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Posted on Fri, Jun. 09, 2006


IMMIGRATION DEBATE | It’s ‘a whole Pandora’s box,’ director says
Patrol balks at moving immigrants
The plan would require troopers to transport them across state lines to federal authorities.
By TIM HOOVER
The Star’s Jefferson City correspondent

JEFFERSON CITY | - JEFFERSON CITY | Proposed legislation requiring troopers to take undocumented immigrants across state lines to federal authorities would open “a whole Pandora’s box,” Missouri’s top public safety official wrote lawmakers Thursday.

The Highway Patrol would need special authority to operate outside the state, and in any case, the Department of Public Safety does not have the manpower or vehicles to handle such a job, director Mark James wrote to Rep. Ed Emery, a Lamar Republican, chairman of the House Special Committee on Immigration.

The panel heard testimony Thursday from state agencies and others on undocumented immigration. Legislation earlier this year to give troopers power to enforce federal immigration laws passed the Senate but never was taken up in the House.

“The Department of Public Safety has concerns with any legislation making the highway patrol responsible for enforcing federal immigration laws beyond the current process of temporarily detaining illegal aliens until ICE (U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agents respond,” James said in the letter.

“While I applaud the initiative of the Missouri legislature in researching this very contemporaneous, far-reaching issue, I urge a complete legal and fiscal analysis be conducted before any legislative mandates are pursued,” James wrote. “It appears to me that we at the state level will be challenged to define a course of action until the federal government determines what the national immigration policy is going to be.”

Those comments didn’t go over well with some members of the committee.

“I’m disappointed,” said Rep. Gary Dusenberg, a Blue Springs Republican. Dusenberg, a former trooper for 26 years, said James was “putting blinders on” to the issue of undocumented immigration.

Because James was unavailable to attend the committee meeting, officials with the Missouri Highway Patrol, which is under the department, read his letter to the panel. Emery told patrol officials that the panel probably would want to hear more from James himself.

Rep. Brian Nieves, a Union Republican, added that “many of us are not happy about this letter.”

Gene McNary, an immigration lawyer in St. Louis County who was commissioner of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service under President Ronald Reagan, also testified. McNary said although there are federal laws to punish employers who hire undocumented immigrants, they are not well enforced.

“You have to hire 100 illegal aliens and be abusing them” before federal officials step in, McNary said.

“A state misdemeanor with some teeth would cause an employer to take seriously their responsibility” to check out employees, he said.