Sheriff BJ Barnes, considered by some
to be the most powerful Republican
politician in Guilford County, has found
himself at odds with a black-Latino
coalition led by clergy and lawyers over
his plans to implement the controversial
287(g) program, which delegates federal
immigration enforcement authority to
local deputies.
Meanwhile, the Obama administration
is reviewing the program for possible
civil rights violations, as members of
Congress, including Rep. David Price, the
Democrat who represents parts of the
Triangle, demand stronger guidelines and
accountability.
Marty Rosenbluth, an immigration lawyer with the Southern Coalition for Social Justice in Durham, heaped scorn on that assertion during a bilingual meeting at New Light Missionary Baptist Church in Greensboro to devise strategies for blocking aggressive immigration enforcement. “You only have to read the first sentence of the statute to know that the sheriff doesn’t understand the state law,” Rosenbluth said. The statute reads, “When any person charged with a felony or an impaired driving offense is confined for any period in a county jail, local confinement facility, district confinement facility or satellite jail/work unit, the administrator or other person in charge of the facility shall attempt to determine if the prisoner is a legal resident of the United States by inquiry of the prisoner, or by examination of any relevant documents.” Barnes backed away from his assertion that the law required wholesale identity checks of detainees, but said he considers it a responsibility of his job as the county’s top law enforcement officer. “If you come in with no identification whatsoever, how do I know that you’re not the Craigslist killer, how do I know you’re not wanted in some other state?” he said.
“My job requires me to identify people in my jail who have no identification.” At one point he described the people in his jail whose immigration status is subject to question “as people who have committed crimes.” When it was pointed out that many of them have not been convicted and enjoy the presumption of innocence, Barnes acceded, “That’s true, but they have been adjudicated by a magistrate to show probable cause that they have committed a crime.” Barnes statement echoes talking points created by the NC Sheriff’s Association, which assume the guilt of pre-trial detainees before they have been convicted of a crime. A PowerPoint presentation created by the association says of the 287(g) jail enforcement model: “It only applies to criminals who also happen to be illegal aliens.”
“What I can’t deal with is the fact that, if I have people who have committed crimes and I don’t know their identity I have to make sure they are not a mass murderer, not a mass rapist, not wanted in another state,” Barnes said. “If it comes up that they happen to be illegal at the same time, then I have to report that.”
At least two “Click It or Ticket” checkpoints have taken place so far this month in Greensboro, according to reports by immigrant rights activists and confirmation by the sheriff’s office.
One was spotted at the intersection of Freeman Mill Road and Coliseum Boulevard, and another reportedly took place on Aycock Street, both areas being among the most multiethnic in the city. The Rev. Mark Sills, executive director of FaithAction International, suggested in an e-mail to fellow activists that, whether intended or not, the checkpoints have cast a shadow of fear across the Latino community.
“My wife teaches GED classes to immigrant women at Randolph Community College in Asheboro,” Sills wrote. “She has heard a number of these women talking together about ‘not going to Greensboro to shop’ anymore as a result of their fear of the sheriff’s department checkpoints.”
Rosenbluth told the group at New Light Missionary Baptist Church on April 20 that 287(g) and other programs like it are inherently flawed.
“The pressure that needs to be applied is to make sure that people are not arrested solely so that their immigration status can be checked,” he said. “This is where the racial profiling aspect comes in. I can pretty much guarantee that if I’m driving through Alamance County or I’m driving through Wake County and I’m having one of those days where I left my wallet at home — it happens from time to time — if I’m pulled over, they are not going to arrest Marty Rosenbluth, and bring me into jail and fingerprint me for driving without a license.”
Even as the Guilford County Coalition for Just Laws and Peace Among Street Organizations has urged Barnes to delay implementation of 287(g), Rosenbluth has argued that the sheriff is either mistaken or bluffing, and that what he’s really pursuing is a similar ICE program called Secure Communities.
“Officers undergo a four-to-six week training period,” Rosenbluth said, explaining 287(g). “They’re trained in constitutional law, they’re trained in immigration law. They have to have a written certification. What first got me suspicious that this wasn’t 287(g) was when the sheriff said that the only training his officers receive is how to use the fingerprinting machine.”
Barnes said he absolutely is pursuing the 287(g) program. “They already know how to use the fingerprint machine,” he said of his deputies. “They receive the four-weeks training. They would also receive certification as an ICE officer to access the ICE database.”
In early April Barnes told YES! Weekly that the reason he had not finalized a memorandum of agreement with ICE to implement the 287(g) program was because he was uncomfortable with pressure from ICE to design an aggressive program would search out Latinos. But sources in the federal government suggest that the hesitation is on the other end. In January, the Government Accountability Office released a critical report, which found that in more than half of 29 local programs reviewed community members raised concern about whether 287(g) would lead to racial profiling, and inconsistencies in memoranda of agreement have led to wide variations between the various local programs
Julio Cesar Mora, 19, testified before a joint congressional hearing on April 2 that earlier this year he and his father were stopped in Phoenix by officers who he later learned were deputies of the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, which holds a 287(g) memoranda of agreement. Mora had been on his way to drop his father off at his job at Handyman Maintenance, a company that holds landscaping contracts for government buildings. Mora said the two were taken to his father’s workplace, where numerous detainees were lined up and held by officers in black uniforms with the word SWAT written on them and wearing masks over their faces.
“I got up the courage to ask one of the officers if I could please leave because I didn’t work at HMI,” Mora said. “He told me no. When I got to the front of the line, the same officer asked me if I was a US citizen. I said I was born here, and gave him my name and social security number. They checked me out on their computer, and finally they let me go, almost three hours after it all began. They let my dad go too because he has had his green card since 1976. “To this day, I don’t know why the officers stopped us out of all the cars on the road,” Mora said. “Maybe it’s because of the Campesina radio station sticker on our bumper or maybe it’s because my dad was wearing his Mexcian tejana and they thought we were illegal. But they never bothered to ask us. I don’t think it’s fair the way we were treated.” Spokesman Matt Chandler said the Department of Homeland Security is undertaking a broad review of programs and policies, “and 287(g) is part of that. It’s an opportunity to address any previous allegations of civil rights abuses, and a natural step in the transition process.”
He added that the agency is “redrafting the template that is used for drafting memoranda of agreements” and will “make sure all partner agencies are held to identical standards.”
The last time ICE enrolled a new local partner in the 287(g) program was last September. A congressional source who had been briefed on the matter said that the Obama administration has placed a moratorium on new programs until necessary improvements are made. Critics have also noted that the Government Accountability Office found that although ICE officials claimed at the outset of the program that its objective was to address serious crimes such as drug trafficking, the agency has not documented that objective in program materials, and some local partners have used the program “to process individuals for minor crimes, such as speeding, contrary to the objective of the program.”
Rep. Price noted in his opening statement for another hearing held in early April that ICE broke records last year for the number of people it deported and the numbers held in detention. But dangerous narco-traffickers aren’t exactly the profile of the immigrants getting swept up in the ICE dragnet. Since 2002, Price said, deportation of non-criminals has exploded by 400 percent, while criminal deportations have increased only 60 percent.
The
bill governing this year’s funding for the 287(g) program sets aside $5
million for compliance reviews conducted by ICE’s Office of
Professional Responsibility.
The spending bill stipulates that
“ICE is strongly encouraged to prioritize new 287(g) agreements that
will maximize the identification and removal of deportable criminal
aliens.”
Even as questions have arisen about 287(g), the
similar Secure Communities has both won support and inspired dread.
Much like the jail enforcement model of 287(g), under Secure
Communities, local officers take the fingerprints of all people booked
in jail and run them simultaneously through the FBI’s IAFIS database
and Homeland Security’s IDENT database. ICE is automatically notified
of a detainee’s previous convictions and immigration record. All
sheriff offices currently have the FBI database, but many do not have
the one created by Homeland Security.
We never had that ability before. We relied on
local law enforcement to make the referrals or to have ICE officers in
those facilities to encounter those individuals.”
Twelve out
of the 48 Secure Communities programs are located in North Carolina,
where it has gotten a boost from the NC Sheriff’s Association’s Illegal
Immigration Project, which received $600,000 in funding from the NC
General Assembly through the Governor’s Crime Commission. The sheriff’s
association reported to the NC General Assembly that they had
“developed and proposed an action plan to ICE for a one-year
implementation schedule for Secure Communities in North Carolina,”
outpacing the rest of the nation by two and a half years.
“We
offered the state as a test site,” said Tony Queen, director of special
projects for the NC Sheriff’s Association, adding that because Attorney
General Roy Cooper upgraded the state’s IAFIS system, “we have the
nation’s latest and best statewide system, so it only makes sense that
North Carolina would be chosen as a pilot project.”
The
program’s foes in North Carolina see an opportunity. “The strategy I
think we have to adopt,” Rosenbluth said, “is to demand accountability
from the sheriff’s office and from ICE to make sure that the Secure
Communities program is being enforced the way it is intended, to take
dangerous criminals off the street rather than people who are driving
without a license…. We already know the dangers of 287(g). We can start
here to make sure the same mistakes are not made under Secure
Communities.”
