago and I happened to mention illegal aliens and asked him if they were having problems with them down there. He nearly went ballistic. I can’t even repeat to you some of the names he used to describe the INS.

Typically, he said, they catch some Mexican or Guatemalan either speeding or driving drunk or whatever and find out they have no license (or a fake one) and no insurance. A quick check and they confirm that their captive is illegal. That’s where the fun starts, according to him. The INS is contacted and the police are told that the Feds can’t be bothered with the illegal unless they (the police) have sixty or more of them to justify a chartered plane to take them out of the country. At this point the police have no choice but to release the illegal with nothing more than a fine for the traffic violation.

That’s the way it’s been for years. Unless the local police catch a full planeload of illegals speeding all at the same time, the INS could care less. That’s your federal government at work, folks. This supposedly “new” tactic that the NY Times talks about is the result of long built-up frustration by local police and has nothing to do with recent events.

Path to Deportation Can Start With a Traffic Stop
_{April 14, 2006 (NY Times)}

While lawmakers in Washington debate whether to forgive illegal immigrants their trespasses, a small but increasing number of local and state law enforcement officials are taking it upon themselves to pursue deportation cases against people who are here illegally. In more than a dozen jurisdictions, officials have invoked a little-used 1996 federal law to seek special federal training in immigration enforcement for their officers.

In other places, the local authorities are flagging some illegal immigrants who are caught up in the criminal justice system, sometimes for minor offenses, and are alerting immigration officials to their illegal status so that they can be deported. In Costa Mesa, Calif., for example, in Orange County, the City Council last year shut down a day laborer job center that had operated for 17 years, and this year authorized its Police Department to begin training officers to pursue illegal immigrants — a job previously left to federal agents.

In Suffolk County, on Long Island, where a similar police training proposal was met with angry protests in 2004, county officials have quietly put a system in place that uses sheriff’s deputies to flag illegal immigrants in the county jail population. In Putnam County, N.Y., about 50 miles north of Manhattan, eight illegal immigrants who were playing soccer in a school ball field were arrested on Jan. 9 for trespassing and held for the immigration authorities.

As an example of the uneven results that sometimes occur in such cross-hatches of local and federal law enforcement, the seven immigrants who were able to make bail before those agents arrived went free. The one who could not make bail in time, a 33-year-old roofer and father of five, has been in federal detention in Pennsylvania ever since.

“I took an oath to protect the people of this county, and that means enforcing the laws of the land,” said Donald B. Smith, the Putnam County sheriff. “We have a situation in our country where our borders are not being adequately protected, and that leaves law enforcement people like us in a very difficult situation.” Other local law enforcement officials expressed similar frustration at the apparent inability of the federal government to stem the rise in illegal immigration. It is a frustration they say has been growing in the last few years, and is now reaching a point of crisis.

During that time, a number of coinciding trends may have added to the sense that there has been a breach in the covenant between the local and federal authorities, according to interviews with immigration officials, police and advocates. These trends include a housing boom that attracted growing numbers of illegal workers, especially to distant suburbs and exurbs, where federal resources are especially thin; an apparent stagnation in the size of the federal immigration police force, which has remained at about 2,000 for several years; and increasing local opposition to illegal immigration, again, especially in the suburbs.

George A. Terezakis, a Long Island immigration lawyer, said that in his practice, he had seen a trend. “The heat is definitely getting turned up. Not just on criminals, but against people I would consider charged with relatively minor offenses: Having an invalid driver’s license, a fake Social Security card. A person with a job and a family can end up sitting in jail for months, and then being deported.”

- More on this story at the NY Times ...

Posted by The Skipper     on 04/14/2006 at 05:42 AM   
Filed Under: • Illegal-Aliens and Immigration •  
• Comments (6) • Trackbacks(0)  Permalink •  

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