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  1. #1
    Senior Member Brian503a's Avatar
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    Illegal immigration laws on books but not enforced

    http://www2.dailybulletin.com/news/ci_2977582

    Illegal immigration laws on books but not enforced
    There's a way, but no will, experts say

    Brenda Gazzar, Staff Writer
    Inland Valley Daily Bulletin

    Nearly four years after Sept. 11, 2001, the U.S. government still lacks the commitment and the political will to enforce its immigration laws on a day-to-day basis, immigration specialists and politicians said Friday.

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    "Not only do the complexities and gray areas of immigration law make it difficult to enforce, but there's been a severe lack of resources and policies over the last decade to deal with them effectively," said Janice Kephart, a former counsel to the 9/11 Commission at a conference titled "Illegal Immigration: Its Impact on America" at the Regent Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Beverly Hills.

    The one-day conference was sponsored by the Center for the Study of Popular Culture, the Federation for American Immigration Reform and the Coalition for Immigration Reform of California, all of which support tightening restrictions on immigration.

    Critical intelligence on terrorist travel indicators is still not being declassified or distributed to front-line officers, Kephart said. Few in the ranks of immigration enforcement have the security clearances necessary to collect information now available on terrorist travel.

    While there are only about 2,000 U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to handle interior immigration law enforcement, there are about 700,000 state and local police officers that can help them do that job, said Kris Kobach, a professor at the University of Missouri -- Kansas City School of Law.

    Local police officers should be made aware of their inherent legal authority to make immigration arrests if they have probable cause that an individual standing in front of them is present in the country illegally, he said.

    Second, local law enforcement agencies should take advantage of a 1996 provision of the law to negotiate agreements with federal officials to be trained to receive the enforcement powers that federal officials have.

    Kobach said he was recently dismayed to learn that ICE was intending to scale back the authority so local governments could only apply these enforcement powers in jails.

    Third, it would implement departure controls to track who was overstaying their visas and list violators in a national criminal database that any law enforcement officer could access.

    "There are many good policy ideas sitting in in-boxes all over the Department of Homeland Security today, but what is missing in many cases, is political will," he said.

    But Keynote Speaker Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., who has flirted with the idea of running for president, said he believes that the nation is winning the war on illegal immigration.

    "We have to be aware that this war on the border was started inside this country by the same radicals who are sabotaging the war in Iraq," he said. "They are communists. They are Anti-American."

    He called two recent events "seismic shifts" in the immigration debate, the passage of Prop. 200 in Arizona, which denies social service benefits and the ability to vote to illegal immigrants, and the the creation of the Minuteman Project, a civilian border watch group that called attention to the flow of illegal immigration.

    Outside the event, about 20 protesters from the "La Tierra es de Todos" coalition, or the Land is for Everyone, chanted, "Minutemen, KKK, Nazi scum, go away."

    Protester William Figueroa of Pasadena said he was there to protest Tancredo and Minuteman Project founder Jim Gilchrist, who also spoke at the event.

    Figueroa said the anti-illegal immigrant movement wants to blame the country's economic problems on immigrants, when the government is spending billions in Iraq.
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