NJ-Local police departments focus on illegal immigrants
Local police departments focus on illegal immigrants
March 23, 2008, 9:11 AM
Seven months after the New Jersey state attorney general ordered local police departments to question people they arrest for certain crimes about their immigration status and to report illegal immigrants to federal authorities, the rate of such referrals has nearly doubled, according to a report in The New York Times.
But immigrants and their advocates say that some people have been unfairly swept up in the dragnet because of overzealous enforcement or confusion over how Attorney General Anne Milgram's directive was supposed to be implemented, creating a chilling effect on some immigrants' relationships with the police, according to the report.
The directive was announced last August amid outrage after a triple murder in which one of the suspects was an illegal immigrant who had been released on bail after previous arrests. It urged officers to inquire about citizenship and nationality when booking people for felonies or drunken driving.
From September through February, New Jersey law enforcement agencies referred 8,874 cases to a United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement center in Vermont, up from 4,589 for the same period a year earlier, according to The Times story. In the latest period, there were also 1,501 referrals to a Newark office of the federal agency, and while officials could not provide the previous year's numbers, they said there had been a noticeable increase.
According to statistics from the federal agency, of the more than 10,000 New Jersey referrals since September, 1,417 people were charged with immigration violations. Through January, immigration authorities placed detainers on an additional 1,468 people -- giving federal agents the right to hold suspects who are released from jail.
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