One man turned over to ICE in Georgia by local authorities participating in the program had run afoul of the law for fishing without a license, Amaya said yesterday. Another, in California, had been stopped for making an illegal U-turn on a bicycle and riding in the wrong direction.
By Leslie Berestein
The San Diego Union-Tribune
SAN DIEGO, Calif. — The growing popularity of a nationwide immigration-enforcement program that partners local law enforcement with federal immigration authorities is leading to complications that include ethnic profiling, a panel of legal experts and immigrant-rights advocates said yesterday at the National Council of La Raza Convention.
The program is referred to as 287(g), for the section of a federal law that authorized it. Under the program, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement provides participating state and local law enforcement agencies with training and authorization to identify, process and detain people who are in the country illegally or otherwise deportable.
While the intent of the program is to find dangerous individuals, according to ICE, these aren’t necessarily the sort of people being turned over by participating agencies, said John Amaya, a legislative staff attorney for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund.
One man turned over to ICE in Georgia by local authorities participating in the program had run afoul of the law for fishing without a license, Amaya said yesterday. Another, in California, had been stopped for making an illegal U-turn on a bicycle and riding in the wrong direction.
“That doesn’t seem like terrorism to me, and it doesn’t seem like assault and battery,” Amaya said. “We are seeing that people are exerting their authority above and beyond their memorandum of agreement.”
The program is not used in San Diego County, but its popularity has spread in recent years as federal funding for it has grown, as has the political fervor surrounding illegal immigration.
While there were only two participating agencies nationwide in 2003, today 55 state and local agencies participate in 287(g), according to ICE. Among them are sheriff’s departments in Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino and Los Angeles counties, which screen for legal status in their jails. An additional 80 requests for participation from agencies are pending. ICE says the program has identified more than 60,000 deportable individuals, mostly in jails.
“It’s a very efficient way of identifying deportable criminals when they are in a contained environment,” said Lauren Mack, a spokeswoman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement in San Diego.
Others on the panel complained about legal residents and even U.S. citizens being screened in jails for legal status.
“We know that racial profiling is happening, we hear it every day,” said Stephen Fotopulos, executive director of the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition in Nashville, in a county that participates in the program. “Foreign-born people are treated differently when they cross the threshold of the jail.”
Mack said ICE agents who screen inmates in county jails -- an initiative separate from 287(g), and one in which the agency cooperates with San Diego County -- try to review all inmates regardless of ethnicity. However, she added, when agents are not physically present, agents later will scan intake rosters for those who show up as foreign-born.
“Sometimes it’s not possible for us to screen every single person,” Mack said.
San Diego County Undersheriff Bill Gore said the main reason the county does not participate in the 287(g) program involves resources.
“I’ve only got a finite number of deputies,” Gore said. “It takes them away from answering a call for domestic violence or suspicious activity. That doesn’t mean we are not sympathetic to the immigration issue, but I don’t want to see us localize a federal problem.”
ICE officers have been provided space to work in San Diego County booking facilities downtown, in Vista and in Santee, Gore said. He said the rate of individuals earmarked for deportation is about 7.7 percent, slightly less than in Orange County.
“We are getting the same result,” Gore said. “But we are not using our resources.
Copyright 2008 The San Diego Union-Tribune