Thread: Pendergraph’s first Washington tour ended in frustration

Pendergraph’s first Washington tour ended in frustration

Ninth District congressional candidate seeks return to D.C. after a rocky tenure at ICE

By Jim Morrill
jmorrill@charlotteobserver.com
Posted: Monday, Jul. 09, 2012

Jim Pendergraph’s last job in Washington didn’t work out quite the way he’d planned.

He tangled with bureaucrats, butted heads with a congressman and made a remark that sent shudders up the spines of immigrant rights advocates. Then he left.

Now he wants to go back.

“It didn’t turn out the way I wanted it to,” he says. “But I’ve got another opportunity now to make it right.”

Pendergraph, 61, is running for Congress from the 9th District. He faces fellow Charlotte Republican Robert Pittenger in a July 17 runoff. The winner meets Democrat Jennifer Roberts in the district that includes parts of Mecklenburg, Iredell and Union counties.

In 2007 Pendergraph, now a Mecklenburg County commissioner, stepped down after 13 years as sheriff for a job in the Bush administration’s Department of Homeland Security. He became the first executive director of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency’s Office of State and Local Coordination.

For Pendergraph, immigration has always been a sort of trump card. But his time in Washington at the agency that oversees the issue has drawn relatively little scrutiny.

In Mecklenburg, he’d been the first sheriff east of California to use a program called 287(g), named for a section of the Immigration and Nationality Act. It allows local officials to enforce federal immigration laws by checking the citizenship status of people they arrest.

“We had no way of identifying people here illegally,” he once said in describing the program. “It’s my responsibility as sheriff to know who’s in jail.”

Pendergraph won national attention for the program. So when ICE created a job of liaison to work with local law enforcement agencies, in part to expand 287(g), he beat out other applicants.

As in the presidential race, immigration has become a point of contention in the congressional contest. Pittenger mailers called Pendergraph a “flip-flopper” and “an old school moderate” after published comments suggested the former sheriff would support giving illegal immigrants a path to citizenship if they pay a penalty, comments that Pendergraph denies.

In Washington, Pendergraph’s new job started well. New information came so fast he felt like he was “drinking out of a fire hose.”

“I was so excited,” he recalls. “Things went great for a couple months.”

Feuding with Price

Pendergraph helped open training facilities for local law enforcement to learn about programs like 287(g). But he was soon caught up in a squabble between ICE and Congress, in particular with Rep. David Price, a Chapel Hill Democrat who chaired the appropriations subcommittee that oversaw Homeland Security.

Price wanted to see less money spent on programs like 287(g) and more on efforts to deport illegal immigrants who committed serious crimes.

In July, 2008, Pendergraph told a Durham TV station that Price was being “politically correct” by emphasizing only criminal enforcement.

His comments drew fire from Price, whose office later said then-Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff called and disavowed Pendergraph’s statement. An ICE spokesman said at the time that Pendergraph wasn’t authorized to present the agency’s views on congressional appropriations.

Price, who was out of the country last week, could not be reached.

Pendergraph says he was told by the head of ICE, Julie Myers, to tell sheriffs there was no training money. He says he was asked to send sheriffs a letter to that effect. “I said, “I’m not signing that letter,’ ” he recalls. “That’s a line I will not cross.”

Work grew more frustrating.

“It was giving me heart palpitations because of my frustration with not being able to do my job,” he says.

By August 2008, he’d been put on a short leash, with limited travel and other duties. “I knew I was just treading water,” he says.

Myers could not be reached.

Days before he announced his departure from the agency, Pendergraph stepped into another controversy.

‘…Make them disappear’

On August 21, Pendergraph was on a panel at a conference of the Police Foundation in Washington. The discussion turned to gangs.

“If you have a gang problem … and you just don’t have enough to charge them criminally but you believe they are probably foreign or illegal aliens in your community, if we can track them down and find out who they are, we can make them disappear from your community, if they are illegally in the country and if they’re involved in a gang,” Pendergraph said, according to a transcript.

“I know you would rather prosecute them but sometimes removing the problem is second best.”

Five words – “we can make them disappear” – shocked advocates for immigrant rights. A few months later, the words were featured prominently over Pendergraph’s name in a report called “Jailed Without Justice” by Amnesty International.

“To us it was completely shocking that somebody would go out on the record and make a statement like this,” says Justin Mazzola, who co-authored the Amnesty report. “That personified everything we were hearing about immigrant detention. To us it was basically an official statement saying, ‘This is what we do. We make immigrants disappear.’ … And it’s wrong.”

Margaret Huang, executive director of the Rights Working Group, a coalition of civil liberties advocates, credits the backlash over Pendergraph’s statement for new policies that make it easier to track detained immigrants.

“For folks who’ve been concerned about harsh immigration enforcement, it really stood as a candid perspective on what ICE was trying to do,” she says.

Pendergraph says the comment was taken out of context. “I’m not denying I said it,” he says. “But it was said in context.”

Pendergraph says he gave the agency notice at about the time of the controversial comments. Five days after the conference, the Observer carried a story about his decision to leave. He stayed on until Nov. 1, shortly before the election of Democrat Barack Obama.

When he announced his departure in August 2008, Pendergraph said he wanted to return to Charlotte to spend more time with his family. He said he wasn’t being pushed out.

“If they were trying to force me out, I certainly wouldn’t stay two months,” he said at the time. “If I was mad about something, I’d give them a week’s notice and be out of here.”

Morrill: 704-358-5059

Pendergraph’s first Washington tour ended in frustration | CharlotteObserver.com & The Charlotte Observer Newspaper

The fact that the pro illegal immigration folks at the liberal Charlotte Observer are attacking Pendergraph is a good sign. They fear him and they fear he could win.

W