Cops prepped for deportation powers

(http://www.suburbanchicagonews.com/news ... S1.article)

June 20, 2007

BY CRAIG PETERSON Special to the News-Sun

WAUKEGAN -- City police officers are training to act as federal immigration agents in deporting immigrant criminals.

The City Council approved a measure Monday for the police department to assume delegation of immigration authority from the federal government's Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The sole intended purpose of this policy, council proponents insisted, is to permanently remove violent criminals from the city.

"It's to keep documented criminals and undocumented criminals off the streets," said 9th Ward Ald. Rafael Rivera, chairman of the Public Safety Committee, who said this initial step is only the beginning of the process toward certifying Waukegan as a local government with Immigration Act authority.

A provision in the act allows trained local law enforcement officers to identify and detain immigration offenders and directly process them for deportation.

The law does not allow local governments and their agents to do "sweeps," enter homes for immigration enforcement purposes or dictate residential standards to landlords, Mayor Richard Hyde said. The delegated authority "gets (violent criminals) off the street and gets them out of our country," said Hyde, adding the city learned a lesson on the legal hazards of discrimination when it was forced to pay a $300,000 fine for a court judgment several years ago.

After entering into an intergovernmental agreement with the Department of Homeland Security, Deputy Chief Daniel Greathouse said the City Council will have ultimate authority on determining what criminal offenses will meet the standard for deportation.

In their remarks, most of the seven aldermen supporting the measure mentioned violent crimes and major felonies as a standard, which could include sexual offenses, gang activity, drug trafficking, armed robbery and battery, felony DUI and homicide, among others.

The federal government encourages local law enforcement to go after criminal immigrants, Greathouse said.

"Violent criminals is the idea. Violent criminals are what they want to remove from the streets," he added.

Fourth Ward Ald. Tony Figueroa and 1st Ward Ald. Samuel Cunningham opposed the measure, insisting this is the federal government's problem and Waukegan should not be expending limited resources to do their job.

Waukegan police are already deporting criminal immigrants indirectly through the Lake County justice system, Figueroa said. "We're going to train them to fill out paperwork," he added. "This is the difference."

Cunningham suggested forming a countywide task force to distribute the added work load. "We're going to have Waukegan police officers doing all the work," he said. "It's a depletion of service."

After a recent failure to reform immigration laws, Cunningham said the federal government is "putting this on us the way they put everything else on us."

"I don't care about Washington," Hyde responded. "We have to protect the people in Waukegan."