Cox News Service
August 22, 2008 Friday
STUDY FINDS MOST LOCAL POLICE PREFER TO LEAVE ENFORCING IMMIGRATION LAWS TO THE FEDS
by NIN-HAI TSENG
Washington General News
Cox New Service
WASHINGTON - Local and state police should leave immigration enforcement up to federal agencies, the preliminary findings of a Police Foundation study found.
Through a series of focus groups that brought together academics, law enforcement officials, human-rights groups and other stakeholders, the foundation found that most prefer having federal authorities enforce immigration laws instead of the nation's local police and sheriff's departments.
The Police Foundation is an independent nonprofit that seeks to help law enforcement officials improve policing. Its findings, which will be included in a full report in the coming months, were presented at a two-day conference hosted by the foundation that ended Friday.
Some local officials said their agencies lack the expertise and resources to deal with detaining illegal immigrants. By helping to conduct crackdowns, community police and sheriff's agencies risk straining trust with locals who police rely on for tips to fight crime, they say.
"If the community doesn't trust us, it makes our job harder," said El Paso Mayor John Cook, one of several speakers at the conference who touched on the growing fear within many communities following immigration raids.
Cook and other local leaders urged Congress to work diligently on comprehensive immigration reform as they struggle to make sense of what they see as incoherent federal policies.
The mayor, who supports providing undocumented immigrants with a path toward legalization, added that the city's officers aren't nearly as trained as federal agents in enforcing immigration laws. The lack of expertise puts the city at risk of expensive lawsuits, Cook said, pointing to one in Katy, Texas.
Cook is among many Texas officials who have opposed being part of a federal program that allows locally designated officers and deputies perform immigration law enforcement duties through training with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers.
The Travis County Sheriff's Office also does not participate in the program.
"We don't have enough man power to enforce the local and state laws right now," Sheriff Greg Hamilton said Friday. "By us bringing in another area of enforcement, all it's going to do is diminish what we were sanctioned to do -- crime fighting."
Hamilton added that immigration policies are not easily understood.
"I'm not talking about two weeks of training or three weeks of training," he said. "There are hundreds and hundreds of different visas."
Like many agencies, however, the sheriff's office does ask foreign-born individuals in its custody if they are authorized to be in the country. If they are undocumented, ICE gets involved.
But some feel local agencies have a critical role. More than 60 local law enforcement agencies, including the Collier County Sheriff's Office in Florida, have officers and deputies enforce immigration laws through training with ICE.
"This issue of racial profiling is relatively untrue," Collier County Sheriff
Donald Hunter said, responding to criticisms of policing tactics used to spot unauthorized immigrants.
The sheriff added that his agency is focused on deporting gang members not authorized to be in the country.
There are an estimated 12 million illegal immigrants in the United States, according to the Pew Hispanic Center. The population is relatively young. It's also made up of mostly families, about 7.1 million, said Jeff Passel, a senior demographer with the center who presented the statistics at the conference. About 22 percent are "mixed status families" in which the children are U.S. citizens.
Nin-Hai Tseng's e-mail is ntseng@coxnews.com
from Lexis Nexis
No comments:
Post a Comment