Thread: Congressman hosts ICE training for local police

Congressman hosts ICE training for local police

LoHud.com
By Marcela Rojas • mrojas@lohud.com
July 24, 2009

Rep. John Hall has invited officers from more than 50 law enforcement agencies throughout five counties to participate in training sessions with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to foster "better working relationships" between federal and local officials.

The meetings, scheduled for August, come in the wake of a July 3 drunken driving arrest in Brewster involving a man who police say is in the country illegally. At the time, Segundo Ordonez-Tanay, 26, was released from the Putnam County jail after posting bail. Putnam Undersheriff Peter Convery had said ICE was not contacted because the agency did not take calls on the weekend.

"The statement that local law enforcements believed ICE was unreachable on the weekends, resulting in a criminal illegal immigrant being released, deeply concerned Congressman Hall," said Meaghan Smith, a spokeswoman for the Dover Plains Democrat.

Hall met with several ICE officials, Smith said, and discovered that law enforcement in the counties he represents were using ICE's services, specifically the agency's Law Enforcement Support Center, at an "uneven rate." The Law Enforcement Support Center is based in Vermont and is reachable around-the-clock, 365 days a year.

Hall's office said Putnam County had contacted the national center twice in the past nine months to check on the status of a detained criminal, while Westchester County used the service 589 times and Rockland used it 235 times.

But Capt. William McNamara of the Putnam County Sheriff's Office said his department has a protocol established with ICE to contact the federal agency's Detention and Removal Office in Castle Point, N.Y.

In the past three years, the Sheriff's Office has reported 558 illegal immigrants in the county jail on state or local criminal charges to the Detention and Removal Office. Those contacts, he said, resulted in more than 215 federal detainer warrants and the turning over of 156 detainees to ICE's custody. An additional 30 detainees were released to other law enforcement agencies, McNamara said.

In the past nine months, the department has contacted ICE to report more than 150 illegal immigrants, McNamara said.

The Putnam County Sheriff's Office will send a representative to the training session, McNamara said, and looks forward to telling Hall how effectively Putnam uses the alien reporting and detention procedures it has with ICE.

Other departments invited include Carmel, Kent, Cold Spring, Brewster, Bedford, Mount Kisco, Peekskill and North Salem and the Rockland County Sheriff's Department and the Westchester County Department of Public Safety.

"These training sessions will present our local law enforcement community with the different ways ICE can help them when they have detained a criminal who is potentially not in our country legally," Hall said in a news release. "If a local law enforcement officer calls ICE to check the immigration status of a detained suspect, ICE can typically confirm the immigration status in less than an hour."

Training sessions are planned for Aug. 4 in Goshen and Carmel.

http://www.lohud.com/article/2009907240368

Local Police are and have not practiced due diligence for the safety of communities against the illegal aliens.

New York State is finally acting, thank God!