Thread: Editorial: One locality wages an immigration war

Editorial: One locality wages an immigration war
Too bad mandates don't work in reverse. Localities could force Congress to act on illegal immigration.
http://www.roanoke.com/editorials/wb/wb/xp-133210

What Prince William County is about to do -- spend $2.85 million a year nabbing illegal aliens without any real idea what will happen once they're locked up -- is foolish. But it is exactly the kind of poor public policy born from the pressure of desperation.

Prince William isn't unique. It is one of the many and growing number of localities across the nation forced to deal with the burden that increasing numbers of illegal immigrants are placing on county services and schools.

Legal residents and taxpayers are mad. They want something done. But the men and women of Congress who could actually address their grievances remain deaf to public pleas to reform immigration policy.

So the masses go where they will be heard: county supervisor meetings. In Prince William, the supervisors decided in July to respond and directed their police to check the legal status of every person pulled over for traffic violations or suspected of a crime.

Last week they learned it will cost them $14.2 million to train police to act as immigration officers and then to lock up people without the proper paperwork. But that estimate is banking on U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement stepping up to detain and deport every illegal immigrant caught driving a car with a busted taillight.

It's not going to happen. ICE can't even keep up with current caseload.

What will happen then? Will Prince William find even more money to indefinitely hold these people, to buy them tickets home, to build more jail cells?

Already those rallying against this plan rightfully worry that police will be diverted from other duties such as community policing and that immigrants, regardless of their legal status, will be even more reluctant to report crimes.

Prince William can't go it alone. The supervisors should be smart enough to figure this out. Other localities have. Take Winchester, for example. City officials adopted a treatise that spells out their grievances -- ICE's failure to act on referrals; the tremendous financial costs on schools, health care, housing; and the emergence of Latino gangs -- and calls upon the federal government to stand up to its duties.

This is, as Winchester knows, a federal problem without a local solution -- no matter how desperate places like it and Prince William become.

We need to find out exactly why this training is so cost-prohibitive. It seems way out of line.