New Jersey's Latino Leadership asks Obama to rescind Morristown's 287(g) status
by Jamie Duffy
Monday July 20, 2009, 7:00 AM


Martin Perez, president of the New Brunswick-based Latino Leadership Alliance of NJ as he appeared at a forum in Elizabeth in April. He and his group have sent President Obama a letter asking him to halt progress on the 287(g) federal program in Morristown and Monmouth County.

The Latino Leadership Alliance of New Jersey has sent a letter to President Barack Obama asking him to revoke 287(g) status for Morristown and Monmouth County, according to Sunday's editions of El Diario, a regional Spanish language daily newspaper.

The letter was sent last week signaling "profound disagreement" with the administration's move to grant immigration officer status to Morristown police and the Monmouth Sheriff's Department.http://www.impre.com/eldiariony/noticia ... 30-1.html#

"We are asking him to reconsider," Martin Perez, LLA president, is quoted as saying.

Pastor David Silva of the Centro Biblico of NJ in Morristown says applying for 287(g) status to deputize police officers as immigration officers has served to divide Morristown. This week the Latino Leadership Alliance of NJ wrote to Obama asking him to rescind Morristown's enrollment in the 287(g) program.

The federal program through the Department of Homeland Security and its agency ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement), allows municipalities to deputize police officers to enforce immigration laws.

The officers are legally permitted to ask a person's immigration status no matter what the offense, including broken taillights or jaywalking. However, the crux of the program is designed to prevent criminals from re-entering the population at large, by ordering them on to deportation.

The controversial program became a Morristown issue when current mayor Donald Cresitello, a Democrat, applied for 287(g) status in February, 2007. When he lost his re-nomination bid in the June 2 primary, many Latinos hoped that 287(g) would go away, arguing that it had impacted Cresitello's primary bid negatively.

Instead, the Obama administration announced in early July that Morristown was one of 11 cities nationwide to be accepted into the program. Cresitello said he hopes within a month to pull out six officers for the two-week training and then incrementally train the entire 58-person police force.

Perez pointed out that 78 percent of Hispanic voters supported Obama with the idea that comprehensive immigration reform including a "pathway to citizenship" would be forthcoming.

"We backed Obama with the expectation that he would resolve the immigration problem," said Perez in the article.

David Silva, pastor of the Centro Biblico of New Jersey in Morristown, said the introduction of 287(g) in Morristown sowed division by subtly suggesting that Latinos were taking away jobs from other groups and by "trying to imply that all criminal activity is done by immigrants. That is not true."

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