Police partner with the Department of Homeland Security to arrest and detain illegal immigrants.
By Rachel L. Swarns, The New York Times
Montgomery, Ala., -- Every workday morning, before the sun creeps above the trees, State Trooper Anthony Birmingham goes on patrol with his new law enforcement bible, the “Immigration Law Handbook,” in his Ford Crown Victoria.
For seven and a half years, he has watched sleepy state roads and bustling highways for speeding commuters and careless drivers. Now he also serves as a foot soldier in the domestic war on terrorism, one of a small but growing number of police officers empowered by the Department of Homeland Security to arrest and detain illegal immigrants.
Over the past six months, Trooper Birmingham and 20 others on the state force have arrested 106 illegal immigrants, including a Mexican man driving 90 miles per hour and a Mexican mother of two who presented invalid documents while applying for a driver’s license. In the past, such immigrants were often given traffic tickets or warnings and sent on their way. These days, they might be arrested by the state police - even if they have not broken a state law - and handed over to federal authorities for deportation.
“Before, the only thing we could do was issue a traffic citation and let them go,” Trooper Birmingham said as he cruised along State Road 9. “It’s different now.”
Alabama is the epicenter of a widening effort by the Department of Homeland Security to encourage states and localities to help enforce immigration laws in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks.
Colorado, Idaho and Virginia are considering following the examples of Alabama, which began its partnership with the Department of Homeland Security in September, and Florida, which signed an agreement with federal officials in 2002. In Los Angeles County, the sheriff’s office is close to an agreement to allow booking officers to identify illegal immigrants in county jails for deportation.
These and other efforts to involve law enforcement agencies in immigration matters have stirred a furor among both advocates for immigrants and police chiefs in Boston, Houston, several communities in California and around the country. They warn that these arrangements may make immigrants wary of cooperating with the police or reporting crime and could lead to racial profiling, at the expense even of people in the country legally.
Many immigration violations, like overstaying a visa, are civil infractions, not criminal offenses typically handled by the police. At least 30 jurisdictions bar their officers from enforcing immigration laws, Congressional researchers say, but others are joining in.
Homeland Security officials, understaffed and eager for assistance, are making it easier for police officers to help by adding to an F.B.I. crime database the names of immigrants who have evaded deportation orders, including 112,000 with criminal records and 28,000 without them. The database is used by 80,000 agencies to track felons and fugitives. In December, immigrants’ lawyers sued to stop the expansion of the database, saying the police should not enforce civil immigration laws outside of formal partnerships like those in Alabama and Florida.
Officials are also improving the efficiency of the Department of Homeland Security’s Law Enforcement Support Center, which holds more detailed immigration records than the F.B.I. database. In March, police officers who called the center helped federal agents locate more than 2,000 illegal immigrants, officials say.
Some Republicans in Congress say such efforts need to be stepped up. About 5,500 agents are assigned to immigration enforcement, but over eight million immigrants are estimated to be in the country illegally. More than 100 members of Congress are now backing legislation that would require the nation’s 600,000 state and local police officers to help enforce the immigration laws.
Homeland Security officials say the cooperative efforts in place, while small in scope, represent an unusual degree of collaboration between federal officials and local police officials, who were overwhelmingly reluctant to assume any federal immigration enforcement duties before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
“I see the future of this being very positive,” said Michael J. Garcia, the homeland security under secretary for the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which promotes cooperation with the local police on a range of issues, including identifying and deporting gang members who are illegal immigrants.
Mr. Garcia emphasized that states were not required to participate in the formal partnerships and noted that local police officers involved in such arrangements receive several weeks of intensive training and strict warnings against racial profiling.
State officials in Alabama, as well as immigrant advocates here, say so far there have been no complaints from immigrants about the federal-local partnership.
Senior police officials here said they were eager to join the national experiment after grappling in recent years with concerns about terrorism and complaints from residents and local police officers that the number of illegal immigrants involved in traffic accidents had surged.
So last year, the officials issued a directive against racial profiling, to allay concerns of advocacy groups, and assigned specially trained officers - 14 to the highway patrol and 7 to driver’s license bureaus.
Col. W. M. Coppage, director of the Alabama Department of Public Safety, said his officers are reactive, not proactive. They do not conduct raids, and only question immigrants and run background checks on those stopped for traffic violations or applying for driver’s licenses, he said.
“It’s got to be a legitimate, probable-cause-type stop,” Colonel Coppage said. “You can’t just say hey, `There’s somebody that may be Hispanic,” and stop them or say, `There’s somebody from the Middle East,’ and stop them.”
Trooper Ronni Fetty, who works at a driver’s license bureau, described several arrests in which illegal immigrants were charged with presenting fraudulent documents. Trooper Birmingham recounted the arrest of a speeder who turned out to be carrying 50 pounds of marijuana.
Statistics indicate that most of the immigrants caught so far have been arrested for violating federal immigration laws, not for state crimes.
Of the 106 illegal immigrants arrested Oct. 14 to April 1, 84 were charged with overstaying visas, entering the country illegally or evading a deportation order, officials here said. Sixteen of them also had criminal convictions. It is unclear whether any have yet been deported.
Officials from the American Civil Liberties Union here and the Hispanic Interest Coalition of Alabama, who oppose the initiative, say they fear that some immigrants have already been deported and that others have been driven underground.
In June, the groups hope to start posting fliers to urge immigrants to tell them about their experiences with the police. In the meantime, advocates are telling clients not to attract attention on state roads by speeding or driving cars with broken taillights or missing license plates.
“Just because nothing has happened in these first six months doesn’t make me breathe any more easily,” said Isabel Rubio, executive director of the Hispanic Interest Coalition. “We feel like this is definitely something we still have to watch.”