Thread: How Escondido, ICE will target criminal illegal immigrants

How Escondido, ICE will target criminal illegal immigrants

By: MARIE WALDRON - Commentary

The Escondido City Council's support for police Chief Jim Maher's new policy to aggressively deport criminal aliens puts Escondido

on the forefront of local law enforcement through using a cutting-edge approach to work closely and consistently with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, in dealing with both felony and misdemeanor offenders.

Illegal aliens caught driving without a license and with no insurance and no legal form of ID will be transferred to the city's ICE agent housed at the Escondido Police Department. Escondido is unique in having an on-site ICE agent assigned full time to our police department and is able to deal with various scenarios, including local gang enforcement and other criminal acts.

Specifically, the new policy includes:

- Criminal aliens arrested in the city of Escondido will be turned over to ICE for formal deportation, which is a more severe level of deportation.

- Our arrestees' info will be turned over to our ICE agent (even when the ICE agent at the Vista jail agent is not on duty). We will account for our arrests and not have any detainees fall through the cracks.

- What used to be a cite/release policy is now a detain/hold-and-transfer-to-ICE policy. Our citation puts them in our city system and then we hand them to ICE.

At our traffic checkpoints, we can hold up to two hours at the station while ICE determines legal status. We will no longer just tow the car and release the person. All undocumented persons will be sent to our ICE agent for processing.

- The police chief and City Council will monitor this program and continue to research how the Memorandum of Understanding 287(g) could work for us.

People who are in this country illegally are already criminals! We cannot listen to a bunch of namby-pamby excuses, bogus international covenants that are often quoted to us, and politically-correct nonsense about why we can't enforce our

laws! I am in favor of having the Border Patrol do immigration sweeps in our city and am working on that joint-agency effort, which would be handled in a different way than our driver's license checkpoints. We have the additional benefit of having a full-time ICE agent assigned to our police department and we will verify the legal status of misdemeanor as well as felony aliens during our traffic enforcement.

I personally feel having ICE available during our traffic enforcement sends a positive ripple effect through the community, not a negative one. However, there is a fine line between the city operating normal traffic enforcement checkpoints and doing an immigration checkpoint. The police department's goal is to eliminate unlicensed drivers from our roads to protect our citizens. This is a cutting-edge approach and should be modeled by other cities.

Marie Waldron is a member of the Escondido City Council.

http://www.nctimes.com/articles/2007..._413_10_07.txt

I admire and respect Marie Waldron. She, and others on her council, like Sam Abed, are trying to hard to take care of their city. And to think they are doing this in Escondido which is surrounded by sanctuary cities. I once emailed her and she responded simply: "We just want our laws enforced." Imagine that? What a concept eh? It's so easy here to just go along and do the feel-good-look-the-other-way approach so many elected officials do but Marie Waldron is a strong outspoken person and I wish her sincere luck.