Thread: CO-Audit: Colorado police obey illegal immigrant law

Audit: Colorado police obey illegal immigrant law
Auditors find the law doesn't stop accidents like one last year that killed three people.
By Tim Hoover
The Denver Post
Posted: 06/09/2009 01:00:00 AM MDT
Updated: 06/09/2009 01:04:40 AM MDT


Police departments in Colorado are largely complying with a 2006 law that requires them to report illegal immigration suspects that they have arrested, according to a state audit released Monday.

However, the audit said, the law still will not prevent incidents similar to the one in Aurora last year in which a vehicle driven by an illegal immigrant was involved in an accident that killed three people.

"We concluded that the implementation of (the 2006 law) alone is unlikely to either prevent fatal traffic accidents allegedly caused by illegal immigrants or increase the number of detained or removed illegal immigrants," auditors wrote.

The problem is that local police agencies do not have the resources to enforce immigration laws, and illegal immigration is the purview of the federal government in any case, auditors wrote.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency frequently does not pick up illegal immigration suspects arrested for only minor crimes, the report said.

Lawmakers asked state auditors to examine whether local police were complying with the 2006 law after the accident last year in which a vehicle driven by Francis Hernandez struck a pickup in Aurora, killing two women in the truck as well as a 3-year-old boy who was in an ice-cream shop hit by the truck.

Hernandez, a native of Guatemala, had been arrested many times, and there were dozens of warrants for his arrest for failing to appear in court. He also had never possessed a driver's license.

The audit said local police reports to ICE of illegal immigration suspects had increased by nearly 69 percent since the 2006 law took effect. However, auditors noted, they could not adequately judge whether increased deportations resulted because ICE did not respond to requests for information.

Auditors said that the Colorado Crime Information Center, the state's criminal database for law enforcement, needed an automatic system to flag suspects who might be illegal immigrants. Despite previous arrests and contact with law enforcement, Hernandez was not flagged as an illegal immigrant, police said, because he spoke English well and said he was from California.

"We reviewed the suspected illegal alien's publicly available CCIC record and found that he had previously disclosed foreign places of birth, including Mexico and Guatemala, and that this information was available to law enforcement officers through CCIC during several of his previous arrests," auditors said in the report.

"In this situation, an automatically generated flag would have alerted local law enforcement officers of the foreign and conflicting places of birth," the auditors said.

Tim Hoover: thoover@denverpost.com

http://www.denverpost.com/ci_12549664?source=rss

There needs to be a state level immigration police in order to get operational efficiencies and economies of scale. That is a better solution than to roll out 287 to every municipality.

I think everyone, and I mean everyone that is stopped, regardless of race or ethnic background, needs to be checked out to see if they are illegal.