Program to have state and local police enforce immigration laws has had problems

A program designed to allow local police to enforce federal immigration laws has serious flaws and may not be accomplishing its intended goal, says a new report released by the Department of Homeland Security's inspector general. The report says state and local police officers authorized to enforce the laws are "not adequately screened, trained or supervised, and the civil rights of the immigrants they deal with are not consistently protected," Julia Preston of The New York Times reports. The report was a sweeping review of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement program commonly known as 287(g) after the clause in immigration law that established it.

The program operates through agreements with about 60 county and state police forces, and allows local officers to question immigrants about their legal status and detain them for deportation. The report describes the program as "haphazardly administered, with local agencies detaining and prosecuting immigrants with little oversight from federal agents and significant inconsistencies from place to place," Preston writes. It concludes, "In the absence of consistent supervision over immigration enforcement activities, there is no assurance that the program is achieving its goals." Top ICE officials have said the program is designed to deport immigrants with serious criminal records, but the report concluded it lacked measures to determine if immigrants were serious offenders.

"Since the audit was conducted, ICE has fundamentally reformed the program," agency spokesman Richard Rocha told Preston, "strengthening public safety and ensuring consistency in immigration enforcement across the country by prioritizing the arrest and detention of criminal aliens, fulfilling many of the report’s recommendations." The inspector general "acknowledged many of the program’s improvements, but the report said many of the most serious problems remained unresolved," Preston reports. (Read more)