Feds Kill Immigration Task Force Agreements

Deputy Mike Nugent shows on Friday how the Benton County Jail’s fingerprinting equipment works.
Deputy Mike Nugent shows on Friday how the Benton County Jail’s fingerprinting equipment works.

The agreements allowing local police to track foreign-born criminals in Northwest Arkansas expire Monday, but the effort won’t end, local officials said.

Local sheriffs and a police chief had wanted the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency to keep the task force agreements, formed under the 287(g) program. But John Morton, ICE director, announced Dec. 21 the task forces would end nationwide Dec. 31.

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Data Analysis

To see the analysis of the 287(g) data released by ICE go to NWAonline.com/icedata.

The federal agency is placing more emphasis on a separate program called Secure Communities that sends fingerprints to FBI and ICE databases.

“The Secure Communities screening process, coupled with federal officers, is more consistent, efficient and cost effective in identifying and removing criminal and other priority aliens,” Vincent Piccard, ICE spokesman, said in a statement this month.

Springdale Police Chief Kathy O’Kelley said early this month little will change if the agency rescinds the task force agreements.

At A Glance

About 287(g)

Roots to 287(g) trace back to 1996. That year, federal lawmakers amended the Immigration and Nationality Act by adding section 287(g).

That section authorized what is today ICE to sign agreements, but none were made until 2002, according to a 2010 homeland security report. ICE made six agreements by 2006. As of August, ICE has made 64 agreements in 24 states, according to a September homeland security report.

“Our officers will still be assigned to immigration and continue to do investigation alongside them on serious crime being committed by undocumented aliens in Northwest Arkansas,” she said.

The agreements for the 287(g) program gave local police three options. The task force option allows police to investigate criminal activity from suspected illegal immigrants and others with supervision from federal immigration agents. A jail option allows detention officers to screen people arrested to determine immigration status. Those specially trained deputies have access to ICE computers installed by the agency, according to the agreements. The third option combines both task force and jail options into a hybrid agreement.

The Washington and Benton County Sheriff’s Offices chose the hybrid models in 2007, while the Rogers and Springdale police departments chose the task force option.

“ICE will continue to work with Benton and Washington County jail enforcement officers to identify foreign-born criminals booked into county facilities and ensure their removal from the United States,” Piccard said. “Benton and Washington County deputies will work under the direction of an ICE supervisor and will abide by the same enforcement priorities as ICE officers and agents.”

Piccard also said the agency will work with all local police agencies in Arkansas, including Rogers and Springdale, to dismantle criminal organizations attempting to undermine federal customs and immigration laws.

Advocates said the 287(g) programs sowed seeds of distrust between immigrant communities and local law enforcement and should end.

Task Force

O’Kelley said the public has struggled to understand the task force component. She has three detectives assigned to 287(g), she said.

“My people are assigned directly to (Homeland Security). They work for them as kind of a force multiplier,” she said. “They don’t report to me. They’re like any other task force. With the FBI, we participate in a joint-terrorism task force where I assign an officer to them, and he’s theirs to use.”

William Mason, a Washington County Sheriff’s Office detective assigned to the task force, said the aim is to identify illegal immigrants who commit major crimes, not to arrest all illegal immigrants.

“We’re not taking people off the street and taking them back to wherever they’re from because they jaywalked. We’re doing it because they’re selling drugs or trafficking humans, which is probably one of the worst crimes man has ever known,” Mason said.

Washington County Sheriff Tim Helder and O’Kelley said their patrol officers and deputies do not enforce immigration laws.

“We basically said we will participate in a task force concept if the primary function is not just to identify those here illegally that are working somewhere trying to support their family,” Helder said.

Despite the reassurances, advocates said the program has made illegal immigrants hesitant to call or cooperate with police because they fear deportation.

Mireya Reith, executive director of the Arkansas United Community Coalition, works with other organizations such as Catholic Charities, the American Civil Liberties Union and immigration attorneys to monitor civil rights and immigrant rights.

The enforcement programs created a fear of police, Reith said, which made Hispanics less likely to report crime and their neighborhoods more dangerous.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Arkansas criticized the 287(g) program in an October news release, saying immigrant communities have reported police targeting markets, churches and areas of town frequented by Hispanics for immigration enforcement and not criminal issues.

“Across the board, these are not the worst of the worst who are being snared. Often they are low-level offenders and misdemeanors,” said Holly Dickson, ACLU staff attorney.

Results

Data for fiscal 2011 shows most of the illegal immigrants were detected through the jail option of the 287(g) program and not the task force. Less than half of those, or 213 out of 458, were deported.

Almost 718 criminal charges associated with the 458 arrests show high numbers of traffic offenses, forgery, drug-related offenses, property crimes and driving under the influence. The data shows much lower numbers of crimes such as homicide-negligent manslaughter, rape, aggravated assault and terroristic threatening.

Outgoing Benton County Sheriff Keith Ferguson doesn’t have a deputy assigned to the task force, but has trained jailers through the 287(g) program. The Benton County jail deputies screened 135 of the 213 total deportations. Jail deputies screened 314 arrested people. The 314 arrests booked into the sheriff’s office carried 534 felony or misdemeanor charges.

The largest number of charges among that group was 187 traffic offenses, followed by another 53 charges of driving under the influence of either drugs or alcohol.

“We hold roadblocks and safety checks and do it at prime locations because we’re in a dry county,” Ferguson said.

“We’ve come across a lot of illegal immigrants coming out of Washington County into Benton County at these roadblock areas. It’s set up strictly for any crime that comes through there, whether you don’t have a driver’s license or a DWI or if you’re wanted. It’s not out there because we have a Vietnamese or a Mexican here illegally,” he said of the roadblocks.

The Washington County Sheriff’s Office followed Benton County in the number of arrested, screened and deported. The federal government deported 61 people of the 106 arrests by Helder’s task force officers or screenings at the jail. The highest number of related criminal charges came from 29 counts of forgery, followed by 18 counts of driving under the influence.

The arrests of people screened at the jail could have come from any local police agency, Helder said. He said he likes it that the statistics from his office show lower numbers of misdemeanor crimes, such as traffic offenses, and higher numbers of major crimes, such as document forgery, among the arrests.

“It’s just that Fayetteville or somebody else arrested them and as a result of a DWI, they get identified,” Helder said.

He said despite the program’s end, sheriff’s deputies will continue to help Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

“Life is going to go on, but I think the ability to have access to certain information about major crimes is going to be limited. We’re not going to have that daily relationship,” he said.

Secure Communities

Secure Communities, a program created in 2008, aims to decrease the number of state and local law enforcement agencies enforcing federal immigration laws. Today more than 3,000 jails participate in the program, according to the immigration agency.

It uses fingerprinting technology to send information to FBI criminal files and ICE immigration files on everyone arrested, according to Homeland Security reports.

Arkansas jails began participating in Secure Communities in August 2010. Since then, the federal government has deported 600 people from the jails in all 75 counties, according to an ICE report dated August. Jailers made 159,801 submissions.

In Washington and Benton counties, jailers made 40,803 fingerprint submissions resulting in 250 deportations, according to the report.

Like 287(g), civil rights groups and immigrant advocates criticize the Secure Communities program.

“Secure community on paper is a good program,” Dickson said. “Where the issues come in is how it is being implemented.”

Dickson said street patrols could make arrests of suspected immigrant for any reason, such as a traffic stop, when normally they would be released after the stop.

O’Kelley disagreed.

“People would come and say we’re arresting people and deporting them for not having a driver’s license,” she said. “No, we don’t. We write them a ticket, like we do anybody else, and send them on their way.”

What makes the program hard to research is that Arkansas law does not require police to identify the race of people who receive traffic tickets, Dickson said.

Helder said everyone arrested is processed through Secure Communities so it’s more fair than the 287(g) jail option.

“It takes the pressure off our people to where they’re not racial profiling and kind of going, ‘well you look kind of like a foreigner and speak with an accent so I’m going to check you,’” he said.

Jay Cantrell, Helder’s chief deputy, said the only flaw behind Secure Communities is that illegal immigrants who have not had any encounter with ICE will not turn up in the system. Cantrell said the jail component of 287(g) complements Secure Communities because suspected illegal immigrants can be screened by the trained jailers.

Self-Policing

The government has worked to address concerns about 287(g) and other enforcement programs.

Homeland Security’s Office of Inspector General issued a report in March 2010 that cited almost three dozen concerns, including civil rights issues, and made recommendations for improvement to the 287(g) program.

The office has released three more reports identifying 62 total issues and recommendations. Of the 62, the agency resolved 60 and made significant improvements, according to the most recent report published in September.

The fear of police has diminished with the recruiting of more Hispanic officers, but through door-to-door surveys done by her organization, Hispanics still hesitate to report crime, Reith said.

“The question is why. That’s what we’re all trying to confront. Is it because there are still legitimate complaints out there and our community is still having negative experiences, or is it because of remnants of laws passed in those initial years where we can definitely point to cases of racial profiling and confusion and abuse,” she said.

The immigration agency launched a help line in September to address concerns and questions about detention, enforcement activities and requests for community outreach.

A June 2011 memo from Morton details deportation priorities, such as those who pose serious threats to national security, serious felons and others. The memo granted prosecutorial discretion to immigration enforcement officials, allowing them to release illegal immigrants who are not a priority.

The new approach helped 20-year-old Carlos Martinez, who was released from ICE custody in a little more than 24 hours in December 2011. Martinez went to the Springdale court to pay a fine for not having a driver’s license. Instead, a judge ordered him to jail. Martinez was identified as an illegal immigrant through the Secure Communities program at the Springdale jail.

He has no felony history, he said.

“The next morning, ICE came in and they took a couple of guys and myself into the ICE offices in Fayetteville,” Martinez said.

He was released by 1 p.m., he said.

Martinez now has better hopes for citizenship after qualifying for a new program that allows illegal immigrant youth to apply for legal permanent residency. His experience in detention, he said, motivated him to become a community organizer with Reith’s organization, making door-to-door visits within Hispanic neighborhoods.

Reith said she hopes to compile survey results and share them with lawmakers and local officials to bridge the information gap between the immigrant community and law enforcement.

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