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Immigration Laws - Unenforceable?

Wednesday, November 29, 6 p.m.
By Mike Lewis

Police officers in our area have a new challenge on the streets. They are fighting the battle against crime, but more and more they are facing a new challenge with illegal immigration.

One security expert says it's time to bring state, federal and local agencies together to fight illegal immigration and homeland security issues.

Scranton police are doing their best to bridge the gap, but could use even more help.

On a recent night with the Scranton Police Department, roll call started with a heads up about fake, international identification cards officers were seeing on the streets. On the two nights Newswatch 16 spent with Scranton officers, most of the calls or stops that were made involved proper identification offered by the drivers and citations issued.

Sergeant Dan Duffy recounted a story of another officer who made a stop involving fake identification by what they believe was a case of illegal immigrants.

"During the course of his stop he observed some identifications that had the same photo on them yet bore different names for each one of them. I believe they may have been a resident alien card. I'm not sure," Duffy said.

Police say fake IDs are being marketed on the internet.

"They call it an international driver's license, which there actually is one, but there are ones that are false that go on that pretense. They're absolutely fake. The don't belong to any country or nationality or anything like that," said Officer Christian Gowarty of the Scranton Police Department. He added they are seeing more and more of unauthorized licenses.

Scranton officers have taken training classes to spot the phoney international identification cards, but sometimes without the help and resources of federal immigration officials it's nearly impossible to get true IDs on foreign nationals.

Joe Peters is a former Scranton police officer and former homeland security liaison to the White House. He said this is a homeland security issue and there is a gap between the information local officers have access to and what federal immigration officials can find out.

"There's an enormous gap and we saw this same gap. You think we would have learned the lessons when it came to the drugs wars as they were called in 80s where you had disparate agencies not talking to one another. And when you finally brought them together federal, state and local we put them into task forces so the could share information and work cases better together. We need to do the same thing and bridge that gap on the immigration and terrorism issue because it's really one issue," Peters said.

Scranton is doing its best to bridge the language gap in the Hispanic community. Sergeant Duffy and Officer Gowarty already speak Spanish and continue to take language classes.

Right now if officers stop someone, find fake international identification or have questions about foreign nationals, they have to call the nearest immigration office, in Philadelphia.

Corporal Guy Salerno thinks it may be time to bring an immigration office to our area.

"I believe so, only because of the influx of people from outside of this country that we have moving here, that we have living here and that we have problems identifying. We do run into it all the time," Salerno said.

Attempts to contact federal immigration officials were unsuccessful.