Locals assist with immigration laws

Local, state authorities sometimes drive immigration arrests
Monday, November 28, 2011

It started with a traffic violation and ended with a deportation.

Mexican native Avimael Roblero Roblero, 23, was riding in a car with his boss and three co-workers from a Troy landscaping company when the boss was pulled over by the Watervliet Police for a traffic infraction in May. When asked to produce IDs, all the passengers admitted to being in the United States illegally. Immigration and Customs Enforcement was promptly notified.

In August, Schenectady resident Efrain Diaz Alachan, 38, arrived at Colonie Town Court in August to answer a traffic ticket for aggravated driving while intoxicated, only to encounter ICE officers. Alachan's fingerprints, ran up against ICE's database, had matched those of a previously removed illegal alien from El Salvador.

Local and state law enforcement agencies routinely assist ICE in identifying immigration violators. Such collaboration has been encouraged since 9/11, explained Joanne Macri, director of the New York State Defenders Association Immigrant Defense Project. But what had initially been intended to address national security concerns has since then become an arm of complete immigration enforcement, Macri said.

In New York, there are several ways in which local and state law enforcement agencies can function as immigration checkpoints. Officers can find out the immigration status of anyone suspected, arrested or convicted of a crime by contacting the local ICE office or ICE's around-the-clock, 365-days-a-year Law Enforcement Support Center. ICE also has agents placed in prisons and jails to interview and screen inmates through its Criminal Alien Program, ICE spokesman Ross Feinstein explained.

"The identification and processing of incarcerated criminal aliens prior to release reduces the overall cost and burden to the federal government by minimizing the time aliens spend in ICE detention upon expiration of their sentence." Feinstein said.

In 2008, ICE began implementing Secure Communities, a fingerprint-sharing system that automatically sends the Federal Bureau of Investigations fingerprint database, which contains fingerprints shared by local police, to ICE to check against its immigration database. The program was envisioned as a strategy to focus ICE's enforcement priorities on criminal aliens.

Since then, however, Secure Communities has come under heavy opposition from state legislators and immigration advocacy groups, and was suspended by Gov. Andrew Cuomo this June, as well as the governors of Illinois and Massachusetts. In a controversial turnaround in August, however, ICE announced that states cannot opt out of the program, arguing that once a state or local law enforcement agency submits fingerprint data to the FBI, no agreement with the state is necessary for one part of the federal government to share it with another part.

Though not yet activated in Albany, Rensselaer, Saratoga or Schenectady counties, half the counties in New York are currently participating in Secure Communities. The program is scheduled to reach nationwide activation by the end of 2013.

"The heart of the concern is that the program, conceived of as a method of targeting those people who pose the greatest threat to our communities, is in fact having the opposite effect and compromising public safety by deterring witnesses to crime and others from working with law enforcement," Gov. Cuomo's office declared in a letter to the Department of Homeland Security seeking to suspend participation back in June.

Immigrant advocates say that fear of law enforcement has long existed in the immigrant community, even without Secure Communities, since other collaborative programs are already in place in New York.

Dishpaul Dhuga, legal advocate with the Immigration and Domestic Violence Unit at the Empire Justice Center in Albany, has seen the effects of these collaborative programs firsthand. Clients of his looking to apply for benefits as victims of domestic violence often don't have the documentations of abuse needed to apply, as many had never reported abuse to the police for fear of being identified as illegal immigrants.

Collaborative programs also encourage racial profiling, providing an incentive for officers to arrest people primarily on the suspicion that they are unauthorized immigrants, Macri said. Police officers are not allowed to stop an individual without having a criminal basis for the stop, but in reviewing these cases it's hard to establish whether the criminal suspicision was legitimate, Macri said.

In an effort to reform Secure Communities, ICE began this June to develop training materials for local and state law enforcement agencies to address some of the concerns raised by critics, such as protection for crime victims and witnesses. The training materials will take approximately 18 months to produce, according to an ICE document. ICE is also estalishing a statistical monitoring system to safeguard against racial discrimination — since everyone arrested is fingerprinted, the data would show signs if enforcement was directed at certain groups.

Dhuga said the reforms are a positive step, but their effectiveness would depend on how they are implemented. From his experience of talking to state and local police, "there are some agencies that will take and use that mentality, and there are others that will still dig deep and still try to find out about immigration status even when it does not work in their mission to secure a community or neighborhood."

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