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Bredesen: State conducting review to ensure illegals not receiving services
By John Rodgers, jrodgers@nashvillecitypaper.com
July 23, 2006

The state is conducting a review of its social service programs to make sure that Tennessee taxpayers aren’t over-footing the bill for illegal immigrants.

Gov. Phil Bredesen said the state is reviewing programs like TennCare and welfare, and benefits like food stamps to find out whether undocumented workers are abusing state services and draining state coffers.

“I think it is probably most acute with TennCare,” Bredesen said Friday.

Bredesen said the state has an obligation to provide “emergency” medical care to illegal immigrants, but is not supposed to provide TennCare, the state’s Medicaid program, to those who aren’t legally in the United States.

He said his administration tightened up “loose definitions” regarding emergency services during his TennCare reforms “so that people didn’t get just onto the program and never be looked at again.”

“I feel certain there are still people there,” Bredesen said. “We’ve got to decide what to do in some tough cases.”

There is no timetable at this point for when the review will be completed, Bredesen said.

A new federal law that requires proof of identification and citizenship when people apply or try to be recertified for TennCare coverage has also caused the need for the review.

Bredesen said the law was “so tough” it was “probably impractical.”

“Apparently, it was written by somebody who I’m sure was born in a very nice hospital and forgot that lots of people are born at home,” Bredesen said of the documentation problem, such as people lacking birth certificates, which is one of the criticisms of the new law.

Bredesen announced the review Friday during a roundtable discussion with local and state law enforcement officials, as well as federal immigration officers. The discussion was centered on law enforcement and how it relates to illegal immigration.

Davidson County District Attorney Torry Johnson said, on a local prosecution scale, his office can punish illegals for “any state crimes that may be committed,” but it can’t detain them for “simply being illegal.”

“So they are released back to be arrested again,” Johnson told Bredesen in the roundtable.

Katherine Molyneux, a federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officer, said Tennessee has between 50,000 and 150,000 illegal immigrants, which is “a lot more” than five neighboring states.

That number, combined with only a “handful of agents,” makes manpower the biggest issue in Nashville and Middle Tennessee in enforcing the law regarding illegal immigrants, she said.

“Until we get additional manpower here, we will have a problem,” Molyneux said.

The U.S. House of Representatives and the U.S. Senate have each passed different immigration bills, but failed this year to compromise to provide long-term federal funding for increasing the number of ICE agents.

After hearing the discussion, Bredesen said he would like law enforcement agencies to have guidelines for when they should call ICE officials to turn illegal immigrants over for crimes “that they most want to know about.”

“They were definitely saying don’t call us about the speeders,” Bredesen said, adding that he thought that also applied for illegals who may not have documentation.

Bredesen also wants an electronic database of who is here illegally to keep track of how many times they may have had legal run-ins.

Gustavo Reyes Garcia, an illegal immigrant, had been arrested 17 times before being accused of vehicular homicide in a car crash that killed Sean and Donna Wilson of Mt. Juliet last month.