Add Cabarrus, North Carolina to 287(g) program
Cabarrus County developing illegal immigrant ID system

By Michael Knox
mknox@independenttribune.com
http://chapelhillblog.blogspot.com/

CONCORD - The Cabarrus County Jail could have a program designed to identify illegal immigrants up and running by December, said Cabarrus County Sheriff Brad Riley.

Riley said the sheriff’s office is working toward identifying eight to 10 deputies who will be trained sometime in October or November.

The program uses a database tied in with the U.S. Immigration Customs Enforcement agency. When a person is arrested and brought to the county jail they will be fingerprinted and their information will be processed through the database.

The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has a program that can provide officers with the training and authorization to identify, process and, when appropriate, detain immigration offenders. The federal government will provide the equipment.

Riley said the system will detect when people have been entered in the system before and if the person may not be using their real name.

The jail does not currently track illegal immigrants.

But records show that since 2003, there has been an average of 487 people who listed their place of birth as Mexico.

Before beginning the program, Riley said he talked with Mecklenburg County Sheriff Jim Pendergraph who started a similar program.

Julia Rush, spokeswoman for the Mecklenburg County Sheriff’s Office, said they began their program last May.

Since then, they’ve processed 4,514 people who listed a country other than the U.S. as their country of origin. Of those individuals, 2,540 qualified for a removal process, Rush said.

Those individuals were sent to Immigration Court in Atlanta to provide a reason for why the should be in the country.

Those individuals could be seeking political asylum or had their visa expire, Rush said.

“There’s a large number of issues that could come up,â€