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More police interested in immigration law training

By Vesna Jaksic
Staff Writer

March 6, 2006

STAMFORD -- A small but growing number of the nation's police officers, state troopers, sheriffs and jail assistants are taking a federal course designed to help them enforce immigration law in their communities.

Nobody in Connecticut has been trained, but a state police spokesman said there is growing interest in such courses.

A new federal report shows Connecticut's immigration court last year had one of the highest increases in case load in the nation compared with the previous year.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, part of the Department of Homeland Security, is getting an increasing number of requests for immigration law enforcement training, spokesman Mike Gilhooly said. Florida was the first to sign up in 2002 and other states followed, he said.

"We get interest from agencies all the time," Gilhooly said. "We get a lot of requests for information."

Law enforcement officers learn about immigration laws as part of their training. But it's the federal government that enforces the laws, so local and state officials find the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement training helps. The course lasts 4 1/2 weeks for police officers and 3 1/2 weeks for jail assistants, who book suspects into jails.

Forty-five police officers have taken the course in Florida and the same number in Alabama; 18 jail assistants have been trained in California; and 10 correction officers took the course in Arizona, Gilhooly said. Ten deputy sheriffs in North Carolina are expected to start training soon, he said.

Sgt. J. Paul Vance, spokesman for Connecticut state police, said he did not know of immediate plans for training, but agreed there is growing interest.

"Because there had been some immigration issues here in the state of Connecticut, that has risen to the surface," Vance said.

Danbury has been in the spotlight because of protests for and against immigration. Danbury Mayor Mark Boughton has been a lead figure in trying to get municipalities to enforce immigration law.

In Stamford, where some have raised concerns about groups of day laborers who wait for work on the streets of the East Side, Mayor Dannel Malloy has said immigration is a federal law and should be treated as such.

The Immigration Court in Hartford, which handles all of Connecticut's immigration cases, received 4,161 immigration matters last fiscal year. That was an increase of 74 percent from the 2,389 received the previous year, according to an annual report released last month by the Executive Office for Immigration Review at the U.S. Department of Justice.

The growth rate is the fourth highest in the nation for that time period, behind two courts in Texas and one in Boston.

But Connecticut's case load is smaller compared with most immigration courts. For example, Texas has eight immigration courts that received nearly 110,00 immigration matters last year.

Hartford's Immigration Court completed 3,225 cases last fiscal year, compared with 2,454 the previous year -- an increase of 31 percent.

Stamford police spokesman Lt. Sean Cooney said enforcing immigration law is a much higher priority in states bordering Mexico that have a high number of undocumented immigrants.

"It hasn't been an issue that has become something that we feel we have a big problem with and we need to do something about," Cooney said.

Kevin O'Connor, the U.S. attorney for Connecticut, said it is difficult to comment about whether state and local officials need the federal training because his office mostly prosecutes people who enter the United States illegally after being deported.

"We're seeing more illegal immigration in the country, but ... illegal re-entry ... (is) a small part of that," he said.

There has been a small increase in human trafficking and smuggling cases in Connecticut, but that, too, is a small area of the nation's broad immigration law, O'Connor said.