Thread: Immigration law enforcement: Filling a vacuum

Immigration law enforcement: Filling a vacuum

http://www.pittsburghlive.com

States fed up with the tide of illegal aliens are revealing what could be an addendum to Sir Isaac Newton's Third Law of Motion: For some inactions, there can be equal and opposite reactions.
The inaction of the federal government to enforce its own immigration laws has led to a groundswell of state initiatives. The irony is that some states are turning to a little-known federal stipulation to advance deportations.

Section 287(g) of the 1996 immigration law allows police and jailers to make immigration arrests and process jailed illegal immigrants for deportation under Immigration and Customs Enforcement supervision. Since 2002, 33 states and local agencies have made agreements with the ICE, resulting in nearly 600 trained officers and 26,000 arrests. At least it's a start.
Of course illegal-alien coddlers envision the worst. Nestor Rodriguez of the Center for Immigration Research at the University of Houston says local police enforcement can lead to abuses, such as racial profiling. And the millions of illegals who abuse a broken system?

States cannot be expected to sit idly by waiting for Congress to act on immigration enforcement -- which is unlikely in the short term. It doesn't take an Isaac Newton to calculate the consequences of the federal government's disregard.

This year officers from 23 county and state agencies nationwide have been trained under the federal law -- more than five times the number of training requests made last year.

Hmm, that needs to be taken advantage of.

And it is a great start.