No. 4 story of 2007: Feds, sheriffs fight about immigration

By GARY HARMON
The Daily Sentinel

Saturday, December 29, 2007

Illegal immigration, voted by Daily Sentinel readers the fourth-biggest news story of 2007, sparked competing demonstrations on street corners and a continuing spat involving one sheriff and a federal agency.

Members of the Rocky Mountain Minutemen frequently demonstrated against illegal immigration, occasionally while residents of opposing viewpoints disagreed on opposite corners at 12th Street and North Avenue.

Friction over illegal immigration, however, was limited to disputes between the Garfield County and Mesa County sheriffs and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency charged with controlling illegal immigration.

Disagreement over how to treat people detained as illegal immigrants broke out in August, when agencies from the federal government failed to respond to a Colorado State Patrol stop of a van containing 18 people on Interstate 70 near Fruita.

The stop was among the first by State Patrol troopers specially trained to deal with suspected illegal immigrants.

When no federal agents showed up to take custody of the detainees, however, the State Patrol released them.

It later emerged that Immigration and Customs Enforcement no longer housed detainees in the Garfield County Jail because Sheriff Lou Vallario had refused the federal agency’s request that detainees not be guarded by officers carrying Tasers, devices that could be employed to temporarily paralyze with electrical shocks.

Vallario said he wasn’t going to let the federal government dictate how he was to run his jail.

Vallario said that his reliance on Tasers, as well as other methods frowned on by federal immigration officials, were a matter of jail security and that eliminating the devices would threaten the security of everyone from jailers to inmates and detainees.

Although officials said later that the Garfield County Jail was acceptable to house detainees, Vallario said he wouldn’t allow them in. His staff already was stretched too far, he said.

Federal officials next said they wouldn’t use the Mesa County Jail to house detainees for short-term periods before transferring them to a center in Aurora.

Officials objected to housing detainees on cots in the jail gymnasium, the same accommodations provided to inmates in the county’s workender program. In that program, inmates serve sentences on weekends.

Federal officials this month resumed use of the Mesa County Jail for nonviolent detainees.

Mesa County Sheriff Stan Hilkey also installed some telephones so that detainees can speak with lawyers or the Mexican consulate.

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