Fixing Immigration in the Field

New York Times (Editorial)

August 16, 2014

Fixing Immigration in the Field 

President Obama is looking to give some unauthorized immigrants a temporary path out of the shadows, a legal way to stay and work. He promised to act by the end of summer if Congress didn’t. Though a debate has raged about the legal and political restraints on Mr. Obama’s executive authority to do this, the real question is how many of the unauthorized population, totaling about 11 million, will be lucky enough to win a temporary reprieve from deportation.

There is another task for the administration, just as urgent: to bring immigration policy in line with lawfulness and common sense. The Department of Homeland Security needs to get control of its enforcement machinery to make sure that its actions in the field match the priorities set in Washington, focusing resources on public-safety and national-security threats, not the workers and families trapped in the failed system. The goal is the smart and lawful use of discretion. Easy to say. Not so easily done.

The problem is that Homeland Security has farmed out that discretion — strewn it, actually — across the country, among state and local law enforcement agencies whose officers may only dimly recognize, or not care about, the dangers of an indiscriminate immigrant dragnet. Through programs linking local law enforcement with federal agencies, the administration has vastly increased the numbers of low-priority minor offenders and noncriminals it sweeps up. And it has failed to police its own agencies and employees to ensure that its own rules and priorities are followed.

Two examples may serve to suggest the outlines of the larger problem:

The New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice, an advocacy organization, has been raising an alarm over what it says is unchecked racial profiling by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents working with local police to raid businesses and homes and other places Latinos gather. Using vans equipped with mobile fingerprint readers, they have been sweeping up Latinos who pose no threat and shouldn’t be high-priority targets.

Those who complain — or who try to assert their civil rights in disputes with employers — are often subject to retaliation by ICE and put on a fast track to deportation. The advocates make a strong case that any new program to defer deportations must include workers involved in disputes over civil and labor rights. Employees who have been exploited or are the victims of unconstitutional policing need to be free to expose these abuses without fear, for the protection of all workers.

Meanwhile, in North Carolina, a sheriff, Terry Johnson of Alamance County, is on trial this month, accused by the Justice Department of rampant racial-profiling abuses against Latinos. Two retired supervising deputies testified at the trial that Sheriff Johnson had told officers not to give Latino drivers traffic citations, but to take them directly to jail. Starting in 2007, Sheriff Johnson was a partner in the federal 287(g) program, which trains local officials as immigration agents. The government revoked that agreement in 2012. As with Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Ariz., an inveterate immigrant victimizer whose 287(g) authority was belatedly curtailed, Sheriff Johnson seems to be a prime exhibit of the dangers of outsourcing immigration authority to peace officers who don’t get the memo, or heed the Constitution.

There is, despite these perplexing examples, good news on the local front. In an encouraging example of homegrown immigration reform, dozens of state and local governments and police agencies across the country have been refusing to participate in ICE’s dragnet. Their efforts have focused on the agency’s use of “detainers,” requests to hold suspected immigration violators in jail for up to 48 hours until federal agents can come and get them.

The localities recognize the constitutional peril. Once they have no more reason to keep somebody in jail — if charges are dropped, a sentence is served or bail is granted — they cannot legally hold someone solely because ICE asks them to. Detainers are not commands or judicial warrants. Except in cases where suspects are convicted of or charged with serious crimes, these local officials are telling the feds: No, thank you.

This reflects the realization — well understood at the local level if not in Congress — that get-tough immigration enforcement has in many ways passed the limits of usefulness and good sense. Mr. Obama’s recent directive to the Homeland Security secretary to review the enforcement of immigration laws and make them “more humane” embodies that belief. Those words are welcome, coming from the top. But they have to find a way to reach the bottom, where immigrants, police officers and sheriffs live.

For more information, go to:  www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com