 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 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."
Federal statistics do not measure the
number of immigration arrests and deportations that occur
because of local intervention. Officials with the United
States Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency said the
roughly 160,000 illegal immigrants deported last year
represented a 10 percent increase over the year before — and
a national record — but they could not say how many had been
referred by the local authorities.
Until fairly recently, it was viewed as
inappropriate, even unconstitutional, for the local or state
authorities to be involved in the enforcement of federal law.
In Los Angeles, the police still operate under an internal
rule that says "undocumented alien status is not a matter
for police enforcement." Similar policies apply in San
Francisco and New York City.
But that may be changing, partly because
the local authorities have decided to play a more active role
and partly because of an unabashed call from the federal
government seeking help from states and localities.
"The untold story of immigration
law is that there are just not enough federal immigration
officers to enforce the immigration laws we have," said
Kris W. Kobach, a law professor at the University of
Missouri-Kansas City who as a counsel in the Justice
Department worked on several cooperative agreements with state
and local law enforcement agencies.
"The only way our programs can work
is with help from local law enforcement, and we're expecting
to see that happening more and more," he said.
To make that happen, law enforcement
officials have increasingly been looking to a federal statute,
the 1996 Immigration and Nationality Act. It allows the local
and state authorities to reach agreements with the federal
immigration and customs agency to train their officers — in
a four-week crash course — to be virtual immigration agents,
able to conduct citizenship investigations and begin
deportation proceedings against illegal immigrants.
The law went nearly untried in its first
five years on the books. Then Florida had 60 state agents and
highway officers trained in 2002, and Alabama did the same for
about 40 state troopers in 2003. In the next two years, the
Arizona corrections department and the Los Angeles and San
Bernardino Counties in California each had a few dozen
officers trained.
Indicating a new sense of urgency,
though, 11 additional state and county jurisdictions have
applied to enter the program in the past year alone, according
to a spokesman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement,
Michael W. Gilhooly. He would not specify which they were, but
public officials in Missouri, Tennessee, Arizona and about a
dozen additional counties in California, Texas and North
Carolina have publicly expressed interest in the program.
Local officials involved in these
initiatives say they are mainly targeting hardened criminals
in the immigrant population — people like gang members and
sexual predators who have been the recent target of sweeps by
federal immigration agents.
But many of those affected by the new
home-grown vigilance are immigrants arrested for minor traffic
violations, or charged with unlicensed driving, possession of
forged green cards and other offenses that are virtually
synonymous with the undocumented life, say immigrant advocates
and lawyers.
In Springfield, Mo., for example, a
furor erupted recently when a star player on the high school
soccer team, Tobias Zuniga, was arrested and jailed after a
routine traffic stop because he admitted to the officer that
he was an illegal immigrant. Officers at the Christian County
Jail notified immigration agents, and Mr. Zuniga, an
18-year-old senior, was held for a weekend before being
released on bail.
"He was stopped for having
excessively tinted windows," Tom Parker, the father of a
friend and classmate of Mr. Zuniga, said in a telephone
interview. "And he spent three nights in jail with drug
dealers." Mr. Zuniga faces deportation hearings this
month.
Federal immigration officials, however,
maintain that the vast majority of illegal immigrants detained
and deported are people convicted or charged with serious
crimes. There are simply not enough immigration agents to
respond every time a suspected illegal immigrant is arrested
for driving with an invalid license, said Marc Raimondi, a
spokesman for the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.
Daniel W. Beck, the sheriff of Allen
County, Ohio, 100 miles northwest of Columbus, said calling
immigration agents is no guarantee of action.
"When people drive without
licenses, when they are in this country illegally, it's really
a right and wrong issue. I will arrest them," Mr. Beck
said. "Unfortunately, by the time a federal agent gets
here, they are sometimes already bailed out of jail."
But Marianne Yang, director of the
Immigrant Defense Project of the New York State Defenders
Association, a lawyers' group, said a recurring problem for
immigrants, legal and illegal, is the high bail set for them
if they are arrested, no matter how minor the crime.
"What we see in the increasing
collaboration between local authorities and I.C.E. is
situations where a person would normally be released in his
own recognizance, and instead is held on high bail," she
said of the agreements with the Immigration and Customs
Enforcement agency.
The arrests of the men playing soccer in
Putnam County in January might illustrate that phenomenon.
Sheriff's deputies went there in response to a complaint about
safety by the administrator of the elementary school, which
was in session as the men played.
Mr. Smith, the Putnam sheriff, said
deputies arrested the men that day only after they refused the
school administrator's request for them to leave. They were
charged with criminal trespass, a class B misdemeanor, and a
Brewster village judge set bail at $1,000 for seven of the
eight. Bail for the eighth man, Juan Jimeniz, a roofer, was
set at $3,000 because he was not able to provide his home
address.
Mr. Smith said federal immigration
agents were called to the jail because deputies suspected the
men were illegal immigrants and "because we are trying to
uphold the law for the citizens of this county."
When they arrived, seven of the men had
made bail and Mr. Jimeniz, who was not able to pay his bail,
was taken by the immigration agents to a federal detention
wing of the Pike County Jail in Hawley, Pa., where he has
remained since, fighting deportation.
"He has no criminal record,"
said Vanessa Merton, director of the Immigration Justice
Clinic of the Pace University Law School, which represents Mr.
Jimeniz. "He is a roofer. He is supporting five
children."
"There is no way you could describe
his detention as anything but haphazard, random and completely
arbitrary," she said.
Mr. Kobach, the former Justice
Department official, said "unevenness has been endemic to
the nature of immigration enforcement in recent years."
But efforts by local and state
authorities to pursue illegal immigrants, he said, are at
least in part, "an effort to deal with that
unevenness."
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