OPINION & EDITORIAL
Keep on turning in illegal immigrants


by Sam Clegg
Thursday, February 21, 2008

With an estimated 12 million illegal immigrants residing in this country, local police and federal authorities have a massive stake in finding new ways to deport a great many of them — this is commonly known as upholding the law. Fortunately for the taxpayer of Wisconsin, that is exactly what the Dane County Sheriff’s Office under David Mahoney is doing, despite recent pressure to change their approach.

Dane County officials notify federal authorities in Immigration and Customs Enforcement when they have undocumented inmates in their custody. The process is simple. A Dane County jail inmate’s information is run through the National Crime Information Center’s database, which enables officials to determine if an immigration violation has taken place, and if it has, the individual is reported to ICE. Under pressure from the ACLU and immigrant rights advocates, the sheriff’s office has recently agreed to review the policy this year, and one can only pray they will continue to enforce the law.

It is unrealistic to assume we can magically whisk away the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants currently residing in this country. It is also economically and constitutionally reprehensible.

However, this should not stop Dane County from doing its duty. If an immigrant enters the United States illegally, he or she should be deported if doing so is realistically cost-effective. Enforcing immigration law everywhere, all the time, would require an omnipresent police force that would be little more than the foxhound of an overbearing federal government. However, if the law was to be enforced — and it should — the most cost-effective place to begin is prison, with those who are already incarcerated. By continuing to execute its current policy, Dane County refrains from engaging in a witch hunt for the vast majority of otherwise law-abiding illegal immigrants while at the same time ridding the undocumented population of its most harmful element.

Civil liberties groups such as the ACLU and the Centro Hispano, a Madison-area Latino advocacy organization, are wary of Dane County’s cooperation with ICE because of the fact that illegal immigrants guilty of less serious offenses are currently being reported to ICE by Dane County police. Additionally, Stacy Harbaugh, an ACLU community advocate, informed me that because the immigration violations are civil violations and not criminal ones, they should remain unreported.

The law has sided with the sherriff on the issue, however.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Muehler v. Mena that officers do not need reasonable suspicion of an immigration law violation to question an individual about his or her immigration status during a routine traffic stop or other interactions with police. As the law applies to Dane County and other localities, if an undocumented immigrant is stopped by police for something as trivial as rolling a stop sign, he or she could be checked via NCIC and deported. Obviously, it is necessary for the sheriff’s office to be sensible. Reviewing someone’s immigration record during a traffic stop is a waste of taxpayer money, and while doing so would be constitutional, it would also be unnecessary. By the same token, the same Wisconsin taxpayer should not have to foot the bill for an illegal immigrant’s stay in prison.

The Centro Hispano and the ACLU, however, oppose the cooperation between Dane County police for low-level offenders.

Peter Munoz, executive director of the Centro Hispano, told me in an interview that if there are undocumented immigrants guilty of a violent crime within our prison system, we should “get them out of here,â€