Thread: IL: Cops prepped for deportation powers (!!!!!)

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."

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/loca ... i-news-hed


Suburb seeking power to deport
Waukegan police would target felons

By Ralph Zahorik and Andrew L. Wang, Chicago Tribune. Ralph Zahorik is a freelance reporter; Andrew L. Wang is a Tribune staff reporter
Published June 20, 2007

Waukegan police officers may don an additional hat soon -- that of immigration agents.

The City Council voted 7-2 Monday night to authorize Police Chief William Biang to apply to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement for the power to enforce federal immigration laws.

Officials said details of the local program have yet to be hammered out, but they were quick to point out that it would not be directed at law-abiding immigrants but at violent offenders.

"There's a perception we're going to be cleaning house, taking people from their homes and deporting them, but this is strictly to keep undocumented and documented criminals off the streets and help the deportation process," said Ald. Rafael Rivera, chairman of the Police and Fire Committee.

Mayor Richard Hyde was more blunt: "The purpose of this is to get those who commit felonies off the street and out of the country."

The federal program allows local police to perform some immigration functions if they receive certification and training. The program has been in place since 1996, when Congress passed the Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act.

As the national debate over illegal immigration has heated up, so too has interest among local agencies to increase their enforcement power. Currently, 21 law-enforcement agencies in 11 states have agreements with the immigration agency, and 375 local officers across the country have completed training, most of them in the last two years, said Michael Gilhooly, an agency spokesman. Seventy-one applications are pending, he added, including two from Illinois departments.

One of those is Carpentersville, said Village Manager Craig Anderson.

In Waukegan, the immigration debate has raged as strongly as in any of Chicago's suburbs. Long a predominantly white, working-class city, Waukegan has seen an influx of immigrants from Mexico and other Central American countries in recent decades. According to 2005 U.S. census estimates, 38,000 to 50,000 of the city's 91,000 residents are Hispanic or Latino. Authorities don't have a good estimate as to how many undocumented immigrants live in the city.

Despite Waukegan officials' assurances that the program would focus on those who commit felonies, one Hispanic leader was skeptical, saying it would aggravate the Police Department's already tenuous relationship with minority communities.

Though most police in the city are fair and professional, Margaret Carrasco, 47, a former mayoral candidate, said there are some who "will see this as a license to hunt down immigrants. Is that the society that we want?"

She said the program would make law-abiding immigrants reluctant to call police to report crimes for fear that they would be arrested for being undocumented.

"Residents are the eyes and ears for the Police Department," Carrasco said.

Though some oppose the program, others welcome it.

"There are laws in place to regulate immigration in this country, and our federal authorities seem to have failed in enforcing those laws," said Dan Traynoff, 50, a Waukegan resident who has spoken in favor of the program at recent council meetings.

Additionally, he said, the program would make it less likely that an offender would commit crimes in the city again.

"If you can take a criminal and put them 2,000 miles away, there's a chance they might not come back to the community," he said.

Waukegan already works with the immigration agency when undocumented immigrants are suspected of, or wanted for, serious offenses. On Monday, for example, the department sought deportation through Immigration and Customs Enforcement for three undocumented immigrants it had charged with drug trafficking, Biang said. With federal authority, the local police could start the deportation process on their own, he said.

Lake County Sheriff Mark Curran said Tuesday his department is weighing whether to pursue the program as it devises "a more detailed immigration policy."

During Monday's Waukegan City Council meeting, Ald. Greg Moisio said he supported the program.

"Instead of dragging [immigration officials] out here, who are already understaffed, our guys do it," he said.But Ald. Tony Figueroa and Sam Cunningham voted against the program. Figueroa feared it would make immigrants afraid to contact police, and Cunningham objected because it could lead to racial profiling.

"Civil rights taught us if you pinpoint people, it will come back and bite you," he said.