Jersey needs to run with the ball on immigration



Friday, August 24, 2007

In her first big moment since taking over as attorney general, Anne Milgram got it just right.

She ordered all police agencies in New Jersey to report illegal aliens who are arrested on criminal charges.



Here's the problem: That information will now sink into the fog of the federal immigration bureaucracy, where good policies go to die.

Don't take my word for it. Listen to Scott Weber, the regional boss of enforcement at the agency that is supposed to act on this new information, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

"Everyone is overwhelmed," he says. "Our officers do the best they can. But it's hard."

That was Weber's assessment on Tuesday, before Milgram's announcement. Now that every police agency in the state is required to send ICE this flood of new names, his crew will face an impossible task.
Ask anyone who deals with ICE -- the courts, the cops, the jails -- and you hear the same tale of woe. In Essex County jail, ICE has one part-time agent who visits about once a month, at most, to check inmate names, according to Scott Faunce, the jail's director. By the time ICE acts, the inmate is often long gone.

"The only way you could catch the person is to have an agent here, on each shift, around the clock," Faunce says.

On Wednesday, the powers that be put as much lipstick on this pig as they could. Weber suddenly said he had the resources to do the job, so a miracle must have occurred in Newark overnight.

Milgram and U.S. Attorney Chris Christie expressed their faith that the Department of Homeland Security, which oversees ICE, would rush to the rescue. Which would take a second miracle. So New Jersey really has a choice to make now. Do we want to watch this predictable failure unfold, or do we want to help?

Because ICE wants the help. The agency has a program that would provide training and legal authority to corrections officers in our jails so that they could investigate these cases themselves. They would in effect be deputized as ICE agents.


"It's a great idea," Weber says. "It's a matter of resources. When law enforcement gets together, good things happen."

Review the mistakes in the Newark schoolyard murders, and you can see how that program might have changed everything.

Jose Carranza, the chief suspect in the killings, is an illegal immigrant from Peru who was arrested three times prior to the killings, once for assault and twice for child rape. Yet no one checked to find that he was illegal, including the ICE agent who visits the jail occasionally.
If corrections officers at the Essex jail had been trained as ICE deputies, they could have ordered him held on a federal detainer -- or at least asked the judge for a higher bail on his state charges.

Instead, Carranza's bail was cut in half, for reasons that remain a mystery, and he walked out of the jail as a free man. Three months later, those three college kids were lying dead against a cement wall behind an elementary school.

Yes, this should be a federal job. Washington's failure to deal with the immigration problem is beyond outrageous. You have to hope horror stories like this one will increase the heat.

But the Bush administration is not going to fix this. We've seen them operate for six years now. Enough said.

The real question is what New Jersey will do. The big challenge is at the county jails, where thousands of inmates come and go quickly. Milgram has no legal authority to force their hand, so she has done all she can.

So now it's up to the 21 county governments, who each control their own jails. Time for them to step up, and fill the vacuum left by the feds.

Because if this kind of tragedy happens again, it will be small comfort to know that it was Washington's fault.
Tom Moran may be reached at tmoran@starledger.com or (973) 392-1823.









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