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Sunday, April 23, 2006
Deportation of 3 maids adds fervor to hysteria

GORDON DILLOW
Register columnist
GLDillow@aol.com


It seems that almost every country in the world – with the one large and glaring exception being us – takes illegal immigration seriously.

Even Mexico, whose government howls the loudest about the treatment of illegal immigrants in this country, treats its own illegal immigrants harshly. People who enter Mexico illegally, most often from Central America, are considered felons to be jailed and deported – or, in too many cases, to be robbed, raped or murdered by rogue police and soldiers.

And yet, when an American community takes a small step to address one of the worst problems involving illegal immigration – that is, the minority of illegal immigrants who come here not to work but to commit crimes – some people act as if Nazis were suddenly goose-stepping down the streets.

Now the streets in question are right here in Orange County.

As you probably know, the city of Costa Mesa and the Orange County Sheriff's Department have become focal points in the illegal immigration controversy, this as a result of their proposed plans to have the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency train some of their police officers to enforce federal immigration laws under certain limited circumstances.

Of course, some opponents of the proposals have hysterically depicted them as a plot to sweep the streets free of Hispanics – charges that took on new fervor after it was revealed last week that a sheriff's deputy investigating a theft had reportedly turned over to the Border Patrol three illegal immigrants who were working as maids, resulting in their voluntary return to Mexico. An investigation is under way to determine if the deputy violated department polices.

Well, judging from my mail, many, perhaps even most Orange County residents won't see anything wrong with what the deputy allegedly did. They figure if someone is in this country illegally, he should be sent home – and they don't really care what kind of cop puts him on the bus.

But all that aside, the fact is that the immigration enforcement plans being proposed by Costa Mesa and the Sheriff's Department are much more narrowly targeted. They would simply allow specially trained local officers – primarily jail personnel and investigators who work serious street crime cases, not regular cops on the beat – to check the immigration records of people suspected of committing serious crimes, and to act on that information.

Is a criminal suspect under a federal deportation order that he somehow forgot to show up for? Is he an illegal immigrant ex-con who slipped through the post-prison deportation cracks? If a records check indicates that he is, the ICE-trained local cops could legally detain him on the immigration charges and hand him over to federal authorities. Or if he's arrested and convicted for a state crime, the local officers could start the paperwork to have an immigration hold placed on him so he could be deported after he served his sentence.

There's nothing really radical about it. It would simply extend to criminal illegal immigrants and serious immigration violators the same local-state-federal law enforcement cooperation that has long been used to nab interstate fugitives and other federal criminal suspects, whether it's a guy wanted for burglary in North Carolina or a guy with a federal warrant on him for bank robbery.

"It's a tool that they (local officers) can use to protect their communities," says ICE spokeswoman Virginia Kice, adding that there has been "a huge outpouring of interest in this program" by local jurisdictions across the nation.

"This is going to make the community safer for everyone, including people who are here illegally but are otherwise law-abiding," says Costa Mesa Mayor Allan Mansoor – adding, for the millionth time, that the immigration checks by local police would not, repeat not, be directed at crime victims or guys simply looking for work on a street corner.

Of course, reasonable people can disagree on many aspects of illegal immigration – its impact on wages and the economy, the exploitation of illegal-immigrant workers, amnesty and so on. And if pro-illegal-immigration activists really thought the immigration enforcement plans were somehow being abused, they could always be reviewed.

But in the meantime it's hard to see why anyone wouldn't want law enforcement officers to get truly bad guys off their streets.

And it really shouldn't matter if the badges they're wearing when they do it are local, state or federal.

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Dillow's opinions on local news appear every Wednesday and Sunday. A Register columnist for the past nine years, he was an embedded reporter with a Marine infantry unit in Iraq in 2003 and 2004. Dillow was a U.S. Army sergeant in Vietnam in 1971-72, and has a journalism degree from the University of Montana. Contact him at (714)796-7953 or GLDillow@aol.com.