July 25, 2008


Training expands duties of 9 in THP

Immigration enforcement added

By KATE HOWARD
Staff Writer

The Tennessee Highway Patrol is joining the growing list of agencies with officers trained to enforce immigration laws and send illegal immigrants toward deportation.

Nine investigators from the THP's criminal investigations division are attending a four-week training to be deputized with the powers of the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The officers, charged typically with investigating crimes like vehicular homicide, fraud, drug or human trafficking and identity theft, will be able to investigate citizenship status and detain people they believe to be in the country illegally through an agreement with the federal government allowing them to enforce immigration laws called 287g.

The program that counts the Davidson County Sheriff's Office as a member has 55 agencies involved and about 80 other agencies waiting to join.

Department of Safety Commissioner Dave Mitchell said the trained agents will not be patrolling the highways, and they won't be doing routine citizenship checks for other agencies, either. The focus, he said, will be on people suspected of felonies whose immigration status is in question. But civil and immigrant rights activists are concerned that it will result in racial profiling.

"(Immigration enforcement) is not by design going to become the full-time job of a CID agent," Mitchell said. "Nor will this program be any type of initiative to go round up groups or individuals here illegally.''

Mitchell said there will be no racial profiling. Though the THP conducts DUI and driver's license checkpoints, Mitchell said there "absolutely will not" be ICE agents working those stations.

ACLU is concerned

Hedy Weinberg, executive director of the Tennessee chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, said she's concerned about the implementation of the program so soon after the passing of the Racial Profiling Prevention Act, which went into effect July 1 and defined racial profiling along with encouraging each department to write a policy about it by 2010.

A comptroller's report issued last year about THP's traffic stops raised concerns for her that Hispanic and American Indian drivers are already being stopped more frequently.

"When you look at that report, anyone who cares about civil rights has to be concerned about the increase in profiling that will take place," Weinberg said. "It raises a lot of red flags now to hear that the THP will be taking part in the 287g program."

Troopers in the field who don't have any training could still be asking for immigration checks on people they're arresting based on race or language skills, said Stephen Fotopulos, executive director of the Tennessee Immigrant and Refugee Rights Coalition.

"With everything that's wrong with the Nashville agreement, at least there is the idea of that separation" between arresting officers and the jail employees who conduct ICE screenings, Fotopulos said.

The Davidson County Sheriff's Office has processed about 3,500 immigrants for deportation proceedings since April 2007. Any foreign-born person booked into jail is screened in the Nashville program, and roughly half detained in the first year of the program were arrested during traffic stops.

The sheriff's office sought to train deputies to enforce immigration agreements after a string of vehicular homicides and murders involving illegal immigrants who had previous misdemeanor arrests.

"There's no question that removing 3,500 individuals who are illegal aliens who have also committed local crimes has absolutely made our community safer," spokeswoman Karla Weikal said.

But many advocacy groups have raised questions over the types of criminals caught.

"When we heard about 287g, we heard it was meant to be a program to catch people before their next horrible crime," said Renata Soto, executive director of Conexion Americas, an advocacy group for Latino families.

"What we've seen is that a man with a broken taillight driving his kids to school is also caught in this program."

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