local immigration story on NPR
Posted by Brent Finnegan on January 12th, 2008
National Public Radio ran a story about illegal immigration in the Harrisonburg-Rockingham area yesterday. Reporter Jennifer Ludden interviewed Sheriff Don Farley, immigration lawyer Aaron Cook, Hispanic Services Council Chair Rick Castaneda, and Deputy Sheriff Corrie Bauserman about 287g, the federal program that gives local police officers the authority to arrest and detain unauthorized immigrants, and process them for deportation.
If someone is deemed to be illegally present, the sheriff’s office can then detain him and start the paperwork for the deportation process. Sheriff Farley says that since August, his force has detained 69 illegal immigrants.
“We’re not going and pulling people off the street because they have a foreign look about them,” he says.
[...]
Cook had one client that he says was wrongly arrested when she was a passenger in a car accident. Cook was able to get that charge thrown out, but because the woman’s legal status had been checked at the jail, she was deported anyway.
I would rather see the president issue an executive order federalizing all law enforcement officers and empowering them to carry out all mandates of ICE.
Even better would be for a law to be passed that gave American citizens the same rights and powers that mexicans have in mexico with regards to illegal aliens.
But neither will happen due to the touchy feely nanny welfare state we live in.
Drae88, I would rather see the president and the Congress locked in a room without food or water or campaign money or women or alcohol or photo ops until they come out with a comprehensive solution to the entire immigration – labor shortage – border security problem. 287(g) is a band aid on a severed limb.
(perhaps clarification is unnecessary, but it should be clear from the context that the point of the previous comment was not to suggest that the answer lies in a men-only meeting)
I agree with you Cook, and I’d also like to add that you did an excellent job in Brent’s documentary. Very well said!
Curious as to whether Sheriff Farley gave numbers for how many citizens and documented immigrants were unnecessarily detained/held/inconvenienced so that the 69 could be determined and detained? Did he give numbers on how about how much money state and local taxpayers had to pay to hold the detainees that the federal goverment didn’t seem to want to find? How about on how many law enforcement positions that were formerly gang or drug positions and are now 287(g) positions? Could it be that 287(g) is just the latest law enforcement fad and source of grants and funding from various governmental agencies? Just curious.
Is this new “immigration patrol” the reason we need a bigger jail?
I think we may need to do some fundraising in order to build the new jail. Raise your hand if you’d like Heather Denman from the Boys and Girls Club to head that up?
The only thing that upsets me about the Hispanic influx is, now people who had been considered borderline unemployable are getting better jobs. This means I am more likely to run into a degenerate lazy American who can’t do their job worth a crap. I’d much rather have to deal with the language barrier than the ignorant idiot barrier.
i don’t know that much about 287(g) and i don’t know that much about the overarching panacea through legislative incarceration that cook is hoping for. what i do know is that we need to be demanding solutions. hell, maybe we can even vote on immigration reform instead of abortion this time. and while i understand people’s reluctance to accept local law enforcement as a part of any potential solutions, i would encourage you not to throw the baby out with the bath water when considering where we want to be. i think it can be a positive thing for local officers to be trained to deal with individuals who break the law while they are here illegally. i would even go a step further and say that they should also be required to undergo training that would familiarize them with culture and language. i realize that there have been and will be cases where individuals who have not necessarily broken the law are picked up and deported (like the woman in the car accident). but to me, one of the first steps in a real immigration reform policy would be to ensure, that is make damn well certain, that illegals who break the law are gone for good. this would take the cooperation of many agencies, not the least of which being local law enforcement.
I guess what i’m saying is that we should try to see the positive impact that the police can have. and we should be vigilant to make sure that some hypothetically racist cop isn’t rolling down the street picking up anyone who looks like they ain’t from around here. but what we shouldn’t do is make the police out to be the bad guys. like it or not, they are and will continue to be part of the solution.